A review by adamz24
Forget Foucault by Jean Baudrillard
3.0
The more I read Baudrillard, the more drawn I am to him as a prose artist. This book consists of an introduction, the essay "Forget Foucault" itself, and an interview in which Baudrillard discusses his early work, called "Forget Baudrillard." The intro and interview are interesting enough, but "Forget Foucault" itself is a fine piece of writing indeed, and probably one of the more focused and direct pieces I've read by Baudrillard. As always, he is intellectually stimulating and fascinating, even though I've never entirely bought into his viewpoint. As I mentioned earlier, the prose is just terrific, perhaps not as consistently terrific as in some of his later work, but here's some shit I was into:
“It flows, it invests and saturates the entire space it opens . The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals; a magistral art of decentering allows the opening of new spaces (spaces of power and of discourse) which are immediately covered up by the meticulous outpouring of Foucault's writing. There's no vacuum here, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity, a nonlinear, orbital, and flawless writing. The meaning never exceeds what one says of it; no dizziness, yet it never floats in a text too big for it: no rhetoric either.”
“what if sex itself is no longer in sex? We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason”
“We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its immediate production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure; we find no seduction in those bodies penetrated by a gaze literally absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product”
“Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene," etymologically speaking and in all senses”
“Foucault doesn't want to talk about repression: but what else is that slow, brutal infection of the mind through sex, whose only equivalent in the past was infection through the soul”
“It flows, it invests and saturates the entire space it opens . The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals; a magistral art of decentering allows the opening of new spaces (spaces of power and of discourse) which are immediately covered up by the meticulous outpouring of Foucault's writing. There's no vacuum here, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity, a nonlinear, orbital, and flawless writing. The meaning never exceeds what one says of it; no dizziness, yet it never floats in a text too big for it: no rhetoric either.”
“what if sex itself is no longer in sex? We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason”
“We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its immediate production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure; we find no seduction in those bodies penetrated by a gaze literally absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product”
“Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene," etymologically speaking and in all senses”
“Foucault doesn't want to talk about repression: but what else is that slow, brutal infection of the mind through sex, whose only equivalent in the past was infection through the soul”