Notes on Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared
Foreword by Francois L’Yvonnet:
Why is there nothing rather than something? - Leibniz (reversed).
Exploration of the Nothing by Macedonia Fernandez (Argentina): “On the Nothing, there is more: some of its interstices, which are numerous.”
Jean Baudrillard - saturation of the interstices.
Good - product of eliminating the evil, Eternal = product of eliminating the Temporal, All = product of eliminating the Nothing.
We have rid ourselves of the ambiguity of the world.
A truly negationist system (Baudrillard) - denial of the nothing, of the illusion (not nihilism, because nihilism is forgetting of the nothing).
This isn't a contrary metaphysics, but the contrary of a metaphysics.
P.9 - Question of disappearance of humans from the world (not exhaustion, extinction or extermination, because these are natural phenomena). Human-invented disappearance.
p.10 -
1) disappearance of the real (media, virtual reality, networks)
Hannah Arendt: modern world begins with the invention of Archimedean point outside the world . Paradox: real world begins to disappear at the same time as it begins to exist.
P. 11 - 'to analyse' means literally 'to dissolve’.
We detach things from the world by naming them. For example, the class struggle exists from the moment Marx names it (and it declines after being named).
The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concepts take hold of it, is the moment when it begins to lose its energy-with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology.
The real vanishes into the concept - and vice versa (dreams vanish into their fulfilment).
Human technology -> world without humans, disappearance of humans.
P. 15- Marx: the idealist stage of interpretation, and the irresistible transformation that leads to a world without us.)
That world is perfectly objective because there’s no one left to see it.
P. 16 - Mode of disappearance of the human - is the product of an internal logic,… of the human race's fulfllment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge.
Surprisingly, extreme endeavour on the part of life also amount to disappearance of human: (we’re pre-programmed to die - apoptosis).
Canetti: vanishing point, end of evolution.
P. 20 - human = infantile malady of the machine
P. 21 - Disappearance may be conceived differently:
1) desire no longer to be there (not negative at all);
2) desire to see what the world looks like in our absence (photography);
3) to see, beyond the end/subject, if there still is an occurrence of the world,
Art of disappearance - a possibility of a game.
P.22 - Art in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance: 1) art of making the real disappear; 2) art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel).
Art today has disappeared, but without knowing it (continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state).
P. 25 - Everything that disappears there remain traces. (Cheshire cat’s grin; God disappears, but he leaves behind his judgement - which is terrifying).
p.26 - Disappearance of the subject, which is, more or less, the mirror image of the disappearance of the real.
The subject disappears, gives way to a diffuse, floating, insubstantial subjectivity: disembodied, empty consciousness.
P.28 - Great disappearance = division of subject to infinity; a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.
Cardinal Ratzinger - analysis of religion. A religion which accommodates to the world… becomes superfluous. The same can be said about art (art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous).
P. 31 - We must give disappearance back its prestige or, quite sim- ply, its power, its impact (it is neither for good or for evil). Things exist on the basis of their disappearance, and in order to interpret them in their entirelucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance.
CONCLUSION
P. 32 - Is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?
(telematics, IT, digitization, etc.)
P.33 - Example: disappearance of the image in the inexorable move from the analogical to the digital.
Image is now a tiny detail of the anthropological revolution, where an objective truth is mirrored to us by technology.
ON THE HEGEMONIC AND THE DIGITAL …
Digital photography marks the end of a singular presence of an object, since now it may be digitally constructed.
