Baudrillard has passed away, rumors that Lacoue-Labarthe has passed as well
For a very biased, but funny account of Baudrillard's work read this . But why do right-wing commentators discredit themselves by hating on the French?
For a more balanced, but not as funny appraisal, read this . A generation of thinkers is disappearing. It is time to re-evaluate the radicalism that their thought once represented. Baudrillard's as well as Foucault's anti-liberalism appeared late in their careers less like critique than the dramatic diagnosis of forms mestasticized biopower (for Foucault) and hyperreality (for Baudrillard) that nullified history as much as the society of the spectacle itself.
For a more balanced, but not as funny appraisal, read this . A generation of thinkers is disappearing. It is time to re-evaluate the radicalism that their thought once represented. Baudrillard's as well as Foucault's anti-liberalism appeared late in their careers less like critique than the dramatic diagnosis of forms mestasticized biopower (for Foucault) and hyperreality (for Baudrillard) that nullified history as much as the society of the spectacle itself.
Labels: theory
7 Comments:
Because you can blame postmodernism for ruining the great Bush-Cheney administration?
Umm...postmodernism doesn't exist!
Please please please let that be true of the Bush-Cheney administration soon. Through impeachment of the latter, then the former!
wishful thinking will not make Bush/Cheney not exist...and when they are gone, they will have ceased to exist as an administration, that will certainly not be the end of our trouble...and yes, if you want to make fun of "blaming postmodernism" go right ahead. That doesn't make it a more interesting or defensible concept.
Maybe my "Blame Canada" allusion in the post title or my citation of it in your comment obscures the actual joke in the post itself.... Have you read it?
Goofing on attacks on postmodernism doesn't put me in the position of defending it or even of assuming its existence. But if you want to be all constructivist about it, you could say that "postmodernism" exists in about the same way that "Canada" does in the South Park movie...and song of that title.
constructivist,
you are pointing to my lack of humor about all of this and it is a weakness right now and I don't quite understand it...except to say that maybe I do believe that the academic embrace of postmodernism in the past two decades did in some way contribute to the moral and political turpitude of our times. I think we're all responsible. Rather than knotting ourselves into a pretzel of guilt, we have to work harder to be self-critical and historical.
With the proviso that U.S. academia was a late and relatively less influential adapter of postmodernism, I agree with everything you just said.
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