Baudrillard is not dead.
To die, one must first have lived. Become - at last in this end that is also a beginning - a simulacrum of himself, Baudrillard remains always already dead - and indestructible. It's after the end of the world - don't you know that yet? Infected with Baudrillard's virulent strain of futuristic flu, such illogic comes naturally to us. When everything is science fiction, everything sf, then sf spins on itself and disappears. Sf fx - and not reality fx - are the order of the day.
Our presents, decomposed, yield the elementary particles that make up our futures -- futures that, in a fatal turn, come to constitute our presents. Powered by these implosions of meaning, we blast onward, choking on speed pollution, spinning out at orbital velocities, stopping, perhaps, for just a moment to dig a shallow grave in the desert of the real. Having become not means to an end but ends to a mean, death, we at last discover, is thoroughly wasted on the dead. Indeed, this ecstatic mating of persons and things we call death prefigures an even more seductive end: extinction. With baited breath we await it, the apocalypse, the ultimate seduction: the death of death itself, the end of ends!
No, I assure you, Baudrillard is not dead. He has gone extinct.
Jean Baudrillard (2007-1929)
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- Jean Baudrillard.
