Baudrillard dies

“He argued that spectacle is crucial in creating our view of events - things do not happen if they are not seen.”

BBC NEWS | Europe | French thinker Baudrillard dies

(Via Pia.)

Pia woke me with this news and the question - “Where have they all gone?”.

“Worm food”, was all I could muster.

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him…. Even … the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax…. - Jean Baudrillard

I feel the sudden need to read more commentary of this sort, by Baudrillard, Zizek and anybody else looking for the “reality in the fantasy”.

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philosophy, Baudrillard, war, Iraq, postmodern