Jean Baudrillard est mort

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died in France aged 77. Highly influenced by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard was famous for his book, 'The [First]Gulf War didn't happen', which argued that our (western) knowledge of that war was mediated to such extent that it was impossible to say what really occurred and what in fact reality was at all, instead we were left with the 'hyperreal', a reality only available to us through the media. He also wrote that the Disney sponsored town, Celebration, in Florida wasn't an idealised and artificial version of the American dream, it was the rest of the country that was fake; Celebration, with its white fences and Truman Show style community, was America!
As a mark of respect, here are some exhilarating opening lines from 'Simulations', published by Semiotext(e) in 1983:
"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA- it is the map that engenders the territory..."

Hidden Links: Agamben and Pasolini

A surprising discovery last night while watching The Gospel according to St. Matthew:
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben plays Phillip, one of the amateur actors that director Pier Paolo Pasolini selected ahead of professionals for what is a harsh and admittedly hard going adaptation of Matthew's gospel.
Agamben is currently something of an academic star because of his belief, as outlined by Daniel Binswanger in Sign and Sight, that "the modern state is nothing other than a totalitarian organisation for the efficient administration of bare biological life." His refusal to be fingerprinted at JFK airport in New York and his subsequent ejection from the country have added further to his fame.
Daniel Morris, writing in Bookforum, believes that Agamben's participation in the film was critical to his development as a philosopher and political theorist - he published his first article the year the film was made(1964) and enjoyed something of intellectual flowering subsequent to it, the highlight being a two year stint with Heidegger in France between 66 and 68.
Not content with identifying oppressive character of the modern state, Agamben also has ideas about the gestural nature of cinema.