[iDC] Some thoughts on Jean Baudrillard

[A. G-C]

Just a note on the relationship by JB and his works.

You know that Baudrillard did not resent real problems with the
interpretations of his works from other part whatever misunderstanding. Very
few philosophers have known so much reproductions of his works while alive.
Notoriously online. More subjective interpretation by artists or other
writers.

>From a part it is to know that he had never a lawsuit on the question of the
rights and even not more on the question that he was very much attacked on
false representations by extracting pieces out of their context (notoriously
in France having been the object of several "cabalas" (?) in the Press - but
never receiving himself a lawsuit: absolutely never. Because in fact he was
hated but respected as one of the last truth (the ultimate metaphysic truth
coming from objects as proper conceptual objects, as said McKenzie Wark).

He credited all manifestation of freedom to his works. Two reasons: one
being from a hand that a work is not more the property of his author, but
the public which honours it. If not the work will not meet its proper
cultural life which consists the proper activism of a work having cut the
relationship with its father... (or mother;-)- the author of the work can be
in arts, can be in writings and so on.

Very few writers has so much freedom with their production between friends,
it is to say no being of those not stopping to speak about their proper
works at the dinners... More accepting the hard criticism from proximate
part.

>From the second hand when he was a reference in another work, he accepted
but did not credit the reference as well the Simulationism as well Matrix
and so on, at the moment he was called to do it. Simply because as writer he
was against the representation which attributes always the less part of the
paradoxal meaning that breaks the complexity from the paradox (contraction
of dialectic), so which discredits the proper meaning coming only from the
proper form of essay and style... (aesthetic at the proper act of creation
under the form of essay or aphorisms as micro essays - not the philosophical
disposition outside the work), to become a sort of ideology, or
metamorphosis of the meaning what an author has not to credit as his proper
thought.

Always in distance but truly working from his proper part.

But he was very happy to know the credit given to his works being
interpreted in another works.

He was really an activist of the thought to the thought as well the private"
thought as well its destiny in the common thought.

He played exactly the object, radically coherent.

Well. Yet now we leave to go to the cemetery of Montparnasse and yet now as
usually I am late...


On 12/03/07 22:23, "Simon Biggs" <simon at babar.demon.co.uk> probably wrote:

> Denial and display in the 1970's
> 
> John Inman died within 24 hours of Jean Baudrillard. Inman's death received
> blanket coverage in the UK's popular media. Even the Guardian's obiturary
> came out with an entire "Berliner" page. A quick check of the Australian
> Broadcasting Corporation's web portal confirmed the international import of
> this death. On the other hand I am yet to see a single English language
> printed reference to the great French philosopher's death.
> 
> I imagine for much of the world's peoples the question would be "John who?",
> whilst for the average TV viewer or newspaper reader in the English speaking
> world the question would be "Jean who?".
> 
> John Inman and Jean Baudrillard might actually have more in common than just
> the timing of their deaths. Baudrillard most famously proposed the concept
> of the simulacra, when something is what it is because it resembles what it
> should be, regardless of what it might actually be. In his most famous TV
> role as Mr. Humphreys in UK TV's classic bad taste sitcom "Are you being
> served" John Inman enacted Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum at about
> the same time as Baudrillard would have been furiously thinking through his
> initial thoughts on the subject.
> 
> Baudrillard mastered the art of the philisophical double entendre as he
> absorbed the phenomenologies of Merleau Ponty and Heidegger. The necessity
> to square Kantian circles ensured that he would be able to seem to mean one
> thing whilst actually meaning something entirely different.
> 
> Similarly the character of Mr Humphreys functioned to deny and defer the
> import of gendered identity, whether straight or gay. His effeminate but
> non-confronting persona functioned to reassure us that difference was not
> really different, that we had nothing to fear. In this sense his work
> prefigures not only Baudrillard but also Derrida. The only difference
> between Inman's and Baudrillard's philosophy might therefore only be a
> matter of taste.
> 
> 100 years from today I am confident that Baudrilard will be remembered for
> his important works, such as "Towards a Political Critique of the Sign" and
> "Simulation and Simulacra". As to whether John Inman will be remembered is
> an open question. Until his death I had forgotten his existence (with
> relief). To be reminded of Inman's existence at the same time as absorbing
> the news that a thinker who had very deeply effected my own thinking had
> died was an unwelcome distraction. Unwelcome, but strangely fortuitous.
> 
> March 2007
> 
> Afternote: in the final stages of writing this I received Charlie Gere's
> piece on Baudrillard and found he too connected his death with that of
> Inman. The question now is whether to trash what I have written or "publish
> and be damned"...well, you know the outcome.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> Simon Biggs
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
> AIM: simonbiggsuk
> Research Professor in Art, Edinburgh College of Art
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/
> 
> 
> 
> 
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