an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Spring
2017, ISSN 1552-5112
Jean Baudrillard on Homer and Achilles
An excerpt from the
newly released book, From
Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals
and Others.
Homer
(c800 – c701, poet, epic lyricist). Baudrillard quoted from Walter Benjamin who
wrote, poignantly: “Humankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now an object of contemplation for
itself” (The Conspiracy of Art: 184).
Achilles (great
warrior in Homer’s [c850 BCE, 1999] Iliad).
Achilles appears in Baudrillard’s devastating critique of Marxism: The Mirror of Production (83).
Baudrillard challenged the ethnocentrism of the epistemology of historical
materialism, specifically Marx’s quintessentially nineteenth century
Eurocentric manner of “disqualifying primitive symbolic practices as irrational
in opposition to rational labor”. This is how Marx, said Baudrillard, produced
the materialist stage of history as the real and could not understand magic
(the appropriation of natural forces) as anything but negative against our
rational approach. [Marx had asked “is Achilles possible side by side with
powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at
all compatible with the printing press?” (Marx [1859, 1970: 310-11)].
Baudrillard wrote that this argument “masks the entire problematic of the
symbolic under a functionalist [Marxist] finalist retrospective view of
mythology (and magic) in which it awaits man’s rational and technical
[European] domination” (83-84).
Baudrillard alerts us to how Marx’s lack of respect for traditional
myths made his work vulnerable to fall before primitive symbolic power.
Baudrillard leaves Marx, by the end of The
Mirror of Production, as Achilles left Hector – for the dogs, vultures and
other creatures who consume the dead (Homer, The Iliad, [Book I]; see also the entry for Marx).
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Spring
2017, ISSN 1552-5112