an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, June - October 2016,
ISSN 1552-5112
From
Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals
and Others
An excerpt from the newly released
book, available
here.
Barthes, Roland (1915-80, philosopher,
literary theorist, and critic). Barthes was a very good friend to Baudrillard
and one of his inspirations. In The
System of Objects he cited Barthes (1963) on the mythological object that
the motorcar had become (25-26). He wrote: “Barthes (see especially 1967) is
someone to whom I felt very close, such a similarity of position that a number
of things he did I might have done myself, well, without wishing to compare my
writing to his” (Baudrillard Live:
204). Barthes and Baudrillard each contributed, in his own manner, to two
phases of poststructuralism – Barthes who was there at the birth, and
Baudrillard after Barthes’ death in 1980, who deepened and extended a good deal
of Barthes’ thought, while exploring the increasingly uncertain (and sometimes
chaotic) atmosphere pervading life in poststructural times (see the entry for
Michaux; and Barthes, 1968, 1973, and 1974).
In the
deeply radical amalgam that is poststructuralism, the Barthes-Baudrillard
embrace of emptiness (which I take to be a liberating gesture in the thought of
both), made significant contributions to five concepts: writing; language,
meaning, truth, and the real. These concepts, to which Baudrillard adds
reversibility, allow us to divest ourselves of the urge to grant a privileged
position to the author and similarly the condition under which any of us seek a
fixed identity (Coulter, 2012: 14-34).
Baudrillard
admired Barthes’ refusal of what was too obvious, “a kind of nausea with
received ideas” (The Conspiracy of Art:
83) and Barthes’ writing on photography ([1980] 1993: 95) which challenged him
to think the medium through in a different manner as we entered into the
digital age. Baudrillard was especially fond of Barthes use of punctum – that
absent point, “that nothingness at the heart of the image” (See Art and Artefact: 39, 95; Fragments: 96; The Conspiracy of Art: 73; The
Singular Objects of Architecture: 20; Photographies:
139; Exiles From Dialogue: 133; and
Barthes, 1964).
Baudrillard
credited Barthes ([1977] 1994: 94) for inspiring his love of aphoristic
fragments (Fragments: 21) and for his
wariness concerning language which, as Barthes recognized, continually forces
us to speak (Ibid.:52). Baudrillard was also influenced by Barthes’ take on
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, June - October 2016,
ISSN 1552-5112