The Spectre and the Simulacrum

Theory, Culture and Society 25 (6):69-87 (2008)
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Abstract

With the recent deaths of both Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, it is an opportune moment to consider their respective contributions to social and cultural theory. The purpose of this article is not to establish an unbridgeable gap which allows no communication between Baudrillard and Derrida's thought. Rather, I will argue that there is an underlying assumption which brings them into close proximity: the idea that the dialectical order of the social, and its relationship to human mortality, has been radically altered by the media-technological systems through which `the real' is represented. Baudrillard's concept of simulation attempts to show how the mass media have become the exclusive condition through which the social is staged, and that there is nothing outside of their operational logics. Derrida's conception of the spectre, on the contrary, presents a `quasi-messianic' figure which haunts the system of simulation; it is s/he who arrives through the intensification of social performativity which Baudrillard understands as completely self-referential. My aim is to show that the most political way of approaching Baudrillard is to read him as a kind of `evil genius' of simulation; as a provocation to acknowledge the spectral bodies who hover between life and death within the system of the hyperreal.

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References found in this work

The German Ideology.Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - 1939 - Science and Society 3 (4):563-568.
Of spirit: Heidegger and the question.Jacques Derrida - 1989 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Of Spirit.Jacques Derrida - 1989 - Critical Inquiry 15 (2):457-474.

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