Wednesday, February 14, 2007

An excerpt from Jean Baudrillard:

"Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. Realism had already inaugurated this process...The rhetoric of the real signaled its gravely altered status (its golden age was characterized by an innocence of language in which it was not obliged to redouble what it said with a reality effect).

Surrealism remained within the purview of the realism it contested - but also redoubled - through its rupture with the Imaginary. The hyperreal represents a much more advanced stage insofar as it manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself."

An excerpt from Jean Baudrillard - "Symbolic Exchange and Death," originally published in Paris, in 1976.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello my balance
I came to let you know my husband Paul is still in intensive care now
16 days he got alergic reaction to
medicine for asthma, it is called
Propofol Infusion Syndrome.. very rare. They are making a hole in his
throat today so they can remove the
tubes that can cause vocal damage
he is in very bad shape. Please pray for Paul, every moment of our lifes is so precious, beauty is everywhere... this etching of a single flower feels like me, I am so alone at the house. Here you are in a country with problems and here I am in a place of peace, and yet I have the war. all my love and think of you almost daily. Linda