Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Pawletts William
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On Decay and Other Synthetics
- Chapter 2 Stratagem of the Corpse
- Chapter 3 A Bleak Non-History of History
- Chapter 4 The Hyperactivity of Objects
- Chapter 5 The Unnamable Catastrophe
- Chapter 6 A Cure for Vertigo
- Chapter 7 Chance and the Temporality of Death
- Chapter 8 The Possibility of Nihilism
- Chapter 9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show
- Chapter 10 The Evil Death
- Chapter 11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak
- Chapter 12 Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe
- Appendix 1 Whiteout: Spatiotemporal Interstices, Necropresence and the Immortality of Now
- Appendix 2 Pure Dreaming: Radicalized and Vermiculated Thought, or Death as an Earworm
- Appendix 3 The Non-Existence of the Scream
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Pawletts William
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On Decay and Other Synthetics
- Chapter 2 Stratagem of the Corpse
- Chapter 3 A Bleak Non-History of History
- Chapter 4 The Hyperactivity of Objects
- Chapter 5 The Unnamable Catastrophe
- Chapter 6 A Cure for Vertigo
- Chapter 7 Chance and the Temporality of Death
- Chapter 8 The Possibility of Nihilism
- Chapter 9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show
- Chapter 10 The Evil Death
- Chapter 11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak
- Chapter 12 Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe
- Appendix 1 Whiteout: Spatiotemporal Interstices, Necropresence and the Immortality of Now
- Appendix 2 Pure Dreaming: Radicalized and Vermiculated Thought, or Death as an Earworm
- Appendix 3 The Non-Existence of the Scream
- Index
Summary
But there is perhaps another, more joyous way of seeing things, and of finally substituting for eternally critical theory an ironic theory.
The function of theory is […] to seduce, to wrest things from their condition, to force them into an over-existence which is incompatible with that of the real.
If Georges Bataille had us laughing with the dead, sharing risible chuckles at the expense of our faecalized cadavers, then Jean Baudrillard shows how it is that such laughter has become increasingly nervous, nervous to the point of no longer being laughter, tremulous at a death whose voice we can scarcely hear and with which we cannot commune. To cease laughing with death we must first cease weeping with life, and to achieve both we flush ourselves out to drown in the world, a being-in about which Martin Heidegger could only fantasize, and while drowning grab hold of whatever's left from ‘Integral Reality's’ rapacious appetite, that is, variant forms of nothing and unknowns. Morbidity is the reclamation yard of our identity, and this book attempts a posthumous itinerary of that yawning network of scrap and decommissioned utilities.
In order to ingratiate myself as much as possible with this particular Baudrillardian sickness unto death, I chose not to forgo the necessary immersion, in all its excesses and sacrificial demands. This is, after all, not a dying from or a dying for but a dying with. This book is a world of death, of death becoming Baudrillardian, and if it does not, in part at least, seduce as this death must seduce, it has then failed in its worldliness, which is of course an otherworldliness – an otherworldliness without another world, an end extending beyond its own end with no possibility of beyond. If from its terrain and bad air no giddiness or palpitations are evident, then this dying world will have perished as one that exists through dying perishes: from the asphyxiating insinuation of the real, whereby a world of dying just collapses into the world (the world of living), or else from its own self-destructive principles mimicking too closely those of death's own (propensity for) integral vanishing.
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- Stratagem of the CorpseDying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020