/lit/ - Literature

Guys I’m having an existential crisis is art (specifically the novel) actually dead?

>It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous
Is he right?

>Power has ceased to exist
What did Baudrillard mean by this?

How do I become a Baudrillardian?

Thoughts on Baudrillard?

What was his solution? Was he politically impotent?

Baudrillard is one of the worst philosophers in the world, who deliberately makes simple things confusing instead of making confusing things simple.
take this for example
>If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire, this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreads still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
>Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreads are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

The Borges tale refers to "On the Exactitude of Science", which is a (very) short story about someone making a map that's exactly the same thing as the real thing, which is useless, so they leave it in the desert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

In the first paragraph, if the map rotted in the desert after the actual fall of the empire, then it becomes a simulation that's as real as the real thing itself, even where the real thing no longer exists. This spelled, to Baudrillard, the modern age, when people tried to reproduce the experience of life.

The second paragraph describes a map that is not only better than a real, but has no original -- instead, the map is the original and the real follows the map. To Baudrillard, this is a postmodern age, where traditional structures break down. This analogy might be confusing, but it's useful to think of it as religious or liberal arts/English major ignoramuses interpreting science. The "real" to Baudrillard was not merely real things as normal people think of it, but what he thought was culturally real. Hence, this is not necessarily so much a metaphysical description, but a historical one. Over the years, Baudrillard observed existentialism and modern art espousing the authenticity of experience breakdown and get replaced by globalism, consumerism, mass production, copies that are as good as the real thing.

1/2

What are his best books and where do I start?

>It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
>The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.
>Dying is pointless, You have to know how to disappear"
>Power itself must be abolished -and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.
>If I ever dabbled in anything in my theoretical infancy, it was philosophy more than sociology. I don’t think at all in those terms. My point of view is completely metaphysical. If anything, I’m a metaphysician, perhaps a moralist, but certainly not a sociologist. The only ‘sociological’ work I can claim is my effort to put an end to the social, to the concept of the social.
>…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide. The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence. Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.
Was he the most based and blackpilled out of all the postmodernists?

>It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
>The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.
>Power itself must be abolished -and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.
>If I ever dabbled in anything in my theoretical infancy, it was philosophy more than sociology. I don’t think at all in those terms. My point of view is completely metaphysical. If anything, I’m a metaphysician, perhaps a moralist, but certainly not a sociologist. The only ‘sociological’ work I can claim is my effort to put an end to the social, to the concept of the social.
>…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide. The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence. Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.
Was he based?

i will admit that derrida, foucault, and deleuze had something interesting to say and weren't total hacks but i feel like baudrillard has nothing of substance to say and is a total pseud. was baudrillard a hack?

is he the final boss?

Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.