Читать книгу Baudrillard with Nietzsche and Heidegger: Towards a Genealogical Analysis - Vanessa Freerks - Страница 12

In this chapter, I tried to show that genealogy, as practiced by Nietzsche and Baudrillard, offers different perspectives but it also appeals to our own perspective, putting it into question. Genealogy opens up possibilities within the perspective being addressed without directly rejecting it. Genealogy, as a critically motivated art of drastic presentation, should help readers see themselves differently.

The constructed and fictionalized hypothetical primal scenes of subjectivity that genealogies use against the current self-understandings, are not strictly factual because they are less concerned with the past and more concerned with the not-yet historical present. Our own development is not an external object of disinterested and neutral observation and we therefore need to “distance” ourselves from our past, which according to genealogical hypothesis, is always a history of power.

In the next chapter, I will look at the technological invention of the subject through economies of debt, guilt and obligation as sketched out by Nietzsche in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. I will move to the specific ways in which Baudrillard draws upon Nietzsche’s genealogical account of church practices as he analyzes consumer society. In the process, I bring together Nietzsche’s figure of the ascetic priest and that of the advertiser in Baudrillard. For Nietzsche, priestly power achieves a kind of cultural, interpretative hegemony, by giving a meaning to man’s suffering. Like Nietzsche’s ascetic priests, advertisers create for themselves a mask of “health” that has the power to seduce the healthy by infecting and poisoning their conscience.

1 For a critique of New French Theory and its German ideological roots, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). On Nietzsche and poststructuralism, see The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977). Baudrillard is often ignored within the “post-structuralist” body of thought: Belsey’s (2003) overview does not include him, nor does Schrift’s (1995).

2 On Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche and values see Catherine F. Botha’s (2014) study on Heidegger, Nietzsche and the Question of Values (http://hdl.handle.net/2066/129844).

3 On the relation between Bataille and Baudrillard see Pefanis (1991); Pawlett (2007). See also Leslie Anne Bolt- Irons, “Bataille and Baudrillard - From a General Economy to the transparency of Evil” in Angelaki. Vol 6. No. 2 (2001).

4 As Pawlett points out “Baudrillard is somewhat of an oddity even within poststructuralism. While poststructuralism has become a recognized strand of theory in the humanities and social sciences, a respectable body deftly summarised by Belsey (2003), Baudrillard remains marginal or unacceptable. Belsey’s (2003) overview makes no mention of Baudrillard” (Pawlett, 2007:3).

5 Schrift (1995, 41; note 23) only refers to Baudrillard in a footnote, with regards to Baudrillard’s attack on Foucault in Baudrillard’s book Forget Foucault (first published in French in 1976).

6 On the Genealogy of Morals is also according to Deleuze (2006, 81) “Nietzsche’s most systematic book”.

7 See Mark Poster’s (1981) article, ‘Technology and Culture in Habermas and Baudrillard: From Marx to Baudrillard’.

8 According to Saussure (1966, 120): “in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Proof of this is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighbouring term has been modified”.

9 Baudrillard later will criticize use of value as the “alibi” of exchange value (Baudrillard 1981, 130-142).

10 Charles Levin (1996, 46) sees here the “ironic vulgarisation of the Idea” [ i.e. the Platonic super-sensuous Idea]. The System of Objects is for Levin “a parodic inversion of Platonism – a social simulacrum – just as Deleuze had proposed in the same year (1968) for philosophy”. I will turn to the Nietzschean “reversal of Platonism” in chapter 4 and connect it to Deleuze and Baudrillard’s views on the rise of simulacra.

11 “c’est précisément qu’il n’ y a personne” (Baudrillard 1970, 125). Lost in translation is the ambiguity Baudrillard plays with here in French between ‘une personne’ (a person) and ‘personne’ (nobody).

12 As Saussure puts it: “[i]f, with respect to the idea it represents, the signifier appears to be freely chosen, then, on the contrary, with respect to the linguistic community which uses it, it is not free, it is imposed. The social mass is not consulted, and the signifier chosen by the language could not be replaced by another. This fact, which seems to envelop a contradiction, could be called familiarly the ‘forced card’. One says to the language ‘Choose!’ but adds: ‘it’ll be this sign and no other.’ Not only would an individual be incapable, if he wanted to, of modifying in any way whatsoever the choice which has been made, but the mass itself cannot exercise its sovereignty over a single word; it is bound to the language just as it is” (Saussure 1983, 104). According to Joseph (2000, 127): “Change in language for Saussure always occurs unconsciously, never as result of a willful decision, either by an individual or by the language community” (Joseph 2000, 127). In Saussure, the arbitrariness of linguistic signs takes a central place within Western language theory. Saussure, at the same, puts forward the complete systematicity of languages as sign systems. For Saussure, only the level of parole (speech, the use of language) is voluntary for the individual. “Language is impervious to individual will (the social and the unconscious is a connection that remains only implicit however)” (Joseph 2000, 127).

13 Douglas Kellner (1989, 120) claims that “whereas Nietzsche celebrated the sovereignty of the superior individual as the mode of transition to a higher stage of being, Baudrillard comes to attack the subject as such” (Kellner 1989, 120). On my reading, Baudrillard does not reject the subject, he accounts for its genesis.

14 Under the aspect or species (or ‘from the point of view’) of eternity. This Latin expression refers to Benedict de Spinoza. See ‘Ethics’ trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996) II/126 Cor. 2.60. According to this ‘view’, the epistemic subject is thought to have access to knowledge that is universally true since it occupies a universal perspective outside the world that goes beyond contingencies and variations that are associated with any position in this world.

15 As Charles Levin (1996, 88) puts it: “[w]hile apparently joining Rousseau to denounce historical civilisation as a perversion, however, Baudrillard has demonstrated no particular faith in the innate ‘goodness’ of human nature. In this respect, he is Nietzschean (and Freudian) to the core”

16 Nehamas argues that “hyperbole, the trope of excess or exaggeration has been largely ignored” because it is not philosophical enough to fit into previous conceptions of what constitutes philosophy or a properly philosophical text (Nehamas 1985, 22-23).