Baudrillard and Chuang Tzu

     Jean Baudrillard is (not) dead.  From the Guardian:

Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place. "Dying is pointless," he once wrote. "You have to know how to disappear." The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: "What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?" Baudrillard replied: "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."

     In an odd sort of way, he was consistent.  Arguing that "hyperreality" - the intensively mass-mediated technology-saturated weave of postmodernity -  has undermined the possibility of reality, he turned the idea back on himself, seeing only his own simulacrum.  And he was playful to boot:

One sceptical British interviewer called Baudrillard a "philosopher clown", a description to which he probably would not have objected, instead taking it as an invitation to think about the social function of clowns. As he once argued: "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." He was an aphorist. "Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself," he growled; or: "Our sentimentality towards animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them."

     His embrace of the inescapable unitelligibility of our times, and his eye for paradox has a Chuang Tzu sensibility.  I have long puzzled over a passage in Chuang Tzu and I have come to understand it as a mischevious counter to the sophists of his day, a celebration of unintelligibility in the form of logical explication.  I offer it here as a momento for Baudrillard:

Now, I have something to say about these things.  I don't know if it's similar to "this," or if it's dissimilar.  But similar and dissimilar are quite similar in the end, so it can't be much different than "that."  But be that as it may, let me try to say it:

Being a beginning.  Being not yet beginning to be a beginning.  Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning.  Being Being.  Being nonbeing.  Being not yet beginning to be nonbeing.  Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.  Then suddenly, being nonbeing.  And when it comes to being nonbeing, I don't know yet what's being and what's nonbeing.

There now: I've spoken.  But I still don't know whether it is being spoken or nonbeing spoken.
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Comments

[gmoke]

I learned long ago that Buddhist logic went something like
yes
no
not yes
not no
neither yes nor no
both yes and no

I use these possibilities in the polls sometimes appended to my dkos diaries (http://gmoke.dailykos.com). As a result of that experiment, I added another possibility:
none of the above

I'm debating whether to include yet another:
Elijah
for the open seat you leave at the table during Passover just in case the Prophet Elijah happens to show up.