Stratagem of the Corpse

Gary J Shipley

Description

An original exploration of death in Jean Baudrillard’s work

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Foreword; 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 The Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe; Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Index.

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785272776
• Langue: English

Extrait

Stratagem of the Corpse
Stratagem of the Corpse
Dying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra
Gary J. Shipley
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Gary J. Shipley 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955658
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-275-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-275-6 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Death is an event that has always already taken place.
– Jean Baudrillard

Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword by William Pawlett
Introduction
1 On Decay and Other Synthetics
1.1 The Enigma of the Carcass
1.2 Forgetting Life as a Solution to Death
1.3 My Corpse the Double
2 Stratagem of the Corpse
2.1 The Art of Death
2.2 Models of the Models of the Real
3 A Bleak Non-History of History
3.1 Filming the Apocalypse
3.2 Obscenity as the Horror of Depersonalization
3.3 The Implosion of Depression as Pornography
4 The Hyperactivity of Objects
4.1 The Resurrected Object
4.2 The Exploding Corpse
4.3 Philip K. Dick Did Not Exist
5 The Unnamable Catastrophe
5.1 Media from the Dead
5.2 Rotting and Violence
5.3 The Implausibility of Scandal
6 A Cure for Vertigo
6.1 Vertigo and the Cost of Happiness
6.2 Holographic Autophagy
6.3 The Meaning of Terror
7 Chance and the Temporality of Death
7.1 The Reverse Mutilation of the Accident
7.2 Paralysis and Panic
8 The Possibility of Nihilism
8.1 Schopenhauer’s Twofold Dying
8.2 Some Hell of Obscene Clarity
9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show Smell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder ShowSmell-O-Vision: The Murder Show
9.1 The Pataphysical Murder-Machine
9.2 The Residue of Residues
10 The Evil Death
10.1 Kant’s Schizo Self
10.2 The Unthinkability of Meaning
10.3 A Baudrillardian Pessimism
11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak
11.1 Simulating and the Pretence of Agency
11.2 My Mad Love of Faces
11.3 Talking to the Dead
12 Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe
12.1 For the Love of Death: A Necrophilic Seduction
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
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the indefatigable Edia Connole for her continued support and advice. It is no exaggeration to say that were it not for her this book might never have left my hard drive. I would also like to thank William Pawlett for his generous foreword, and for choosing this as the inaugural work in Anthem’s Radical Theory series. I must also express my sincerest gratitude to Nick Land, Dominic Pettman, Richard G. Smith and Jason Mohaghegh for their kind endorsements.
Earlier versions of parts of this book were published in the anthologies Dark Glamor: Accelerationism and the Occult (Punctum), Phono-Fictions and Other Felt Thoughts – Catalyst: Eldritch Priest (Noxious Sector) and Mors Mystica (Schism); and in the following journals: Bright Lights Film Journal and Fanzine .
Foreword by William Pawlet
Did you ever get the feeling that critical and expositional works on Jean Baudrillard were missing something? Something important, but hard to pin down? That they were missing something of what might, loosely, be called the radicalism of Baudrillard’s ideas? Shipley’s work is one of the rare exceptions. Some of Baudrillard’s best-known, but least understood, ideas are here unleashed, freed of the disciplinary apparatus of academic convention – and rightly so. When higher education has abandoned all pretence that ideas matter, why should ideas be pressed into the service of this ‘spiralling cadaver’, this ‘zone of surveillance’?
Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and simulation have indeed suffered a fate worse than death; they have been reduced to a pulp and then reconstituted as supplements to the inventory of banal notions – globalization, mediation, performativity – that constitute media, cultural and communications studies in the twenty-first century. Shipley, in contrast, finds in Baudrillard what was always there, and reanimates what was killed off: the corrosive, pataphysical effects, the diabolical ambivalence and the deathly irony. Shipley also reminds us of something we had almost forgotten: Baudrillard was serious, and he often takes us just a little further than we want to go.
The author examines the many guises of death in Baudrillard’s thought: the medical and technological processing of death; the production of cadaver as ‘stuffed simulacra’ and the commodification of death; virtuality and the expulsion of death at the core of the social; the denigration of the dying and the dead, but also death in its symbolic and fatal forms: disappearance, suicide, the uncanny appearance of the double that foretells death as inescapable destiny, the radical otherness of our own death. Yet death is also examined here in ways that are far from familiar, that are not pursued by Baudrillard but are not absent from his work either: death without end, immunology and virology; death than resists both meaning and non-meaning; death which refutes the comforts of nihilism and atheism – which are today the very strategies of the system of control.
Shipley’s work is rare in reading Baudrillard’s post– Symbolic Exchange and Death work against the earlier work; Seduction , Fatal Strategies and The Perfect Crime are central to this new reading. In the last 20 years or so Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange has been the focal point for new interpretations, challenging the earlier and erroneous views of Baudrillard as disillusioned Marxist or irresponsible and detached postmodernist. Shipley sets out from Baudrillard’s position in The Ecstasy of Communication , later reinforced in Carnival and Cannibal , that symbolic exchange cannot be located in opposition to integral reality without itself falling into simulation, and that simulation is itself dual and reversive.
While this is certainly not Baudrillard for Beginners , paradoxically the student of Baudrillard will find much of value here. There are acute and incisive discussions of many of Baudrillard’s most suggestive themes and ideas: hyperreality, implosion, terrorism, seduction, suicide, fatal strategies and poetic reversal, doubling and duality, failing, desertification, integral reality, the perfect crime. This study takes us further into the simulacrum than we have been before. It is an uncomfortable journey, but one that should be made.
William Pawlett , 2017
INTRODUCTION

But there is perhaps another, more joyous way of seeing things, and of finally substituting for eternally critical theory an ironic theory. 1
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. 2
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, 3 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 faile