Poet of the Hyperreal

Thank you for the input - it brought me to my knees, but helped me so much and inspired so many. I would love to claim I fully understand your theses, but it took me a long time to appreciate that you were a poet of sorts (a dry poet?), as well as a philosopher.. and I haven't yet reread you with the same voracity of that first time..

When I do I will guard against the perils of nihilism, and keep my eyes open for the heart of humanity which I know you must express - possibly simply in the beautiful and not meaningless exercise of sheer intellectual vitality which is my abiding impression of you now.

And whilst I can't really condone those apparently inhumanly insensitive remarks you made, I have to admit that you spoke for a part of me - a part which I hope never does speak for me.

I heard you echoing Bakhunin, the urge to destroy being also a creative act; except one cannot apply that principle to life; for destruction of life is surely as close a negation of creativity as language, if it must exist at all, can allow?

Using this medium now to homage you seems cruelly apposite beyond compare. This false opposition of ones and zeroes, somehow, expressing a spirit which, in your mental world, may never have existed at all; but which your mental world certainly existed within.
May you rest in peace.

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us – because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand – the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forest – the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature – only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains...


RIP Jean Baudrillard.