Saturday, June 4, 2011

Reading Eric Packer's Death Through Baudrillard - The World Willing His Death




Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis



The true artificial satellite is  the mass of floating currencies orbiting the earth. Money has become an artifact pure and simple, with sidereal mobility and instant convertibility, and has at lat found its true home, a place more extraordinary even that the Stock Exchange: an orbit where it rises and sets like an artificial sun. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 15)


If man must reach the outermost bounds of his possibilities, then he must also go so far as to destroy himself. For that possibility is neither the least, nor the least glorious. - Saul Bellow (Baudrillard - The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact, Berg, p.115)


Dying its nothing. You have to know how to disappear. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 12)

One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan. I believe the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignificant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 114)

He wanted to be solarized. He wanted the plane flown by remote control with his embalmed body aboard..... and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed .... leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that would interact with the desert....(C 209)

He thought about his wife. He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her,live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor said. (C 205-6)

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point.  What did he want that wasn't posthumous? (C 209)

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