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)

Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :