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New Articles from The Dunedin School: Job; Aqedah; Achsah

27 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Continental Philosophy, Hebrew Bible, Postcolonialism, Reception, Violence

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9/11, Achsah, aqedah, differend, divine violence, hybridity, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Job, suicide bombing, symbolic exchange, tangata whenua

Rounding up some recent articles emanating from The Dunedin School:

LyotardDeane Galbraith examines the book of Job through the lens of Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, uncovering a further dimension of injustice in the book resulting from God’s appeal to universalising and transcendent standards of divine justice which serve to deny justice to Job in the specific facts of Job’s dispute. He describes the book of Job as “the Bible’s most anti-Christian text”.
‘”Would you condemn me that you may be justified?”: Job as differend.’ Bible and Critical Theory 5.3 (October 2009)

BaudrillardEric Repphun explores the aqedah and divine violence in general, with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange. He questions whether suicide bombing, including 9/11 horrifies us, in part, not only because of its transgressing of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, but also because “it violates the conventional logics of exchange rooted in capitalist ideas of exchange and use value”.
‘Anything in Exchange for the World: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and the Aqedah.’ International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 7.2 (July 2009)

Come Home (The Gift of Achsah)Judith McKinlay fleshes out the elliptical story of Achsah, a hybrid biblical character, in whose person and genealogy is an uncomfortable reminder of the tangata whenua (indigenous people) still in the land. “Forever located in Scripture, she is the pawn of an imperial hegemony…”
‘Meeting Achsah on Achsah’s land.’ Bible and Critical Theory 5.3 (October 2009)

Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit

25 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, History, Language, Literature, Living, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts

≈ 11 Comments

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Children of Men, commodification, disenchantment, dystopia, Georges Bataille, Henning Mankell, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Wallander, Logan's Run, Max Weber, Never Let Me Go, New Age, Ninni Holmqvist, PBRF, rationalisation, Sweden

Proving that we here in the Dunedin School are interested in books other than the Bible, we turn our attention in quite another direction and continue our ongoing discussion of rationalisation – or disenchantment – and human society (see more on this here, here, here, here, and here).

Whoever pushes rationality forward also restores new strength to the opposite power, mysticism and folly of all kinds.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Right now, no-one else is doing fictional social commentary about the continuing process of rationalisation quite as well as Scandinavians.  From Jens Lien’s lithe, brilliant 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man, which envisions the afterlife as a sterile, highly controlled modern city, to Let the Right One In, which unearths an unspeakable, timeless evil living on the perfectly planned streets of Stockholm (or perhaps this evil is created by or drawn to the city because of its inhuman perfection), there is a whole host of powerful narratives emerging from the northern reaches of Europe, narratives which seriously question the social costs of quantification and reduction of all things, human life included, to exchangeable commodities.n59473

To these more fanciful works, we need to add the growing numbers of excellent Swedish crime fiction, a list which must include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (along with the two other titles in his Millennium Trilogy), which puts a very human face on the immense suffering and violence that goes on, unnoticed and unremarked, in the interstices of rationalised societies.  The gold standard here is probably set by Henning Mankell’s brilliant Kurt Wallander detective novels, which are so popular in Germany that Mankell outsells J.K. Rowling.  Over the course of nine novels, Wallander, a kind of dishevelled, stoic, and utterly baffled Everyman, fights a losing battle against a tide of violence and senseless crime in what should, by all accounts, be an earthly paradise of social planning, a triumph of the welfare state.  The Wallander novels are shot through with a crawling sense of dread that is shocking not because it is so out of place in the quiet towns of southernmost Sweden, but because it quickly becomes so natural,  because it feels so familiar.  Mankell turns what could be boilerplate police procedurals into both a highly-nuanced character study and a far-ranging, even courageous theodicy that could only have emerged out of one of the most secular nations on earth.  The Wallander novels amount cumulatively to a systematic interrogation of the failures of the welfare state and a deconstruction of the social engineering promises that were made so easily, and with remarkably little foresight, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  (Incidentally, for the uninitiated, the suburb English-language BBC production Wallander, with a doughy and heartbreakingly human Kenneth Branagh as Wallander is a great point of entrée into Mankell’s world; for those of you who still read books,  I’ll recommend 1995’s Sidetracked as a personal favourite among the novels).

To this illustrious list we should now add Ninni Holmqvist’s compelling and unjustly overlooked first novel The Unit (2006), an examination of the failures of the present through the classical allegorical strategy of the dystopia.  The story is told by Dorrit Weger, a fifty-year-old woman who, as the novel opens, has been moved to something called ‘the Unit’, about which the reader knows nothing.  As the story unfolds through Holmqvist’s quiet, precise, understated prose, we learn only gradually what the Unit is and why Dorrit finds herself there.  In the future Sweden in which the novel is set – and its exact timeframe is ambiguous, though it is not too far in the future – anyone who has reached the end of their usefulness to society is taken to the Unit, where they are used for medical experiments and as living organ banks, forced to donate their organs one by one until they donate a vital organ, say the heart or the lungs.  ‘Final donation’ is in fact the Unit’s callous euphemism for death.  Dispensable Elsa, in an attempt to be light-hearted about her fate, jokes with her friend Dorrit, ‘We’re like free-range pigs or hens.  The only difference is that the pigs and hens are – hopefully – hopefully ignorant of anything but the present’.[1]

TheUnit - Ninni Holmqvist

This is no prison camp, however, at least not in the traditional sense and this, for some reason, just makes the fate of Dorrit and her fellow ‘dispensables’ all the more repellent.  The Unit is an immaculately constructed alternative world with no view of the outside.  It is a prison, without question, but it is a comfortable prison.  There are shops, gardens, healthy restaurants, and plenty of amusements.  Everything is clean, rational, and as humane as such a thing could possibly be.  The dispensables, within the confines of their role as human capital, are treated with respect and encouraged to pursue their own interests and look after their own (decidedly relative) wellbeing.  Neither is the selection of people for the Unit random or unexpected; the selection criteria are highly rational, highly quantified, and systematised to remove those all-too-human elements of chance and luck.  Anyone who does not work in a vital field – teaching, nursing, etc. – and who remains childless is destined for a one-way trip to the Unit when they reach a certain age.  For women, the cut-off age is fifty, while for men it is sixty.  Even this has a rational justification; male sexual function has a slightly longer life-span than female, thus men retain their usefulness for longer.

The Unit is many things: it is a moving study of the intense and genuine friendships that quickly develop within the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Unit among people who know they have, at most, a few years left to live; when Dorrit meets Johannes and falls in love, it is a refreshing (and refreshingly frank) study of a sexual relationship between two characters past middle age, a time of life that most popular fiction, Harold and Maude notwithstanding, renders oddly asensual; and, in the end, it is simply heartbreaking, especially when Dorrit reminisces about her simple life outside the Unit and about her dog Jock, who she was forced to leave with friends when she taken to away.

In the final analysis, what The Unit, with its focus on the usefulness or utility of human beings, is criticising is rationalisation, the increasing dominance of instrumental reason, and how this effects people living in rationalised societies.  What matters in a rationalised or disenchanted system is what works, not what has meaning.  Only that which conforms to a narrowly-defined idea of function has proper, demonstrable value.  Those in Holmqvist’s dystopian future who find themselves in the Unit fall outside the brutal calculus of value that equates usefulness with the biological necessity of reproduction.  The world that supports the Unit is thus in this sense a subsistence economy that places the highest interest in its own survival.  Holmqvist makes it apparent that members of the Unit have internalised this value system, as we see Dorrit fretting, even after being labelled as dispensable, about being ‘unusable’ as a medical commodity within the Unit itself.  She also spends much of her time – tellingly, she follows standard week-day working hours even while inside the Unit – writing a novel about a mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, in which she muses, ‘The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word?  Is she to be regarded as needed?  The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?’[2]

Rationalisation, first theorised by the sociologist Max Weber in early years of the twentieth century, has arguably held up better than its contemporary, the secularisation thesis.  There are a number of sociologists, theorists (including yours truly), and philosophers who have done some very interesting work within a Weberian framework, working with what Weber famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.  One of the more prominent of these thinkers is Georges Bataille, who captures the long and ultimately indeterminate struggle between instrumental and values-based rationalities when he writes of ‘the poverty of utility’.  Bataille’s related concepts of accursed share and sovereignty have strong resonances with both Weber’s disenchantment and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange.  Bataille’s concept of the sovereign is also related, not coincidentally, with his challenging theory of religion, which in turn owes a good deal to Weber’s narrative of rationalisation and its identification of religious and economic history.[3] Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which celebrates the extra-economic and extra-instrumental use of goods, Bataille writes critically of the ‘servile man’, who ‘averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which serves no purpose’.[4] He opposes the servile to the sovereign: ‘The sovereign I speak of has little to do with the sovereign of States, as international law defines it.  I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’.[5] The sovereign, then, stands apart from and opposed to the closed system of political economy, as does symbolic exchange; indeed, Bataille champions the ‘opposition to the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation’ that is embodied in true exchange.[6] In the world of The Unit, human beings are understood only in relationship to their use value and are thus granted different levels of exchange value in a brutal, mercenary logic where a single older woman is worth demonstrably, quantifiably less than a young single mother of young boys.  There is a good deal that this kind of instrumentalisation misses, of course, and Weber, when formulating his theory of rationalisation, noted that disenchantment carries with it necessarily a dehumanising element.  When Dorrit finds out her sister had been in the same Unit and had died a few years previously, she rages against the narrowness of this calculus of value: ‘But what about me?  Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anyone think about things like that?’[7]

Though exploitative medical practices and the disposal of the aged are classic themes in dystopian fiction, from Michael Bay’s patently awful film The Island to the classic (both in novel and film form) Logan’s Run, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (soon to be released as a film), The Unit is still compelling, neccessary reading, due in no small part to the fact that it is far more grounded in the realities of the disenchanted, rationalised world than many of these other texts. After all, what makes any dystopia work is that it is believable.  This is why Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men is so striking, so haunting: it is chillingly plausible; its account of the future is so convincing as to seem almost inevitable.  What makes Holmqvist’s nightmare so recognisably grounded in our reality is that she draws out the connections between rationalisation and commodification, which are inextricably linked in consumer capitalism.  Dorrit tells a friend:

I used to believe that my life belonged to me … Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it … Those who have the power, I suppose … The state or industry or capitalism.  Or the mass media.  Or all four.  Or are industry and capitalism the same thing?  Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life.  They own everybody’s life.  And life is capital.  A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy.  I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.[8]

As a condemnation of an increasingly rationalised world where everything and, more importantly, everyone, can become a unit of economic value, The Unit is a very fine novel and a nice bit of social criticism.  However, there is something going on further in the depths of the text that should be immensely troubling to anyone invested in the idea of therapy.  That the usual therapies of our world go on unhindered with the Unit, that Doritt regularly visits a psychologist, or that art therapy is available to the doomed residents, suggests something deeply subversive; that the whole therapeutic ethos that dominates contemporary European cultures, with its rhetoric of healing, wholeness, mind-body unity, self-awareness, and self-fulfilment and its social structure of support groups, twelve-step programs, talk therapy, is nothing more than an integral part of the rationalised and rationalising apparatus that prepares and maintains human capital.  That very few of the people who work at the Unit (though they live outside of it) have any intimation of the sheer hypocrisy of the whole enterprise is telling of the perverse coexistence of the recognisable world of therapy and the utterly ruthless logic of exploitation and violence that exists behind the whole edifice of the Unit.  Slavoj Žižek gets at this point in his contributions to the recent The Monstrosity of Christ:

Spiritual mediation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core.  The reason for this shift of accent from religious institutions to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.[9]

This paints the whole of The Unit in a new light and draws out the fact that the novel voices a criticism of the whole edifice of contemporary spiritual/therapeutic culture, most visible in the New Age movement, which often calls for a reversal of disenchantment and the creation of a ‘reenchanted’ world (and here Thomas Moore’s best-selling book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life is but one example).  Viewing it from the angle set out by Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, what is going on in the development of the whole therapeutic ethos is in reality very different.  In important ways that go largely unspoken, the world of universal individual achievement, the world where we can go to a yoga class or purchase ancient Mayan herbs to mediate the effects of a stressful life, is a world not unlike that of the Unit, and we, as its residents, are not unlike the human capital that is corralled there to serve a purpose and then to be discarded when our usefulness is finished.  All of this raises a series or vital, necessary question: Is therapy really just another management technique and, worse, one that many people gladly submit themselves to?  Are we concerned with all of this healing and wholeness because it allows us to more effective employees, voters, and consumers?  Is all of this a symptom of the commodification of the human subject?  Is the New Age, rather than a new era of freedom and respect for the individual, in reality an ideal embodiment of disenchantment and a pathway to an even more dysenchanted world?

Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory


Brief excursus on rationalisation and the contemporary university: That this poverty of utility has permeated the contemporary academy to an unprecedented degree goes perhaps without saying.  That the value of university research and teaching is now primarily filtered though economic concerns is immediately obvious to anyone working within the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, a system which imposes an inappropriate and ultimately harmful standard of ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ drawn from the business world and situated within a narrowly-prescribed system of valuation.  Education is not a product, nor is it a service and to treat it as such has serious detrimental consequences, such as the need to court and treat students as customers.  On the reverse side of the coin, we find significant numbers of students who are unwilling or simply unable to make the intellectual leap to find the value in studying something that will not help them find a job or in studying for a purpose other than gathering marks towards a degree.  The great tragedy here when thinking about the value of the study of religion, or any of the Humanities for that matter, is that, in spending time and energy attempting to prove their worth in the narrow strictures of utilitarian and economic value, scholars are distracted from doing work that is truly valuable (Mark Bauerlein has an excellent piece on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education).  Perhaps all of this ultimately breaks down to a question of belief; either one believes that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, or one does not.  This may be one of those things about which one must square one’s shoulders and declare, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’.

As the Unit’s librarian Kjell tells Dorrit early on in her stay, ‘there are so many intellectuals here.  People who read books … People who read books tend to be dispensable.  Extremely’.[10] That the Unit is also home to a number of artists and writers should perhaps come as no surprise, for the arts, like the pursuit of knowledge, are formally – and often economically – useless.  That these things make life worth living is, of course, of no consequence.


[1] Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit, translated by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2006), 52.

[2] Holmqvist, Unit, 93.

[3] See Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 35-42 and 90.

[4] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15. Emphasis in original.

[5] Bataille, Accursed II, 197.

[6] Bataille, Accursed II, 42.

[7] Holmqvist, Unit, 136.

[8] Holmqvist, Unit, 103.

[9] Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 28.

[10] Holmqvist, Unit, 48.

Microscopic Pornography: Public Enemies and the Problem of Detail

31 Monday Aug 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Continental Philosophy, Film, History, Living, Photography, Theory

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ill-conceived reactionary nostalgia, Jean Baudrillard, microscopic pornography, Pornography, Public Enemies, Robert Frank, The Americans

Last night, I attended a screening of Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s retelling of the final months in the life of the Depression-era bank robber and working-class hero John Dillinger.  As a cultural artefact and an example of the new digital cinema, the film is a fascinating if problematic iteration of an emerging cultural tendency towards overdetermination and a pathological need to reveal the world in all its detail.  The film, as an aesthetic experience, is deeply frustrating.  The script is economical and propulsive, while at the same time it allows for enough space to effective engage with ideas of celebrity and the necessary role of violence in the maintenance of order.  Across the board, the performances Mann gets out of his actors, especially Stephen Graham as a cackling, sociopathic Baby Face Nelson, are compelling.  The period recreation is convincing and the film makes an extraordinary stab at realism by shooting in many of the locations across the American Midwest where the events recounted in the film actually took place.

The problem lies in the fact that Mann shot the film digitally, as he did with his last film, the laughably bad Miami Vice.  Had he shot Public Enemies with the same care for composition and lighting that are needed for celluloid, something Mann is in fact very, very good at (see Heat or Manhunter if you don’t believe me), this could have been a truly great film.  As it is, it just looks cheap.  Not gritty and realistic, just cheap, unfinished.  This kind of digital aesthetic can be and has been used very effectively, in films as diverse as Cloverfield and Che, but here the off-the-cuff cheapness and inconsistency of the whole affair – and a few of the scenes are stunningly beautiful – seriously undercut Mann’s attempt at historical truth and his striving for mythic resonance.  Maybe this is an indicator that filmic convention hasn’t quite caught up with the technological changes and that it will be some years before old-fashioned people like myself will be able to accept period cinema told without the warmth and depth of film.  On the other hand, maybe the film points, to a larger problem (or consideration, if we want to use neutral language) with digital media.  Ignoring entirely the question of quality – at points, the film looks like it was shot with a cell phone, and a cheap one at that – and the still-unsolved problems of digital cinema – the artefacting, the choppy movement when the lighting is less than ideal, the lack of real depth of field – the film renders the world in excessive detail.  Mann’s cameras render the world flat, uninteresting and completely exposed, stripping out the shadows, revealing the hidden and robbing the world of its mystery.

In a pleasing moment of syncronicity, upon arriving home, I ran across the following quotation from Robert Frank, the great Swiss/American photographer whose 1958 book The Americans gutted the American mythos of the 1950s, showing, over the course of only 83 images, that Americans were not contented suburbanites living the good life of the post-war boom but were something altogether darker and more interesting.  Frank, speaking about the rise of digital media, said in a recent interview:

There are too many images.  Too many cameras now.  We’re all being watched.  It gets sillier and sillier.  As if all action is meaningful.  Nothing is really all that special.  It’s just life.  If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore.  Maybe it never was.

The Americans: Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey (1955)
The Americans: Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey (1955)

From a man who turned the everyday life of America as a corporate entity in a stunning work of art, from a man whose vision of America is as influential as that of Elliott Erwitt or Walker Evans, this is more a requiem for a lost aesthetic age than a mere criticism.

Turning our gaze outward, it is interesting to note that the late French cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a good deal about the problem of overrepresentation and overdetermination in a media-saturated world, which he captured in his enigmatic  yet highly evocative phrase ‘microscopic pornography’.  He writes, ‘This is what we have forgotten in modernity: subtraction brings force, power is born of absence.  We have not stopped accumulating, adding, raising the stakes.  And because we are no longer capable of confronting the symbolic mastery of absence, we are now plunged in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of profusion’.[1] There is an argument to be made that Public Enemies takes this disenchanted illusion and transforms it into an aesthetic strategy, perhaps a historical-film analogy to contemporary horror film’s tendency to show too much, too be too generous in its telling.

Baudrillard extends his argument about this paradoxical poverty of excess into the larger world and implicitly argues that the world as we know it is too visible, too well known for our own good: We are no longer in a system of growth, but of excrescence and saturation, which can be summed up the fact that there is too much.  There is too much everywhere, and the system cracks up from excess’.[2] Ours is, in a word, a world of hyperdensity, one in which people suffer from ‘an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate’.[3] Baudrillard employs a number of techniques, phrases and metaphors to describe and critique this situation.  At turns, he writes of a ‘sidereal era of boredom’ and of ‘horizontal madness’,[4] looking always to something better: ‘Let us hope the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin’.[5] In The Transparency of Evil, he links the increasing banality of the world to the effects of technology: ‘We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity.  Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom.  Alienation of man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into a homeostasis by machines’.[6] For Baudrillard, the rise of information technologies, at best a paradoxical form of plenty, serves as a primary illustration of this tendency.  In In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities, he writes,

We are in a universe where there is more and more information, less and less meaning … Everywhere information is reputed to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus-value of meaning homologous to the economic plus-value which results from the accelerated notion of capital.  Information is given as creative of communication, and even if the wastage is enormous a general consensus would have it that there is in the total nonetheless a surplus of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social fabric … We are all accomplices in this myth.  It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organisation would collapse.  Yet the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason.  Just where we think that information is producing meaning, it is doing the exact opposite.[7]

Bringing this insight to bear on our ongoing discussion of the unofficial record of the modern, rationalised city, in a novel extension to his neo-Romantic urge to reenchant language, Baudrillard writes in praise of a familiar form of unofficial, symbolic language as part of his critique of the contemporary urban experience, which he sees increasingly dehumanising: ‘The urban city is also a neutralised, homogenised space, a space where indifference, the segregation of urban ghettos, and the downgrading of districts, races, and certain age groups are on the increase.  In short, it is the cut-up space of distinctive signs’.[8] Baudrillard refers throughout his work to the practice of graffiti as a means of humanising the modern city, writing for example, ‘Graffiti covers every subway map in New York, just as the Czechs changed the names of the streets in Prague to disconcert the Russians: guerrilla action’.[9] In his famed Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard compares graffiti in the subways to ‘Symbolic ritual of incision and marks’[10] and makes explicit a theme in many of his works by writing, ‘Only the wounded body exists symbolically’.[11] Here Baudrillard recalls forcefully Michel De Certeau’s enigmatic statement, ‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’.[12]

In an age where technology allows us to strip more and more of the veneer off of the fundamental mysteries of the world, our films, like all of our art, would do well to remember this.


[1] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. by Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 114.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 191.

[3] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 27.

[4] Baudrillard, Conspiracy, 109.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 88.

[6] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 58-59.

[7] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or the End of the Social, trans. by Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton and Andrew Berardini (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007),99-100.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 76.

[9] Baudrillard, Symbolic, 81.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981), 112.

[11] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 114. He calls back to archaic societies with this image of the marked body: ‘The savages knew how to use the whole body … in tattooing, torture, initiation – sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character’. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 115.

[12] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108.

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  • Vridar » “Partisanship” in New Testament scholarship on Exposing Scandalous Misrepresentation of Sheffield University’s Biblical Studies Department and a Bucket Full of Blitheringly False Accusations: ‘Bewithering is Becoming Bewildering’*
  • Arthur Klassen on The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!!
  • Anusha on Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
  • Cary Grant on J.N. Darby’s End-Times Family Tree: Is Dispensationalism from the Bible or Evangelical Tradition?
  • Christian Discernment on The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!!
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  • lisawhitefern on The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!!

Blogroll

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  • Dr Jim's Thinking Shop and Tea Room (Jim Linville)
  • Forbidden Gospels (April DeConick)
  • Genealogy of Religion (Cris)
  • Joseph Gelfer
  • Otagosh (Gavin Rumney)
  • PaleoJudaica (Jim Davila)
  • Religion and the Media (University of Sheffield)
  • Religion Bulletin
  • Religion Dispatches
  • Remnant of Giants
  • Sects and Violence in the Ancient World (Steve A. Wiggins)
  • Sheffield Biblical Studies (James Crossley)
  • Stalin's Moustache (Roland Boer)
  • The Immanent Frame
  • The New Oxonian (R. Joseph Hoffmann)
  • Theofantastique

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