"I am like a ripe shit"

I am reading Peter Ackroyd's Life of Thomas More betweentimes. In it he quotes Luther as saying "I am like a ripe shit and the world is a gigantic arsehole. We probably will let go of each other soon". (Obviously he said it in German, so something may have been lost in translation.) I feel the same about my paper on 'Culture and Resistance'. It is the s**t, and I am the ar*eh*le: my ideas are starting to cohere into a mass and the urge to get it out of my system is builiding.

Jean Baudrillard

First though, I must do a little more research. In the interviews there are quite a number of references to people either as heroes or enemies. Some I have heard of, some I haven't. Said decries Jean Baudrillard for being one of those who have turned away from the "great narratives of the enlightenment and emancipation". I'm ignorant of his work. My indispensable Dictionary of Important Ideas and Thinkers describes him as a 'French philosopher and sociologist, considered by many to be the quintessential postmodernist'. (Would he accept that classification, I wonder). To fill this gap in my education I try to read Paul Hegarty's 'Live Theory', which includes an interview with Baudrillard and an account of his work. Should I be 'against' Baudrillard too? I find Said's impassioned plea in defense of the enlightenment very inspiring but feel I should try to understand what he is railing at. ( I disloyally reflect that these intellectual types often fall out and accuse each other of the most diabolical crimes viz. Dawkins and Midgely). So with some trepidation I dip into the book. Page after page of incomprehension. What the hell is he driving at? He seems pretty certain about something. Explanations aren't working, but there seems to be a core of 'something realised' there somewhere. IT CLICKS as I read this section, a quote from 'Simulacra and Simulation':

"Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

Such would be the successive phases of the image:
- it is the reflection of a profound reality,
- it masks and perverts a profound reality,
- it masks the absence of a profound reality,
- it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum".

I kid you not. I'm no intellectual, but something clicked. The guys is saying that 'THIS WORLD IS AN ILLUSION', except he is saying it in French and from within the discourse of postmodern philosophy. Ah ha! Yes, a very interesting topic and one that does indeed lend itself to many interesting avenues of research and speculation.

Said and Baudrillard

No wonder Said 'hates' him. Said's work has largely involved showing how Western conceptions of the Orient are based on, to boldly paraphrase, 'false impressions'. Baudrillard appears superficially to be working in a similar field: generalizing and extending Said's work, as it were. But, now I see the difference. It is one of intent. Said's aim was essentially political: to expose dangerous errors in Western thought and reestablish Oriental self-confidence to address the problem of imperialism. Baudrillard, with little interest in praxis at all, is making a deeper point, but for its own sake, perhaps; a point that, by its nature, has no apparent political utility.

Said's friends and enemies

So, on with my research. I need to know more about Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Michael Walzer, Theodore Adorno, Eqbal Ahmad, Fouad Ajami, Hannah Arendt, Geoffrey Aronson, Daniel Barenboim, Yossi Beilen, Azmi Bishara, Max Boot, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Buber, John Burns, Aime Cesaire, Alexander Cockburn, Emmanuel Constant, Hamid Dabashi, Mohammed Al-Dura, Abba Eban, Steven Emerson, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Norman Finklestein, Thomas Friedman....(and that's just A-F)