Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

by Jean Baudrillard, Alain Willaume (Photographer), Chris Turner (Translator)

“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,” writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in March 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical “subject,” whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a “pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.”

Interspersed throughout the text are 15 photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard’s argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen—some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms—yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a “vital dimension” of the existence of things.

           

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, France, Photography, Sociology

84 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Reviews

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

مذهل

مراجعة الكتاب في فيديو على دودة كتب

https://youtu.be/uuO2M4V8gMo

[Christoph · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is certainly an easy read of one of the last writings of Baudrillard. I can only imagine this was salvaged posthumously as there is an incomplete feel to the slim book. It reads appropriately for this post-modernist perhaps as just some musings that made it into book form. The argument is essentially stated as the antithesis of Leibniz's statement, "why is there something rather than nothing". The argument is supported with detail then given as two examples, one conceptual and one concrete. For anyone unfamiliar with post-structural thought, I would imagine this being a very appropriate departure.
There is not much ground-breaking here; however the concrete example of the digital image as symbol of the death of the real is timely and impressionable with young readers who may just be learning of his work. Similarly, some of his points in the conceptual example of death of the real by the model are taken from modern problems such as the discussion of the death of globalization upon its positing or the modeling of marketing's effect on the brain by Parisian officials.
The imagery associating this text, the work of Alain Willaum, strikingly captures the concepts presented in the book. In typical post-modern context, the images are not meant to illustrate them, though, but merely to provide an artistic backdrop along the journey. The technique as usual is effective and appreciated in this situation. It lends the notion that the text is not just a philosophical text for consumption, but a work of art to be appreciated.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happened to read Barthes’ 1980 Camera Lucida and Baudrillard’s 2007 Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? at the same time and thought they were complementary enough for a dual review.

Barthes denies the photograph the capacity for conveying meaning, comparing it to haiku where “everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the possibility of rhetorical expansion.” Baudrillard’s claim (twenty-seven years later) is that photography is no longer capable of meaning. Who’s right? In that Barthes’ analysis seems even at the time of publication bordering on sentimental and Baudrillard’s is purposefully provocational (he’s almost talking about the Singularity here—in some ways it’s already happened, and in some ways it will never happen), the answer is somewhere in the middle.

It isn’t precisely that Barthes disallows meaning in the photograph, only that the photograph is foremost an authoritative witness of something past, so overshadowing meaning that meaning is effectively not present. “The power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.” Writing falls short of this authority even with additional effort and appendages like logic and sworn testimony. Photography is the opposite, requiring much more effort to fictionalize it. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? strips the photo of any such authority, pointing us to the paradigm where “fictional” images are nearly as easy to author as authoritative images were in the past. It’s authenticating the photo that now requires lots of additional effort.

Reading Camera Lucida I was never able to shake the feeling that Barthes too quickly dismissed meaning. For one thing, he omits advertising photography from his investigation on the grounds that “the meaning must be clear and distinct only by reason of its mercantile nature.” It seems that if meaning could be approached in this kind of “kid’s version” why not catalog its telltale signs and experiment with scaling up to trickier cases?

Second, Barthes is strictly interested in the phenomenon of viewing the isolated photograph, but this seems to limit the scope of the search to a scale too small to nurture meaning—like how time is explained just fine on the macro scale but falls apart at the quantum level. In this sense CL is the work of a paleontologist who instead of taking out his chisel, pounds the rock into dust with a sledge hammer and concludes from the remnants that there are no fossils. And so it’s no wonder that the photograph remains perpetually inexplicable.

Just as it rarely makes sense to consider the meaning of an isolated word, meaning is equally uncooperative within the lone photo. Meaning is relational and comparative. It certainly requires more than the one instance to emerge. Of course Barthes can dismiss meaning. Baudrillard’s analysis, on the other hand, makes as its starting point the ubiquity of the photograph—and the years since his book’s publication it has only become more so—so that it took me a while to realize that there was some validity to Barthes’ claims after all. The very first photograph was entirely isolated—or at least its comparisons were only with preexisting media. Barthes wrote in a time when photographs were very much singular entities. When is a photograph anymore in isolation? It was a while into Camera Lucida that I was able to get into this more historical frame of mind. So Barthes isn’t wrong—not quaint either—but with the decades passed since its publication, at this point now CL should maybe be treated more as an anthropological work. (Amazingly his analysis is nevertheless intuitively appealing, often touching, even, in the way a memoir can be.)

Positioning Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? as a comparison really shows that ubiquity of the image is changing what photography is. This paired with the decreased interval between snapping the photo, developing it and viewing it. Speed contributes to ubiquity. But if ubiquity is the key factor, how does Baudrillard claim that the transition to digital has caused photography disappear? (Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? is only sort of ostensibly about photography—photography is merely his primary example in illustrating this concept of “disappearance.”)

Disappearance is somewhat enigmatic, but it might be characterized (losing only a minimum of its subtlety) as passage into the state where a glut of context precludes meaning. Rather than additive, meaning might be more usefully conceptualized as a subtractive attribute. In a process of whittling away and omission, it emerges as a subset of a contextual whole. But as cracks are filled and contextual pools combine (and digitization here is the massive enabler), any potential denotative aspect that comes to the fore almost necessarily leaves contradictions embedded in its connotative substrate, in its omissions—although this is probably not at all obvious to the meaning granter (What is government?). And so disappearance is a symptom of glut and dispersion, not extinction.

These characterizations of context and meaning are useful for looking at CL. Barthes stresses over the act of posing for a photographer, and the photographer’s reaction is then to make the setting more “lifelike” (“wretched notions: they make me pose in front of my paintbrushes, they take me outdoors (more ‘alive’ than indoors), they put me in front of a staircase because a group of children is playing behind me, they notice a bench and immediately (what a windfall!) make me sit down on it.”). Posing formally is becoming less common with the growing ubiquity of cameras, but most people will still sympathize with the awkwardness of enduring it. But not for the reasons Barthes claims. Much of CL centers on the photograph’s predisposition to “mortify” or “embalm” the subject. I don’t think it has anything to do with this at all. It’s not only in front of the camera that I strike a pose—it’s constant and everywhere. I’m at the library and I realize my mind wanders to something frivolous. Instantly I snap back with an almost caricatured expression of studiousness to convince everyone that I’m really on task (this is of course unconscious—not like I’m actually trying to convince them, not in a calculated way at least). The funny thing is that I might do exactly the same thing if I were alone in my apartment. The poses we adopt are like the meaning we attribute to any number of contexts. But we cannot strike a pose that will cover all situations—there is no universal pose. It is not mortification that makes us squirm in front of the camera; it’s the (very high) likelihood that there will be a clash of contexts between the snapping of the image and the subsequent viewing. Not a fear of our image being reckoned, but of being misreckoned.

Again here, in a lot of ways there’s nothing wrong with what Barthes says. I can imagine death might be on your mind in the times when photography was so uncommon that you could count the number of times in your life you were photographed—and Barthes’ investigation often took inspiration from photos where the subjects were certainly dead by the time he viewed them. So again, the ubiquity of the camera and time to development are playing a part in what photography is.

(And so how do people deal with this problem nowadays? By making the fact of the pose unquestionable. Theatrical expressions, the indie group that gets their band photos done at the Sears portrait studio, adolescents (mostly) throwing their hands up in what are the remnants of once culturally significant gestures (peace sign, number one sign, middle finger, thumbs up, (mock) gang sign) which now designate nothing in themselves but instead stand in to demonstrate only the obviousness of the pose. In front of the camera it is always Halloween. I can only imagine what a super-crank this is making me out to be, but I can’t help but including it, my point being that even this strategy of posing-in-excess-in-order-to-negate-the-pose, only a sucker would take this photo seriously doesn’t actually work since it is still a meaning which might later clash with the viewing context. Either that or most people realize that the fate of the image is so ephemeral that there is no “later viewing,” and I’m narcissistically laboring under the outdated paradigm of permanence…)

In Barthes’ world advertising photos are excluded from discussion due to their obvious stupidity, but now advertising stubbornly refuse exclusion. Look at advertising photos these days. They’re not the silly things they were in Barthes day—well they are, but anyway. They seem more like art. We might say that contemporary advertisers are a wilier breed (in order to outsmart a public that have become experts at ignoring advertisements) and have learned to mimic art, but this is probably not what Baudrillard would say. It is precisely Art’s disappearance that allows advertising photography to be more artistic. “Art today, though it has disappeared, doesn’t know it has disappeared and—this is the worst of it—continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state. And becomes the paradigm of everything that survives its own disappearance.”

Again, when something disappears it persists in its own excess. And so Baudrillard takes us to CGI (“photo-synthesis”) where the image precedes the referent. What do you have to say to that, Barthes! Nothing, eh? Well Baudrillard has something to say to you: “In the virtual image there’s no longer anything of that punctual exactitude, that punctum [Barthes’ term for what indefinably grabs, “pricks,” the viewer—the most subjective aspect of viewing photographs] in time which is the ‘point’ when the analogue image was made. In the past, in the days of the ‘real world’, so to speak, photography was, as Barthes argued, witness to an insuperable absence, to something that had been present once and for all time. For its part, the digital photo is in real time and bears witness to something that did not take place, but whose absence signifies nothing.”

There’s much talk about ubiquity of the image—or of its increasing ubiquity more confusingly since ubiquity seems like it should be a binary distinction. On the other hand, ubiquity is sort of an impossible state, so in some sense we can speak of the ubiquitous image if we understand that what approaches ubiquity becomes something else before it arrives: the ubiquitous camera is no longer a camera but a sensor. At some point before the transition is made the line is blurred. When the camera transforms into a sensor we see the disappearance of the pose and at the same time—because there is no space in which to unpose—the disappearance of an increasingly universal Hawthorne effect. I think Baudrillard’s concern that humans will also disappear is something like this. Computer generated images are born without the referent. In the same way, Baudrillard ultimately thinks an entire virtual reality is being digitized where humans are superfluous.

Following a certain trajectory Baudrillard has a legitimate concern, but I’m not convinced we won’t switch tracks before we reach that horizon. It’s too bad Baudrillard isn’t alive to comment on technologies like 3-D printing where the virtual feeds back into the physical. Here the physical and the virtual shift to a new equilibrium that puts the physical back on comparable footing with the virtual. Even so, I’m wondering how much of one of Baudrillard’s remarks still holds: “[CGI] puts an end to the imagining of the image, to its fundamental ‘illusion’ since, in computer generation, the referent no longer exists and there is no place even for the real to ‘take place’, being immediately produced as Virtual Reality.” If the virtual starts coughing objects up into the physical, are they still not somehow virtual? I think we’re here going to see not a disappearance of the real, but its true extinction, where it’s no longer the case that the physical is the home of the real and the virtual the home of the imaginary. When the physical and the virtual fall into a self-reinforcing equilibrium the imaginary-real duality is destroyed. And so it isn’t the case that everything is at that point imaginary, but that there is no such thing as either the real or the imaginary. It isn’t clear that many of Baudrillard’s worries over the place of humans in a world of mass migration into the virtual do not still hold in this scenario, but I think humans have better luck in any scenario that preserves the significance of the physical. At a certain point even the distinction between physical and virtual drops out.

Barthes worries that we’re beating the “scandal” and “madness” the photograph into submission by banalizing it. “Looking around at the customers in a cafe, someone remarked to me (rightly): ‘Look how gloomy they are! nowadays the images are livelier than the people.’ One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United States, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and consumed.” “When generalized it [the Photograph], completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.” Ultimately he asks that we “abolish the images, let us save immediate Desire (desire without mediation).”

Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? says too late. and takes as its starting point the fruition of everything Barthes was concerned about. Baudrillard fears that the problem is spreading beyond photography to all that is digitized. And so what is Baudrillard’s rallying cry? “Apart from all phantasies we maintain around it—and in the entirely justified hope of seeing a certain number of things disappear once and for all—we must give disappearance back its prestige or, quite simply, its power, its impact. We must reinvest it not as a final but as an immanent dimension-I would even say as a vital dimension of existence.” We’ll check back in with him in a couple decades.

[Tirdad · Rating 4 out of 5]

مدت‌ها پیش این کتاب را خریده بودم و کمابیش می‌دانستم موضوع کتاب چیست، اما رغبتی برای خواندنش نداشتم. از روزی که بودریار این کتاب را نوشته ۱۵ سال می‌گذرد و در این ۱۵ سال ما از پیام‌رسان‌های خیلی ابتدایی مانند یاهو مسنجر رسیده‌ایم به متاورس و واقعیت افزوده! همواره برایم محل سؤال بود که فارغ از توجیه‌های کارکردی برای پیش‌روی به سوی دنیای دیجیتال، در نهایت بشر به دنبال چه می‌گردد که لازم است ارتباطش را با واقعیت این‌قدر دست‌کاری کند؟ وقتی فیس‌بوک مدعی است که متاورس شاکلهٔ ارتباطات بشر در آینده را می‌سازد، دیگر بحث صرفاً سرعت انتقال پیام یا دسترس‌پذیری نیست؛ موضوع این است که «واقعیت» به مثابه چیزی که بیرون از ذهن ما «وجود دارد» ارزش خود را از دست داده. درستی سناریو‌های شکاکانه مانند «مغز در خمره» دیگر اتفاق ناگواری نیست؛ شیطان دکارتی، خودِ انسان است. بشر انتخاب کرده که نباشد، انتخاب کرده که بازنمایی را به «برهوت واقعیت» ترجیح دهد. اما چه چیزِ واقعیت این‌قدر زشت و کریه است؟ آیا آن‌گونه که بودریار می‌گوید ناپدیدی بشر در بازنمایی‌ها، تنها راه جاودانگی‌اش است؟ پرسش جالبی است.

[Hossein M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

بسیار انضمامی بود و دقیقاً با اتفاقاتی سروُکار داشت که حالا حتا بیش‌تر از سال ۲۰۰۷ حس می‌شه: پیشرفت سرسام‌آور تکنولوژی و هوش مصنوعی. این جستار بودریار نشون می‌ده که نگاهِ ما به قضایایی مثل هوش مصنوعی و تصاویر ساختگیِ دیجیتال چه‌قدر ساده‌ست و چه راحت براشون فتوا صادر می‌کنیم.

نمی‌تونم بگم اغلب کتاب رو فهمیدم ولی خیلی لذت بردم. (شاید این‌ یه قاعده‌ی کلی باشه برام: هرچی غامض و دشواریاب‌تر، لذت‌بخش‌تر)

ترجمه هم انصافاً خوب بود. فکر نمی‌کردم مترجم زحمت زیادی کشیده باشه. ولی فارسیِ به‌نسبت سالمی داشت و چهارتا متن و کلی پانویس «کمکی» هم به جستار بودریار اضافه شده بود.

[Tuba · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Çünkü insan şeyleri kafasında canlandırıp, isimlendirip kavramsallaştırarak var ederken aynı zamanda da onları ait oldukları ham gerçekliğin içinde kurnazca çekip alarak yok olmalarına neden olmaktadır.”

[Iman Rouhipour · Rating 3 out of 5]

«چون واقعی‌ست پس تصاویرش وجود دارند.»، تبدیل شده به «چون تصاویرش وجود دارند پس واقعی‌ست.» .

[trestitia ⵊⵊⵊ deamorski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Başladıktan 3 sayfa sonra kim yahu bu adam çok tanıdık derken biodaki 'Simülarklar ve Simülasyon'u görünce bNe:


Hâlâ hatırlamayanlar için:


Neyse bu o kitabın konusu.

Yayına hazırlayanın Ergun Kocabıyıkᯓᡣ𐭩 olması peki 🥰

Ciddi olalım şimdi bişi' di'cem.

ARKADAŞLAR YA BEN FELSEFE OKUMAYI UNUTMUŞUM YA DA BU ZAMANA KADAR OKUDUĞUMU SANMIŞIM.
İkincisi daha doğru gibi.
Zaten sorsan kaç tane kitap okudun, çok az.
Ama okuma çok yapıyorum Allah var.
Sanırım hep anladım sanıyormuşum asdfasdfasdf

Neyse biraz zor oldu benim için.

Bazı yerlerde 'sence de teknolojiye biraz fazla yüklenmiyor musun Baudrillardjım' desem de feci haklı. Özellikle teknoloji üzerinden yaptığı imgenin dönüşümü eleştirisi. Tam da ai'ın bu kadar popülerleştiği, 'ele ayağa düştüğü' düşünülürse hiç haksız değil. Biraz da distopik bir bakış açısı, bizim açımızdan.

İmge, nesne ya da kavramın küreselleşme / teknoloji karşısında kaybettiği öz ve anlam, bu çok vurucu. Yazar Ebu Gureyb fotoğraflarından örnek veriyor. Bu kitabın yazıldığı tarihten, yazarın öngörüsü gibi, çok daha vahim bir durumdayız hakikaten. Yaşasaydı, yapay zekayla üretilmiş ve 44 milyonun üzerine paylaşılmış 'all eyes on refah' fotoğrafını örnek verirdi bence.

new level loaded
;;;
deamorski

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Core idea: The recording of the image as life (as in, facebook) has displaced life.

[Meltem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fotoğrafa, videoya dijitalleşmeye başka bir yerden bakan bazı kavramları yapı sökümüne uğratan nefis bir kitap. Özellikle iletişimcilerin okumasını tavsiye ederim.

[Prerna Munshi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baudrillard talks about the modern world which conceived the so called reality and about the modern human beings who have already disappeared. He explains how disappearance is different from extinction, extermination and exhaustion as the latter three happen to be natural processes, while disappearance is an invention of the modern man. He calls it an art akin to martial art (and art not in aesthetic sense) wherein the modern man employs disappearance as a defence mechanism.

With the modern age, man has invented science and analytical knowledge to define the natural world, in the process of which, the natural world gets alienated. Baudrillard says that when a thing is brought into concept, into our cognitive apparatus, we call it into the domain of reality and ironically,at the same time, reality begins to disappear. He quotes the example of class struggle having come into existence with Marxism and once it came into existence, class struggle no longer thrived as a reality. That is to say, the moment a thing is named, it loses its energy and risks becoming a truth or an ideological imposition.

Once a thing is conceptualised, it becomes completely operational, devoid of any contradictions and no longer needs representation, that is it no longer needs us. The modern world, in this way, tries seeing its foreclosure by exhausting possibilities rather than by exploring them. This world has no place for the Other. But disappearance doesn’t mean extinction. Everything that disappears seeps back in ‘infinitesimal doses’, ever more threateningly and imposingly than the visible. This is how human beings employ disappearance as a strategy to keep themselves relevant. This is their method to escape oppression and like Lewis Carrol’s Cheshire Cat’s grin, whose notorious grin remains even when its body has disappeared, human beings too remain like a spectre behind the disappearance.

The larger body of the text focuses on photography . Baudrillard compares photography with a camera against the modern digital photography. The former was about a radical distance between the camera and the subject. The photograph coming out through its realisation on the film, through its negative. On the other hand, digital photography, with proliferation & multiplication , erases this radical distance by manufacturing images. He makes a similar comparison of human beings with artificial intelligence, in the face of which the human being tends to disappear and the very act makes him immortal. The oppression of this artificial intelligence ,technology is that it effaces duality while human beings are naturally grounded in duality which permeates the entire world. Duality cannot be liquidated by the dictatorship of this integral reality.

This was my first Baudrillard and it’s quite a complex read. There were some interesting points that I could assimilate. A lot remains obscure though.
This book deceptively appears nihilistic but nihilism is basically the denial of nothing.This book centres around Nothing and cannot in any which manner be nihilistic.

[Gizem Kendik Önduygu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baudrillard Selamlar,

Sen Türkiye’de biraz şöyle oldun. “The end of social”la saha araştırmacıları ve bazı sosyologların canını epey sıktın. Hiçbir şey yaşamadın, gerçekten sahaya inmedin, hep üstten konuştun veya senin yazdıklarını ikinci sınıf bir bilim kurgu gibi okunabilir dediler. Bazıları, “sanal gerçeklik”, internet de şöyle kötü, “biz eskiden” diyerek nostaljiye övgüyle sana referans gösterdi. Senden ekmek yiyen bir sanat tayfası oluştu. Ben senin peşinden gidilecek bir şey olduğunu düşünüyorum. Keşke İstanbul’a geldiğinde seninle görüşebilseydik. Sonra öldün.

Yüksek bütçeli her bilim kurgu filminin de bize gösterdiği gibi sanırım dünyanın sonu gelmeyecek ya. Varoluşçular neden kendilerinin tercihi olmayan bir hayata atıldıklarına ve kendi ölümlerine bu kadar takıyor ki. Abi bitmiyor işte, insanoğlu bir şekilde hep yaşıyor, ne dilerseniz yapın, hangi düzeni getirirseniz getirin insanoğlu tarihi bitmiyor. Bize böyle bir ölümsüzlük verilmiş ve asıl böyle lanetlenmiş olabiliriz. Baudrillard’da son diye bir şey kalmadı diyor.

İzin varsa şuraya bir özet koyacam.
Tarih boyu bildiğimiz çelişki üzerine oturan, olumsuz sürecin itici güç görevi yaptığı zamanı geçtik. Şeyler var olabilmek için karşıtlarına gerek duymuyor. Eğer artık bir karşıta ihtiyaç duyulmuyorsa, karşıtlık itici güç görevini yapmıyorsa, her zaman bir modeli örnek alan insanoğlu bu modelin hem başarılı hem de başarısız olması için elinden geleni yapmıyorsa, sıkıntı.

Biraz şunlardan var: dualite ve insani öz olan dualitenin eksikliği, analog-dijital fotoğraf ve sahte gazetecilik üzerinden sanal imge üretimi örnekleri.

[gøkhan kiyici · Rating 5 out of 5]

ikilik üzerine yazılan satırların tadı damağımda kaldı.

[sutlusekersiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simülasyon kuramının kurucusu olan Baudrillard'yı okumanın tam da zamanı diye düşündüğüm günlerden geçiyoruz. Hipergerçeklik döneminin bir simülasyona evrildiği bugünleri, 2007'de vefat eden Baudrillard bile bu denli tahmin edebilir miydi bilemiyorum. Aslen bir Fransız sosyolog olan ve Fransa'da Almanca dersler verebilecek kadar derinlemesine bir Almanca eğitimi almış bu düşünürün fikirlerini ve dünyaya bakışını gerçekten önemsiyorum. Marksizm ve postmodern felsefe hakkında ciddi bir birikimi olan Baudrillard'ye göre "her kavram televizyonlardan akmakta, insanlar teknolojinin onlara sağladığı bu rahatlık sayesinde herhangi bir şeyi derinlemesine düşünememektedir". Kitapta şöyle diyor yazar: "..Marx'ın öngördüğü modern dünya çelişki üstüne oturan, olumsuz sürecin itici güç görevi yaptığı bir yerken; zaman içinde giderek abartılı boyutlara ulaşan kusursuzlaşma çabasıyla şeylerin var olabilmek için artık karşıtlarına gerek duymadıkları, ışığın var olabilmek için artık gölgeye, dişinin var olabilmek için artık erile (ya da tersi) ihtiyaç duymadığı, iyiliğin artık kötülüğe, dünyanın ise artık bizim varlığımıza gerek duymadığı bir yer hâline gelmiştir.."
Ben ise kitabın bir bölümüne kendi düşüncelerimden bir cümleyi şöyle not almışım: Maksimum boyutta, maksimum alanda ve zamanda var olmak için uğraşarak, yok oluyoruz.

[Hala gharaibeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The desire to not exist anymore
It's like the whole world exposing me to this idea of disappearance, to "the other " and backrooms and nostalgia of a whole another generation.
It's v sauce (where do deleted files go)
And Clark elieson
Once you give something meaning or a name, you sentence it to be shredded into its most capacity, people analyze it to reach the perfection of an objective judgement.
Same for us, human is challenging their utmost, until we drain every perspective we have to reach.
And we do that by transforming the world into AI, people by that can fulfill their presence, but here's the turning point, the world then doesn't need us anymore, doesn't need the evil to distinguish good, because everything standby itself, in a 1 0 system.
It's crazy he wrote that in 2007, the writer focuses on photography, on the no more need of the negatives which is the line connecting the picture with reality.

[M Ali Arman · Rating 3 out of 5]

این کتاب دیالکتیک هست، دیالکتیک محض
متن کمی سخت خوان هست، البته چون من قبلا سابقه خوندن مقالات دیگه ای از بودریا رو داشتم، این ویژگی نویسنده هست و ترجمه سعی شده مناسب باشه و به نظرم در این سعی موفقیت هم حاصل شده.
اگر به بودریا و آرا او اعتقاد یا علاقه ندارید توصیه میکنم سراغ این کتاب نرید.
این کتاب از اون جمله چیزهایی هست که اگر در دیده مجنون نشینی بغیر از خوبی لیلی نبینی.
اول باید به بودریا و نظریاتش علاقمند باشید و بعد این رو بخونید، و گر نه هر قدر هم با دقت بخونید، تهش احساس خوبی ندارید
حداقل من اینطور بودم.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

آیا فانتزی دیرینۀ دنیایی که بدون ما به راهش ادامه خواهد داد همیشه در وجودمان نبوده ؟ همیشه این وسوسۀ شاعرانه را نداشته ایم که به دنیایی در غیاب خود ، فارغ از هر خواست و ارادۀ انسانی، بسیار انسانی نگاه کنیم؟… ناپدید شدن شاید میلی باشد برای اینکه ببینیم دنیا در غیاب ما چه شکلی است ؟

[IAN MARTIN · Rating 3 out of 5]

feels weird to record my reading this on a digital platform.

[Pripri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baudrillard dans une coquille de noix, comme disent ceux qui roulent du mauvais côté. La noix est bien mûre ici, moins la coquille. On y retrouve le Baudrillard photographe en théoricien, répétiteur de la dénonciation du mythe de la modernité (illusion régulatrice et pas moins nécessaire pour autant) avec cette coda : y aller à fond les ballons, comprendre pour en jouir, dans un ultime frisson intellectuel, ultime parce qu'éternel. Bon, dit comme ça c'est pas terrible. Il y a les défauts de Baudrillard en plus gros : beau-parleur, prêtant le bâton aux réactionnaires et le flanc aux lecteurs pressés (à raison), jargonnant un peu mais finalement pédagogue par l'exemple. C'est bien là l'avantage de cette petite vingtaine de pages, voir Baudrillard faire onduler la surface plane de la métaphysique plan-plan du réel, crever à l'aiguille la baudruche du diptyque présence-représentation au profit de celui de présence-absence non plus du tout en docte (comme à l'époque de "La société de consommation") mais presque en phénoménologue. Dans l'hyperquelquechose, quelque chose n'est plus sous le même mode qu'auparavant. Et après on voudra croire que Descartes, symbole de la raison se fondant de manière prétendument autonome et symbole de la quête du réel sous l'apparence, n'est, à ce titre, qu'un symbole à l'heure où le symbole est tout, à l'heure où le symbole a bavé (presque, encore) entièrement sur le reste de la toile.
(octobre)

[Nico · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a postmodern fashion Baudrillard flips Leibniz question on its head. As soon as something is symbolized it disappeared or is already gone. Definitely one of Budrillards easier writings while still find myself having to reread but every other minute I get a sense of clarity and think I understand.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD. It was only afterwards that the Silence came."
"...it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death. It becomes immortal only by paying the price of its own technological disappearance, of its inscription in the digital order..."

Should we save absence from disappearance?

Very post-Benjamin to me, like the next step after his original: "the work of mechanical reproduction in the age of virtual reality". Essentially argues for a sanctity, an 'aura', of what Benjamin described as having no aura, in the face of the horror of total digital superreality.
Maybe I'm just too far away in time for Benjamin but I find this "delirium of visibility at all costs" more convincing, and more terrifying.

[Zarek Hennessy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Throwing pebbles into his reflection in a stream, having first-hand experience of his own disappearance, I can't help but wonder what the Baudrillard of around 1800 would have said about the camera obscura.

a dinosaur disappearing in a virtual sink-hole
paradoxical points pointed to in paradoxical prose - or is it tautology?
sounds of a stoner on a deathbed
recommend to readers who like to go quote dipping

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot of talk about the relationship of something and nothing here and of how by being expressed or by achieving its purpose a thing is already starting to fade away while at the same time every disappearance brings about something new. This reminded me of Hegel and of how Being and Nothing are not easily distinguished and what there is is really becoming, moving from one condition to another. There is also a lot of talk here about excess of everything and how it leads to even greater disappearance than disappearance itself. This reminded me of Nietzsche and how the ever greater excess of the Apollonian paradoxically leads to the death of God. And this made me wonder if Baudrillard can be seen as a sort of a synthesis of Hegel and Nietzsche which is an interesting thing to think about. Baudrillard wrote about these motifs throughout his life and I've read plenty of his books, but I am wondering this only now and I wonder why. Did the synthesis sort of click together at the end of his life or is it just my impression after reading so much of him. In any case it is interesting way of looking at his philosophy. But this all is not exactly new and it is not expressed in the best way. It is sort of style over substance and although I like Baudrillard for his style here it almost seems like he is trying too hard. And there is also this incredible feeling of despair throughout the whole text. This is Baudrillard's last book and him dealing with the question of why the process of disappearance he described is still going on feels like him dealing with his own legacy. Is the core idea correct? Will the process he was describing ever be finished? If it is finished, will his work still be relevant? This is an incredible contrast to The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. There few years before his death he is taking a look back at the core ideas from his earlier works and presenting them in a more accessible form. Here just before his death he is unfocused and grappling with doubt.
Oh, and he rejects dialectics. It's nothing new, I just don't like that one part of him and especially when he uses it to criticize Marx. That is all.

[Austra]

As the “Solar Plexus Clown Glider” creepypasta (see above) was what led me to this text, I will talk about how it connects directly to what Baudrillard is talking about here.

Baudrillard’s "Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?" and the “Solar Plexus Clown Gliders” phenomenon converge around the idea that mediation, through language, images, and technology, produces disappearance by severing reality from its original state, leaving only self-referential signs. For Baudrillard, the digital image erases the “singular presence” of the object, replacing it with a virtual construct; the SPCG functions in precisely this way, existing only as an ephemeral linguistic-visual parasite whose rumored black-and-white images and very name infect viewers with hallucinations, paranoia, and perceptual instability. Like Baudrillard’s “art of disappearance,” SPCG operates autonomously, detached from any stable referent, feeding on the human fascination with absence while accelerating the collapse of reality into a closed circuit of signs. The SPCG’s horror lies in its inversion of Baudrillard’s meditative pleasure in disappearance, transforming the philosophical allure of absence into an involuntary psychic implosion, yet both reveal the same underlying condition: that in the mediasphere, the image and the word no longer represent the real but replace it, making disappearance not an impending event but an ongoing process.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

To the very end, attempting to show how the “nothing instead of something” is just as valuable as the “something instead of nothing”. A nail in the coffin of western metaphysics. Baudrillard showing how the negative is, at the least, identical, in nature, to the referent. The inherent duality of nature’s game that is sacrificed by the eradication of evil by good. The real always leaving a residual of its disappearance until there is no longer memory, let alone representation leading back to its inception. An immortal good permanently detached from all that was evil. An automatization of the subject. Representation dissolved by the information of the virtual. Liberating any choice between affirmation and negation. Objectifying all that might have been affirmed or negated. An absolute rational object.

“there is no finer analogy than that of the photograph that has become digital, being liberated at a single stroke from both the negative and the real world.”

“there will no longer be any film, any light-sensitive surface onto which things inscribed themselves negatively.”

“But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of a real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas) then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more..”

[Uğur · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does nihilism feel?
What are the limits of nihilistic philosophy?
Why would a man want to get rid of his nothingness while complaining about his existence?
Why dispose of the fundamental facts that have been discovered with an unending desire; tries to melt the time, the good, the bad, in the crucible of nihilism?
Is there the idea that if the nothingness that lies at the core of our existence is destroyed, we will take control of the world?

The phenomenon of nothingness in this work cannot be subjected to a nihilistic interpretation, says François l Yvonnet. Because nihilism is the denial of nothingness. However, we need to protect our nothingness. Humanity must learn to live with its nothingness in its existence. Because we are now alone with nothingness rather than existence.

We took on modernism and post-modernism and set out on a path we didn't know where it led, we are going. But -still- we couldn't bring the end of the world...

We are fighting both against nature and what we do, that is, against ourselves... In this short work, Baudrillard says; “In the beginning there was the word. silence ensued after that. There is nothing left that can be called the end now.”

You ask why?

We haven't been able to end anything yet; because even that famous end that we know does not exist anymore. It's an amazing piece of work that tastes crazy.

[agenbiteofinwit · Rating 3 out of 5]

in this essay, Baudrillard carries with what is left to explore in Marcuse's One-dimensional Man, and simply extends it further to the topic surrounding technology, digitalisation, photography, and temporality. the grand narrative is long gone, and Baudrillard focuses on this compartmentalisation of human in today's world. the hindsight is so much that the disappearance of analogue photography leads to a disappearance of time, and because time is lost, there is no point to create pictures, for they store the moments. he also elaborate this onto which the internet has made people's lives into data, as though their lives would forever be remembered as the data records all of it. this debate of immortality (in the digital/ virtual world) is separating human from distinguishing the false from the real, in the sense which you could still see pictures of someone on their insta even though they'd passed away. the points are quite inspiring, but not so creative really, that it falls into the typical spectrum of the leftist, or post-marxist ramblings of the modernised, digitalised, capitalist world which they cannot influence the mass with. insightful but not creative enough as critical theory.

[Leon Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pareciera que en este libro Baudrillard estuvo atañiendo una nueva teoría además de la simulación. O pareciera que estaba puliendo lo que él asumía como la desaparición de la singularidad en el mundo por el automatismo de los simulacros. Es un libro un tanto desordenado y al mismo tiempo demasiado bello para tratarlo de ensayo. Es más, me atrevo a decir que se siente como un libro de fragmentos en prosa. A la vez Baudrillard se coloca en una posición apocalíptica, a la vez se sitúa en el efecto poético que esto conlleva; pues, ¿qué es la desaparición para el mundo contemporáneo? Hay que verlo reflejado en la expansión de la IA como sustitución de los trabajos humanos, o en el campo del arte (que es, creo yo, donde más abre debate). Hay que ver este propio efecto hacia otros paradigmas: el desligue de las voluntades por sustitución de lo virtual. Por ejemplo, a Alexa ha hecho una tarea por mí, pero fuera de esto soy capaz de reflexionar lo que Alexa ha hecho por mí? Claro que no, pues de eso se encarga mi asistente virtual. Baudrillard lo coloca ya desde el punto de vista analógico: mi videocasetera tiene la función de grabar la película mientras no esté en casa, pero al llegar a casa, ¿aún siento la necesidad de querer ver esa película grabada? Nada más lejos de lo que se piensa. Este es un horizonte nuevo, y es que no hemos visto que realmente la misma desaparición en el mundo es "funcional", desde algún modo. El mundo ya no pesa sustancialmente, pero tampoco levita artificialmente (tomando la idea de Kundera), sino que ahora es un propio limbo. Los feed se actualizan, la información prolifera, los contenidos se exceden, los live action se aprueban, el nuevo iPhone cada año, el traslado de lo físico a lo digital (libros, videojuegos, películas, obras, etc.). Es evidente, tomando lo que dice Baudrillard, el mundo estructural sigue funcionando aún sin nosotros.

[Farimah Jalalpour · Rating 3 out of 5]

من نوشتار درباب ناپدیدی را یک نوع استدلال مکاشفه‌ای آموزشی می‌بینم که می‌خواهد درباره‌ی آنچه که ناپدید شده، آنچه که دیگر و بعد از این نخواهد بود، تعمق کند؛ مثل برداشت‌های مدرن ما از واقعیت و معنا و سوژه و ساحت اجتماعی یا حوزه های خودآیین مدرنیته مثل هنر و سیاست و دین و سکسوالیته. بودریار در یک چنین مراقبه‌ی پر رمز و رازی به ما می‌گوید ناپدیدی این چیزها نتیجه‌ی فرایندی تکاملی نبوده‌، بلکه "رخدادی بی همتاست‌.. که به هیچ وجه منفی نیست".
او از ما می‌خواهد نه تنها به آنچه که در برهه‌ی فعلی‌مان، جدید و متفاوت به نظر می‌رسد، توجه کنیم، بلکه درآنچه هم که ناپدید شده تامل بورزیم.
داگلاس کلنر

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

reality is fast dissolving (in fact, has already consummated its dissolution, we discover all too late) in the proliferation of images, especially digital images which have no referent and are infinitely manipulatable.
not anything especially novel or insightful, if you're already somewhat familiar with the themes of late Baudrillard's works, although as always the apocalyptic tenor of his writing is amusing to enjoy