Laughing Matters
Everyone has ideas,
even more than they need.
What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis.
Only this spirituality of language can justify writing.
Not a critical objectivity of ideas.
There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas,
except inside language itself,
in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language.
Radical thought: an intelligence without hope,
but a fortunate and happy form…
Critics, always being unfortunate (unhappy) in their nature,
choose the realm of ideas as their battlefield…
Language and writing are the living illusion of meaning,
the resolution of the misfortune of meaning operated
through the good fortune of language
Language gives and account of the very illusion of language
as a definite stratagem and through that
writes the illusion of the world as an infinite trap,
as a seduction of the mind,
as a stealing away of all mental capacities.
While being a transporter of meaning, language is at the same time
a supra-conductor of illusion
and the absence of meaning.
-excerpt Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard, Published 1995
More thoughts from a philosopher of semiotics.
I am not well this morning, a head cold that hopefully is at its apex. It will run its course and I will feel better in due time. The manifestations of the “cold” a rhinovirus, reminds me of how little to nothing I know about such things. I’ll take medication to reduce the symptoms, get more rest and hope for the best. Thus far in life, that has worked. There is no guarantee.
Do these words lifted from the essay Radical Thought, cause your “head to spin?’ I hope that is the immediate effect. That feeling is the dissonance which comes with the suggestion that our search for the one true, the final version of “reality” is misguided. That we’ve been wasting precious time. A disturbing thought indeed. The philosopher of language “plays for keeps” when pointing out that language is a necessary and important mediator of meaning,… and at the same time deceives, seduces, entrapping us in a fun house of mirrors. …the invisible oscillation, the slight-of-hand trick. Except when your personal survival or that of your nation pivots upon the outcome, — making a mistake is not a laughing matter.
I read this morning in The New York Times: Even after Biden was sworn in, John Eastman, an architect of the Jan. 6 strategy, wanted to hunt for election fraud — and to get paid.
