A brief and meandering meditation by the late French postmodernist on the notion of the disappearance of both the “real world” and the human subject in modernity's drive toward objective knowledge and technological domination, this work more broadly links that “disappearance” with language's representational and conceptualizing dimensions. Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation
) argues that the outcome of such a split between subject and the “natural world” is an absolute alienation in which both sides vanish. Distinguishing this process from any suggestions of an evolutionary trajectory, the author positions himself between a variety of poles, such as psychoanalysis, Marx, Hegel and Canetti, to characterize this disappearance as psychological or metaphysical rather than natural, and hence emphasizes its threatening aspects. By turns lucid and impenetrable, the prose makes frequent recourse to art and in particular photography to exemplify the distance between the human and the natural. With Willaume's images adding little by way of insight or illumination, the text neither undermines nor extends the theoretical framework laid out in previous writings, though perhaps offers, by virtue of its brevity, a good insight into the provocative theorist. (Oct.)
