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Jean Baudrillard The Vital Illusion Analysis

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This exhaustion or the end of Philosophy that Heidegger pronounces towards the end of his life is the point of departure for my main argument. Keeping up to the originary spirit of this paper – the Holzwege – the questioning must not end; the anesthetic effect of technology must be confronted with thinking. With the above discussion, we seem to have come to an abrupt end, but our tryst with technology seems for an endless time. We must then probably take a detour from Heidegger’s mirror of technology, to which “technology is the absolute achievement of metaphysics”. Jean Baudrillard, who is the most cynical about technology and the world today, in one of his later works The Vital Illusion reverses Holderlin’s famous line: “But where danger …show more content…

When these two are taken together, one understands the crisis of representation, which is most evident in the Holocaust images. (Figure 3) The absence of faces in the image is the inability of the enframing to contain the horror of the times. The punctum in the image is the bent heads of the old woman and the children that disturbs and destroys the wholeness of the image. The image intensifies the “re-” prefix of re-presentation to such an extent that the absence of the true suffering becomes the melancholy of the image. Hitler, on the other hand, used (re)presentation to create the image of humanity - Jean-luc Nancy calls this a super-(re)presentation because “here is the representation of a type that is itself a (re) presentative not of a function like the hammer and sickle, but of a nature or an essence (the Aryan body).” The Aryan is the representative of representation. The Jew is the representative par excellence of the destruction of representation (here, super-representation). The concentration camps were the sites where the authentic representation of a presence plays out the spectacle of annihilation of what, in its eyes, is non-representation. There is no meaning beyond the exterminator for he is his own hardened meaning. The “representation of concentration camps” is the crisis of representation itself, which must be put up in the Western history of metaphysics as a question and “such an opening-interval or wound-not be shown as an object but rather that it be inscribed right at the level of representation, as its very texture, or as the truth of its

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In other words, if one does not contribute towards the cause, they will be completely erased. The use of the image helps convey this message because the human remain was reduced to ash and could not be identified. Therefore, the identity of victim is destroyed along with any signs of them existing in the first place. As a student, the image helps visual the horrors of concentration camp by depicting the crematorium and

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Nazi propaganda was meant to promote anti-Semitism, hatred, and fear. The Jew was reduced to a vermin or pest that needed to be exterminated. Not only did the Nazis achieve this dehumanization goal on posters, they achieved their dehumanization of the Jews within the walls of the ghettoes, the concentration camp’s electric fence, and the humane soul of the people. From the starvation in the ghettos, people had already started falling victim to savagery as they were being transported in the rail cars. After a lady had continually screamed about an imaginary fire, “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” as the crowd shouted their approval (Wiesel 26).

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“In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (Wiesel 36). This quote from Night, by Elie Wiesel, shows how almost immediately, the victims of the Holocaust were dehumanized. The prisoners were stripped of every quality that made them human and were changed to fit the Nazi’s needs. In his memoir, Wiesel tells the tragedy from his memories as a prisoner of the concentration camps, while gradually losing his faith in his religion and humanity. The loss of his identity, dignity, and the inhumane conditions he had to face are the most prominent ways the dehumanization changed Wiesel’s attitude, outlook, and identity.

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Elie Wiesel’s touching memoir, Night, shares intimate details about the cruelty of World War Two concentration camps and the horrors that occurred within them. Concentration camps were spread throughout Germany and Poland from 1933-1945 as the result of strong anti-Semitic views radiating from the President and Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. In the memoir, Night, Wiesel shares of the time that he and his father endured being held captive in several concentration camps, and the battle to escape death, day after day. In the memoir, the significance of night was used throughout the piece to draw connections and emotions from the reader. In Night, night was used both literally and symbolically to portray the unknown, pain, and the end of a journey.

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Seventy four years ago, Elie Wiesel was taken from of his town and forced into brutal concentration camps, where he lost his family, was starved, whipped, beaten, and made to witness the executions of many innocent Jews. After three years of unimaginable struggle and hardship, he survived the Holocaust and went on to write Night, a memoir about his horrific experiences, and “Perils of Indifference”, a famous speech. Both of his works have the same powerful message: We cannot ever allow an atrocity such as the Holocaust to occur again. Elie’s message is very important, but which of his works conveys it more effectively? Night has few ways of effectively delivering Elie’s message.

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This book shows how the Holocaust should be taught and not be forgotten, due to it being a prime example of human impureness. Humans learn off trial and error, how the Jewish population was affected, decrease in moral, and the unsettled tension are prime examples of such mistakes. The Jewish population was in jeopardy, therefore other races in the world are at risk of genocide as well and must take this event as a warning of what could happen. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, there was a room filled with shoes.

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Many actions played out during the Holocaust and World War II were not humane, and still remind us like a scream behind closed doors: hidden but still heard. While hearing the horrid stories and seeing the ghoulish photos of times not to be forgotten, we see the tragedy that is the mistreatment of human lives. Our identities are lost little by little, but those victims had theirs ripped from their bodies. After losing everything and then becoming a nearly empty vessel, it is amazing that we attempt to comprehend the cruelty of the Holocaust. The loss of identity and self might have started with Adolf Hitler’s reign, for the Holocaust legacies, but we are all losing bits of ourselves constantly.

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The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.

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Very few books illustrate the suffering endured in World War II concentration camps as vividly as Elie Wiesel's Night. It is a memoire that will leave disturbing mental images of famine, anti-Semitism, and death such as infants being shoveled as

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The characterization of Moshie and Mrs. Shachter shows the indifference and denial of the Jews of Sighet. The chilling juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape containing a camp of death illustrates how the world not only was indifferent to the inhumane suffering, but also continued to shine brightly as if nothing really mattered. This timeless theme of denial and its consequences during the Holocaust echoes the struggles of those in our time who are persecuted solely due to their beliefs. The reader takes away the important lesson of never turning away from those who need it greatest, each time one reads Elie Wiesel’s memoir,

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It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.

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