Jean Baudrillard The Vital Illusion Analysis

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

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