(bez virsraksta)
Mar. 23., 2014 | 05:13 pm
No:: bljanna
" 'Natural' death is devoid of meaning because the group has no longer any role to play in it. It is banal because it is bound to the policed and commonplace [banalisé] individual subject, to the policed and commonplace nuclear family, and because it is no longer a collective mourning and joy. Each buries his own dead. With the primitives, there is no 'natural' death: every death is social, public and collective, and it is always the effect of an adversarial will that the group must absorb (no biology). This absorption takes place in feasting and rites. Feasting is the exchange of wills (we don't see how feasting would reabsorb a biological event). Evil wills and expiation rites are exchanged over the death's head. Death deceives and symbolically gains esteem; here death gains status, and the group is enriched by a partner.
To us, the dead have just passed away and no longer have anything to exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of a lifetime of accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an economic operation. They do not become effigies: they serve entirely as alibis for the living and to their obvious superiority over the dead. This is a flat, one-dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a credit: 'giving in one's soul', like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents. What banality!"
/J.Baudrillard "Symbolic exchange and death"/
To us, the dead have just passed away and no longer have anything to exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of a lifetime of accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an economic operation. They do not become effigies: they serve entirely as alibis for the living and to their obvious superiority over the dead. This is a flat, one-dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a credit: 'giving in one's soul', like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents. What banality!"
/J.Baudrillard "Symbolic exchange and death"/