Baudrillard & Zizek

In “The Precession of Simulacra”, Baudrillard talks about how our society has replaced all reality with signs. He discusses simulacra’s (copies of things that do not have an original) and how they refer to symbols of culture and media that create our perceived reality. He also says, “simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false”, the “real” and the “imaginary” (454 Baudrillard). He talks about the example when someone (simulator) fakes sick- if any symptom can be “produced” and doesn’t have to be due to nature than every sickness can potentially be simulated and therefore medicine’s meaning (to cure illness) is gone, because medicine is only supposed to cure “real” illness.

In “The Spirit of Terrorism”, Jean Baudrillard begins with discussing how images are the most important things and have the most impact on us. He brings up the attack on the World Trade Center and that the reason people are so fascinated with the attack is because of the image that we think of when we think of that day. It is true that we remember how we felt on 9/11 (scared, confused, sad) but we mostly have an image in our head; where we were when it happened, looking at everyone else’s reaction around us, watching the TV and seeing the planes crash into the buildings. He talks about how the real is added to the image which makes it an additional “frisson” and how it is more scary for us to think about that day because there was no violence that made this event “real”, but just a random act of terror- all we have to think about is the image that was created for us to remember. Like he states, it’s not like the violence was there first and then the image was added to it, but rather the image is there first and then the “frisson” of the real is added after. He also discusses how much media and terrorism go hand-in-hand. After 9/11, the terrorists have gotten so much media attention, that they probably consider themselves famous in America. This type of media attention is inevitable because people do want to know what’s going on in our country, but it does not help the terrorist situation, not only because they probably like the attention, but also because they will know what information we know about them and what we don’t know, which does not favor in our advantage.

Even though we each have our own image of 9/11, there is a ‘derealization’ (Zizek 233) of what happened that day. As he states, the months that followed were filled with the news repeatedly stating how many people died in that tragic event, but never were their bloodied bodies shown. Even though this is probably due to the families’ wishes and what is regulated by the government, it still separates their reality from our reality…so it makes us wonder, is our reality even real?

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