The Daily Bleed: July 29 Jean Baudrillard, Élisée Reclus, Goliardo Fiaschi, Gaetano Bresci, Louise Michel, Maria Occhipinti, Emilie Carles, Roberto Elia, Francisco Granado, Joaquín Delgado International Anarchist Congress 1896, Eyvind Johnson, Bl(A)ck Tea Society ...

In 1945, in Raguse, Sicily, Maria Occhipinti lies down in front of army trucks which came to find new young conscripts to incorporate into the new Italian army. Within minutes, a crowd surrounds the soldiers, forcing them to release their recruits, but they kill a demonstrator & set off a major revolt.

Maria Occipinti The city falls to the insurgents & resists government troops for three days. The revolt is subdued only at the cost of many deaths. The ringleaders, including Maria & Erasmo Santangelo, were imprisoned until the end of 1946, (except the young anarchist Santangelo, who was sentenced to 23 years & later found hanged in his cell).

The Communist Party, seeking to help restore the capitalist state & the national army in a bid for a piece of the power pie, condemned this revolt as a "soulèvement fasciste."

Maria Occhipinti tells her own story of the uprising in A Woman of Sicily (Italy, 1957; translated into French, 1980) & published It carrubo E altri racconti (1993).

http://www.ephemanar.net/juillet29.html

"Showing no irritation at my rusty command of his language, he rolled his own cigarettes & lit mine, drank espressos & conjured castles of theory in the air, offering every formulation with a twinkle, exuding an irrepressible joie de penser."

«"Ouf! It's a game!"» "It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous."

"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message & messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it & have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/mar/08/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/

... show more

Reader Mark S comments, in 2009:

Jean Baudrillard (20 June 1929, according to the "London Times" & numerous other sources, although Wikipedia has July 29. Baudrillard was notably evasive about his biography. He prefered "to be without a background”.) Baudrillard noted that the reduction of information to digital binarism enables the proliferation of the perfect copy, & therefore a by-passing of the real, & into the experience of hyperreality (his coinage).

Baudrillard’s nightmarish vision of the simulacrum (cf, the copy, the double, the twin) is in fact a version of [Gemini-born] Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, in which the easily-accessed ecstasies of online pornography, gambling, & passive specularity, have, according to Baudrillard, hollowed out the civic soul, which is now imploding under the vitality of a counterbalancing religious terrorism. This puts him in the company of Gemini’s icy anarchic extremists: de Sade, Bakunin (inventor of revolutionary terrorism), Celine, the Unabomber, Drs. Kervorkian & Guillotin.

Of the pitiless heart of dualism Baudrillard writes:

“No one seems to have understood that Good & Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of one does not eclipse the other—far from it. . . . Good does not conquer evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen, they are at once both irreducible to each other & inextricably interrelated.” (The Spirit of Terrorism, 2002).

As an addendum, a few more Baudrillard titles which make me think he's a Gemini, whatever Wikipedia says: The Mirror of Production, Symbolic Exchange & Death, The Evil Demon of Images, Simulacra & Simulation, The Twin Towers.

"Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc."

— J. Baudrillard

From the article:
http://astrodreamer.squarespace.com/blog/2008/6/8/happy-birthday-tim-berners-lee-gemini-post-modern-philosophe.html

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