Jean Baudrillard Sticker
When asked during an interview in January 2006 with Antoine Perraud what it meant to wish someone Happy New Year, Baudrillard amusingly replied that it was "a collectively remote-controlled symbolic ritual that has its place in a [...] cost-free sphere".
In other words, an empty gesture without value; a seasonal greeting from another time which, just like Merry Christmas, tries to desperately recreate a social bond or, more accurately, evoke nostalgia for such, via an exchange of disintensified signs. All the high days and holidays that we so want to enjoy and make special, invariably leave us feeling lonely and inadequate; hostages to our own lives of consumption.
Having said that, Baudrillard hates to be thought of as a pessimist or a nihilist in the pejorative sense of the term.
And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has "nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality", we might simply call evil.
And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has "nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality", we might simply call evil.
And so, in wishing readers a Happy New Year, I suppose I'm wishing them the courage to become complicit with l'intelligence du mal.
See: Baudrillard, 'The Murder of Reality', trans. Chris Turner, essay in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David. B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 266-71.
