Contradictions of Hyperreality: Baudrillard, Žižek, and Virtual Dialectics

Abstract

In this article I situate and make sense of Jean Baudrillard’s writings regarding “hyperreality” and then consider Slavoj Žižek’s insistence on the “reality of the virtual” as opposed to “virtual reality.” I argue that Baudrillard has offered a contemporary, inverted variation on Leibniz’s classical idealist position, whereas Žižek has followed a dialectical materialist course charted especially by Ernst Bloch. Finally, I contend that there remain contradictions of hyperreality itself that constitute a domain of virtual dialectics. I see where [Žižek is] coming from, his vision of things, a particular kind of perception. I share the “feeling” of what he writes, whilst not agreeing with him at all. You can question it all: he wants to keep a sort of dialectic, there’s still Marxism in there somewhere. He works with Jameson and people like him, with American neo-Marxists. Not forgetting the form of Lacanian real he uses. All of that is mixed in together, and there are all sorts of strange complexities. I don’t know whether you can separate it all out, but it’s very interesting – being very much in phase and also totally out of phase. Jean Baudrillard 1. From Leibniz to Baudrillard In section eight of his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) G.W. Leibniz asserts that all true predication has some basis in the nature of things and that, when a proposition is not an identity, that is, when the predicate is not explicitly contained in the subject, it Special Issue: Baudrillard and Žižek