School of Social and Political Science

Luca Zazzi

Job Title

PhD: "To Have Done With Theory? Baudrillard, Or the Literal Confrontation With Reality"

Photo
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Building (Address)

27-28

Street (Address)

George Square

City (Address)

Edinburgh

Country (Address)

United Kingdom

Post code (Address)

EH8 9LD

Research interests

Research interests

Sociology, Social Theory, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Society, Pataphysics

Background

To Have Done With Theory? Baudrillard, Or the Literal Confrontation With Reality

Eluding the temptation to reinterpret Baudrillard once more, this work started from the ambition to consider his thought in its irreducibility, that is, in a radically literal way. Literalness is a recurring though overlooked term in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, and it is drawn from the direct concatenation of words in poetry or puns and other language games. It does not indicate any realist positivism but a principle that considers and connects things in their singularity without passing through a general equivalent (such as the meaning of words in a poem, which only destroys it).

Reapplying the idea to Baudrillard and finding other singular routes through his “passwords” is a way to short-circuit their reductio ad realitatem and reaffirm his direct challenge to the hegemony of global integration. Even in the literature dedicated to his work, this exercise has been rare compared to the ‘hermeneutical’ one, where Baudrillard’s oeuvre was taken as a discourse to be interpreted and explained (finding equivalents for its singularity).

In plain polemic with any ideal of conformity between theory and reality (from which our present conformisms arguably derive, too), Baudrillard conceived thought not as something to be verified but as a series of hypotheses to be repeatedly radicalised – he often described it as a “spiral”, a form which challenges the codification of things, including its own. Coherent with this, the thesis does not consider Baudrillard’s work either a reflection or a prediction of reality but, instead, an out-and-out act, a precious singular object which, interrogated, ‘thinks' us and our current events 'back'.

In the second part, Baudrillard’s hypotheses are taken further and measured in their capacity to challenge the reality of these events and phenomena. The thesis confronts the ‘hypocritical’ position of critical thinking which, with the idea of correcting its malfunctioning, accepts reality’s hegemonic principles. It questions the interminability of our condition, where death seems thinkable only as a senseless interruption of the apparatus. It also confronts the solidarity between orthodox and alternative realities of the covid pandemic and the Ukrainian invasion, searching for what is irreducible to the perfect osmosis of “virtual and factual”.

Drawing equally from the convulsions of globalisation and the psychopathologies of academics, from DeLillo’s fiction and Baudrillard’s lesser-studied influences, this study evaluates the irreversibility of our system against the increasingly silent challenges of radical thought. It looks for what an increasingly pessimistic late Baudrillard called ‘rogue singularities’: forms which, often outside the conventional realms one would expect to find them, constitute potential sources of the fragility of global power.

‘To have done with theory’ does not mean abandoning radical thought and, together with it, the singularity of humanity. It means, as the thesis concludes, the courage to leave conventional ideas of theory and listen to less audible voices which, at the heart of this “enormous conspiracy”, whisper — as a mysterious lady in Mariupol did to Putin — “It’s all not true! It’s all for show!”.

Supervisors

Dr Stephen Kemp

Prof Jonathan Hearn

Prof Paolo Quattrone

Publications

Zazzi, L. (2017). Severino and Cacciari: Rethinking Europe and change. The Sociological Review.

Conferences

Zazzi, L. (2017). The Figure of the Mass: A Theoretical Challenge to Sociology, Crowds, Mobs, Masses and Publics. Annual Sociology Conference. The New School for Social Research, New York City, NY.

Zazzi, L. (2017). Representation and Appropriation: A Theoretical Challenge to Sociology. Sociology New Directions Conference 2017. School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

Workshops

Zazzi, L. (2020). Virtualità e viralità. Il punto della situazione. Economia, società, ambiente al tempo del Covid-19 [Virtuality and Virality. An Assesment of the Situation. Economy, Society, Environment at the Time of Covid-19]. Webinar. Social Innovation Teams, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, IT

Teaching Experience​

Tutoring and Marking

Works within