ABSTRACT
It is not easy to describe or identify precisely Baudrillard’s point of departure or fundamental position in this project. It is facile to suggest that he simply supports the position of the primitive against culture. It is only slightly more sophisticated to argue that he is best interpreted as a Nietzschean surveying the disenchanted world with aristocratic disdain. Although it is probably still grossly inadequate as a description, it seems
that his position is very close to that of a modern Hölderlin of whom Blanchot has written:
Today the poet no longer has to stand between gods and men as their intermediary. Rather he has to stand between the double infidelity; he must keep to the intersection of this double-this divine and humanreversal. This double and reciprocal movement opens a hiatus, a void which must henceforth constitute the essential relation of the two worlds. The poet, then, must resist the pull of the gods who disappear and draw him toward them in their disappearance. He must resist pure and simple subsistence on the earth which poets do not found. He must accomplish the double reversal, take upon himself the weight of the double infidelity and thus keep the two spheres distinct, by living the separation purely, by being the pure life of the separation. For this empty and pure space which distinguishes between the spheres is the sacred, the intimacy of the breach which is the sacred.
