Poetic Transfer of a (Serious) Situation

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard passed away on Tuesday, 6 March 2007. In the months following, a German publisher asked whether I would be interested in publishing an interview I had conducted with the French philosopher in 2004. I contacted Marine Baudrillard, his widow, to obtain permissions for this publication. I met her in the summer of 2007 in Paris, the day on which she first shared with me and a mutual friend the audio version of the text you will encounter here. It was a strange moment because, oddly enough, Marine’s voice on the recording reminded me of one of Emilie Camacho’s dance videos. I later sent it to Marine herself. She also noticed the resemblance between Comacho’s Vertigo and the recording, prompting me later to construct a montage of the two. We never published this montage, but she allowed me to show it in September 2012, on the last day of the Flashbacks-nostalgic media and other mediated forms of nostalgia conference, which I had organised at the University of Geneva. The video closed the conference as a nostalgic counter-nostalgia poetic reflection on the idea of creative nostalgia and our sometimes ambivalent and difficult relation to time and death.