Ecstasy

Definition

Ecstasy, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's term for the form a thing takes when, instead of passing dialectically into its opposite, it is potentialized to the limit — redoubled, outbid, raised to the nth power until all sense is lost and it "shines forth in its pure and empty form." "Ecstasy is the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form. Fashion is the ecstasy of the beautiful: pure and empty form of an aesthetic spinning about itself. Simulation is the ecstasy of the real." The formula is the "more-X-than-X": "the truer than true," "the more beautiful than beautiful," "the realer than real," "the fuller than full." "Every trait thus raised to the superlative power… is assured of having an effect of vertigo independent of any content or quality of its own." Ecstasy is therefore the mode of disappearance by excess: "Movement does not disappear as much into immobility as into speed and acceleration." Its social forms: fashion (the ecstatic form of the beautiful), simulation (of the real), pornography (of sex), obscenity (of the visible), and the masses (of the social). Baudrillard's English translators gloss this as the point where "things have found a way of avoiding a dialectics of meaning." See simulation-hyperreality, obscenity, hypertely, nihilism-of-transparency.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the "more-X-than-X," ecstasy as the pure and empty form, "the ecstatic form of the social" (1983).
• Roger Caillois — the game-theoretical grid Baudrillard adopts: the drift from games of competition/expression to "games of chance and vertigo" (the aleatory and the vertiginous as "cold" ecstasy).
• Paul Virilio — "pure war" as the ecstatic form of the real ("the ecstasy of unreal war, contingent and present everywhere").
• Baudrillard elsewhere: the nihilism of transparency as the terminal affect of the ecstatic state.

Related Concepts

• Simulation / Hyperreality — "simulation is the ecstasy of the real"; the hyperreal is the real ecstasized.
• Obscenity — the ecstatic form of the scene/visible ("more visible than visible").
• Hypertely — the ecstatic form of finality (function pushed past its end).
• Inertia — the paired term of the book's opening chapter: acceleration and inertia as the same oversaturation.
• Nihilism of Transparency — the affect of a world in ecstasy: fascination, "cold" passion.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "Ecstasy is the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost"; "the realer than real"; "Masses are the ecstasy of the social"; "We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the adjacent machinery of implosion and precession.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is ecstasy distinct from implosion, or its aesthetic name? Both describe absorption without reversal.
• The concept turns every dialectical pole into a "potentialization." Does this leave any room for genuine negation, or does critique become one more ecstatic form?