Metastasis

Definition

Metastasis, in Fatal Strategies (1983), names the process of death anticipated within life — the "excrescence" of living tissue that no longer knows limits. Baudrillard takes the term from Franz von Baader, whose essay "On the Concept of Ecstasy as Metastasis" defines metastasis as "the anticipation of death, and of the beyond of its own end at the heart of life itself." The obese are its somatic figure: "we may think of them as having swallowed their own dead bodies while still alive… This is the engorgement of a useless organ." But Baader's "ecstatic or metastatic form" generalizes to information systems ("these too are metastatic in their anticipation of dead meaning in living signification, thereby producing too much meaning") and to pornography ("its ghostly ambiance comes to it from its anticipation of dead sex in living sexuality… the weight of all the dead sex"). "The obese somehow escape sexuality… by the indivisibility of the full body… The proliferation of the body is not far from genetic proliferation." Revolt itself becomes metastatic: "In our quartenary universe, revolt has become genetic, like the cells in cancer and metastases: uncontrollable vitality and undisciplined proliferation." Metastasis is thus the pathological form of the same overpotentiality that ecstasy and hypertely name in the aesthetic and evolutionary registers. See the-obese, hypertely, obscenity, cloning-and-the-genetic-code, ecstasy.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: metastasis as "the anticipation of death… at the heart of life itself"; "revolt has become genetic" (1983).
• Franz von Baader — the Romantic philosopher (not yet paged) from whom Baudrillard takes "Uber den Begriff der Ekstasis als Metastasis," the essay identifying ecstasy with metastasis.
• Sigmund Freud — the death drive read as "the undifferentiated excrescence of the living."

Related Concepts

• The Obese — the body's metastasis made flesh.
• Hypertely — the sister concept: excess of finality.
• Obscenity — metastasis produces the superfluous ("sex is too much") that is obscene.
• Cloning and the Genetic Code — the genetic register of the same proliferation.
• Ecstasy — Baader's ecstatic form is metastasis; Baudrillard links the two directly.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Obese"; Baader's "On the Concept of Ecstasy as Metastasis"; "revolt has become genetic, like the cells in cancer and metastases"; the metastasis of information and porn.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — "the metastasis that began with industrial objects ends with cellular organization" (Clone Story).
• 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

• Baader's metastasis (a speculative Romantic concept) and Baudrillard's are not the same; the wiki should decide whether the borrowing is legitimate or decorative.
• If metastasis is the general form of contemporary systems, is any organic or informational limit still conceivable? Baudrillard's answer is not — only the "spiral of worsening."