The Obese

Definition

The obese is Baudrillard's chief figure, in Fatal Strategies (1983), of obesity as a mode of disappearance — not the protective or neurotic fat of psychology, but the body's loss of its "scene" and its limit. "Paradoxically, it is a mode of disappearance for the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism… it is as if the body was no longer opposed to an external world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance." The obese have not completed the mirror stage — "they have not succeeded in producing the flat mirror that could reflect them" — and so enter "the undivided multiplication of bodies without images." They are "fascinating for their total oblivion of seduction." Their fat is not endocrine but "a pathology of the scene and the obscene": they display "the system… its empty inflation," "the formless form, the amorphous morphology of the currently social." Baudrillard reads the obese and the clone together as mutants of one process ("the proliferation of the body is not far from genetic proliferation") and generalizes obesity to "a whole system" — "the obesity characteristic of operational modernity, in its frenzy to store and memorize everything." The figure is thus both somatic and social: the social body, having "lost its law, its scene and its stakes," reaches "the pure and obscene form we know it to be." See metastasis, obscenity, transpolitical, cloning-and-the-genetic-code.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: obesity as "a mode of disappearance for the body"; "the ideal individual paradigm of reconciliation, of the closed and self-managed niche" (1983).
• Sigmund Freud — the mirror stage and the death drive invoked (via Lacan) as the processes obesity escapes.
• Jacques Lacan (not yet paged) — the mirror stage that the obese never accomplishes.
• Baudrillard — the obese as the body's version of the masses.

Related Concepts

• Metastasis — the organic process obesity manifests ("no longer even individualized or sexual… metastasis").
• Obscenity — obesity is the body's obscenity: "not that there is too much body, but that the body is superfluous, de trop."
• The Transpolitical — the obese is one of the transpolitical's "figures of exacerbated indifference."
• Ecstasy — "the ecstasy of movement"; the obese is "larger than large," a body in ecstasy.
• Cloning and the Genetic Code — the paired mutant: "the sex of the clone is superfluous."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Obese"; "a mode of disappearance for the body"; "they have not succeeded in producing the flat mirror"; "the obesity of a whole system, the obscenity of a whole culture."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the adjacent pathology of the code (the clone).
• 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

• Does Baudrillard's obese body do analytical work, or is it a rhetorical figure recycling 1980s American cultural anxiety? The wiki should mark its datedness while preserving the structural claim (obesity = loss of the body's scene).
• If the obese escapes the mirror and the scene, is it a figure of liberation from representation or of its catastrophe? Baudrillard leaves the ambivalence open ("They are its nihilist expression").