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Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bradley Butterfield
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Abstract

Like today's masses, the characters in J. G. Ballard's Crash are fascinated by what Jean Baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. Ballard's characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making Crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. Calling Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation,” Jean Baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in Crash and in the still-real world. As a fiction writer, Ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when Baudrillard's theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. In defense of Baudrillard, I read him, like Ballard, in the Nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which I argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.

Type
Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethics and Literary Study Introduction by Lawrence Buell , January 1999 , pp. 64 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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