"Phantom Communities" reconsiders the status of the
simulacrum--sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more
rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and
authority of its model--in light of recent debates in literature,
art, philosophy, and cultural studies.
The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level,
he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form
that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of
exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the
Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean
Genet, Pierre Klossowski, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G.
Ballard, Balthus, and Raul Ruiz. Through his readings of these
works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum,
showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the
postmodern canon.
On another level, the author offers an account of the role played
by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying
analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such
theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault,
and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, "Phantom Communities" intervenes
in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and
ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian
possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern
context.
Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual
works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental
aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture
of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the
margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by
its proliferating images.
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