Jacques Derrida - Differance

Jacques Derrida Differance
1968, published in Margins of Philosophy 1972

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense, Research in Phenomenology, 1988

Félix Guattari - Machinic Heterogenesis

Félix Guattari Machinic Heterogenesis

from Chaosmosis 1992

Nicolas Bourriaud - Postproduction

"The artistic question is no longer 'What can we make that is new?' but, 'How can we make do with what we have?' ... Artists today program forms more than they compose them."

Postproduction Nicolas Bourriaud 

Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002 

Jean Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Read the full essay here.