In doing so, Baudrillard is inconsistent: on the one hand, he is not in favor of our dependence on medicine and health services because they decrease our natural immunity. On the other hand, he does not seem to mind the discoveries that medicine has made until the time he was writing his work (in the 1980ies). It follows that, for Baudrillard, the treatment methods and remedies that exist in his time are acceptable, but if they develop further, they will contribute to worse, gentler and weaker – from aspect of health – humans. In order not to fall into this trap, he conveniently draws an arbitrary line – to a certain point we can depend on medicine (for particular illnesses), whereas from that point on we should not depend on it (for other types of illnesses). “It would not be too far-fetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs,” Baudrillard considers (38).
Such views implicitly state the position that immunity and physical quality of the living beings, in this case humans, decreases with the enabling of the survival of the weaker species; as well as that even if full cleanliness could be achieved, it is not desirable, because that would be “deadly cleanliness”, that is, people would lose their ability for survival. However, even if medical progress truly led to decrease of the immunity, is that a reason to put an end to medical research and advances? The logical consequence of Baudrillard’s thinking is: in order for humankind not to lose the ability for survival, the ill, who could potentially be cured, should be left to die; Baudrillard, however, decides to ignore (perhaps hide?) this conclusion.
Another problem, which, again, is due to lack of establishing a logical connection between the statements, is the fact that in The Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard puts himself in defense of the instincts and opposes science and progress. This choice, however, is actually absurd because progress is also one of the human instincts.
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One of the most famous essays related to poststructuralism is “The Death of the Author” by the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes, but in the essay itself as well as in the later interpretations of this essay, certain inconsistences may be revealed. Quoting a sentence from this essay, which describes a castrato, Barthes wonders who gives the description: “Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology?” (Barthes 228). Barthes concludes that we will never find out what the answer is because writing is “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (Barthes 228), thus being a starting point of the death of the author. Postmodernism frequently refers to this position of Barthes in order to show that in interpreting literary works we do not need to know anything about the life or the beliefs of the author. That is indeed so, but the fact that we can read, interpret and discuss literature without mentioning biographical data does not mean that they are not present in it. This approach in interpreting a text as an isolated text without external influences is only one of the possible interpretation approaches, and not a truth discovered by Barthes after which all interpretations should ignore the life and beliefs of the writers.
We do not know whether Balzac’s sentence is the attitude of only one of his characters or of Balzac the individual or of the traditional literary or social ideas of femininity. If it is the position of only one character, that would be visible in the work in which the attitudes of the other characters who do not think in the same way would be presented. The works tell us a lot about the author, even if we decide to focus on other points in our interpretation. If it is the understanding of Balzac the writer, then it may be something specific to Balzac as an individual or it may be a reflection of him as a representative of the culture he belongs to. The questions asked by Barthes serve to illustrate his position that once a certain fact is narrated, it is disconnected from the narrator because the text as a linguistic structure can means something different from what the author meant to say. That, however, is a matter of choice in the approach to a literary work, that is, it’s not a matter of disconnecting the link between the narrator and the text, but a matter of the opportunity of the interpreter to ignore that link. The link between the writer and the text is never disconnected, since Balzac, regardless of our free will to ignore and not to take into account his biography or beliefs, is always present; for, the written text does not exist as some kind of a mysterious autonomous organism that has its own life and can be changed or can adopt various meanings independently of its author, readers or critics, but they are the ones who give meanings to it, who can add or neglect (deliberately or accidently) certain meanings.
Barthes is undoubtedly right in underlining how small the role of the author is in regard to the fact that neither his views nor the language he uses are his own invention or his original property independent of history and of the language he has inherited. This, however, still does not mean that “it is language that speaks, not the author” (229), as Barthes emphasizes in his discussion on Mallarmé; Barthes supports the position that the work is not a result of the author as an individual because the voices of the whole culture he belongs to merge together. Still, an argument against this claim can be found: the same culture produces authors with various, even opposing views, which suggests that the text, at least partially is the result of the author as an individual, and not just as a member of a certain culture. “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 231). Barthes gives a major contribution to releasing the text from the chains of the author’s intentions and turning the attention towards the reader. It can be added, however, that go give a text an author does not entail to impose a limit to it. The meanings of the text can be various, and they depend on the writer and on the interpretation of the readers, who can chose to take into consideration the biography of the writer or to ignore it altogether.
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In the Macedonian theoretical and critical thinking, there is a view of literature as a phenomenon that develops similarly to living organisms. According to Georgi Stardelov, “a literary gap would stand open” without Stale Popov in the evolution of the Macedonian history (13). Similarly, according to Dimitar Mitrev, the novel Крпен живот by Stale Popov, being a folkloristic novel, comes to fill a gap in our literature, so its publication “no matter how belated, is not anachronistic to us” (quot. In Drugovac 40). Miograg Drugovac has a similar view, pointing out that there was a vacuum in Macedonian artistic literature, which “sooner or later had to be filled with the works of the artistic-aesthetic orientation which, if not completely identical to such orientations in the Serbian, Croatian or, for example, Bulgarian literature of the last decade of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, then at least with assemblage of traits closes to them…” (40-1).
Here we can clearly see the parallel drawn between the development of the living creatures (whether plants or animals) and the development of literature as a phenomenon. A tree, for instance, has to go through certain development phases, thus, for example, it has to be one meter high before it reaches two meters. It is similarly claimed that literature must first go through folkloristic period in order to reach a more aesthetic period.