“The Conspiracy of Imbeciles,” Reloaded: Baudrillard and the DSK Affair

This essay is a rhetorical invention. It projects what Jean Baudrillard would have found theoretically interesting in the recent Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) affair, configured as a transpolitical media pseudo event revealing the immunodeficiency of Europe’s political class. The DSK affair is doubly contextualized in relation to its reception on both sides of the Atlantic: in (academic) North American feminists’ critique of French cultural exceptionalism and in French (real-time) resolutely nonhermeneutic coverage of “the already told story.” Both readings of the affair are centered upon a key Baudrillardian term, seduction, either in its “hot” (Don Juan) form or in its “cold” ludic form. When viewed from the perspective of immersive, immediate, and immanent forms of distance-abolishing media (such as smartphones and GPS), the summer sex scandals of 2011 instantiate shifts within simulation toward integral reality.