Escape from Germany: Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Kracht's Prose

Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson claims, has brought about "the transformation of reality into images" (125). This postmodern apotheosis of the visual has, according to Martin Jay, led not only to a visual hypertrophy but also to the denigration of sight (543, 546). Certainly the most concise if not renowned account of the postmodern frenzy of the visual, Jean Baudrillard's genealogy of the image, employs the relationship of a map to a landmass to illustrate how visible signs have severed themselves from their referents such that they themselves now pass for reality itself. In effect, the difference between cartographic abstraction and the actual territory it maps disappears such that we are left with only a hyperreal world of simulations. Along with this triumph of illusions over their referents, the cartographer's object of study, the terrain itself, has also vanished from view. In spite of the existence of lingering vestiges of reality, Baudrillard insists that the dominion of images is complete and unassailable. Even the most violent provocations like hijackings or armed robbery-forms of agency designed by a few individuals to strike at a locus of power and rematerialize the real-are nostalgic and ineffectual, for what they seek is nowhere to be found (Simulacra 20-21). Primarily concerned with establishing the structure and function of simulacra as globalized systems of domination, Baudrillard provides no answers for his readers as to how to orientate themselves in a world that is both spectacular and vanishing before their eyes. The postmodern hall of mirrors is an endless labyrinth without an escape hatch. While postmodern simulacra have played deceptive tricks on the mind and the eye, postmodernity has instigated others to embrace iconoclasm, blindness, and disappearing acts as guidelines for re-orientation and agency. Jay cites Jean-Francois Lyotard as identifying in absence, nothingness, and formlessness the possibility of accessing a "postmodern sublime" (573-84). Lyotard's anti-ocularcentrism refrained from reconciling the postmodern split between "the senses and what makes sense" and instead suggested that the wandering de-materialized body constituted the precondition for negotiating the continuously shifting phantasmagorias of the postmodern (Jay 584, 586). With an eye on the abject body in contemporary art, Hal Foster proffers the view that critical responses to postmodernity have not necessarily jettisoned the body's materiality but rather have locked on to corporeal sites and conditions that espouse formlessness and non-being (149). From this perspective, putting the broken boundaries of the material body on display rejects the simulacrum's knack for whitewashing the real and staging its own virtuality. In Foster's engagement with Julia Kristeva, the abject-any phantasmic substance that is both foreign and intrinsic to the subject and that must therefore be expelled in order to preserve the subject's integrity-can exceed modernism's ability to sublimate the abject's blurring of borders and obfuscation of identities (Foster 153, 165; Kristeva 207). Under the sign of postmodernity, the abject has proliferated and intensified such that it proves capable of shattering the illusions of the simulacrum and arriving at the real.1 The abject can also backfire and obliterate the body entirely. In this case, the corpse occupies a position of radical negation where "power cannot penetrate"; but this comes at the price of pushing agency into the realm of nihility (Foster 166-68). While Lyotard and Foster advance divergent approaches for grappling with the simulacra, both make convincing cases that the eye is no longer reliable; the fight against the simulacrum must transpire in and on the material body. This quagmire-the body as a site of domination and resistance within the postmodern apotheosis of the visual-figures centrally in the narratives and public personae of Christian Kracht. Take, for example, his incendiary pronouncements from late September 2001: "Ich mochte ein Bilderverbot haben, ein radikales, islamisches Bilderverbot" (Reents). …