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The Algorithmic Faust: Baudrillard, Khaby Lame, and the Digital Soul

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Pygmalion.exe—AI image Thesis This article argues that contemporary digital culture transforms the classical Faustian pact into a new form of algorithmic self-production. Whereas Goethe’s Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge, experience, and self-expansion, the digital subject increasingly converts identity itself into reproducible data, visibility, and continuous circulation within platform economies. Through Jean Baudrillard’s concept of self-production, the article interprets the “digital soul” not as metaphysical essence but as an operational identity optimized for algorithmic systems. Introduction Recent discussions surrounding Khaby Lame and the sale of his so-called “digital soul” reveal something philosophically unsettling about contemporary culture. The phrase itself initially appears absurd, almost satirical, yet it captures a genuine transformation in the structure of subjectivity under digital capitalism. What is being commercialized is no longer merely labor, celeb...
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In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts: Difference, Self-Reflexivity, and the Collapse of Universals

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Studieraum mit klassischen Werken. AI image   “ Historical materialism, dialectics, modes of production, labor power—through these concepts Marxist theory has sought to shatter the abstract universality of the concepts of bourgeois thought: Nature and Progress, Man and Reason, formal Logic, Work, Exchange, etc. Yet Marxism in turn universalizes them with a ‘critical’ imperialism as ferocious as the other’s…to be logical, the concept of history must itself be regarded as historical, turn back upon itself, and only illuminate the context that produced it by abolishing itself. Instead, in Marxism history is transhistoricized: it redoubles on itself and thus is universalized. To be rigorous the dialectic must dialectically surpass and annul itself. ” J. Baudrillard. Thesis: This article argues that Baudrillard’s critique of Marxism in The Mirror of Production operates through a structuralist logic of difference and a Nietzschean suspicion toward universal truth, while also converg...
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The Algorithmic Mirror: Baudrillard, Self-Production, and the Digital Subject

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Pygmalion: Manufacturing the Ideal Self. AI image Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard’s critique of “self-production”—the modern imperative to continuously construct, optimize, and perform the self—anticipated the structure of contemporary digital subjectivity. What Baudrillard identified as the productivist logic of late capitalism has intensified under social media, platform culture, and artificial intelligence, where individuals increasingly construct themselves as visible, measurable, and continuously optimizable entities within algorithmic systems. Production no longer functions merely as an economic category; it increasingly defines the conditions under which contemporary existence becomes legible, valuable, and socially real. Introduction One of the most striking aspects of Baudrillard’s early work is the extent to which it anticipated forms of subjectivity that would only fully emerge decades later. In The Mirror of Production, he argues that modern society no ...
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Baudrillard Turns Marx Against Marxism: Production and the Limits of Western Thought

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Western Thinkers. AI image   Introduction: The Specter of Production The most radical gesture in Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production is not a critique of capitalism. It is a refusal of the very horizon that makes capitalism and its critique legible in the first place: production. What is at stake is not an economic disagreement, but the conceptual space in which capitalism itself becomes thinkable as a system and critique becomes possible as its negation. The thesis that structures this reading is therefore uncompromising: Marxism does not escape the conceptual universe of political economy; it universalizes its deepest metaphysical assumption—the idea that being is production. What appears as critique is, at a deeper level, the extension of the very logic it claims to overcome. In Baudrillard’s reading, historical materialism does not break with the system of production; it completes it by elevating it to a universal principle of intelligibility. This is why Baudril...
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Production and Code: Baudrillard on the Semiotics of Consumption

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Porträt aus Werbung, in the style of Arcimboldo. AI image Introduction:   The Primacy of  Production In classical political economy, production occupies a privileged position. Factories, labor, and material output appear as the decisive forces shaping society, while consumption is often treated as a secondary moment in which goods are merely used or exhausted. Jean Baudrillard challenges this hierarchy by arguing that modern consumer society operates less through the production of objects than through the circulation of signs. Commodities do not simply satisfy needs; they communicate distinctions, aspirations, and forms of identity. His analysis emerges partly from the structuralist tradition influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, although Baudrillard extends those concepts well beyond their original linguistic framework. Production and Its Privilege According to Baudrillard, both classical economists and Marx inherited what he describes as a productivist orientation. Even...
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Labor as Transcendental Signified in Marx’s Thought

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Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard does not merely criticize Marxist economics but exposes the metaphysical privilege granted to labor and production within Marx’s system. While Karl Marx appears to overturn classical political economy, he preserves its foundational structure by elevating labor into the hidden ground of truth, consciousness, and historical emancipation. Baudrillard’s intervention begins at the point where this “mirror of production” destabilizes, and where signification gradually displaces production as the organizing principle of advanced capitalism. Introduction: Breaking the Mirror of Production Marx’s critique of capitalism is often read as a decisive rupture with classical political economy. Against the framework developed by economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx shifts attention toward labor, production, and exploitation as the real conditions underlying exchange (Marx & Engels, 1970). Jean Baudrillard, however, contests ...
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