The Map and the Territory

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https://www.admagazine.fr/art/portfolio/diaporama/luigi-ghirri-un-regard-different-sur-le-monde/51630 The Map and the Territory received the Prix Goncourt on 8 November 2010 on the first ballot with seven votes against two for Apocalypse bébé by Virginie Despentes. [4] Synopsis [ edit ] Later he paints people in different professions. He paints Michael Houellebecq: Writer, of course. Houellebecq, the character, doesn't seem to care. I thought, then, that Houellebecq, the author, was giving me, the reader, direction.

D'un autre côté je me dis que c'est le propos de Houellebecq de donner une espèce de bilan de la relation des Français ou des Européens de l'ouest au travail aujourd'hui... Mais je trouve ça quand même misérabiliste, un peu. Houellebecq" is destined to encounter problems rather greater than a weakness for salami, and it's best not to give them away here. Jed, meanwhile, is also experiencing difficulties: his series of paintings about professions – the most celebrated of which is entitled Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto – have made him both wildly rich and enormously acclaimed, but he has a propensity for suddenly abandoning successful work. When a double portrait of artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst founders – "He was making a truly shit painting" – he knows he is done, despite the critics' confidence that he has achieved nothing less than an artistic history of the post-industrialised world. En ‘El mapa y el territorio’, el personaje que más me ha gustado y con el que más he empatizado ha sido la caldera. En serio. Lo más emocionante ha sido descubrir si la caldera, que lanza extraños gruñidos, va a estropearse o no; su lucha por la supervivencia me ha emocionado. Por otra parte, los personajes de carne y hueso me han importado un comino. Y eso que salía el propio Houellebecq como personaje, pero ni así. A ver, la novela es una especie de biografía de un artista, pero en ningún momento me llegó a interesarme ni su vida ni su obra. Es un alienado, como todos los personajes de Houellebecq, pero es que su alienación no tenía nada de particular ni de remarcable; parecía escrito con desgana, nunca llegué a sentir lo que sentía él (yo misma me pregunto si será por qué ya no siento esta misma alienación o por qué la siento ya demasiado). In a televised interview given after the Goncourt award, Houellebecq declared that the main themes of the novel were "aging, the relationship between father and son and the representation of reality through art". [5]Then, he meets Michel Houellebecq, a writer as reclusive and despondent as he is, and feels immediately a connection with the man, almost a form of sympathy. Jed is working on a series of portraits defining people by their work, and the last painting he completes is a portrait of the author, which he makes a present of to Houellebecq (the character), even though he could sell it on the art market for nearly a million euros. The same goes for Houellebecq, of course -- and fortunately he is quite good in his presentation of these, and especially personality (if often also too lazy to be able to situate it better in any sort of community: Houellebecq's characters thrive only in almost complete isolation).

Author Robert M. Pirsig uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book Lila when the main character/author becomes temporarily lost due to an over-reliance on a map, rather than the territory that the map describes. [8] The book is a bundle of reflections tied together by a story, but the reflections are entertaining as well as elegiac and the story carries you along. (...) A passing insistence on detail -- every meal is described, and even the trials of travelling Ryanair get a mention -- helps chain a sometimes scatty book to earth." - George Walden, The Observer Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference", from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), argued the essential impossibility of knowing what any actual territory is. Any understanding of any territory is based on one or more sensory channels reporting adequately but imperfectly: Shyam Wuppuluri is an independent researcher working in the domain of foundations of science. His research interests range from philosophy to theoretical physics, mathematics and cognitive science. He is the recipient of Honra ao Mérito from the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy (Academia Brasileira de Filosofia) and has been a corresponding member of the academy since 2018. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Albert Einstein Fellowship 2020 from the Einstein Forum at Potsdam & Caputh and is a fellow of Royal Society of Arts. He is the instigating editor of several highly interdisciplinary volumes that disseminate and discuss issues underlying the foundations of sciences, and for which he has gathered the world's leading scientists and intellectuals as contributors; among them Noam Chomsky, Sir Roger Penrose, Sir Martin Rees, Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Nicholas Humphrey, Gregory Chaitin, Gerard 't Hooft, Ian Stewart, Barry Mazur, Stephen Wolfram, Paul Davies, Tyler Burge, Doron Swade, Julian Barbour, Newton Da Costa, Francisco Antonio Doria, Reuben Hersh, Nicholas Maxwell and many others.

About the Author

Derrière son masque, M. Tout-le-Monde est un "alien", et Michel Houellebecq un écrivain puissant, quoi qu'on en dise : loin des mille livres bien polis qui, chaque année, ne font finalement ni chaud ni froid, les siens dérangent, révulsent ou ébranlent -- ils agissent. Et s'ils provoquent, chaque fois, une réaction chimique sur l'esprit du lecteur, c'est parce que leurs questions sont, au fond, toujours les nôtres -- même et surtout quand elles soulèvent le coeur. Houellebecq n'est pas humaniste ? Il est humain. Et bien vivant." - Raphaëlle Rérolle, Le Monde One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq -- usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations -- is that he is a first-rate prose stylist. This is not quite enough, however, to make him a good novelist. (...) The Map and the Territory is part mystery thriller and part satire, set in the near-future. It presents a vision of contemporary French society as a cross between a reality show and Third World dystopia. (...) (T)he plot is ludicrous, teasing and entertaining in roughly equal measure." - Andrew Hussey, Literary Review It was public knowledge that Houellebecq was a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies: it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog.

Even allowing for the unavoidable vagaries of translation, "pleasant" is not a word that even his greatest admirers would apply to the reading experience Houellebecq offers; rather, one has the sensation of trying to follow a complex but intriguing game while in possession of about half of the rules. In this novel, for example, we are invited, in studiedly detached prose, to contemplate Jed's career, from its earliest beginnings – a youthful project to systematically photograph the world's manufactured objects, from suspension files to handguns to forks – through a period in which he manipulates Michelin maps to the painting phase in which he first encounters Houellebecq. Throughout these apparently discrete passages, Jed's overriding concern is "to give an objective description of the world"; discussions about the extent to which this is possible form the basis of his association with the writer. Houellebecq, the one outside the book I’m not sure about the one inside the book, usually brings up the themes of the politics of sex and the way lust motivates all aspects of our lives, but in this book he just settles for some philosophical musings on prostitutes. This is the third book I’ve read by him and this is the book he spends the least amount of time talking about sex… libido slowing down Mr. Houellebecq?One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. Les Nymphéas noirs, avec son duo policier, le milieu de l'art, l'étrange abolition du temps qui est commune aux villages de Souppes et de Giverny Historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith concluded his eponymous essay collection, Map is not Territory with a rejoinder to scholars that echoes the Borgesian analysis (1978, p.309): yönlü bir çağdaş Fransız sanatçısı olan Houellebecq’in oldukça farklı, hatta ayrıksı bir romanı. Çok zeki ve yaratıcı bir yazar. Bu romanının kahramanlarından birisini kendisi olarak seçmiş, benzer muzipliği bilinen bazı edebiyatçı ve tanınmış kişileri romanına ekleyerek de yapmış. İncelemeleri oldukça ayrıntılı, adeta Perec’e öykünerek yapmış tanımlamalarını. The prose is a pleasure to read (apart from the over-liberal use of italics) and there are some good jokes, but the book feels underpowered and Olga is no more than a cipher. As the author moves us forward to the year 2035, we sense that not much has happened in Jed’s life in the intervening years." - Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement