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5: Political Economy and Death, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [125]-194. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents] |
The Extradition of the Dead
As soon as savages began to call `men' only those who were members of
their tribe, the definition of the `Human' was considerably enlarged: it
became a universal concept. This is precisely what we call culture. Today
all men are men. Universality is in fact based exclusively on tautology and
doubling, and this is where the `Human' takes on the force of a moral law
and a principle of exclusion. This is because the `Human' is from the outset
the institution of its structural double, the `Inhuman'. This is all it is: the
progress of Humanity and Culture are simply the chain of discriminations
with which to brand `Others' with inhumanity, and therefore with nullity.
For the savages who call themselves `men', the others are something else.
For us, by contrast, under the sign of the Human as a universal concept,
others are nothing. In other cases, to be `man' is, like being a gentleman, a
challenge, a distinction experienced as a great struggle, not merely giving
rise to an exchange of quality or status amongst different beings (gods,
ancestors, foreigners, animals, nature ...), but imposing its stakes
universally, being praised and prohibited. We are happy to be promoted to
the universal, to an abstract and generic value indexed on the equivalence
of the species, to the exclusion of all the others. In some sense, therefore,
the definition of the Human inexorably contracts in accordance with
cultural developments: each `objective' progressive step towards the
universal corresponded to an ever stricter discrimination, until eventually
we can glimpse the time of man's definitive universality that will coincide
with the excommunication of all men -- the purity of the concept alone
radiant in the void.
Racism is modern. Previous races or cultures were ignored or eliminated,
but never under the sign of a universal Reason. There is no criterion
of man, no split from the Inhuman, there are only differences with which to
oppose death. But it is our undifferentiated concept of man that gives rise
to discrimination. We must read the following narrative by Jean de Léry,
from the sixteenth century: Histoire d'un voyage en la terre de Brésil (`The
History of a Journey to the Land of Brazil') to see that racism did not exist
in this period when the Idea of Man does not yet cast its shadow over all
the metaphysical purity of Western culture. This Reformation puritan from
Geneva, landing amongst Brazilian cannibals, is not racist. It is due to the
extent of our progress that we have since become racists, and not only
Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural
history, takes the form of a genealogy of discrimination in which, at the
start of the nineteenth century, labour and production occupy a decisive
place. At the very core of the `rationality' of our culture, however, is an
exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of
madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and
serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death.
There is an irreversible evolution from savage societies to our own: little
by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group's
symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play,
worthy partners in exchange, and we make this obvious by exiling them
further and further away from the group of the living. In the domestic
intimacy of the cemetery, the first grouping remains in the heart of the
village or town, becoming the first ghetto, prefiguring every future ghetto,
but are thrown further and further from the centre towards the periphery,
finally having nowhere to go at all, as in the new town or the contemporary
metropolis, where there are no longer any provisions for the dead, either in
mental or in physical space. Even madmen, delinquents and misfits can
find a welcome in the new towns, that is, in the rationality of a modern
society. Only the death-function cannot be programmed and localised.
Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since, today, it
is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable
anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an
incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or spacetime,
they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia.
They are no longer even packed in and shut up, but obliterated.
But we know what these hidden places signify: the factory no longer
exists because labour is everywhere; the prison no longer exists because
Survival, or the Equivalent to Death
It is correct to say that the dead, hounded and separated from the living,
condemn us to an equivalent death: for the fundamental law of symbolic
obligation is at play in any case, for better or worse. Madness, then, is only
ever the dividing line between the mad and the normal, a line which
normality shares with madness and which is even defined by it. Every
society that internalises its mad is a society invested in its depths by
madness, which alone and everywhere ends up being symbolically
exchanged under the legal signs of normality. Madness has for several
centuries worked hard on the society which confines it, and today the
asylum walls have been removed, not because of some miraculous
tolerance, but because madness has completed its normalising labour on
society: madness has become pervasive, while at the same time it is
forbidden a resting place. The asylum has been reabsorbed into the core of
the social field, because normality has reached the point of perfection and
assumed the characteristics of the asylum, because the virus of confinement
has worked its way into every fibre of `normal' existence.
So it is with death. Death is ultimately nothing more than the social line
of demarcation separating the `dead' from the `living': therefore, it affects
both equally. Against the senseless illusion of the living of willing the living
to the exclusion of the dead, against the illusion that reduces life to an
absolute surplus-value by subtracting death from it, the indestructible logic
of symbolic exchange re-establishes the equivalence of life and death in the
indifferent fatality of survival. In survival, death is repressed; life itself, in
accordance with that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more
than a survival determined by death.
The Ghetto Beyond the Grave
The concept of immortality grew alongside the segregation of the dead.
For the flip-side of death, this eminent status which is the mark of the `soul'
and `superior' spiritualities, is only a story that conceals the real extradition
of the dead and the rupturing of a symbolic exchange with them. When the
dead are there, lifelike [vivants] but different from the living [vivants]
We must get rid of the idea of progress in religions, leading from
animism to polytheism and then to monotheism, in the course of which an
immortal soul progressively emerges. It is to the precise extent that the
dead are confined that they are conferred an immortality, just as, in a
similar way, we see life expectancy grow simultaneously with the segregation
of pensioners, deemed asocial, in our societies.
Immortality is progressive, and this is one of the strangest things. It
progresses in time, passing from limited to eternal survival; in social space,
immortality becomes democratic and passes from being the privilege of a
few to being everyone's virtual right. This is relatively recent, however. In
Egypt, certain members of the group (Pharoahs, then priests, chiefs, the
wealthy, the initiates of the dominant class), according to the degree of
their power, slowly broke away as immortals, others having only the right
to death and the double. Towards the year 2000 BC, everyone accedes to
immortality in a sort of social conquest, perhaps the outcome of a great
struggle. Without attempting a social history or constructing a fiction, we
can well imagine, in Egypt and the Great Dynasties, revolts and social
movements demanding the right to immortality for all.
In the beginning, then, immortality was a matter of an emblem of power
and social transcendence. Where, in primitive groups, there were no
structures of political power, there was no personal immortality either.
Consequently, in the least segmented societies, a `relative' soul and a
`restricted' immortality correspond to a similarly relative transcendence of
power structures. Then, with the Grand Empires, despotic societies of
total transcendence of power, immortality is generalised and becomes
eternal. The King or the Pharoah is the first to benefit from this
advancement, but then, at a more advanced stage, issuing from God
Himself who is immortality par excellence, immortality is democratically
redistributed. But the phase of the immortal God, which coincides with the
great universalist religions (and Christianity in particular), is already a
phase of a huge abstraction of social power in the Roman Imperium. If the
Greek gods were mortals, it is because they were bound to a specific
culture and were not yet universal.
In its initial stages, Christianity was not in accord over immortality,
which was a late acquisition. The Church Fathers still admitted the
provisional elimination of the soul awaiting resurrection. Even when St
Paul preached the idea of resurrection, the pagans mocked him for it and
even the Church Fathers had a deep resistance to it. In the Old Testament
(Daniel), resurrection is promised only to those who have not received
retribution during their lifetime for good or evil. The beyond of life, survival,
is only the settling of all accounts, existing only according to what
Originally the distinctive emblem of power, the immortality of the soul
acts, throughout Christianity, as an egalitarian myth, as a democratic
beyond as opposed to worldly inequality before death. It is only a myth.
Even in its most universalist Christian version, immortality only belongs to
every human being by right: in fact, it is sparingly granted, remaining the
privilege of a culture, and within this culture, the privilege of a specific
social and political caste. Have the missionaries ever believed in the
immortal soul of the natives? Has woman ever really had a soul in
`classical' Christianity? What about madmen, children and criminals? In
fact it always comes down to this: only the rich and powerful have a soul.
Social, political and economic inequality (life expectancy, prestigious
funerals, glory and living on in men's memories) before death is only ever
the effect of this fundamental discrimination: some, the only real `human
beings', have the right to immortality; others have only the right to death.
Nothing has changed greatly since Egypt and the Great Dynasties.
`What does immortality matter?' the naïve materialist will say, `It's all
imaginary.' Yes, and it is exciting to see that this is where the basis of the
real social discrimination lies, and that nowhere else are power and social
transcendence so clearly marked than in the imaginary. The economic
power of capital is based in the imaginary just as much as is the power of
the Church: capital is only its fantastic secularisation.
We can also see that democracy changes nothing here. We used to be
able to fight in order to gain immortality for the souls of all, just as
generations of proletarians fought in order to gain equality in terms of
goods and culture. It is the same fight, the former for survival in the
beyond, and the latter for survival here. It is the same trap: the personal
immortality of a few resulting, as we have seen, in the break-up of the
group -- so what's the point of demanding immortality for all? It is simply to
generalise the imaginary. The revolution can only consist in the abolition
of the separation of death, and not in equality of survival.
Immortality is only a kind of general equivalent bound to the abstraction
of linear time (taking form as soon as time becomes this abstract dimension
bound to the process of political-economic accumulation and, in short, to
the abstraction of life).
Death Power
The emergence of survival can therefore be analysed as the fundamental
operation in the birth of power. Not only because this set-up will permit
the necessity of the sacrifice of this life and the threat of recompense in the
Historically, we know that sacerdotal power is based on a monopoly
over death and exclusive control over relations with the dead.
[74]
The dead
are the first restricted area, the exchange of whom is restored by an
obligatory mediation by the priests. Power is established on death's
borders. It will subsequently be sustained by further separations (the soul
and the body, the male and the female, good and evil, etc.) that have
infinite ramifications, but the principal separation is between life and
death.
[75]
When the French say that power `holds the bar',
[76]
it is no metaphor:
it is the bar between life and death, the decree that suspends exchange
between life and death, the tollgate and border control between the two
banks.
This is precisely the way in which power will later be instituted between
the subject separated from its body, between the individual separated from
its social body, between man separated from his labour: the agency of
mediation and representation flourishes in this rupture. We must take
note, however, that the archetype of this operation is the separation
between a group and its dead, or between each of us today and our own
deaths. Every form of power will have something of this smell about it,
because it is on the manipulation and administration of death that power,
in the final analysis, is based.
All the agencies of repression and control are installed in this divided
space, in the suspense between a life and its proper end, that is, in the
production of a literally fantastic and artificial temporality (since at every
instant every life has its proper death there already, that is to say, in this
same instant lies the finality it attains). The first abstract social time is
installed in this rupture of the indivisible unity of life and death (well
before abstract social labour time!). All the future forms of alienation that
Marx denounces, the separations and abstractions of political economy,
take root in this separation of death.
The economic operation consists in life taking death hostage. This is a
residual life which can from now on be read in the operational terms of
calculation and value. For example, in Chamisso's The Man who Lost his
Shadow, Peter Schlemil becomes a rich and powerful capitalist once his
Life given over to death: the very operation of the symbolic.
The Exchange of Death in the Primitive Order
Savages have no biological concept of death. Or rather, the biological fact,
that is, death, birth or disease, everything that comes from nature and that
we accord the privilege of necessity and objectivity, quite simply has no
meaning for them. This is absolute disorder, since it cannot be symbolically
exchanged, and what cannot be symbolically exchanged constitutes a
mortal danger for the group.
[77]
They are unreconciled, unexpiated, sorcerous
and hostile forces that prowl around the soul and the body, that stalk
the living and the dead; defunct, cosmic energies that the group was unable
to bring under control through exchange.
We have de-socialised death by overturning bio-anthropological laws, by
according it the immunity of science and by making it autonomous, as
individual fatality. But the physical materiality of death, which paralyses us
through the `objective' credence we give it, does not stop the primitives.
They have never `naturalised' death, they know that death (like the body,
like the natural event) is a social relation, that its definition is social. In this
they are much more `materialist' than we are, since for them the real
materiality of death, like that of the commodity for Marx, lies in its form,
which is always the form of a social relation. Instead, all our idealism
converges on the illusion of a biological materiality of death: our discourse
of `reality', which is in fact the discourse of the imaginary, surpasses the
primitives in the intervention of the symbolic.
Initiation is the accented beat of the operation of the symbolic. It aims
neither to conjure death away, nor to `overcome' it, but to articulate it
socially. As R. Jaulin describes in La Mort Sara [Paris: Plon, 1967], the
ancestral group `swallows the koys' (young initiation candidates), who die
`symbolically' in order to be reborn. Above all, we must avoid understanding
this according to the degraded meaning we attach to it, but in the sense
that their death becomes the stakes of a reciprocal-antagonistic exchange
between the ancestors and the living. Further, instead of a break, a social
relation between the partners is established, a circulation of gifts and
counter-gifts as intense as the circulation of precious goods and women: an
incessant play of responses where death can no longer establish itself as
end or agency. By offering her a piece of flesh, the brother gives his wife to
a dead member of the family, in order to bring him back to life. By
nourishing her, this dead man is included in the life of the group. But the
exchange is reciprocal. The dead man gives his wife, the clan's land, to a
living member of the family in order to come back to life by assimilating
himself to her and to bring her back to life by assimilating her to himself.
The important moment is when the moh (the grand priests) put the koy
It is clear that the initiation consists in an exchange being established
where there had been only a brute fact: they pass from natural, aleatory
and irreversible death to a death that is given and received, and that is
therefore reversible in the social exchange, `soluble' in exchange. At the
same time the opposition between birth and death disappears: they can
also be exchanged under the form of symbolic reversibility. Initiation is the
crucial moment, the social nexus, the darkroom where birth and death stop
being the terms of life and twist into one another again; not towards some
mystical fusion, but in this instance to turn the initiate into a real social
being. The uninitiated child has only been born biologically, he has only
one `real' father and one `real' mother; in order to become a social being he
must pass through the symbolic event of the initiatory birth/death, he must
have gone through the circuit of life and death in order to enter into the
symbolic reality of exchange.
It is not, in this initiatory test, a matter of staging a second birth to
eclipse death. Jaulin himself leans towards this interpretation: society
`conjured' death away, or even opposed it `dialectically', in the initiation,
to a term of his invention which it uses and `overcomes': `To the life and
death they are given, men have added initiation, by means of which they
transcend the disorder of death.' This formula is very beautiful and very
ambiguous at the same time, since initiation is not `added' to the other
terms, and it doesn't play life off against death towards a rebirth (we are
extremely suspicious of those who triumph over death!). It is the splitting
of life and death that initiation conjures away, and with it the concomitant
fatality which weighs down on life as soon as it is split in this way. For life
then becomes this biological irreversibility, this absurd physical destiny,
life has then been lost in advance, since it is condemned to decline with the
body. Hence the idealisation of one of these terms, birth (and its doubling
in resurrection) at the expense of the other, death. This, however, is simply
one of our ingrained prejudices concerning the `sense' or `meaning of life'.
For birth, as an irreversible individual event, is as traumatising as death.
Psychoanalysis puts this differently: birth is a sort of death. And with
baptism, Christianity has done nothing more than, through a collective
ritual, to define the mortal event of birth. The advent of life is a crime of
sorts, if it is not repeated and expiated by a collective simulacrum of death.
Life is only a benefit in itself within the calculable order of value. In the
symbolic order, life, like everything else, is a crime if it survives unilaterally,
if it is not seized and destroyed, given and returned, `returned' to
death. Initiation effaces this crime by resolving the separate event of life
and death in one and the same social act of exchange.
Symbolic/Real/Imaginary
The symbolic is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a `structure',
but an act of exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real,
which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the
opposition between the real and the imaginary.
The initiatory act is the reverse of our reality principle. It shows that the
reality of birth derives solely from the separation of life and death. Even
the reality of life itself derives solely from the disjunction of life and death.
The effect of the real is only ever therefore the structural effect of the
disjunction between two terms, and our famous reality principle, with its
normative and repressive implications, is only a generalisation of this
disjunctive code to all levels. The reality of nature, its `objectivity' and its
`materiality', derives solely from the separation of man and nature, of a
body and a non-body, as Octavio Paz put it. Even the reality of the body,
its material status, derives from the disjunction of a spiritual principle,
from discriminating a soul from a body.
The symbolic is what puts an end to this disjunctive code and to
separated terms. It is the u-topia that puts an end to the topologies of the
soul and the body, man and nature, the real and the non-real, birth and
death. In the symbolic operation, the two terms lose their reality.
[78]
The reality principle is never anything other than the imaginary of the
other term. In the man/nature partition, nature (objective, material) is
only the imaginary of man thus conceptualised. In the sexual bipartition
masculine/feminine, an arbitrary and structural distinction on which the
sexual reality (and repression) principle is based, `woman' thus defined is
only ever man's imaginary. Each term of the disjunction excludes the
other, which eventually becomes its imaginary.
So it is with life and death in our current system: the price we pay for the
`reality' of this life, to live it as a positive value, is the ever-present
phantasm of death. For us, defined as living beings, death is our
imaginary.
[79]
So, all the disjunctions on which the different structures of the
real are based (this is not in the least abstract: it is also what separates the
teacher from the taught, and on which the reality principle of their relation
is based; the same goes for all the social relations we know) have their
archetype in the fundamental disjunction of life and death. This is why, in
whatever field of `reality', every separate term for which the other is its
imaginary is haunted by the latter as its own death.
Thus the symbolic everywhere puts an end to the fascination with the
real and the imaginary, to the closure of the phantasm drawn up by
psychoanalysis, but where, at the same time, psychoanalysis locks itself up
by establishing, through a considerable quantity of disjunctions (primary
and secondary processes, unconscious and conscious, etc.), a psychical
reality principle of the unconscious inseparable from psychoanalysis's own
reality principle (the unconscious as psychoanalysis's reality principle!) and
thus in which the symbolic cannot but put an end to psychoanalysis too.
[80]
The Inevitable Exchange
The real event of death is imaginary. Where the imaginary creates a
symbolic disorder, initiation restores symbolic order. Incest prohibition
does the same thing in the domain of filiation: the group responds to the
real, natural, `asocial' event of biological filiation by a system of alliance
and the exchange of women. It is essential that everything (women in this
case, but otherwise birth and death) becomes available for exchange, that
is, comes under the jurisdiction of the group. Incest prohibition, in this
sense, is interdependent with and complementary to initiation, in that in
the one case young initiates circulate amongst the living adults and the
dead ancestors: they are given and returned, whereby they accede to
symbolic recognition. In the other case, it is women who circulate: they too
only attain real social status once given and returned, instead of being
retained by the father or brothers for their own use. `Whosoever gives
nothing, whether his daughter or his sister, is dead.'
[81]
Incest prohibition lies at the basis of alliances amongst the living.
Initiation lies at the basis of alliances amongst the living and the dead. This
is the fundamental fact that separates us from the primitives: exchange
does not stop when life comes to an end. Symbolic exchange is halted
neither by the living nor by the dead (nor by stones or beasts). This is an
absolute law: obligation and reciprocity are insurmountable. None can
withdraw from it, for whom-- or whatever's sake, on pain of death. Death is
nothing other than this: taken hostage by the cycle of symbolic exchanges
(cf. Marcel Mauss, `L'effet physique chez l'individu de l'idée de mort
suggérée par la collectivité', in Sociologie et Anthropologie [4th edn, Paris:
PUF, 1968]).
[82]
But we could also say that this does not separate us from the primitives,
and that it is exactly the same for us. Throughout the entire system of
political economy, the law of symbolic exchange has not changed one iota:
we continue to exchange with the dead, even those denied rest, those for
whom rest is prohibited. We simply pay with our own death and our
anxiety about death for the rupture of symbolic exchanges with them. It is
profoundly similar with inanimate nature and beasts. Only an absurd
theory of liberty could claim that we are quits with the dead, since the debt
is universal and unceasing: we never manage to `return' what we have
taken for all this `liberty'. This huge litigation, involving all the obligations
and reciprocities that we have denounced, is properly the unconscious. No
need for a libido, for desire, for an energetics or for the pulsions and their
destinations to give an account of this. The unconscious is social in the
sense that it is made up of all that could not be exchanged socially or
symbolically. And so it is with death: it is exchanged in any case, and, at
best, it will be exchanged in accordance with a social ritual, as with the
primitives; at worst, it will be `redeemed' by an individual labour of
mourning. The unconscious is subject in its entirety to the distortion of the
death of a symbolic process (exchange, ritual) into an economic process
The Unconscious and the Primitive Order
The reciprocity of life and death, which entails their exchange in a social
cycle instead of being cut up according to biological linearity or the
repetition of the phantasm, the reabsorption of the prohibition separating
the living from the dead that rebounds so violently on the living; all this
puts the very hypothesis of the unconscious into question again.
In his Oedipe africain [Paris: Plon, 1969], Edmond Ortigues asks what it
means `to marry one's mother' and `to kill one's father':
The verb `to marry' has a different meaning in different contexts, it has not got
the same social and psychological content. As for the verb `to kill', apparently so
clear-cut, are we quite certain that it holds no surprises? What then is a `dead
father' in a country where the ancestors are so close to the living? ...
Everything changes, requiring us to re-examine the meaning of each term.
In a society under the sway of ancestral law, it is impossible for the individual
to kill the father, since, according to the customs of the Ancients, the father is
always already dead and always still living.... To take the father's death upon
oneself or to individualise the moral consciousness by reducing paternal
authority to that of a mortal, a substitutable person separable from the ancestral
altar and from `custom', would be to leave the group, to remove oneself from the
basis of tribal society.
When we talk of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, we think of an
individually experienced drama. But what might this be in a tribal society where
the religion of `fertility' and the `ancestors' proposes as the explicit basis of the
collective tradition what, for us, the young Oedipus is condemned to live out in
his personal phantasms?
Therefore, the `symbolic function' in primitive societies is articulated not
through the law of the Father and the individual psychical reality principle,
but from the outset through a collective principle, through the collective
movement of exchanges. In the initiation, we have seen how, by means of a
social process, the biological figures of filiation break up in order to make
way for the initiatory parents. These parents are symbolic figures who refer
to the socius, that is, to all the fathers and mothers of the clan, and
ultimately to the dead fathers, the ancestors, and to the clan's earth
mother. The instance of the Father does not appear, it is broken down into
the collectivity of rival brothers (initiates). `Aggressivity will be displaced
along a horizontal line, into fraternal rivalry, overcompensated by an
extremely powerful solidarity' (Ortigues, ibid.). (Why `will be displaced'?
As if it were normally directed onto the Father?) Opposed to the Oedipus
principle, which corresponds to the negative aspect of incest prohibition
(prohibited with the mother and imposed by the father) is, in the positive
sense, a principle of the exchange of sisters by brothers. It is the sister, and
not the mother, who is at the centre of this apparatus, and it is at the level
The appearence of the concept of the gift was implemented at the core of one
and the same age group in an atmosphere of equality. The sacrifice to which the
child consents in the nursery to benefit another child is not of the same order as
separation from the mother. (Ortigues, ibid.)
All this tells of a social principle of exchange opposed to a psychical
principle of prohibition. All this tells of a symbolic process opposed to an
unconscious process. Nowhere in the primitive order, since it is well
ventilated and resolutely social, does there emerge the psychically over-determined
biological triad of the family, with the psychical apparatus and
the intertwined phantasms, as its double, the whole thing crowned by the
fourth purely `symbolic' term, the phallus. The phallus is `strictly necessary
in order to introduce a relation to the level of speech, and to make it into a
reciprocal law of recognition amongst subjects'. It is here, in fact (at least
in psychoanalytic theory), that the Name of the Father, the signifier of the
Law, is inscribed for us, and alone introduces us into exchange. The
famous ploy of the Word of the Father protects us against mortal fusion
with, and absorption by, the desire for the mother. Without the phallus,
there is no salvation. The necessity of this Law and of a symbolic agency
barring the subject, thanks to which the primary repression at the basis of
the formation of the unconsious is implemented, by the same token gives
the subject access to his own desire. Without this agency to arrange
exchanges, without the mediation of the phallus, the subject, incapable of
repression, no longer even gains access to the symbolic and sinks into
psychosis.
Because they were effectively ignorant of this Law, and the structure of
repression and the unconscious which it entails, we were able to say that
primitive societies were `psychotic' societies. Of course, this is simply our
fierce way of abandoning them to their gentle madness (if not to see, as
begins to happen in the psychoanalytic West itself, whether psychosis
might not conceal a more radical meaning, a more radical symbolicity than
we have ever glimpsed under the sign of psychoanalysis). Yes, these
societies have access to the symbolic.
[83]
No, they do not gain access to the
symbolic by means of the intercession of an immutable Law, the image of
which is sketched in the social order itself: the Father, the Chief, the
Signifier and Power. The symbolic is not an agency here, so that access to it
would be regulated by the mediation of a Phallus, an upper-case figure to
embody all the metonymic figures of the Law. The symbolic is precisely
this cycle of exchanges, the cycle of giving and returning, an order born of
the very reversibility which escapes the double jurisdiction, the repressed
psychical age
[84]
When fathers are exchanged, given, received and transmitted from one
If we can speak of a society with neither repression nor unconscious, it is
not in order to rediscover some miraculous innocence where the flows of
`desire' roam freely and the primary processes are realised without
prohibition. This is an order of the dispressed [défoulé], an idealism
of desire and the libido such as haunts Freudo-Reichian, Freudo-Marxist
and even schizo-nomadic imaginations: the phantasm of a desire or a
(machined) unconscious naturalised in order to be `liberated'. The phantasm
of `liberty' has today been transferred from the spheres of rational
thought to those of the irrational, the brute, the `primary' and the
unconscious while, however, remaining a bourgeois problematic (namely
the Cartesian and Kantian problematic of freedom and necessity).
To put the theory of the unconscious into question is also to put the
theory of Desire into question, in that here, at the level of an entire
civilisation, it is always simply a matter of a negative phantasm of the
rational order. Hence Desire becomes an integral part of our reigning
prohibition, its dreamt materiality becomes part of our imaginary.
Whether it is dialectically related to the prohibition, as with Oedipus and
psychoanalysis, or whether it is exalted in its brute productivity, as in
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, it remains the promise of a savage
naturality, the phantasm of an objective, liberatory pulsional energy to be
liberated -- a force of desire inherited from the mobile field of revolutions:
good old labour force. As we know, the effect of force is always the effect
of repression, as the effect of reality is always the effect of the imaginary.
We must write the `Mirror of Desire' as we have written The Mirror of
Production.
An example: primitive cannibalism. Apart from the question of sustenance,
this is a problem of the `oral drive' of devouring, on which there
weighs a fundamental (perhaps even the most fundamental) prohibition for
us, whereas certain primitives would naïvely transgress and fulfil their
`desire' through this very process. A postulate: every man would like to
devour his fellow man, and when, due to necessity, a Catholic rugby team
did just this after their plane crashed in the Cordillère des Andes, the
whole world was astonished at this divine resurgence of a nature they
thought dead and buried. Even the Pope blessed and exculpated them, so
as not to make them into an example; nevertheless, this is no longer
Killing no longer has the same meaning for us. The ritual murder of the
king has nothing to do with the `psychoanalytic' murder of the father.
Behind the obligation to expiate the privilege the king retains through
death, his murder aims to keep what threatened to accumulate and become
fixed on the king's person (status, wealth, women and power) within the
flow of exchanges, within the group's reciprocal movements. His death
prevents this accident. This is the essence and function of sacrifice: to
extinguish what threatens to fall out of the group's symbolic control and to
Thus, neither killing nor eating have the same meaning for us: they do
not result in a `murder-pulsion', in an oral sadism, nor in a structure of
repression, which alone gives them the meaning they have for us today.
They are social acts that rigorously follow the apparatus of symbolic
obligation. Amongst other things, they never have the unilateral meaning
in which all the aggression at the basis of our culture is expressed: killing--
eating -- I kill I eat -- you are killed, you are eaten. The unconscious and all
its phantasms (and their psychoanalytic theory) presuppose the acknowledgement
of this disjunction, the repression of ambivalence, the restitution
of which, under whatever form it may be, in the symbolic process,
puts an end to the jurisdiction of the unconscious.
KILLING POSSESSING DEVOURING -- the entirety of our individual
unconscious is organised around these terms and the phantasmas that
surround them, under the sign of repression.
GIVING RETURNING EXCHANGING -- with the primitives, everything
operates in the manifest collective exchange around these three
terms, in the myths that underlie them.
Each of these `verbs' of the unconscious presupposes a break, a rupture,
the bar we find everywhere in psychoanalysis, along with the guilt it gives
rise to, the play and the repetition of the prohibition. The `verbs' of the
symbolic assume on the contrary a reversibility, an indefinite cyclical
transition.
Above all, however, the radical difference lies in the autonomisation of a
psychical sphere: something operates collectively in primitive societies, the
repression of which works for us solely on the agency of the psychical
apparatus and the unconscious. The ritual is utterly different to the
phantasm, as is the myth from the unconscious. All the analogies on which
anthropology and psychoanalysis play are profound mystifications.
The distortion that psychoanalysis submits primitive societies to is of the
same order, but in the opposite sense than what they have to endure under
Marxist analysis.
1. For the anthropo-Marxists, the economic instance is also present and
determinant in the type of society, it is merely hidden, latent, whereas for
us it is manifest. This difference is judged to be secondary, however; the
analysis does not stop and passes without meeting any opposition onto its
materialist discourse.
2. For the anthropo-psychoanalysts, the agency of the unconscious is
also present and determinant in this type of society; it is simply manifested,
externalised, whereas for us it is latent, repressed. This difference remains
inessential, however, and the analysis continues without disguising its
discourse in terms of the unconscious.
On both sides there is the same misrecognition [méconnaissance] of this
apparently miniscule difference: for one and the same structure, the
economy or the unconscious, we pass from primitive formations to our
own, now from the manifest to the hidden, now the reverse. Only our own
metaphysics could neglect this detail, in the illusion that the content
remains the same. But this is radically false: when the economic `is hidden
behind' other structures, it quite simply ceases to exist; it provides no
account of anything, it is nothing. On the other hand, when the unconscious
is `manifest', when it becomes a manifest and articulated structure, it
is no longer unconscious at all. A psychical structure and a process based
on repression have no meaning in the other, ritual and non-psychical
configuration of an overt resolution of signs. Everything changes when we
pass from the latent to the manifest, and from the manifest to the latent.
[86]
This is why, against Marxist and psychoanalytic misrecognition, we must
start over again beginning from this displacement.
We will come to see that the impossibility of locating and specifying the
economic is due precisely to the symbolic. And that the possibility of
overtly manifesting something unconscious, but which by this very fact
ceases to be so, is also due to the symbolic.
The Double and the Split
The figure of the double, intimately bound up with figures of death and
magic, poses in itself all the problems of psychological and psychoanalytic
interpretation.
Shadow, spectre, reflection, image; a material spirit almost remains
visible, the primitive double generally passes for the crude prefiguration of
the soul and consciousness in accordance with an increasing sublimation
and a spiritual `hominisation', as in Teilhard de Chardin: towards the
apogee of a single God and a universal morality. But this single God has
everything to do with the form of a unified political power, and nothing to
Between the primitive and its double, there is neither a mirror relation
nor one of abstraction, as there is between the subject and its spiritual
principle, the soul, or between the subject and its moral and psychological
principle, consciousness. There is no sign of such a reason common to both
the primitive and its double, no relation of ideal equivalence that structures
the subject for us to the point of splitting it. The double is no longer a
fantastic ectoplasm, an archaic resurgence issuing from guilt and the depths
of the unconscious (we will come back to this). The double, like the dead
man (the dead man is the double of the living, the double is the familiar
living figure of the dead), is a partner with whom the primitive has a
personal and concrete relationship, sometimes happy, sometimes not, a
certain type of visible exchange (word, gesture and ritual) with an invisible
part of himself. We cannot speak of alienation here, for the subject is only
alienated (like we are) when he internalises an abstract agency, issuing
from the `other world', as Nietzsche said -- whether psychological (the ego
and the ego-ideal), religious (God and the soul) or moral (conscience and
the law) -- an irreconcilable agency to which everything else is subordinated.
Historically then, alienation begins with the internalisation of the
Master by the emancipated slave: there is no alienation as long as the duel-relation
of the master and the slave lasts.
The primitive has a non-alienated duel-relation with his double. He
really can trade, as we are forever forbidden to do, with his shadow (the
real shadow, not a metaphor), as with some original, living thing, in order
to converse, protect and conciliate this tutelary or hostile shadow. The
shadow is precisely not the reflection of an `original' body, it has a full part
to play, and is consequently not an `alienated' part of the subject, but one
of the figures of exchange. In another context, this is precisely what poets
find when they question their own body, or interpellate words in language.
To speak to one's body and to speak to language in a duel mode beyond
the active and the passive (my body speaks (to) me, language speaks (to)
me) -- to make each fragment of the body and each fragment of language
autonomous, like a living being, capable of responding and exchanging -- is
to bring about the end of separation and the split, which is only the
submissive equivalence of each part of the body to the principle of the
subject, and the submissive equivalence of each fragment of language to
the code of language.
The status of the double (as well as that of spirits and gods, which are
also real, living and different beings, not idealised essences) in primitive
society is therefore the inverse of our alienation: one being multiplies into
innumerable others just as alive as the first, whereas the unified, individual
subject can only confront itself in alienation and death.
With the internalisation of the soul and consciousness (the principle of
identity and equivalence), the subject undergoes a real confinement,
similar to the confinement of the mad in the seventeenth century as
described by Foucault. It is at this point that the primitive thought of the
double as continuity and exchange is lost, and the haunting double comes
to the fore as the subject's discontinuity in death and madness. `Whoever
sees his double, sees his death.' A vengeful and vampiric double, an
unquiet soul, the double begins to prefigure the subject's death, haunting
him in the very midst of his life. This is Dostoevsky's double, or Peter
Schlemihl's, the man who lost his shadow. We have always interpreted this
double as a metaphor of the soul, consciousness, native soil, and so on.
Without this incurable idealism and without being taken as a metaphor, the
narrative is so much more extraordinary. We have all lost our real
shadows, we no longer speak to them, and our bodies have left with them.
To lose one's shadow is already to forget one's body. Conversely, when the
shadow grows and becomes an autonomous power (as with the mirror-image
in The Student of Prague, which has the effect of the Devil and
dementia), it is so as to devour the subject who has lost it, it is a murderous
shadow, the image of all the rejected and forgotten dead who, as is quite
normal, never accept being nothing in the eyes of the living.
Our entire culture is full of this haunting of the separated double, even in
its most subtle form, as Freud gave it in `Das Unheimliche' (`The Uncanny`:
`Disturbing Strangeness' or `Disturbing Familiarity'): the anxiety
that wells up around the most familiar things. Here the vertigo of
separation builds up to its greatest intensity, since this is its simplest form.
There comes a moment, in fact, when the things closest to us, such as our
own bodies, the body itself, our voice and our appearance, are separated
from us to the precise extent that we internalise the soul (or any other
equivalent agency or abstraction) as the ideal principle of subjectivity. This
is what kills off the proliferation of doubles and spirits, consigning them
once again to the spectral, embryonic corridors of unconscious folklore,
like the ancient gods that Christianity verteufelt, that is, transformed into
demons.
By a final ruse of spirituality, this internalisation also psychologizes
doubles. In fact it is interpretation in terms of an archaic psychical
apparatus that is the very last form of the Verteufelung, the demonic
corruption and elimination of the primitive double: projection of the guilt
attached to the phantasmatic murder of the other (the close relative) in
accordance with the magic of the omnipotence of ideas (Allmacht der
Gedanken), the return of the repressed, etc. In `The Uncanny', Freud
writes:
Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic
conception of the universe. This was characterised by the idea that the world was
peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject's narcissistic overvaluation
of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts
and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various
outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or `mana'; as well
as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted
narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest
prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of
individual development corresponding to the animistic stage in primitive men,
that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and
traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything
which now strikes us as `uncanny' fulfils the condition of touching those residues
of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them back to expression.
(Standard Edition, Vol. 17, 1955, pp. 240-1)
This is how psychology, our authority in the depths, our own `next world',
this omnipotence, magical narcissism, fear of the dead,
[87]
this animism or
primitive psychical apparatus, is quietly palmed off on the savages in order
then to recuperate them for ourselves as `archaic traces'. Freud does not
think this is what he said in speaking of `narcissistic overvaluation of ...
mental processes'. If there is such an overvaluation of one's own mental
processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as we have done with our
morality and techniques, to the core of every culture), then it is Freud's
overvaluation, along with our whole psychologistic culture. The jurisdiction
of the psychological discourse over all symbolic practices (such as the
dazzling practices of the savages, death, the double and magic; but also
over our current symbolic practices) is even more dangerous than that of
the economistic discourse: it is of the same order as the repressive
jurisdiction of the soul and consciousness over the body's entire symbolic
potential. Psychoanalysis's reinterpretation of the symbolic is a reductive
operation. Since we live under the unconscious (but is this the case? Isn't it
our own myth, marking out and even participating in repression: a
repressed thought of repression?), we believe that we are justified in
extending the jurisdiction of psychical history as we used to do with history
itself, to every possible configuration. The unconscious, and the psychical
order in general, becomes the insurmountable agency, giving the feudal
right of trespass over every previous individual and social formation. This
imaginary also spreads into the future, however: if the unconscious is our
modern myth, and psychoanalysis its prophet, the liberation of the
unconscious (Desiring-Revolution) is its millenial heresy.
The idea of the unconscious, like the idea of consciousness, remains an
idea of discontinuity and rupture. Put simply, it substitutes the irreversibility
of a lost object and a subject forever `missing' itself, for the positivity of
the object and the conscious subject. However decentred, the subject
remains within the orbit of Western thought, with its successive `topologies'
(hell/heaven -- subject/nature -- conscious/unconscious), where the
fragmented subject can only dream of a lost continuity.
[88]
It will never get
back to, or catch up with [rejoindre] utopia, which is not at all the phantasm
Politicai Economy and Death
We do not die because we must, we die because it is a habit,
to which one day, not so long ago, our thoughts became bound.
Raoul Vaneigem
Den Göttern ist der Tod immer nur ein Vorurteil
[To the Gods, death is only ever a prejudice.]
F. W. Nietzsche
As a universal of the human condition, death exists only when society
discriminates against the dead. The institution of death, like that of the
afterlife and immortality, is a recent victory for the political rationalism of
castes, priests and the Church: their power is based on the management of
the imaginary sphere of death. As regards the disappearance of the
religious afterlife, it is the even more recent victory for the State's political
rationality. When the afterlife fades in the face of the advances made by
`materialist' reason, it is quite simply because it has crossed over into life
itself. The power of the State is based on the management of life as the
objective afterlife. In this, it is more powerful than the Church, since the
abstract power of the State is increased not by an imaginary beyond, but by
the imaginary of life itself. It relies on secularised death, the transcendence
of the social, and its force derives from the mortal abstraction it embodies.
Just as medicine is the management of the corpse, so the State is the
management of the dead body of the socius.
From the start, the Church was established on the bipartition of survival,
or the afterlife, from life, the earthly world and the Kingdom of
Heaven. It kept a jealous watch over this partition, for if the distance
disappeared, its power would be at an end. The Church lives in the
deferred eternity (as the State lives in deferred society, as revolutionaries
live in the deferred revolution: all are living in death) that it had so much
trouble imposing. All primitive Christianity, and later popular, messianic
and heretical Christianity, lived in the hope of parousia, in the necessity of
the immediate realisation of the Kingdom of God (cf. W. E. Mühlmann,
To counter the dazzling sight of earthly communities, the Church
imposes a political economy of individual salvation. First through faith
(which became the soul's personal relation to God instead of the effervescent
community), then through the accumulation of works and merits, that
is, an economy in the strict sense of the term, with its final account and its
equivalences. It is then, as always since the appearance of processes of
accumulation,
[89]
that death really arose at the horizon of life. It is then that
the Kingdom really passes to the other side of death, before which
everyone finds themselves alone once again. Wherever it goes, Christianity
trails with it the fascination with suffering, solitude and death involved in
the destruction of archaic communities. In the completed form of the
religious universal, as in the economic (capital), everyone finds themselves
alone again.
With the sixteenth century, the modern figure of death was generalised.
The Counter-Reformation, the funereal and obsessional games of the
Baroque, and especially Protestantism, by individualising conscience
before God and disinvesting collective ceremonials, brought about the
progress of the individual's anguish of death. It also gave rise to the
immense modern enterprise of staving off death: the ethics of accumulation
and material production, sacralisation through investment, the
labour and profit collectively called the `spirit of capitalism' (Max Weber,
The Protestant Work Ethic [tr. T. Parsons, London: Routledge, 1992])
constructed a salvation-machine from which intra-worldly ascesis is little by
With the turn of the sixteenth century, the vision and iconography of
death in the Middle Ages was still folkloric and joyous. There is a collective
theatre of death, which was not yet buried in individual consciousness (nor,
as later, in the unconscious). In the fifteenth century, death also inspired
the great messianic and egalitarian festival of the Dance of Death: kings,
bishops, princes, townsfolk and villagers are all equal in the face of death,
by way of a challenge to the unequal order of birth, wealth and power. This
was the last great movement that Death was able to appear as an offensive
myth, and as collective speech, since, as we know, death has become an
individual, tragic
[90]
thought `of the law [de droite]', a `reactionary' thought
as regards revolt and social revolutionary movements.
Our death was really born in the sixteenth century. It has lost its scythe
and its clock, it has lost the Apocalyptic Horsemen and the grotesque and
macabre plays of the Middle Ages. Again, all this came from folklore and
festival, in which death was still exchanged, not of course with the
primitives' `symbolic efficacy', but at least as the collective phantasm on
cathedral pediments and in the divided operations of hell. We could even
say that pleasure is possible insofar as there is a hell. Its disappearence
from the imaginary is only the sign of its psychological interiorisation;
death ceases to be the Grim Reaper, and becomes an anguish concerning
death. More subtle and more scientific generations of priests and sorcerers
will flourish on this psychological hell.
With the disintegration of traditional Christian and feudal communities
through bourgeois Reason and the nascent system of political economy,
death is no longer divided. It is cast in the image of the material goods
which, as in previous exchanges, begin to circulate less between inseparable
partners (it is always more or less a community or a clan who
exchange), and increasingly under the sign of a general equivalent. In the
capitalist mode, everyone is alone before the general equivalent. It is no
coincidence that, in the same way, everyone finds themselves alone before
death, since death is general equivalence.
From this point on the obsession with death and the will to abolish death
through accumulation become the fundamental motor of the rationality of
political economy. Value, in particular time as value, is accumulated in the
phantasm of death deferred, pending the term of a linear infinity of value.
Even those who no longer believe in a personal eternity believe in the
infinity of time as they do in a species-capital of double-compound
interests. The infinity of capital passes into the infinity of time, the eternity
of a productive system no longer familiar with the reversibility of gift-exchange,
but instead with the irreversibility of quantitative growth. The
accumulation of time imposes the idea of progress, as the accumulation of
science imposes the idea of truth: in each case, what is accumulated is no
longer symbolically exchanged, but becomes an objective dimension.
Ultimately, the total objectivity of time, like total accumulation, is the
We already know that the economic rationalisation of exchange (the
market) is the social form which produces scarcity (Marshall Sahlins, `The
original affluent society', in Stone Age Economics [Chicago: Aldine and
Atherton, 1972]). Similarly, the infinite accumulation of time as value
under the sign of general equivalence entails the absolute scarcity of time
that is death.
A contradiction in capitalism? No, communism in this instance is in
solidarity with political economy, since, in accordance with the same
fantastic schema of an eternal accumulation of productive forces, communism
too aims for the abolition of death. Only its total ignorance of death
(save perhaps as a hostile horizon to be conquered by science and technics)
has protected it up to now from the worst contradictions. For nothing can
will the abolition of the law of value if you want to abolish death, that is, to
preserve life as absolute value, at the same time. Life itself must leave the
law of value and achieve a successful exchange against death. The
materialists, with their idealistic life expurgated of death, a life `free' at last
of all ambivalence, hardly trouble themselves with this.
[91]
Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to
ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time
as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our phantasm, and
ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for
science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation.
No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the
interests of life as positivity: life as accumulation, death as due payment.
No other culture had this impasse: as soon as the ambivalence of life and
death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter
into a process of accumulation of life as value; but by the same token, we
also enter the field of the equivalent production of death. So life-become-value
is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same
instant, becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very
separation of life and death.
This is the only way that we can speak of a death-drive. This is the only
way we can speak of the unconscious, for the unconscious is only the
accumulation of equivalent death, the death that is no longer exchanged
and can only be cashed out in the phantasm. The symbolic is the inverse
dream of an end of accumulation and a possible reversibility of death in
exchange. Symbolic death, which has not undergone the imaginary
disjunction of life and death which is at the origin of the reality of death, is
exchanged in a social ritual of feasting. Imaginary-real death (our own) can
only be redeemed through the individual work of mourning, which the
subject carries out over the death of others and over himself from the start
The Death Drive
With Freud we pass from philosophical death and the drama of consciousness
to death as a pulsional process inscribed in the unconscious order;
from a metaphysics of anguish to a metaphysics of the pulsion. It's just as if
death, liberated from the subject, at last gained its status as an objective
finality: the pulsional energy of death or the principle of psychical
functioning.
Death, by becoming a pulsion, does not cease to be a finality (it is even
the only end from this standpoint: the proposition of the death drive
signifies an extraordinary simplification of finalities, since even Eros is
subordinate to it), but this finality sinks, and is inscribed in the unconscious.
Now this sinking of death into the unconscious coincides with the
sinking of the dominant system: death becomes simultaneously a `principle
of psychical functioning' and the `reality principle' of our social formations,
through the immense repressive mobilisation of labour and production. In
other words, with the death drive, Freud installs the process of repetition at
the core of objective determinations, at the very moment when the general
system of production passes into pure and simple reproduction. This
coincidence is extraordinary, since we are much more interested in a
genealogy of the concept of the death drive than in its metaphysical status.
Is the death drive an anthropological `discovery' which supplants all the
others (and which can from now on provide a universal explanatory
principle: we can imagine political economy entirely governed and engendered
by the death drive), or is it produced at a given moment in relation to
a particular configuration of the system? In this case, its radical nature is
simply the radical nature of the system itself, and the concept merely
sanctions a culture of death by giving it the label of a trans-historical
pulsion. This operation is characteristic of all idealist thought, but we
refuse to admit this with Freud. With Freud (as with Marx), Western
reason will stop rationalising and idealising its own principles, it will even
stop idealising reality through its critical effect of `objectivity'. Ultimately,
reality will designate unsurpassable pulsional or economic structures: thus
the death drive as the eternal process of desire. But how is it that this
proposition is itself not a matter of a secondary elaboration?
It is true that, at first, the death drive breaks with Western thought.
From Christianity to Marxism and existentialism: either death is openly
denied and sublimated, or it is dialecticised. In Marxist theory and
practice, death is already conquered in the being of the class, or it is
integrated as historical negativity. In more general terms, the whole
Western practice of the domination of nature and the sublimation of
In Freud it is quite another matter. A dialectic with the death drive is no
longer possible; there is no longer any sublimation, even if it is tragic. For
the first time, death appeared as an indestructible principle, in opposition
to Eros. The subject, class and history are irrelevant in this regard: the
irreducible duality of the two pulsions, Eros and Thanatos, rewakens
the ancient Manichean version of the world, the endless antagonism of the
twin principles of good and evil. This very powerful vision comes from the
ancient cults where the basic intuition of a specificity of evil and death was
still strong. This was unbearable to the Church, who will take centuries to
exterminate it and impose the pre-eminent principle of the Good (God),
reducing evil and death to a negative principle, dialectically subordinate to
the other (the Devil). But there is always the nightmare of Lucifer's
autonomy, the Archangel of Evil (in all their forms, as popular heresies
and superstitions that always have a tendency to take the existence of a
principle of evil literally and hence to form cults around it, even including
black magic and Jansenist theory, not to mention the Cathars), which will
haunt the Church day and night. It opposes the dialectic as an institutional
theory and as a deterrent to a radical, dualistic and Manichean concept of
death. History will bring victory to the Church and the dialectic (including
the `materialist' dialectic). In this sense, Freud breaks quite profoundly
with Christian and Western metaphysics.
The duality of the life and death instincts corresponds more precisely to
Freud's position in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Civilisation and its
Discontents, the duality completes itself in a cycle dominated solely by the
death drive. Eros is nothing but an immense detour taken by culture
towards death, which subordinates everything to its own ends. But this last
version does not, however, revert to an inverted dialectic between the two
terms of the duality, since dialectics can only be the constructive becoming
of Eros, whose goal is `to establish ever larger unities and to bind and
regulate energies'. Two principal characteristics oppose the death drive to
this:
1. It dissolves assemblages, unbinds energy and undoes Eros's organic
discourse by returning things to an inorganic, ungebunden, state, in a
certain sense, to utopia as opposed to the articulate and constructive topics
of Eros. Entropy of death, negentropy of Eros.
2. This power of disintegration, disarticulation and defection implies a
radical counter-finality in the form of an involution towards the prior,
inorganic state. The compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang), or the
`tendency to reproduce and revive even those past events that involve no
satisfaction whatsoever', is primarily, for every living being, the tendency
In the proposed death drive therefore, whether in its duel form or in the
incessant and destructive counter-finality of repetition, there is something
irreducible to all the intellectual apparatuses of Western thought. Freud's
thought acts fundamentally as the death drive in the Western theoretical
universe. But then, of course, it is absurd to give it the constructive status
of `truth': the `reality' of the death instinct is indefensible; to remain
faithful to the intuition of the death drive, it must remain a deconstructive
hypothesis, that is, it must be adopted solely within the limits of the
deconstruction that it carries out on all prior thought. As a concept,
however, it too must be immediately deconstructed. We cannot think
(other than as the ultimate subterfuge of reason) that the principle of
deconstruction is all that escapes it.
The death drive must be defended against every attempt to redialecticise
it into a new constructive edifice. Marcuse is a good example of this.
Concerning repression through death, he writes: `Theology and philosophy
today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential
category. Perverting[!] a biological fact into an ontological essence, they
bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of mankind which they help to
perpetuate' (Eros and Civilisation [London: Sphere, 1970], p. 188). Thus it
is for `surplus-repression'. As for fundamental repression:
The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive
existence. For death is the final negativity of time, but `joy wants eternity'....
Time has no power over the Id, the original domain of the pleasure principle.
But the Ego, through which alone pleasure becomes real, is in its entirety subject
to time. The mere anticipation of the inevitable end, present in every instant,
introduces a repressive element into all libidinal relations. (ibid., p. 185)
We will overlook the `brute fact of death': it is never a brute fact, only a
social relation is repressive. What is most curious is the way in which
death's primal repression exchanges signs with the `liberation' of Eros:
The death instinct operates under the Nirvana principle: it tends towards ... a
state without want. This trend of this instinct implies that its destructive
manifestations would be minimised as it approached such a state. If the instinct's
basic objective is not the termination of life but of pain -- the absence of tension --
then paradoxically, in terms of the instinct, the conflict between life and death is
the more reduced, the closer life approximates the state of gratification....
Eros, freed from surplus-repression, would be strengthened, and the strengthened
Eros would, as it were, absorb the objective of the death instinct. The
instinctual value of death would have changed. (ibid., p. 187, J. B.'s emphasis)
Thus we will be able to change the instinct and triumph over the brute fact,
in accordance with good old idealist philosophy of freedom and necessity:
Death can become a token of freedom. The necessity of death does not refute
The Marcusean dialectic therefore implies the total restoration of the death
drive (in Eros and Civilisation, however, this passage is immediately
followed by the `Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism'!), thus limiting the
resistances this concept provokes in pious souls. Here again, it is not too
much for dialectics -- the `liberation' of Eros in this instance; in others the
`liberation' of the forces of production -- to bring about the end of death.
The death drive is irritating, because it does not allow of any dialectical
recovery. This is where its radicalism lies. But the panic it provokes does
not confer the status of truth on it: we must wonder if, in the final instance,
it is not itself a rationalisation of death.
This is first of all the conviction that we hear in Freud (elsewhere he will
talk of a speculative hypothesis):
The dominating tendency of mental life ... is the effort to reduce, to keep
constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the `Nirvana principle', to
borrow a term from Barbara Low) ... [which] is one of our strongest reasons for
believing in the existence of death instincts. (`Beyond the pleasure principle', in
Standard Edition, Vol. 18, 1955, pp. 55-6)
Why, then, all Freud's efforts to ground the death instinct in biological
rationality (Weissmann's analysis, etc.)? This positivist effort is generally
deplored, a little like Engels' attempt to dialecticise Nature that we agree
to ignore out of affection for him. However:
If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies
for internal reasons -- becomes inorganic once again -- then we shall be compelled
to say that `the aim of all life is death' and, looking backwards, that `inanimate
things existed before living ones'.... Thus these guardians of life [instincts], too,
were originally the myrmidons of death, (ibid., p. 38)
It is difficult to rid the death drive of positivism here in order to turn it
into a `speculative hypothesis' or `purely and simply a principle of psychical
functioning' (J. B. Pontalis, L'Arc, 34, 1968). Moreover, at this level there
is no longer any real pulsional duality: death alone is finality. But it is this
finality that in turn poses a crucial problem, since it inscribes death as
anterior, as psychical and organic destiny, almost like programming or
genetic code, in short, as a
positivity that, unless we believe in the scientific
reality of this pulsion, we can only take it as a myth. We can only set Freud
against what he himself says:
The theory of the drives is so to say our mythology. Drives are mythical entities,
magnificent in their indefiniteness. (`New introductory lectures', in Standard
Edition, Vol. 22, 1964, p. 95)
If the death drive is a myth, then this is how we will interpret it. We will
interpret the death drive, and the concept of the unconscious itself, as
myths, and no longer take account of their effects or their efforts at `truth'.
A myth recounts something: not so much in the content as in the form of its
discourse. Let's make a bet that, under the metaphoric species of sexuality
Eros in the service of death, all cultural sublimation as a long detour to
death, the death drive nourishing repressive violence and presiding over
culture like a ferocious super-ego, the forces of life inscribed in the
compulsion to repeat; all this is true, but true of our culture. Death
undertakes to abolish death and, for this very purpose, erects death above
death and is haunted by it as its own end. The term `pulsion' or `drive' is
stated metaphorically, designating the contemporary phase of the politicaleconomic
system (does it then remain political economy?) where the law of
value, in its most terroristic structural form, reaches completion in the pure
and simple compulsive reproduction of the code, where the law of value
appears to be a finality as irreversible as a pulsion, so that it takes on the
figure of a destiny for our culture. Stage of the immanent repetition of one
and the same law, insisting on its own end, caught, totally invested by
death as objective finality, and total subversion by the death drive as a
deconstructive process -- the metaphor of the death drive says all of this
simultaneously, for the death drive is at the same time the system and the
system's double, its doubling into a radical counter-finality (see the
Double, and its `worrying strangeness', das Unheimliche).
This is what the myth recounts. But let's see what happens when it sets
itself up as the objective discourse of the `pulsion'. With the term `pulsion',
which has both a biological and a psychical definition, psychoanalysis
settles down into categories that come straight from the imaginary of a
certain Western reason: far from radically contradicting this latter, it must
then interpret itself as a moment of Western thought. As for the biological,
it is clear that scientific rationality produces the distinction of the living and
the non-living on which biology is based. Science, producing itself as a
code, on the one hand literally produces the dead, the non-living, as a
conceptual object, and, on the other, produces the separation of the dead
as an axiom from which science can be legitimated. The only good
(scientific) object, just like the only good Indian, is a dead one. Now it is
this inorganic state to which the death drive is oriented, to the non-living
status that only comes about through the arbitrary decrees of science and,
when all's said and done, through its own phantasm of repression and
death. Ultimately, being nothing but the cyclical repetition of the nonliving,
the death drive contributes to biology's arbitrariness, doubling it
through a psychoanalytic route. But not every culture produces a separate
concept of the non-living; only our culture produces it, under the sign of
biology. Thus, suspending the discrimination would be enough to invalidate
the concept of the death drive, which is ultimately only a theoretical
agreement between the living and the dead, with the sole result that
The problem is the same as regards the psychical, putting the whole of
psychoanalysis into question. We must ask ourselves when and why our
system began to produce the `psychical'. The psychical has only recently
become autonomous, doubling biology's autonomy at a higher level. This
time the line passes between the organic, the somatic and `something else'.
There is nothing psychical save on the basis of this distinction. Hence the
ensuing insoluble difficulty of linking the two parts together again; the
precise result of this is the concept of the pulsion, which is intended to form
a bridge betwen the two, but which merely contributes to the arbitrariness
of each. Here the metapsychology of the pulsion reverts to mind-body
metaphysics, rewriting it at a more advanced stage.
The separated order of the psychical results from our precipitate desire,
in our (conscious or unconscious) `heart of hearts', for everything that the
system prohibits from collective and symbolic exchange: it is an order of
the repressed. It is hardly astonishing that this order is governed by the
death drive, since it is nothing but the precipitate individual of an order of
death. Psychoanalysis, like every other discipline, theorises the death drive
as such within its own order, and so merely sanctions this mortal
discrimination.
Conscious, unconscious, super-ego, guilt, repression, primary and
secondary processes, phantasm, neurosis and psychosis: yes, all this works
very well if we consent to the circumscription of the psychical as such,
which circumscription produces our system (not just any system) as the
immediate and fundamental form of intelligibility, that is to say, as code.
The omnipotence of the code is precisely the inscription of separate
spheres, which then justifies a specialised investigation and a sovereign
science; but it is undoubtedly the psychical that has the best future. All the
savage, errant, transversal and symbolic processes will be inscribed and
domesticated within it, in the name of the unconscious itself, which, like an
unexpected joke, is generally considered today as the leitmotiv of radical
`liberation'! Death itself will be domesticated under the sign of the death
drive!
In fact the death drive must be interpreted against Freud and psychoanalysis
if we wish to retain its radicality. The death drive must be
understood as acting against the scientific positivity of the psychoanalytic
apparatus as developed by Freud. The death drive is not just the limit of
psychoanalysis's formulations nor its most radical conclusion, it is its
reversal, and those who have rejected the concept of the death drive have,
in a certain sense, a more accurate view than those who take it, as even
Freud himself did, in their psychoanalytic stride without, perhaps, understanding
what he had said. The death drive effectively goes far beyond all
previous points of view and renders all previous apparatuses, whether
Death in Bataille
Despite its radicality, the psychoanalytic vision of death remains an
insufficient vision: the pulsions are constrained by repetition, its perspective
bears on a final equilibrium within the inorganic continuum, eliminating
differences and intensities following an involution towards the lowest
point; an entropy of death, pulsional conservatism, equilibrium in the
absence of Nirvana. This theory manifests certain affinities with Malthusian
political economy, the objective of which is to protect oneself against
death. For political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot,
the absence haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone
permits the exchange of values and the play of equivalences. An infinitesimal
injection of death would immediately create such excess and ambivalence
that the play of value would completely collapse. Political economy is
an economy of death, because it economises on death and buries it under
its discourse. The death drive falls into the opposite category: it is the
discourse of death as the insurmountable finality. This discourse is
oppositional but complementary, for if political economy is indeed Nirvana
(the infinite accumulation and reproduction of dead value), then the death
drive denounces its truth, at the same time as subjecting it to absolute
derision. It does this, however, in the terms of the system itself, by
idealising death as a drive (as an objective finality). As such, the death
drive is the current system's most radical negative, but even it simply holds
up a mirror to the funereal imaginary of political economy.
Instead of establishing death as the regulator of tensions and an
equilibrium function, as the economy of the pulsion, Bataille introduces it
in the opposite sense, as the paroxysm of exchanges, superabundance and
excess. Death as excess, always already there, proves that life is only
Not only do we renounce death, but also we let our desire, which is really the
desire to die, lay hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We enrich our
life instead of losing it. (Eroticism, p. 142)
Here, luxury and prodigality predominate over functional calculation, just
as death predominates over life as the unilateral finality of production and
accumulation:
On a comprehensive view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of
anguish, to the point where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere
moralising chatter. ... A febrile unrest within us asks death to wreak its havoc
at our expense. (ibid., p. 60)
Death and sexuality, instead of confronting each other as antagonistic
principles (Freud), are exchanged in the same cycle, in the same cyclical
revolution of continuity. Death is not the `price' of sexuality -- the sort of
equivalence one finds in every theory of complex living beings (the
infusorium is itself immortal and asexual) -- nor is sexuality a simple detour
on the way to death, as in Civilisation and its Discontents: they exchange
their energies and excite each other. Neither has its own specific economy:
life and death only fall under the sway of a single economy if they are
separated; once they are mixed, they pass beyond economics altogether,
into festivity and loss (eroticism according to Bataille):
[W]e can no longer differentiate between sexuality and death [, which] are
simply the culminating points of the festival nature celebrates, with the
inexhaustible multitude of living beings, both of them signifying the boundless
wastage of nature's resources as opposed to the urge to live on characteristic of
every living creature. (Eroticism, p. 61)
This festivity takes place because it reinstates the cycle where penury
imposes the linear economy of duration, because it reinstates a cyclical
revolution of life and death where Freud augurs no other issue than the
repetitive involution of death.
In Bataille, then, there is a vision of death as a principle of excess and an
anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of luxury and the luxurious character
of death. Only sumptuous and useless expenditure has meaning; the
In Bataille, this luxurious conjunction of sex and death figures under the
sign of continuity, in opposition to the discontinuous economy of individual
existences. Finality belongs in the discontinuous order, where discontinuous
beings secrete finality, all sorts of finalities, which amount to only
one: their own death.
We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of
an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. (Eroticism,
p. 15)
Death itself is without finalities; in eroticism, the finality of the individual
being is put back into question:
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its
practitioners ...? The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the selfcontained
character of the participants as they are in their normal lives. (ibid., p.
17)
Erotic nakedness is equal to death insofar as it inaugurates a state of
communication, loss of identity and fusion. The fascination of the dissolution
of constituted forms: such is Eros (pace Freud, for whom Eros binds
energies, federates them into ever larger unities). In death, as in Eros, it is
a matter of introducing all possible continuity into discontinuity, a game of
complete continuity. It is in this sense that `death, the rupture of the
discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there
before us more real than life itself (ibid., p. 19). Freud says exactly the
same thing, but by default. It is no longer a question of the same death.
What Freud missed was not seeing the curvature of life in death, he
missed its vertigo and its excess, its reversal of the entire economy of life,
making it, in the form of a final pulsion, into a belated equation of life.
Freud stated life's final economy under the sign of repetition and missed its
paroxysm. Death is neither resolution nor involution, but a reversal and a
symbolic challenge.
For once they travel down their allotted paths
The proposition according to which life and death are exchanged, and
exchanged at the highest price with death, no longer belongs to the order
of scientific truth, since it is a `truth' that science is forever forbidden.
If the union of two lovers comes about through love, it involves the idea of
death, murder or suicide ... [a] continuous violation of discontinuous individuality
... the orifices, gulfs and abysses whereby beings are absorbed into
continuity, somehow assimilates it to death. (Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 21ff)
When Bataille says this, concerning eroticism, there is no objective
relation, no law, and no natural necessity in any of this. Luxury and excess
are not functions, they are inscribed neither in the body nor in the world.
Nor on the other hand is death -- sumptuous, symbolic death, which
belongs to the order of the challenge -- inscribed in a body or a nature any
longer. The symbolic can never be confused with the real or with science.
But even Bataille commits the following error:
The desire to produce at cut prices is niggardly and human. Nature, for its part,
is boundlessly prodigious, and `sacrifices' in good spirits. (ibid., p. 60)
Why seek the security of an ideally prodigious nature, as opposed to the
economists' ideally circulating nature? Luxury is no more `natural' than
economics. Sacrifice and sacrificial expenditure are not of the order of
things. This error leads Bataille to confuse reproductive sexuality with
erotic expenditure:
The excess from which reproduction springs can only be understood with the aid
of the excess of death, and vice-versa. (ibid., p. 101)
But reproduction as such has no excess -- even if it implies the individual's
death, it is still a matter of a positive economy and a functional death --
from which the species might benefit. Sacrificial death, however, is anti-productive
Bataille, here, labours the influence of the temptation of naturalism, if
not biologism, leading him, conversely, to naturalise a tendency to
discontinuity: `The urge to live on characteristic of every living creature'
(ibid., p. 61). The `living creature' protects itself against the living energies
of a debauched nature, an orgy of annihilation by means of prohibitions,
resisting the excess of the death drive that comes from nature by every
available means (its resistance, however, is only ever provisional: `Men
have never definitively said no to violence and death' -- ibid., p. 62).
Thus, on the basis of a natural definition of expenditure (nature as the
model of prodigality) and a substantial and ontological definition of
economics (the subject wishes to live on in his being -- but where does this
basic desire come from?), Bataille sets up a kind of subjective dialectic of
prohibition and transgression, where the initially high-spirited character of
sacrifice and death is lost in the delights of Christianity and perversion;
[94]
a
kind of objective dialectic between continuity and discontinuity where the
challenge posed by death to economic organisation is effaced in the face of
a great metaphysical alternation.
Nevertheless, something remains in Bataille's excessive and luxuriant
vision of death that removes it from psychoanalysis and its individual and
psychical domain. This something provides the opportunity to disturb
every economy, shattering not only the objective mirror of political
economy, but also the inverse psychical mirror of repression, the unconscious
and libidinal economy. Beyond all mirrors, or in their fragments,
shattered like those of the mirror where The Student of Prague rediscovered
his real image at the moment of death, something appears for us
today: a fantastic dispersal of the body, of being and wealth. Bataille's
figure of death is the closest premonition of this.
My Death is Everywhere, my Death Dreams
Punctual Death, Biological Death
The irreversibility of biological death, its objective and punctual character,
is a modern fact of science. It is specific to our culture. Every other culture
says that death begins before death, that life goes on after life, and that it is
We are living entirely within evolutionist thought, which states that we
go from life to death: this is the illusion of the subject that sustains both
biology and metaphysics (biology wishes to reverse metaphysics, but
merely prolongs it). But there is no longer even a subject who dies at a
given moment. It is more real to say that whole parts of `ourselves' (of our
bodies, our language) fall from life to death, while the living are subjected
to the work of mourning. In this way, a few of the living manage to forget
them gradually, as God managed to forget the drowned girl who was
carried away by the stream of water in B recht's song:
Und es geschah, dass Gott sie allmählich vergass,
The subject's identity is continually falling apart, falling into God's
forgetting. But this death is not at all biological. At one pole, biochemistry,
asexual protozoa are not affected by death, they divide and branch out
(nor is the genetic code, for its part, ever affected by death: it is
transmitted unchanged beyond individual fates). At the other, symbolic,
pole, death and nothingness no longer exist, since in the symbolic, life and
death are reversible.
Only in the infinitesimal space of the individual conscious subject does
death take on an irreversible meaning. Even here, death is not an event,
but a myth experienced as anticipation. The subject needs a myth of its
end, as of its origin, to form its identity. In reality, the subject is never
there: like the face, the hands and the hair, and even before no doubt, it is
always already somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution, an endless
cycle impelled by death. This death, everywhere in life, must be conjured
up and localised in a precise point of time and a precise place: the body.
In biological death, death and the body neutralise instead of stimulating
each other. The mind-body duality is biology's fundamental presupposition.
In a certain sense, this duality is death itself, since it objectifies the
body as residual, as a bad object which takes its revenge by dying. It is
according to the mind that the body becomes the brute, objective fact,
fated for sex, anguish and death. It is according to the mind, this imaginary
schizz, that the body becomes the `reality' that exists only in being
condemned to death.
Therefore the mortal body is no more `real' than the immortal soul: both
result simultaneously from the same abstraction, and with them the two
great complementary metaphysics: the idealism of the soul (with all its
moral metamorphoses) and the `materialist' idealism of the body, prolonged
in biology. Biology lives on as much by the separation of mind and
body as from any other Christian or Cartesian metaphysics, but it no longer
declares this. The mind or soul is not mentioned any more: as an ideal
principle, it has entirely passed into the moral discipline of science; into the
legitimating principle of technical operations on the real and on the world;
into the principles of an `objective' materialism. In the Middle Ages, those
who practised the discourse of the mind or soul were closer to the `bodily
signs' (Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions [tr. Helen Lane, New
York: Arcade, 1990]) than biological science, which, techniques and
axioms, has passed entirely over to the side of the `non-body'.
The Accident and the Catastrophe
There is a paradox of modern bourgeois rationality concerning death. To
conceive of it as natural, profane and irreversible constitutes the sign of the
`Enlightenment' and Reason, but enters into sharp contradiction with the
principles of bourgeois rationality, with its individual values, the unlimited
progress of science, and its mastery of nature in all things. Death,
neutralised as a `natural fact', gradually becomes a scandal. Octavio Paz
has analysed this brilliantly in his theory of the Accident:
Modern science has eliminated epidemics and has given us plausible explanations
of other natural catastrophes: nature has ceased to be the depository of our
guilt feelings; at the same time, technology has extended and widened the notion
of accident and, what is more, it has given it an absolutely different character.
... Accidents are part of our daily life and their shadow peoples our dreams.
... The uncertainty principle in contemporary physics and Gödel's proof in
logic are the equivalent of the Accident in the historical world. ... Axiomatic
and deterministic systems have lost their consistency and revealed an inherent
defect. But it is not really a defect: it is a property of the system, something that
belongs to it as a system. The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our
political regimes; nor is it a correctable defect of our civilisation: it is the natural
consequence of our science, our politics and our morality. The Accident is part
of our idea of progress. ... The Accident has become a paradox of necessity: it
possesses the fatality of necessity and at the same time the uncertainty of
freedom. The non-body, transformed into a materialist science, is a synonym for
terror: the Accident is one of the attributes of reason that we adore. ...
Just as society gives rise to madmen and anomalies at its peripheries in the
process of normalisation so reason and the technical mastery of nature, as
they become more entrenched, become surrounded by the catastrophic
breakdown of the `inorganic body of nature' they give rise to as unreason.
This unreason is intolerable, since reason wants to be sovereign and can no
longer even think of what escapes it; it is unresolvable since for us there are
no longer any propitiating or reconciling rituals: the accident, like death, is
absurd, that's all there is to it. It is a piece of sabotage. An evil demon is
there to make this beautiful machine always break down. Hence this
rationalist culture suffers, like no other, from a collective paranoia.
Something or someone must have been responsible for the least accident,
the slightest irregularity, the least catastrophe, an earth tremor, a house in
ruins, bad weather; everything is an assassination attempt. Thus the new
wave of sabotage, terrorism and banditism is less interesting than the fact
that what happens is interpreted this way. Accident or not? Undecidable.
Nor is it important, since the category of the Accident analysed by Octavio
Paz has fallen under that of the assassination attempt. And this is normal in
a rational system: since chance can only be left to a human will, every
breakdown is interpreted as a curse, an evil spell, or, politically, as a breach
of the social order.
[96]
And it is true that a natural catastrophe is a danger to
the established order, not only because of the real disorder it provokes, but
by the blow it strikes to every sovereign `rationality', politics included.
Hence the state of siege for the earth tremor (Nicaragua), hence the police
presence at the scenes of catastrophes (which, at the time of the
Ermenonville DC--10 catastrophe, is more important than at a demonstration).
For no-one knows to what extent the `death drive', primed by the
accident or the catastrophe, may be unleashed on this occasion and turn
against the political order.
It is remarkable that we have returned, in the heyday of the rational
system and as a full logical consequence of this system, to the `primitive'
vision where we impute a hostile will to every event, and particularly to
death. But it is ourselves and ourselves alone who are full primitives (which
nickname we attach to the primitives in order to exorcise it). For the
`primitives' themselves, this conception corresponded to the logic of their
reciprocal and ambivalent exchanges involving everything around them;
even natural catastrophes and death were easily intelligible through the
categories of their social structures, whereas for us it is plainly paralogical.
This is arational paranoia, the axioms of which give rise to an increasingly
ubiquitous and absolute unintelligibility: death as unacceptable and insoluble,
the Accident as persecution, as the absurd and spiteful resistance of a
matter or a nature that will not abide by the `objective' laws with which we
`Natural' Death
An ideal or standard form of death, `natural' death, corresponds to the
biological definition of death and the rational logical will. This death is
`normal' since it comes `at life's proper term'. Its very concept issues from
the possibility of pushing back the limits of life: living becomes a process of
accumulation, and science and technology start to play a role in this
quantitative strategy. Science and technology do not manage to fulfil an
original desire to live as long as possible; through the symbolic disintrication
of death, life passes into life-capital (into a quantitative evaluation),
which alone gives rise to a biomedical science and technology of prolonging
life.
Natural death therefore signifies not the acceptance of death within `the
order of things', but a systematic denegation of death. Natural death is
subject to science, and death's call is to be exterminated by science. This
clearly signifies that death is inhuman, irrational and senseless, like
untamed nature (the Western concept of `nature' is always the concept of a
repressed or domesticated nature). The only good death is a death that has
been defeated and subjected to the law: this is the ideal of natural death.
It should be possible for everyone to reach the term of their biological
`capital', to enjoy life `to the end' without violence or premature death. As
if everyone had their own little print-out of a life-plan, their `normal
expectation' of life, basically a `contract of life'; hence the social demand
for a quality of life that makes up part of a natural death. The new social
contract: society as a whole, with its science and technology, becomes
collectively responsible for the death of each individual.
[97]
This demand
could moreover involve calling the existing order into question, as do
quantitative (wage) demands: to demand a just lifespan just as one
demands just rewards for one's labour power. Essentially, this right, like
every other, conceals a repressive jurisdiction. Everyone has a right, but
also a duty, to a natural death, for this death is characteristic of the system
of political economy, its typical obligation to die:
1. As a system of maximalisation of the forces of production (in an
`extensive' system of manpower, slaves have no natural death, they are
made to work themselves to death);
2. More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life
(habeas corpus -- habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over death.
Death is socialised like everything else, and can no longer be anything but
natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have not done what
is necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the
social, which even annexes death to itself. Everyone is dispossessed of their
death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now understood. One will no
Old Age and Retirement: the `Third Age'
Here too, science's conquest of death enters into contradiction with the
system's rationality: retirement becomes a dead weight on social self-
management. An entire portion of social wealth (money and moral values)
is sunk into it without being able to give it a meaning. A third of society is
thus segregated and placed in a situation of economic parasitism. The lands
conquered on this death march are socially barren. Recently colonised, old
age in modern times burdens society with the same weight as colonised
native populations used to. Retirement, or the `Third Age', says precisely
what it means: it is a sort of Third World.
Old age has merely become a marginal and ultimately asocial slice of life
-- a ghetto, a reprieve and the slide into death. Old age is literally being
eliminated. In proportion as the living live longer, as they `win' over death,
they cease to be symbolically acknowledged. Condemned to a forever
receding death, this age group loses its status and its prerogatives. In other
social formations, old age actually exists as the symbolic pivot of the group.
In such societies, the status of the elderly, the perfected form of the
ancestor, is the most prestigious. `Years' constitute real wealth which is
exchanged for authority or power, instead of the situation today, where
years `gained' are only calculable accumulated years that have no capacity
to be exchanged. Prolonged life expectancy has therefore simply ended up
discriminating against old age, which follows logically from discriminating
against death itself. Here again, the `social' has worked well, making old
age into a `social' territory (which in journals appears under this rubric
alongside immigrants and abortions), and socialising this part of life into an
enclosure over itself. Under the `beneficent' sign of natural death, it has
been made into an early social death.
Because the individual life of civilised man, placed into an infinite `progress'
according to its own immanent meaning should never come to an end; for there
is a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man
who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some
peasants of the past, died `old and satiated with life' because he stood in the
organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his
days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no
puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had `enough' of life.
Whereas civilised man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of
culture by ideas, knowledge and problems, may become `tired of life' but not
`satiated by life' ... And because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is
meaningless. (Max Weber, `Science as a Vocation' [in From Max Weber: Essays
Natural Death and Sacrificial Death
Why is it that today there are no expected and foreseen deaths from old
age, a death in the family, the only death that had full meaning for the
traditional collectivity, from Abraham to our grandfathers? It is no longer
even touching, it is almost ridiculous, and socially insignificant in any case.
Why on the other hand is it that violent, accidental, and chance death,
which previous communities could not make any sense of (it was dreaded
and cursed as vehemently as we curse suicide), has so much meaning for
us: it is the only one that is generally talked about; it is fascinating and
touches the imagination. Once again, ours is the culture of the Accident, as
Octavio Paz says.
Death is not abjectly exploited by the Media since they are happy to
gamble on the fact that the only events of immediate, unmanipulated and
straightforward significance for all are those which in one way or another
bring death onto the scene. In this sense the most despicable media are also
the most objective. And again, to interpret this in terms of repressed
individual pulsions or unconscious sadism is trivial and uninteresting, since
it is a matter of a collective passion. Violent or catastrophic death does not
satisfy the little individual unconscious, manipulated by the vile mass-
media (this is a secondary revision, and is already morally weighted); this
death moves us so profoundly only because it works on the group itself,
and because in one way or another it transfigures and redeems in its own
eyes.
`Natural' death is devoid of meaning because the group has no longer
any role to play in it. It is banal because it is bound to the policed and
commonplace [banalisé] individual subject, to the policed and commonplace
nuclear family, and because it is no longer a collective mourning and
joy. Each buries his own dead. With the primitives, there is no `natural'
death: every death is social, public and collective, and it is always the effect
of an adversarial will that the group must absorb (no biology). This
absorption takes place in feasting and rites. Feasting is the exchange of
wills (we don't see how feasting would reabsorb a biological event). Evil
wills and expiation rites are exchanged over the death's head. Death
deceives and symbolically gains esteem; here death gains status, and the
group is enriched by a partner.
To us, the dead have just passed away and no longer have anything to
exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of a
lifetime of accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an
economic operation. They do not become effigies: they serve entirely as
alibis for the living and to their obvious superiority over the dead. This is a
flat, one-dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a
credit: `giving in one's soul', like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents.
What banality!
All passion then takes refuge in violent death, which is the sole
manifestation of something like the sacrifice, that is to say, like a real
transmutation through the will of the group. And in this sense, it matters
little whether death is accidental, criminal or catastrophic: from the
moment it escapes `natural' reason, and becomes a challenge to nature, it
once again becomes the business of the group, demanding a collective and
symbolic response; in a word, it arouses the passion for the artificial, which
is at the same time sacrificial passion. Nature is uninteresting and
meaningless, but we need only `return' one death to `nature', we need only
exchange it in accordance with strict conventional rites, for its energy (both
the dead person's energy and that of death itself) to affect the group, to be
reabsorbed and expended by the group, instead of simply leaving it as a
natural `residue'. We, for our part, no longer have an effective rite for
reabsorbing death and its rupturing energies; there remains the phantasm
of sacrifice, the violent artifice of death. Hence the intense and profoundly
collective satisfaction of the automobile death. In the fatal accident, the
artificiality of death fascinates us. Technical, non-natural and therefore
willed (ultimately by the victim him-- or herself), death becomes interesting
once again since willed death has a meaning. This artificiality of death
facilitates, on a par with the sacrifice, its aesthetic doubling in the
imagination, and the enjoyment that follows from it. Obviously `aesthetics'
only has a value for us since we are condemned to contemplation. The
sacrifice is not `aesthetic' for the primitives, but it always marks a refusal of
natural and biological succession, an intervention of an initiatory order, a
controlled and socially governed violence. These days, we can only
rediscover this anti-natural violence in the chance accident or catastrophe,
which we therefore experience as socially symbolic events of the highest
importance, as sacrifices. Finally, the Accident is only accidental, that is
to say, absurd, for official reason; for the symbolic demand, which we
have never been without, the accident has always been something else
altogether.
Hostage-taking is always a matter of the same scenario. Unanimously
condemned, it inspires profound terror and joy. It is also on the verge of
becoming a political ritual of the first order at a time when politics is
collapsing into indifference. The hostage has a symbolic yield a hundred
times superior to that of the automobile death, which is itself a hundred
times superior to natural death. This is because we rediscover here a time
of the sacrifice, of the ritual of execution, in the immanence of the
collectively expected death. This death, totally undeserved, therefore
totally artificial, is therefore perfect from the sacrificial point of view, for
which the officiating priest or `criminal' is expected to die in return,
according to the rules of a symbolic exchange to which we adhere so much
more profoundly than we do to the economic order.
The workplace accident is the concern of the economic order and has no
symbolic yield whatsoever. Since it is a machinic breakdown rather than a
sacrifice, it is as indifferent to the collective imagination as it is to the
We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are
all dreaming, instead of dying stupidly working oneself to the ground, of
receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving constitute one
symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the
indifferent negativity it holds for us in the `natural' order of capital. In the
same way, our relations to objects are no longer living and mortal, but
instrumental (we no longer know how to destroy them, and we no longer
expect our own death), which is why they are really dead objects that end
up killing us, in the same fashion as the workplace accident, however, just
as one object crushes another. Only the automobile accident re-establishes
some kind of sacrificial equilibrium. For death is something that is shared
out, and we must know how to share it out amongst objects just as much as
amongst other men. Death has only given and received meaning, that is to
say, it is socialised through exchange. In the primitive order, everything is
done so that death is that way. In our culture, on the contrary, everything
is done so that death is never done to anybody by someone else, but only by
`nature', as an impersonal expiry of the body. We experience our death as
the `real' fatality inscribed in our bodies only because we no longer know
how to inscribe it into a ritual of symbolic exchange. The order of the
`real', of the `objectivity' of the body as elsewhere the order of political
economy, are always the results of the rupture of this exchange. It is from
this point that even our bodies came into existence as the place in which
our inexchangeable death is confined, and we end up believing in the
biological essence of the body, watched over by death which in turn is
watched over by science. Biology is pregnant with death, and the body
taking shape within it is itself pregnant with death, and there are no more
myths to come and free it. The myth and the ritual that used to free the
body from science's supremacy has been lost, or has not yet been found.
We try to circumscribe the others, our objects and our own body within a
destiny of instrumentality so as no longer to receive death from them but
there is nothing we can do about this -- the same goes for death as for
everything else: no longer willing to give or receive it, death encircles us in
the biological simulacrum of our own body.
The Death Penalty
Until the eighteenth century, we hanged guilty animals, after a formal
condemnation, for causing a man's death. We even hanged horses.
Author unknown
There had to be a very specific reason for the revulsion inspired in us by
punishing these animals, since it ought to have been more serious to judge
As opposed to physical elimination, justice is a social, moral and ritual
act. The odious character of punishing a child or a madman comes from the
moral aspect of justice: if the `other' must be convinced of their guilt and
condemned as such, punishment looses all meaning, since neither consciousness
of the wrong nor even humiliation are possible with these
`criminals'. It is therefore as stupid as crucifying lions. But there is
something else in the punishment of an animal, which this time derives
from the ritual character of justice. It is the application of a human
ceremonial to a beast, rather than just the infliction of death, that gives the
scene its extraordinary atrocity. Every attempt to dress an animal, every
disguise and attempt to tame an animal to the human comedy is sinister
and unhealthy. By dying, it would become frankly unbearable.
But why this revulsion at seeing an animal treated like a human being?
Because then man changes into a beast. In the hanged animal there is, by
way of the sign and the ritual, a hanged man, but a man changed into a
beast as if by black magic. A `reflex' signification results from the
ubiquitous action of the deep reciprocity, whatever we are dealing with,
between man and animal or the executioner and his victim, mingled with
the visual representation in a terrible confusion, and this malific ambiguity
(as in Kafka's `Metamorphosis') gives rise to disgust. The end of culture, of
the social, the end of the rules of the game. Killing a beast in this
fundamentally human manner unleashes an equivalent monstrosity in the
man, who thus becomes the victim of his own ritual. The institution of
justice, by which man claims to draw a line between himself and `brutality',
turns against him. Of course, such brutality is a myth -- a caesura that
implies the absolute privilege of the human, the expulsion of the animal
into the `brutal'. This discrimination is justified, however, when at the
same time as the privilege, it implies all the risks and responsibilities of the
human, in particular that of justice and social death, which by contrast,
according to the same logic, does not concern the animal at all. For man to
impose this form on the animal is to erase the limit between the two, and at
the same time to eliminate the human. Man is then only the squalid
caricature of the myth of animality that he himself has instituted.
We do not need psychoanalysis, the `Father-Figure', sadistic eroticism
and guilt to explain the nausea attendant upon the torture of animals.
Everything here is social, everything relates to the social line of demarcation
Of course, this nausea, bound up with the loss of the privilege of the
human, is also therefore proper to a social order, where the break with the
animal, and therefore the abstraction of the human, is definitive. This
revulsion distinguishes us: it signifies that human Reason has made
progress, allowing us to consign all this `medieval' torture of humans and
animals to `barbarism'. `As late as 1906 in Switzerland, a dog was tried and
executed for participating in theft and murder.' We are so reassured when
we read that `we are no longer like that', the subtext of which is `today we
are "humane" to animals, we respect them'. But the opposite is the case:
disgust is inspired in us by the execution of an animal in exact proportion to
the contempt in which we hold it. It is insofar, as is proper to our culture, as
we relegate the animal to a non-human state of irresponsibility that the
animal becomes unworthy of the human ritual. All we need then do is
apply this ritual to the animal to make us nauseous, not because of some
moral progress, but because of the deepening of human racism.
Those who, in times past, used to ritually sacrifice animals did not take
them to be beasts. Even medieval society, which condemned and punished
animals in accordance with its own norms, was far closer than we are to
those who are horrified by this practice. By holding animals culpable, these
societies paid them tribute. The innocence to which we consign animals
(along with madmen, the sick and children) is significant of the radical
distance separating us from them, and of the racial exclusion by which we
rigorously maintain the definition of the Human. In a context where every
living being is a partner in exchange, the animal has the `right' to sacrifice
and to ritual expiation. The primitive sacrifice of the animal is bound up
with its exceptional and sacred status as a divinity, as a totem.
[100]
We no
longer sacrifice them, we no longer even punish them, and we take pride in
this; but this is simply because we have domesticated them and because we
have turned them into a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of
our justice; they are barely even exterminable as butcher meat. Or perhaps
rational liberal thought takes those it excommunicates into their charge,
such as animals, madmen and children who `know not what they do', and
who therefore do not deserve punishment and death as much as they do
public charity: protectionism of every kind, the RSPCA, `open' psychiatry,
modern pedagogy; all the definitive but gentle forms of inferiorisation in
which Liberal Reason takes refuge. A racial compensation whereby
humanism increases its privilege over `inferior beings'.
[101]
In the light of all this, the question of the death penalty is posed, which is
also the question of the naivety or hypocrisy of every liberal humanism on
this question.
With the primitives, the `criminal' is not an inferior, abnormal or
The end of the culture of cruelty where difference is glorified and
expiated in one and the same sacrificial act. We no longer know any other
way of dealing with deviants but extermination or therapy. We now only
know how to cut, expurgate and repel them into society's dark regions.
And this only to the extent of our `tolerance', our sovereign conception of
freedom.
If contemporary societies have progressed to the moral level, this does not rule
out their regression to mood shifts. (Encyclopaedia Universalis)
By being normalised, that is to say, by extending the logic of equivalences
to everyone, society, socialised at last, excludes every antibody. It then
creates, in the same movement, specific institutions to receive them, and
so, throughout successive centuries, prisons, asylums, hospitals and
schools have flourished, not to forget the factories, which also began to
flourish with the Rights of Man (this is how labour must be understood).
Socialisation is nothing but the immense passage from the symbolic
exchange of difference to the social logic of equivalence. Every `social' or
socialist `ideal' merely doubles the process of socialisation. Even liberal
thought, which wants to abolish the death penalty, simply perpetuates it.
As regards the death penalty, the thought of the right (hysterical reaction)
and the thought of the left (rational humanism) are both equally removed
from the symbolic configuration where crime, madness and death are
modalities of exchange, the `accursed share' around which all exchange
gravitates. Why do we reintegrate the criminal into society? To make him
into the equivalent of a normal man? But exactly the opposite is true. As
Gentis says: `It is not a question of returning the madman to the truth of
society, but of returning society to the truth of madness' (Les Murs de
If the bourgeois order first got rid of crime and madness by elimination
or confinement, then secondly it neutralised all this on a therapeutic basis.
This is the phase of the progressive absolution of the criminal and his
reform into a social being, by every devious means of medicine and
psychology. We must see, however, that this liberal change of policy takes
place on the basis of a wholly repressive social space whose normal
mechanisms have absorbed the repressive function that hitherto devolved
onto special institutions.
[103]
Liberal thinking believes this cannot be put better than its claim that
`penal law is called upon to develop in the direction of a preventative social
medicine and a curative social service' (Encyclopaedia Universalis). Does
this imply the disappearance of the penal aspect of the law? Not at all: the
penalty is called upon to be realised in its purest form in great therapeutic,
psychological and psychiatric reform programmes. Penal violence finds its
most subtle equivalent in re-socialisation and re-education (also in the
form of self-criticism or repentance, according to the dominant social
system), and from this point we are all summoned to it in normal life itself:
we are all madmen and criminals.
[104]
It is not just that penal violence and the death penalty might disappear in
this society, but that they must, and the abolitionists, totally contradicting
themselves, merely follow the tendency of the system. They want to
abolish the death penalty without abolishing responsibility (since without
responsibility, there would be no human conscience or dignity, and
therefore no liberal thought!). This is illogical, and above all futile, since
responsibility has been dead for a long time. As a vestigial individual trait
from the Enlightenment, it has been eliminated by the system itself as the
latter becomes more rational. When capitalism rested on merit, initiative,
individual enterprise and competition, it needed an ideal of responsibility,
and therefore its repressive equivalent: for better or worse, everyone,
whether entrepreneur or criminal, received his penalty or his credit. In a
system that rests on bureaucratic programming and the execution of a plan,
irresponsible executants are required, and so the entire system of values
based on responsibility collapses into itself, since it is no longer viable. It is
a matter of indifference whether you struggle for abolition or not: the
death penalty is useless. Justice also collapses: generally irresponsible, the
individual becomes, whatever happens to him, a pretext for bureaucratic
structures, and will no longer accept being tried by just anyone, nor even
by society as a whole. Even the problem of collective responsibility is a red
herring: responsibility has quite simply disappeared.
Hence the secondary benefit of the elimination of humanist values and
the dismantling of the repressive apparatus, based on the possibility of
being able to distinguish `in one's conscience', between good and evil, and
In other contexts, both speak the same medical language: remove a
diseased member, says the right; cure a sick organ, says the left. On either
side death acts at the level of equivalences. The primitive procedure is only
aware of reciprocities: clan contra clan, death contra death (gift contra
gift). We know only a system of equivalences (a death for a death) between
two terms as abstract as in economic exchange: society and the individual
under the jurisdiction of a `universal' and legal morality.
A death for a death, says the right, fair's fair, you have killed so you
must die, that's the law of the contract. Intolerable, says the left, the
criminal must be spared: he is not really responsible. The principle of
equivalence is intact: basically one of the terms (responsibility) tends
towards zero, while the other (penalty) also tends in this direction. The
environment, childhood, the unconscious,
[105]
social conditions, outline a
new equation of responsibility, but still in terms of causality and the
contract. In the terms of this new contract, the criminal merits no more
than (Christian) pity or social security. Here again, the thought of the left
merely invents more subtle neo-capitalist formations, where repression
becomes diffuse, as surplus-value did in another context. In the psychiatric
and ergonomic cures, however, it is very much a matter of an equivalent to
death. Here the individual is treated as a functional survivor, as an object
to be retrained: we surround him with care and solicitude, so many traits of
his anomaly, and we invest in him. The tolerance he enjoys is of the same
order as that we have seen being exercised over the beasts: it is an
operation by means of which the social order exorcises and controls its own
hauntings. Does the system make us all irresponsible? We can only accept
this if we delimit a category of notorious examples of irresponsibility, that
we will care for as such. By the effect of contrast, it will return the illusion
of responsibility to us. Delinquents, criminals, children and madmen will
suffer the effects of this clinical operation.
A simple examination of the evolution of the death penalty in `materialist'
terms (of profit and class) should leave those who wish to abolish it in
perplexity. It is always through the discovery of more profitable economic
substitutes, subsequently rationalised as `more humane', that the death
penalty is curbed: hence prisoners of war are spared in order to be made
slaves; hence, in Rome, criminals were sent to the salt mines; hence the
prohibition of duels in the seventeenth century, the institution of forced
labour as a corrective solution, the variable extortion of the labour force
and the ergo-therapeutic retraining of the Nazi camps. There are no
But this analysis remains totally insufficient, since it merely substitutes
an economic for a moral rationality. Something else is in operation here, a
`heavy' hypothesis with respect to which the materialist interpretation
appears to be a `light' hypothesis. Profit may be an effect of capital, but it is
never the fundamental law of the social order. It's fundamental law is the
progressive control of life and death. Its objective is equally therefore to
snatch death away from radical difference in order to submit it to the law of
equivalence. And the naïvety of humanist thought (liberal or revolutionary)
consists in not seeing that its rejection of death is necessarily the same
as that of the system, that is, the rejection of something that escapes the
law of value. It is only in this sense that death is an evil. But humanist
thought turns it into an absolute evil, and it is from this point that it
becomes enmeshed in the worst contradictions.
[107]
Claude Glayman (discussing
the execution of Buffet and Bontemps):
The irremediably human feeling that no man has the right to deal out death at
will (`irremediably' is a kind of lapsus: the humanist does not appear to be totally
convinced of this evidence). Life is sacred. But even without religious faith we
are completely persuaded.... In a consumer society that tends to banish
scarcity, death, we might say, is still more intolerable (life as a consumer good,
death as scarcity: what an incredible platitude! But communism, and even Marx
himself, are in agreement over this equation.)... Here too, the impression of a
sort of permanence of the Middle Ages remains.... What society do we live in?
What shores are we drifting towards? For we must not turn our backs on life,
whatever it may be. (Le Monde)
This is precisely the `rear' entry to life, the basic principle of pious souls,
who are also those who enter the revolution backwards and turn their
backs on life. These unbelievable acrobatics are, however, typical of
thought bending over backwards to satisfy its rejection of death.
We can clearly see that the humanist debate starts from the individualist
system of values of which it is the crown: `The social and individual instinct
of conservation', says Camus, `requires the postulate of individual responsibility.'
But precisely these postulates define the platitude of life and death
in our equivalence-dominated systems. Beyond this point, man need only
cultivate the instinct of conservation or responsibility (two complementary
prejudices in the abstract and rationalist view of the subject). Death
resumes its meaning as a sacrificial exchange, a collective moment and an
intense deliverance of the subject. `There is no passion ... so weak but it
mates and masters the fear of death', said Bacon (Essays [London: Dent,
1906], Vol. II, p. 6). But this is too little: death is itself a passion. And at
this level the difference between self and others is effaced: `The desire to
kill often coincides with the desire to die oneself or to eliminate oneself';
`Man desires to live, but he also desires to be nothing, he wants what
cannot be undone, he wants death for its own sake. In this case, not only
This passionate, sacrificial death overtly accepts the spectacle of death,
which, as with all organic functions, we have made into a moral and
therefore clandestine and shameful function. The good souls heavily insist
on the shameful character of public executions, but they do not see that
odiousness of this type of execution stems from its contemplative attitude in
which the death of the other is savoured as a spectacle at a distance. This is
not sacrificial violence, which not only demands the presence of the whole
community, but is one of the forms of its self-presence [présence à ellemème].
We rediscover something of this contagious festivity in an episode
in England in 1807, when the 40,000 people who came to attend an
execution were seized by delirium upon seeing a hundred dead bodies lying
on the ground. This collective act has nothing in common with the
spectacle of extermination. By confusing the two in the same abstract
reprobation of violence and death, one merges with the thought of the
State, that is, the pacification of life. Now, if the right prefers to use
repressive blackmail, the left, for its part, is distinguished by imagining and
setting up future models of pacified socialisation.
A civilisation's progress is thus measured only by its respect for life as
absolute value. What a difference from public, celebrated death by torture
(the Black from the Upper Volta laughing in the face of the guns that hit
him, cannibalism in the Tupinamba), and even murder and vengeance,
passion for death and suicide! When society kills in a totally premeditated
fashion, we do it a great honour when we accuse it of a barbaric vengeance
worthy of the Dark Ages, because vengeance is still a fatal reciprocity. It is
neither `primitive' nor `purely the way of nature'; nothing could be more
false. It has nothing to do with our calculable and statistical abstract death,
which is the by-product of an agency both moral and bureaucratic (our
capital punishment and concentration camps), and thus has everything to
do with the system of political economy. This system is similarly abstract,
but never in the way that a revenge, a murder or a sacrificial spectacle is
abstract. We have produced a judicial, ethnocidal and concentration camp
death, to which our society has adjusted. Today, everything and nothing
has changed: under the sign of the values of life and tolerance, the same
system of extermination, only gentler, governs everyday life, and it has no
need of death to accomplish its objectives.
The same objective that is inscribed in the monopoly of institutional
violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a
forced `life for life's sake' (kidney machines, malformed children on life-
support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.).
All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and imposing
life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely
this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit
In order that the system consents to such economic sacrifices in the
artificial resurrection of its living losses, it must have a fundamental
interest in withdrawing even the biological chance of death from people.
`You die, we'll do the rest' is already just an old advertising slogan used for
funeral homes. Today, dying is already part of the rest, and the Thanatos
A transcendent, `Objective' agency requires a delegation of justice,
death and vengeance. Death and expiation must be wrested from the
circuit, monopolised at the summit and redistributed. A bureaucracy of
death and punishment is necessary, in the same way as there must be an
abstraction of economic, political and sexual exchanges: if not, the entire
structure of social control collapses.
This is why every death and all violence that escapes the State monopoly
is subversive; it is a prefiguration of the abolition of power. Hence the
fascination wielded by great murderers, bandits or outlaws, which is in fact
closely akin to that associated with works of art: a piece of death and
violence is snatched from the State monopoly in order to be put back into
the savage, direct and symbolic reciprocity of death, just as something in
feasting and expenditure is retrieved from the economic in order to be put
back into useless and sacrificial exchange, and just as something in the
poem or the artwork is retrieved from the terrorist economy of signification
in order to be put back into the consumption of signs. This alone is
what is fascinating in our system. Only what is not exchanged as values,
that is, sex, death, madness and violence, is fascinating, and for this reason
is universally repressed. Millions of war dead are exchanged as values in
accordance with a general equivalence: `dying for the fatherland'; we might
say they can be converted into gold, the world has not lost them altogether.
Murder, death and violation are legalised everywhere, if not legal,
provided that they can be reconverted into value in accordance with the
same process that mediatises labour. Only certain deaths, certain practices,
escape this convertibility; they alone are subversive, but do not often make
the headlines.
Amongst these is suicide, which in our societies has taken on a different
extension and definition, to the point of becoming, in the context of the
offensive reversibility of death, the form of subversion itself. While there
are fewer and fewer executions, more and more commit suicide in prison,
an act of subverting [détournement] institutional death and turning it
against the system that imposes it: through suicide, the individual tries and
condemns society in accordance with its own norms, by inverting the
authorities and reinstating reversibility where it had completely disappeared,
while at the same time regaining the advantage. Even suicides
outside prison become political in this sense (hari-kiri by fire is only the
most spectacular form of this): they make an infinitesimal but inexpiable
breach, since it is total defeat for a system not to be able to attain total
perfection. All that is needed is that the slightest thing escapes its
rationality.
The prohibition of suicide coincides with the advent of the law of value.
Whether religious, moral or economic, the same law states `no-one has the
right to remove any capital or value'. Yet each individual is a parcel of
capital (just as every Christian is a soul to be saved), and therefore has no
The Palestinians or the rebellious Blacks setting fire to their own district
become suicidal, as is resistance to the security forces in all its forms, as are
the neurotic behaviour and multiple breakdowns by which we challenge
the system's capacity to ever fully integrate us. Also suicidal are all political
practices (demos, disorder, provocation, etc.) whose objective is to arouse
repression, the `repressive nature of the system', not as a secondary
consequence, but as the immediacy of death: the game of death unmasks
the system's own function of death. The order has possession of death, but
it cannot play it out -- only those who set death playing against itself win.
The property system is so absurd that it leads people to demand their
death as their own good -- the private appropriation of death. The mental
devastation of this appropriation is so great that it leads to investment in
the `immovable' [immobilier] property of death, not only as a preoccupation
with the `third home', such as the tomb or the burial ground have
become (many people buy a concession in the village cemetery at the same
time as they buy their country house), but as the demand for a `quality of
death'. A comfortable, personalised, `designer' death, a `natural' death:
this is the inalienable right constituting the perfected form of bourgeois
individual law. Besides, immortality is only ever the projection of this
natural and personal right into infinity -- the subject's appropriation of the
afterlife and eternity; her body and her death are equally inalienable. What
despair is hidden by this absurd demand, analogous to that which fuels our
delirious accumulation of the objects and signs from which we manically
assemble our own private universe: death must once again become the
final object in this collection and, instead of going through this inertia as
the only possible event, it must itself re-enter the game of accumulating
and administering things.
Contrary to the twists the subject stamps on his own demise, dispossession
occurs only in violent, unexpected death, which reinstates the
possibility of escaping the neurotic control of the subject.
[108]
Everywhere, a stubborn and fierce resistance springs up to the principle
of the accumulation, production and conservation of the subject in which
he can read his own programmed death. Everywhere death is played off
against death. In a system which adds up living and capitalises life, the
death drive is the only alternative. In a meticulously regulated universe,
the only temptation is to normalise everything by destruction.
Security as Blackmail
Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed
with the afterlife. It is universally present for us today, and `security forces'
range from life assurance and social security to the car seatbelt by way of
the state security police force.
[109]
`Belt up' says an advertising slogan for
seatbelts. Of course, security, like ecology, is an industrial business
extending its cover up to the level of the species: a convertibility of
accident, disease and pollution into capitalist surplus profit is operative
everywhere. But this is above all a question of the worst repression, which
consists in dispossessing you of your own death, which everybody dreams
of, as the darkness beneath their instinct of conservation. It is necessary to
rob everyone of the last possibility of giving themselves their own death as
the last `great escape' from a life laid down by the system. Again, in this
symbolic short-circuit, the gift-exchange is the challenge to oneself and
one's own life, and is carried out through death. Not because it expresses
the individual's asocial rebellion (the defection of one or millions of
individuals does not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it
carries in it a principle of sociality that is radically antagonistic to our own
social repressive principle. To bury death beneath the contrary myth of
security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange.
Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be
exhausted? No, but in order that they die the only death the system
authorises: the living are separated from their dead, who no longer
exchange anything but the form of their afterlife, under the sign of
comprehensive insurance. Thus car safety: mummified in his helmet, his
seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of security, wrapped up in the security myth,
the driver is nothing but a corpse, closed up in another, non-mythic, death,
as neutral and objective as technology, noiseless and expertly crafted.
Riveted to his machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the risk of
dying, since he is already dead. This is the secret of security, like a steak
under cellophane: to surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent
you from dying.
[110]
Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death. It is not
only armaments that remain the general archetype of material production,
but the simplest machine around us constitutes a horizon of death, a death
that will never be resolved because it has crystallised beyond reach: fixed
capital of death, where the living labour of death has frozen over, as the
Living by the production of death, capital has an easy time producing
security: it's the same thing. Security is the industrial prolongation of death,
just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution. A few more
bandages on the sarcophagus. This is also true of the great institutions that
are the glory of our democracy: Social Security is the social prosthesis of a
dead society (`Social Security is death!' -- May '68), that is to say, a society
already exterminated in all its symbolic wheels, in its deep system of
reciprocities and obligations, which means that neither the concept of
security nor that of the `social' ever had any meaning. The `social' begins by
taking charge of death. It's the same story as regards cultures that have
been destroyed then revived and protected as folklore (cf. M. de Certeau,
`La beauté du mort' [in La culture au pluriel, Paris: UGE, 1974]). The
same goes for life assurance, which is the domestic variant of a system
which everywhere presupposes death as an axiom. The social translation of
the death of the group -- each materialising for the other only as social
capital indexed on death.
Death is dissuaded at the price of a continual mortification: such is the
paradoxical logic of security. In a Christian context, ascesis played the
same role. The accumulation of suffering and penitence was able to play
the same role as character armour, as a protective sarcophagus against hell.
And our obsessional compulsion for security can be interpreted as a gigantic
collective ascesis, an anticipation of death in life itself: from protection
into protection, from defence to defence, crossing all jurisdictions, institutions
and modern material apparatuses, life is no longer anything but a
doleful, defensive book-keeping, locking every risk into its sarcophagus.
Our system lives off the production of death and pretends to manufacture
security. An about-face? Not at all, just a simple twist in the cycle
whose two ends meet. That an automobile firm remodels itself on the basis
of security (like industry on anti-pollution measures) without altering its
range, objectives or products shows that security is only a question of
exchanging terms. Security is only an internal condition of the reproduction
of the system when it reaches a certain level of expansion, just as
feedback is only an internal regulating procedure for systems that have
reached a certain point of complexity.
After having exalted production, today we must therefore make security
heroic. `At a time when anybody at all can be killed driving any car
whatsoever, at whatever speed, the true hero is he who refuses to die' (a
Porsche hoarding: `Let's put an end to a certain glorification of death').
But this is difficult, since people are indifferent to security: they did not want
it when Ford and General Motors proposed it between 1955 and 1960. It
had to be imposed in every instance. Irresponsible and blind? No, this
resistance must be added to that which traditional groups throughout have
opposed to `rational' social progress: vaccination, medicine, job security, a
school education, hygiene, birth control and many other things. Always
these resistances have been broken, and today we can produce a `natural',
`eternal' and `spontaneous' state based on the need for security and all the
good things that our civilisation has produced. We have successfully
infected people with the virus of conservation and security, even though
they will have to fight to the death to get it. In fact, it is more complicated,
since they are fighting for the right to security, which is of a profoundly
different order. As regards security itself, no-one gives a damn. They had
to be infected over generations for them to end up believing that they
`needed' it, and this success is an essential aspect of `social' domestication
and colonisation. That entire groups would have preferred to die out rather
than see their own structures annihilated by the terrorist intervention of
medicine, reason, science and centralised power -- this has been forgotten,
swept away under the universal moral law of the `instinct' of conservation.
However, this resistance always reappears, even if only in the form of the
workers' refusal to apply safety standards in the factories; what do they
want out of this, if not to salvage a little bit of control over their lives, even
if they put themselves at risk, or if its price is increasing exploitation (since
they produce at ever greater speed)? These are not `rational' proletarians.
But they struggle in their own way, and they know that economic
exploitation is not as serious as the `accursed share', the accursed fragment
that above all they must not allow to be taken from them, the share of
symbolic challenge, which is at the same time a challenge to security and to
their own lives. The boss can exploit them to death, but he will only really
dominate them if he manages to make each identify with their own
individual interests and become the accountant and the capitalist of their
The car driver's resistance to security is of the same order and must be
eliminated as immoral: thus suicide has been prohibited or condemned
everywhere because primarily it signifies a challenge that society cannot
reply to, and which therefore ensures the pre-eminence of a single suicide
over the whole social order. Always the accursed share (the fragment that
everyone takes from their own lives so as to challenge the social order; the
fragment that everyone takes from their own body so as to give it; this may
even be their own death, on condition that everyone gives it away), the
fragment which is the whole secret of symbolic exchange, because it is
given, received and returned, and cannot therefore be breached by the
dominant exchange, remaining irreducible to its law and fatal to it: its only
real adversary, the only one it must exterminate.
Funeral Homes and Catacombs
By dint of washing, soaping, furbishing, brushing, painting, sponging,
polishing, cleaning and scouring, the grime from the things washed rubs
off onto living things.
Victor Hugo
The same goes for death: by dint of being washed and sponged, cleaned
and scoured, denied and warded off, death rubs off onto every aspect of
life. Our whole culture is hygienic, and aims to expurgate life from death.
The detergents in the weakest washing powder are intended for death. To
sterilise death at all costs, to varnish it, cryogenically freeze it, air-condition
it, put make-up on it, `design' it, to pursue it with the same
relentlessness as grime, sex, bacteriological or radioactive waste. The
make-up of death: Hugo's formula makes us think of those American
funeral homes where death is immediately shielded from mourning and the
promiscuity of the living in order to be `designed' according to the purest
laws of standing, smiling and international marketing.
It is not so worrying that the dead man is made beautiful and given the
appearance of a representation. Every society has always done this. They
have always staved off the abjection of natural death, the social abjection
of decomposition which voids the corpse of its signs and its social force of
signification, leaving it as nothing more than a substance, and by the same
token, precipitating the group into the terror of its own symbolic decomposition.
It is necessary to ward off death, to smother it in artificiality in order
to evade the unbearable moment when flesh becomes nothing but flesh,
and ceases to be a sign. The skeleton, with its stripped bones, already seals
the possible reconciliation of the group, for it regains the force of the mask
and the sign. But between the two, there is the abject passage through
nature and the biological that must be warded off at all costs by
In short, every society has its sarcophagic rituals; embalming, the
artificial preservation of the flesh, is one of its variants. The practices of the
funeral homes, which appear so ridiculous and misplaced to us, idealists of
natural death that we are, therefore remain faithful to the most remote
traditions. The point at which they become absurd is their connotation of
naturalness. When the primitive showers the dead with signs, it is in order
to make the transition towards the state of death as quick as possible,
beyond the ambiguity between the living and the dead which is precisely
what the disintegrating flesh testifies to. It is not a question of making the
dead play the role of the living: the primitive concedes the dead their
difference, for it is at this cost that they will be able to become partners and
exchange their signs. The funeral home scenario goes the other way. Here,
it becomes a question of the dead retaining the appearance of life, the
naturalness of life: he still smiles at you, the same colours, the same skin,
he seems himself even after death, he is even a little fresher than when he
was alive, and lacks only speech (but we can still hear this in stereo). A
faked death, idealised in the colours of life: the secret idea is that life is
natural and death is against nature. Death must therefore be naturalised in
a stuffed simulacrum of life. In all of this there is on the one hand a refusal
to let death signify, take on the force of a sign, and, behind this sentimental
nature-fetishism on the other, a great ferocity as regards the dead himself:
rotting and change are forbidden, and instead of being carried over to
death and thus the symbolic recognition of the living, he is maintained as a
puppet within the orbit of the living in order to serve as an alibi and a
simulacrum of their own lives. Consigned to the natural, he loses his right
to difference along with every chance of a social status.
This is what separates those societies that are afraid neither of the sign
nor of death, since they make it signify overtly, from our `ideological'
societies where everything is buried under the natural, where signs have
become nothing but designs, entertaining the illusion of a natural reason.
Death is the first victim of this ideologisation: rigidly set in the banal
simulacrum of life, it becomes shameful and obscene.
There is an enormous difference between these sanctuaries and drugstores
of smiling, sterilised death and the corridors of the Capuchin
convent in Palermo, where three centuries of disinterred corpses, meticulously
fossilised in the clay of the cemetery, with skin, hair and nails, lie flat
or suspended by the shoulders in close ranks, along the length of reserved
corridors (the corridor of the religious, the corridor of the intellectuals, the
corridors of women, children, etc.), still dressed either in a crude wrap or,
on the contrary, in costume with gloves and powdered muslin. In the pale
half light from the barred windows, 8,000 corpses in an incredible
The Dereliction of Death
The cult of the dead is on the wane. An order has been placed over the
tombs, no longer a perpetual concession. The dead become socially
mobile. The devotion to death remains, particularly in the working or
middle classes, but today this is much more as a variable of status (a second
home) than as tribal piety. We speak less and less of the dead, we cut
ourselves short and fall silent: death is discredited. End of a solemn and
detailed `death in the family': we die in hospital, death has become
extraterritorial. The dying lose their rights, including the right to know
when they are going to die. Death, like mourning, has become obscene and
awkward, and it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of
others. Etiquette forbids any reference to the dead. Cremation is the limit
point of this discrete elimination, since it minimalises the remains. No
more vertigo of death, only dereliction [désaffecté]. And the immense
funeral cortège is no longer of a pious order, it is the sign of dereliction
itself, of the consumption of death. In consequence, it grows in proportion
to the disinvestment of death.
We no longer have the experience that others had of death. Spectacular
and televised experience has nothing to do with this. The majority no
longer have the opportunity to see somebody die. In any other type of
society, this is something unthinkable. The hospital and medicine take
charge of you; the technical Extreme Unction has replaced every other
sacrament. Man disappears from his nearest and dearest before being
dead. He dies somewhere else.
Roos, a Swiss woman, had the idea of going to speak to the dying about
their own death, of making them speak. This is an obscene idea, a general
denegation: no-one dies in the service of any hospital (it is the staff that
have a problem). She was taken to be a madwoman, a provocatrice, and so
The priest and the extreme unction still bore a trace of the community
where death was discussed. Today, blackout. In any case, if the priest was
nothing but a vulture, today this function is largely fulfilled by the doctor,
who shuts speech off by overwhelming the dying with care and technical
concern. An infantile death that no longer speaks, an inarticulate death,
kept out of sight. Serums, laboratories and healing are only the alibi of the
prohibition of speech.
The Exchange of Disease
In any case, we no longer die at home, we die in hospital -- for many good
`material' reasons (medical, urbane, etc.), but especially because the sick
or dying or man, as biological body, no longer has any place but within a
technical milieu. On the pretext of being cared for, he is then deported to a
functional space-time which is charged with neutralising the symbolic
difference of death and disease.
Precisely where the goal is the elimination of death, the hospital (and
medicine in general) takes charge of the sick as the virtually dead.
Therapeutic scientificity and efficiency presuppose the radical objectification
of the body, the social discrimination of the sick, and hence a process
of mortification. The logical conclusion to the medical genealogy of the
body:
Medicine becomes modern with the corpse. ... It will no doubt remain a
decisive fact about our culture that its first scientific discourse concerning the
individual had to pass through this stage of death. (Michel Foucault, The Birth of
the Clinic [tr. A. M. S. Smith, London: Routledge, 1990], p. 197)
Mortified, the patient is also deadly, taking his revenge as he can: by means
of its functions, its specialisations and its hierarchies, the clinical institution
as a whole seeks to preserve itself from contamination from the already-dead.
The patient is dangerous because he is expected to die the death to
which he has been condemned, and because of the neutrality in which he is
enclosed at the term of his cure. From now on, the dead body can only act
its incidental nature and its cure, it radiates the total difference between
itself and the sick man, and, as dead, all its potential malificence. Neither
the technical manipulation, the `humane environment', nor even the
occasion of his death in reality will be too much to ensure his silence.
The most serious danger the sick man represents, and by reason of which
he is genuinely asocial and like a dangerous madman, is his profound
demand to be recognised as such and to exchange his disease. It is an
aberrant and inadmissible demand from the sick (and the dying) to base an
The human or therapeutic relation to the hospital cannot be perfected;
the general practice of medicine cannot change anything as concerns the
blackout or the symbolic lock-out. Summoned to cure the sick, devoted to
healing, the doctor and his helpers, exclusively equipped to cure the entire
institution, including its walls, its surgical machinery and its psychological
apparatuses (alternating between coldness and solicitude, and today the
`humanisation' of the hospital): none of this breaks the fundamental
prohibition of a different status for disease and death. At best, the sick will
be left the possibility of `self-expression', of speaking about his disease,
and recontextualising his life, in short the possibility of not experiencing
this temporary anomaly so negatively. As regards recognising the madness
of disease as difference, as meaning, a wealth of meaning, as material from
which to restructure an exchange, without trying in any way to `return the
sick to their normal lives', this presupposes the total elimination of
medicine and the hospital, the entire system of enclosing the body in its
`functional' truth; ultimately even the social order in its entirety, for which
the mere demand that disease be treated as a structure of exchange is an
absolute danger.
[112]
Sexualised Death and Deadly Sex
Speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and obscene manner.
Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is legal, only
death is pornographic. Society, having `liberated' sexuality, progressively
replaces it with death which functions as a secret rite and fundamental
prohibition. In a previous, religious phase, death was revealed, recognised,
while sexuality was prohibited. Today the opposite is true. But all
`historical' societies are arranged so as to dissociate sex and death in every
possible way, and play the liberation of one off against the other -- which is
a way of neutralising them both.
Is everything evenly balanced in this strategy, or is there a priority of one
term over the other? For the phase which concerns us, everything happens
as if the indexation of death were the principal objective, bound up with
the exaltation of sexuality: the `sexual revolution' was entirely oriented in
this direction, under the sign of the one-dimensional Eros and the function
of pleasure. In other places, this is precisely what gave it its naïvety, its
pathos, its sentimentality, and, at the same time, its `political' terrorism
(the categorical imperative of desire). The slogan of sexuality is in
solidarity with political economy, in that it too aims at abolishing death.
We will only have exchanged prohibitions. Perhaps, by means of this
`revolution', we will even have set up the fundamental prohibition against
My Death is Everywhere, my Death Dreams
Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No
longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living
imagination in certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary
substance, it passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the
mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is
when everything functions and serves something else, it is the absolute,
signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques
Tati's film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in
Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is
the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy,
finality not only in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death
is confused with the law of value -- and strangely with the structural law of
value by which everything is arrested as a coded difference in a universal
nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of
the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid connection of all the terms in a system.
Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars,
hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer
biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our
societies' true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank
spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where
the world's sterilised memories are frozen. Only the dead remember
everything in something like an immediate eternity of knowledge, a
quintessence of the world that today we dream of burying in the form of
microfilm and archives, making the entire world into an archive in order
that it be discovered by some future civilisation. The cryogenic freezing of
all knowledge so that it can be resurrected; knowledge passes into
immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting
everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and
information, a dense and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury
ourselves alive in the fossilised hope of one day being rediscovered.
Computers are the transistorised death to which we submit in the hope
of survival. Museums are already there to survive all civilisations, in order
to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere fact
that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses
any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning
for someone else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment
of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorised in a
gigantic whole, just as money reaches the point of no return when it is
nothing more than a system of writing.
Basically, political economy is only constructed (at the cost of untold
sacrifices) or designed so as to be recognised as immortal by a future
Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. (`The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations [tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970], p. 244)
For Benjamin, this was the very form of fascism, that is to say, a certain
exacerbated form of ideology, an aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing
the acceptance of a culture of death to the point of jubilation. And it is true
that today the whole system of political economy has become the finality
without end and the aesthetic vertigo of productivity to us, and this is only
the contrasting vertigo of death. This is exactly why art is dead: at the point
of saturation and sophistication, all this jubilation has passed into the
spectacle of complexity itself, and all aesthetic fascination has been
monopolised by the system as it grows into its own double (what else would
it do with its gigantic towers, its satellites, its giant computers, if not double
itself as signs?). We are all victims of production become spectacle, of the
aesthetic enjoyment [jouissance], of delirious production and reproduction,
and we are not about to turn our backs on it, for in every spectacle
there is the immanence of the catastrophe. Today, we have made the
vertigo of politics that Benjamin denounces in fascism, its perverse
aesthetic enjoyment, into the experience of production at the level of the
general system. We produce the experience of a de-politicised, deideologised
vertigo of the rational administration of things, of endlessly
exploding finalities. Death is immanent to political economy, which is why
the latter sees itself as immortal. The revolution too fixes its sights on an
immortal objective, in the name of which it demands the suspension of
death, in the interests of accumulation. But immortality is always the
monotonous immortality of a social paradise. The revolution will never
rediscover death unless it demands it immediately. Its impasse is to be
hooked on the end of political economy as a progressive expiry, whereas
the demand for the end of political economy is posed right now, in the
demand for immediate life and death. In any case, death and enjoyment,
highly prized and priced, will have to be paid for throughout political
economy, and will emerge as insoluble problems on the `day after' the
revolution. The revolution only opens the way to the problem of death,
without the least chance of resolving it. In fact, there is no `day after', only
days for the administration of things. Death itself demands to be experienced
Note from page 126:
1. Racism was founded, and from the universal point of view we claim to have overcome it
in accordance with the egalitarian morality of humanism. Neither the soul, in times past,
nor today the biological characteristics of the species, on which this egalitarian morality
is based, offer a more objective or less arbitrary argument than, for example, the colour
of one's skin, since they too are distinctive criteria. On the basis of such criteria (soul or
sex), we effectively obtain a Black = White equivalence. This equivalence, however,
excludes everything that has not a `human' soul or sex even more radically. Even the
savages, who hypostatise neither the soul nor the species, recognise the earth, the
animal and the dead as the socius. On the basis of our universal principles, we have
rejected them from our egalitarian metahumanism. By integrating Blacks on the basis of
white criteria, this metahumanism merely extends the boundaries of abstract sociability,
de jure sociality. The same white magic of racism continues to function, merely
whitening the Black under the sign of the universal.
Note from page 126:
2. The more we stress the human character of the divine essence, and the more we see the
distance that separates God from man increase, the more we see reflection on religion or
theology nullify the identity and unity of the divine essence and the human essence, the
more we see the debasement of all that is human, in the sense that human consciousness
becomes its object. The reason for this is that if everything positive in the conception we
have of the divine being is reduced to the human, then man, the object of consciousness,
could only become a negative and inhuman conception. To enrich God, man must
become poor (Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity [I. H. G. translation;
available tr George Eliot, New York: Harper and Row, 1957] ).
Note from page 127:
3. At a time when public sector housing is taking on the appearance of a cemetery,
cemeteries normally adopt the form of real estate (as in Nice, etc.). On the other hand,
it is remarkable that in the American metropolis, and often in the French, traditional
cemeteries constitute the only green, or empty, spaces in the urban ghetto. That the
space of the dead became the only district in the city where living is tolerable says a great
deal about the inversion of values in the modern necropolis. In Chicago children play in
cemeteries, cyclists ride there and lovers kiss. What architect would dare to draw
inspiration from the truth of the contemporary urban set-up and form a conception of a
city on the basis of cemeteries, waste ground and `accursed' spaces? This would truly be
the death of architecture.
Note from page 130:
4. Heresies always put this `Kingdom of the Beyond' in question to establish the Kingdom
of God hic et nunc. To deny the doubling of life and sur-vival, to deny the next world, is
also to deny the rupture with the dead and therefore the necessity of crossing over via an
intermediary agency to establish trade with them. This is the end of the Church and its
power.
Note from page 130:
5. God keeps the signifier and the signified, good and evil, apart, He also separates man
and woman, the living and the dead, the body and the mind, the Other and the Same,
etc. More generally, it is He who maintains the split between the poles of every distinct
opposition, and therefore between the inferior and the superior, Black and White. As
soon as reason becomes political, that is to say, as soon as the distinct opposition is
resolved as power and leans in the interests of one of these terms, God is already on this
side.
Note from page 130:
6. [tient la barre: `at the helm' -- tr.]
Note from page 131:
7. For us, by contrast, everything which is symbolically exchanged constitutes a mortal
danger for the dominant order.
Note from page 133:
8. There is therefore no distinction on the symbolic plane between the living and the dead.
The dead have a different status, that is all, which requires certain ritual precautions.
But visible and invisible do not exclude each other since they are two possible states of a
person. Death is an aspect of life. The Canaque arriving in Sydney for the first time,
stupefied by the crowds, soon explains the thing by the fact that in this country the dead
walk amongst the living, which is nothing strange. `Do Kamo', for the Canaques
(Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World [tr. Basia
Miller Gulati, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979] ), is that `which lives', and
everyone may belong to this category. There again the living/non-living is a distinctive
opposition that we alone make, and we base all our `science' and our operational
violence on it. Science, technics and production assume this rupture of the living and the
non-living, privileging the living on which alone science in all its rigour is based (cf. J.
Monod, Chance and Necessity). Even the `reality' of science and technics is also the
separation of the living and the dead. The very finality of science as a pulsion, as the
death drive (the desire to know), is inscribed in this disjunction, so that an object is only
real insofar as it is dead, that is, relegated to inert and indifferent objectivity, as were
initially, above everything else, the dead and the living.
Note from page 133:
9. This rule also applies in the political sphere. Thus the peoples of the Third World
(Arabs, Blacks and Indians) act as Western culture's imaginary (as much an object or
support of racism as the support of revolutionary aspirations). On the other hand, we,
the technological and industrial West, are their imaginary, what they dream of in their
separation. This is the basis of the reality of global domination.
Note from page 133:
10. Of course, the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) real is no longer given as substance, nor as a
positive reference: it is the always lost object that cannot be located, and of which there
is nothing ultimately to say. A delimited absence in the network of the `symbolic order',
this real retains however the charm of a game of hide-and-seek with the signifier which
traces after it. From the representation to the trace, the real is effaced -- not entirely,
however. There is all the difference between an unconscious topology and utopia.
Utopia puts an end to the real, even as absence or lack.
Note from page 134:
11. On the other hand, whoever cannot be given also dies, or falls to the necessity of selling
themselves. This is where prostitution takes hold, as the residue of gift-exchange and the
first form of economic exchange. Even though the prostitute's wages were initially, in the ancient context,
a `sacrificial wage', it inaugurates the possibility of another type of
exchange.
Note from page 134:
12. Cf. also M. Leenhardt: There is no idea of nothingness in death. The Canaque does not
mistake the idea of death for that of nothingness. Perhaps we may find in their term sèri
an idea similar to our `nothingness'. Sèri indicates the situation of the bewitched or
cursed man who has been abandoned by his ancestors, the baos, a man in perdition, out
of society. He feels himself non-existent and suffers a veritable ruin. For him
`nothingness' is, at most, a social negation and is not a part of the idea he has of death.
(Do Kamo, p. 35)
Note from page 136:
13. Such societies are consequently less psychotic than our modern societies (for which we
politely reserve the qualification `neurotic', but which are in fact in the process of
becoming `psychotic' according to our own definition, that is, they are in the process of a
total loss of access to the symbolic).
Note from page 136:
14. Because the `social' itself does not exist in `primitive societies'. The term `primitive' has
been eliminated today, but we must also eliminate the equally ethnocentric term
`society'.
Note from page 138:
15. Cf. the cannibalism scene in Jean de Lhéry's Les Indiens de la Renaissance.
Note from page 140:
16. On this point see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred [tr. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1979].
Note from page 143:
17. Just like Jaulin (La Mort Sara) on the primitive fear of the dead: `By lending anti-social
intentions to the forces of death, the Sara have merely logically extended some very
broad observations and, at the same time, several unconscious givens.' It is not at all
certain that these unconscious `givens' have much to do with this. The haunting and the
negativity of the forces of death might well be explained as the menacing agency and the
immanence of these wandering forces as soon as they escape from the group, where they
can no longer be exchanged. `The dead man', in fact, `avenges himself.' But the hostile
double, the hostile dead man, is repeatedly incarnated in the group's failure to preserve
his material in symbolic exchange, to repatriate, through an appropriate ritual, this
`nature' that escapes with the dead man and which then cyrstallises into a malefic
instance. This nevertheless leaves his relation with the group intact: he exercises it in the
form of persecution (the dead labour frozen within capital plays the same role for us).
This has nothing to do with a superegoic projection or an unconscious apparatus issuing
from the depths of the species ...
Note from page 143:
18. The neo-millennialism of the liberation of the unconscious should not be analysed as a
distortion of psychoanalysis: it follows logically from the imaginary resurrection of the
lost object (objet petit `a') that psychoanalysis buried at the core of its theory: the always
unlocatable real which allows it to guard the gates to the symbolic. The objet petit `a' is in
fact the true mirror of Desire, and, at the same time, the mirror of psychoanalysis.
Note from page 145:
19. Science itself is cumulative only because it is half bound up with death, because it heaps
death upon death.
Note from page 146:
20. In times past, however, there had already existed another individual and pessimistic
thought of death: the Stoics' aristocratic, pre-Christian thought was also bound up with
the conception of a personal solitude in death in a culture where collective myths were
collapsing. The same emphases are also found in Montaigne and Pascal, in the feudal
lord or the Jansenist of noblesse de robe (the ennobled bourgeoisie), in humanist
resignation or desperate Christianity. This, however, marks the beginning of the modern
anguish of death.
Note from page 147:
21. In this respect, there is no difference between atheist materialism and Christian
idealism, for they part company only on the question of the afterlife (but whether or not
there is anything after death has no importance: `that is not the question' [in English in
the original -- tr.]), they agree on the basic principle: life is life, and death is always
death; that is, they share the will to keep them scrupulously at a distance from each
other.
Note from page 149:
22. The Christian dialectic of death epitomises and puts an end to Pascal's formula: `It is
important for all life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal', is succeeded by
humanist thinking, a rationalist mastery over death. In the West, this has been drawn on
from the Stoics and the Epicureans (Montaigne -- the denegation of death -- benign or
cold serenity), up to the eighteenth century and Feuerbach: `Death is a phantom, a
chimera, since it exists only when it does not exist.' The staging of reason never results in
an excess of life, nor in an enthusiastic sense of death: humanism seeks a natural reason
for death, a wisdom backed up by science and the Enlightenment thinkers.
Note from page 158:
23. There is a great risk of confusion here, for if we acknowledge that death and sexuality
are biologically intertwined in the organic destiny of complex beings, this has nothing to
do with the symbolic relation of death and sex. The first is inscribed in the positivity of
the genetic code, the second in the destruction of social codes. Or rather, the second has
no biological equivalent inscribed anywhere, whether in a code or in language. It is play,
challenge and intense pleasure [jouissance] as it mockingly thwarts the former. Between
the two, between the real relation of death and sexuality and their symbolic relation,
there passes the caesura of exchange, a social destiny where everything plays.
Note from page 158:
24. In fact, Bataille's vision `of excess' often falls into the trap of transgression, a
fundamentally Christian dialectics or mysticism (but shared by contemporary psychoanalysis
and by every `libertarian' ideology of the festival and release [défoulement]) of
the prohibition and transgression. We have made the festival into an aesthetics of
transgression, because our entire culture is one of prohibition. Repression still marks the
idea of the festival, which by the same token may be accused of reactivating the
prohibition and reinforcing the social order. We treat the primitive feast to the same
analysis since we are basically incapable of imagining anything other than the bar, its onthis-side
and its beyond, which again issues from our fundamental schema of an
uninterrupted linear order (the `good form' which culture excludes is always that of the
end, of a final fulfilment). Like the sacrifice, the primitive feast is not a transgression but
a reversal, a cyclical revolution. This is the only form that puts an end to the bar and its
prohibitions. The inverse order of the transgression or `liberation' of repressed energies
simply ends up in a compulsion to repeat the prohibition. Thus only reversibility and the
cycle are in excess; transgression remains by default. `In the economic order, all
production is reproduction; in the symbolic order, all reproduction is production.'
Note from page 159:
25. It is, moreover, curious to see how, technically, death becomes increasingly undecidable
for science itself: heart failure, then a level encephalogram; but then what? There is no
longer any objective progress here: something of the indeterminacy and undecidability
of death in the heart of science itself is reflected on the symbolic plane.
Note from page 161:
26. To the point that it is sufficient that certain political groups demand some accident or
assassination attempt of unknown origin: this is their only `practice', transforming
chance into subversion.
Note from page 162:
27. Since today this contractual demand is addressed to social authorities, whereas before
one signed pacts with the Devil to prolong, enrich and enjoy one's life. The same
contract, and the same trap: the Devil always wins.
Note from page 163:
28. This is more important than the maximal exploitation of the labour force. This can
clearly be seen in the case of the elderly: they are no longer exploited (if they are
allowed to live on the fruits of society) if they are forced to live, since they are the living
example of the accumulation of life (as opposed to its consumption). Society supports
them as models of the use-value of life, accumulation and saving. This is precisely why
they no longer have any symbolic presence in our society.
Note from page 166:
29. It only becomes the object of a passion again if it can be imputed to a person (a
particular capitalist or a particular business personified), and is therefore experienced
once again as crime and sacrifice.
Note from page 168:
30. Contrary to what is generally thought, human sacrifices succeeded animal sacrifice to the
extent that the animal lost its magical pre-eminence, and the man-king succeeded the
animal-totem as worthy of the sacrificial function. The more recent substitutive sacrifice
of the animal has a very different meaning.
Note from page 168:
31. Hence in the past prisoners of war were spared in order to be used as slaves. No longer
worthy of potlach and sacrifice, they were condemned to the lowliest role and to a slow
death from labour.
Note from page 169:
32. But when and why did this death cease to be a sacrifice and become a torture? When did
it cease to be a form of torture to become an execution, as it is for us? There is no history
of death and the death penalty: there is only a genealogy of the social configurations to
provide death with meaning.
Note from page 170:
33. The same liberal policy change took place, at another level, in England in 1830, where
they wanted to replace the executioner with a preventative regular police force. The
English prefer the executioner to the regular police force. And in fact the police,
established in order to reduce the violence being wrought on the citizens, quite simply
took over from crime in wreaking this violence against the citizen. In time, it revealed
itself to be much more repressive and dangerous for the citizen than crime itself. Here
again, overt and selective repression metamorphoses into generalised preventative
repression.
Note from page 170:
34. Hence the meaning of the famous formula, `We are all German Jews' (but also, `we are
all Indians, Blacks, Palestinians, women or homosexuals'). From the moment that the
repression of difference was no longer carried out by extermination, but by absorption
into the repressive equivalence and universality of the social, we are all different and
repressed. There are no more detainees in a society that has invented `open' prisons, just
as there are no more survivors in a society that claims to abolish death. In this retaliatory
contamination, the omnipotence of the symbolic order can be read: the unreal basis of
the separations and the lines traced by power. Hence the power of this particular
formula -- We are all German Jews -- in that rather than expressing an abstract solidarity
(of the type `all together for ... we are all united behind this or that ... forward with the
proletariat', etc.), it expresses the inexorable fact of the symbolic reciprocity between a
society and those it excludes. In a single movement it falls into line with them as radical
difference. This is how it captured something fundamental in May '68, whereas other
slogans were mere political cant.
Note from page 171:
35. For in this will to abolish death, which is the project of political economy, the
unconscious, by a curious reversal (`that which knows no death' is the death drive),
starts to play an important role. It becomes the referential discourse of the thesis of the
criminal's irresponsibility (crime as acting out). It is well versed in the defence dossier as
an explanatory system. The unconscious plays a decisive role today in rationalist
progressivist and humanist thought: it has indeed fallen on hard times. And in this way,
psychoanalysis also enters (without willing it?) ideology. The unconscious, however,
would have had many other things to say about death if it had not learnt to speak the
system's language: quite simply, it used to say that death did not exist, or, rather, that to
abolish death was a phantasm that itself originates from the depths and repression of
death. Instead of this, today it serves only as evidence, to our social idealists, of
irresponsibility and justifies their moral discourse: life is a good, and death is an evil.
Note from page 172:
36. In 1819, under pressure from even the entrepreneurs and proprietors, and because the
penal machine was jammed by the courts being too severe with the death penalty (jurors
had the stark choice between the death penalty and acquittal), the death penalty was
abolished in a hundred or so cases (England). Its abolition therefore corresponds to a
rational adaptation, to an increasing efficiency of the penal system. Koestler:
Note from page 172:
37. Of the type: `The state is led to multiply very real murders in order to avoid an unknown
murder. It will never know if whether this murder has any chance of being perpetrated'
(Camus, Sur la peine capitale). This play on logic, seeking to place the system in
contradiction with itself, leads liberal humanism directly to abject compromise: `The
abolition of the death penalty must be demanded both for reasons of logic and
realism(!)' (ibid.). `In the last resort, the death penalty is bad because, by its very
nature, it rules out any possibility of making punishment and responsibility proportionate'
(Koestler, `The "bloody code"`); this was already the reason that the English
capitalists had demanded its abolition in 1820! The liberal argument is: terror goes
against its own ends; a scale of well administered penalties, of `minimal punishment', is
both `more humane and more effective(!)' The equivalence of the human and the
effective has a long history in humanist thought.
Note from page 176:
38. It's not so simple however, since the subject can still invoke violent death, death `from
the outside' -- an accident, suicide or a bomb -- to avoid putting his `natural' immortality
into question. The ultimate subterfuge, the ultimate ruse of the ego that may lead the
subject to the opposite extreme, to seek an `absurd' death in order to better safeguard
his immortal principle.
Note from page 177:
39. [CRS -- Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité: the French riot police -- tr.]
Note from page 177:
40. Cryogenic freezing, or being sealed in a gel so as to be resurrected, is the limit-form of
this practice.
Note from page 181:
41. Just as much by simply devouring the body: in this sense, cannibalising the dead is itself
a semiurgic activity (the idea that is always put forward is that through cannibalism `one
assimilates the forces of the dead': this is a secondary magical discourse for both the
primitive and the ethnologist. It is not a question of force, that is to say, of a natural
surplus or potential; on the contrary, it is a question of signs, that is to say, of preserving
the sign's potential against every natural process, against the devastations of nature).
Note from page 184:
42. For the Dangaleat (Jean Pouillon, Nouvelle Revue de Psychoanalyse, no. 1, 1967),
disease had an initiatory value. One must have been sick in order to become part of the
group. One only becomes a doctor if one has been sick, and by the very fact of having
been so. Disease comes from the margaï, each has their own margaï or margaïs, which
they inherit from father to son. Every social position is acquired thanks to disease, which
is a sign of election. Disease is a mark, a meaning -- the normal man goes his own way, he
islinsignificant. Disease is culture, the source of value and the principle of social
organisation. Even where disease does not have this determinant social function, it is
always a social matter, a social crisis, socially and publically resolved, by reactivating the
whole social metabolism through the extraordinary relation between the doctor and the
sick man, and setting it to work. This is radically different from contemporary medical
practice, where the illness is individually borne and therapy individually applied. The
reciprocity and exchange of the illness is preponderant in primitive societies. Illness is a
social relation, like labour, etc. Organic causality can be recognised and treated by all
sorts of means; the illness itself is never conceived as an organic lesion, but in the last
instance as the rupture and breakdown of social exchange. The organic is a metaphor: it
will therefore be treated `metaphorically' by the symbolic operation of social exchange
through the two protagonists in the cure. The two are always three in other contexts: the
group is immanent to the cure, at once the operator and the stakes of `symbolic efficacy'.
In short, the doctor and the sick are redistributed around the illness as social relation,
instead, as is the case for us, of making the illness autonomous as an organic relation
with its objective causality, doctor and patient each becoming objectified as passive and
active, patient or specialist.
5: Political Economy and Death
[p. 126]
towards Indians and cannibals: the increasing hold of rationality on our
culture has meant the successive extradition of inanimate nature, animals
and inferior races
[71]
into the Inhuman, while the cancer of the Human has
invested the very society it claimed to contain within its absolute superiority.
Michel Foucault has analysed the extradition of madmen at the dawn
of Western modernity, but we also know of the extradition and progressive
confinement of children, following the course of Reason itself, into the
idealised state of infancy, the ghetto of the infantile universe and the
abjection of innocence. But the old have also become inhuman, pushed to
the fringes of normality. Like so many others, the mad, children and the
old have only become `categories' under the sign of the successive
segregations that have marked the development of culture. The poor, the
under-developed, those with subnormal IQs, perverts, transsexuals, intellectuals
and women form a folklore of terror, a folklore of excommunication
on the basis of an increasingly racist definition of the `normal human'.
Quintessence of normality: ultimately all these `categories' will be
excluded, segregated, exiled in a finally universal society, where the
normal and the universal will at last fuse under the sign of the Human.
[72]
[p. 127]
arrests and confinements pervade social space-time; the asylum no longer
exists because psychological control and therapy have been generalised
and become banal; the school no longer exists because every strand of
social progress is shot through with discipline and pedagogical training;
capital no longer exists (nor does its Marxist critique) because the law of
value has collapsed into self-managed survival in all its forms, etc., etc. The
cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over
their function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational
metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is
a culture of death.
[73]
[p. 128]
whom they partner in multiple exchanges, they have no need to, and
neither is it necessary that they should, be immortal, since this fantastic
quality shatters all reciprocity. It is only to the extent that they are
excluded by the living that they quietly become immortal, and this
idealised survival is only the mark of their social exile.
[p. 129]
remained unexchanged in life. Resurrection, or immortality, is a fine
example of the last resort as regards the symbolic possibility of the archaic
group's immediate regulation of all its accounts, annulling all its symbolic
debt without reference to an afterlife.
[p. 130]
next (this is exactly the priest-caste's strategy), but more profoundly by
instituting the prohibition of death and, at the same time, the agency that
oversees this prohibition of death: power. Shattering the union of the living
and the dead, and slapping a prohibition on death and the dead: the
primary source of social control. Power is possible only if death is no longer
free, only if the dead are put under surveillance, in anticipation of the
future confinement of life in its entirety. This is the fundamental Law, and
power is the guardian at the gates of this Law. It is not the repression of
unconscious pulsions, libido, or whatever other energy that is fundamental,
and it is not anthropological; it is the repression of death, the social
repression of death in the sense that this is what facilitates the shift towards
the repressive socialisation of life.
[p. 131]
shadow has been lost (once death is taken hostage: the pact with the Devil
is only ever a political-economic pact).
[p. 132]
(the initiates) to death, so that the latter are then consumed by their
ancestors, then the earth gives birth to them as their mother had given
birth to them. After having been `killed', the initiates are left in the hands
of their initiatory, `cultural' parents, who instruct them, care for them and
train them (initiatory birth).
[p. 133]
[p. 134]
[p. 135]
(redemption, labour, debt, individual). This entails a considerable difference
in enjoyment: we trade with our dead in a kind of melancholy, while
the primitives live with their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the
feast.
[p. 136]
of brothers that the whole social act of exchange is organised. Therefore,
no desocialised Oedipal triangle, no closed familial structure sanctioned by
prohibition and the dominant Word of the Father, but a principle of
exchange between peers, on the basis of the challenge and reciprocity: an
autonomous principle of social organisation.
[p. 137]
generation of initiates to the other in the form of already dead and always
living ancestors (the biological father is himself inexchangeable, no-one
can stand in for him, and his symbolic figure, his word, is immutable; it too
remains unexchanged, a word with no response); when the mother (the
ancestral grounds put at stake with each successive initiation), is given,
received and transmitted (this is also the tribal language, the secret
language to which the initiate gains access) by the fathers, then everything
-- the father, the mother and the word -- loses its character as a fatal and
indecipherable agency, even its position in a structure controlled by
prohibition (just as birth and death lose their status as fatal events, as
necessity and as law, in the symbolic hyperevent of initiation).
[p. 138]
absolutely a crime. And why not, if only by reference to a nature whose
consecration (unconscious and psychoanalytic), whose libidinal consecration
is today in competition with the sanctity of the divine and the
religious? Cannibals themselves do not claim to live in a state of nature,
nor in accordance with their desire at all; they quite simply claim, through
their cannibalism, to live in a society, the most interesting case being a
society that eats its own dead. This is neither due to a vital necessity nor
because the dead no longer count for anything, quite the contrary: it is in
order to pay homage to them and thus to prevent those left to rot in
accordance with the natural order, escaping from the social order, turning
against the group and persecuting it. This devouring is a social act, a
symbolic act, that aims to maintain a tissue of bonds with the dead man or
the enemy they devour. In any case they don't just eat anybody, as we
know; whoever is eaten is always somebody worthy, it is always a mark of
respect to devour somebody since, through this, the devoured even
becomes sacred. We scorn what we eat, we can only eat what we despise,
that is, death, the inanimate, the animal or the vegetable condemned to
biological assimilation. We think of anthropophagia as despicable in view
of the fact that we despise what we eat, the act of eating and ultimately
even our own bodies. Primitive devouring is ignorant of the abstract
separation of the eater and the eaten into the active and the passive.
Between the two there is a duel mode, combining honour and reciprocity,
perhaps even a challenge and a duel tout court, which the eaten can
eventually win (cf. the whole ritual of propitiation as regards nourishment).
In any event, it is not a mechanical act of absorption.
[85]
It is not
even an absorption of the `vital forces', as ethnologists, following the
natives, communally claim, merely passing from an alimentary to a magical
functionalism (the psychoanalysts adhere to a psychical functionalism of
the pulsion). Devouring, no longer just an act of subsistence, nor a
transubstantiation of manna benefiting the eater, is a social act, a sacrificial
process where the metabolism of the whole group is at stake. Neither the
fulfilment of desire nor the assimilation of something or other, it is on the
contrary an act of expenditure, consumption or consummation, and of the
transmutation of the flesh into a symbolic relation, the transformation of
the body in social exchange. We find the same thing in the Eucharist, but in
the abstract form of the sacrament, using the general equivalence of bread
and wine. The accursed share consumed here is already considerably
sublimated and evangelised.
[p. 139]
bury it under all the weight of the dead. The king must be killed from time
to time, along with the phallus which began to rule over social life. The
king's murder does not therefore come from the depths of the unconscious
or from the figure of the father, on the contrary, it is our unconscious and
its peripeteia that result in the loss of sacrificial mechanisms. We now only
conceive of murder within a closed economy, as the phantasmatic murder
of the father, that is, as the balance of repression and the law, as the
fulfilment of desire and as the regulation of the accounts. The stake is
phallic, and it is certain that it is on the basis of repression that, with the
death of the father, the phallic peripeteia of the seizure of power enters the
game. This is an extremely simplified rewriting of death and murder as
repressed aggression, as a violence equivalent to the violence of
repression. In the primitive order, murder is neither violence nor an acting-out
of the unconscious. So for those who kill the king, there is no seizure of
power nor any increase in guilt, as there is in the Freudian myth. Neither
does the king simply endure this. Instead, he gives his death, returns it in
exchange, and marks it with the feast, whereas the phantasmatic murder of
the father is lived as the experience of guilt and anxiety.
[p. 140]
[p. 141]
do with the primitive gods. In the same way, soul and consciousness have
everything to do with a principle of the subject's unification, and nothing to
do with the primitive double. On the contrary, the historical advent of the
`soul' puts an end to a proliferating exchange with spirits and doubles
which, as an indirect consequence, gives rise to another figure of the
double, wending its diabolical way just beneath the surface of Western
reason. Once again, this figure has everything to do with the Western
figure of alienation, and nothing to do with the primitive double. The
telescoping of the two under the sign of psychology (conscious or
unconscious) is only a misleading rewriting.
[p. 142]
[p. 143]
[p. 144]
of a lost order but, contrary to all the topologies of discontinuity and
repression, the idea of a duelling order, of reversibility, of a symbolic order
(in the strong etymological sense of the term) where, for example, death is
not a separate space; where neither the subject's own body nor its own
shadow are separate spaces; where there is no death putting an end to the
history of the body; where there is no bar putting an end to the
ambivalence of the subject and the object; where there is neither a beyond
(survival and death) nor an `on this side' (the unconscious and the lost
object); only an immediate, non-phantasmatic actualisation of symbolic
reciprocity. This utopian idea is not fusionale only nostalgia engenders
fusional utopias. There is no nostalgia here, nor is anything lost, separated
or unconscious. Everything is already there, reversible and sacrificed.
[p. 145]
Les Messianismes révolutionnaires [tr. J. B., 1968]). The mad Christians did
not at first believe in a heaven and hell in the beyond: their vision implied
the pure and simple resolution of death in the collective will for immediate
eternity. The great Manichean heresies that threatened the foundations of
the Church hold the same principle since they interpret this world as an
antagonistic duality, a here and a there, of the principles of good and evil;
impiously, they bring heaven and hell down to earth. For having effaced
the glaze of the beyond they were ferociously suppressed, as were the
spiritualist heretics of the St Francis of Assisi or the Joachim of Fiore type,
whose radical charity amounted to establishing a total community on this
earth and thus sparing the Last Judgement. The Cathars also set their
sights a little too much on achieved perfection in the inseparability of body
and soul, the immanence of salvation in collective faith, which made a joke
of the Church's power of death. Throughout its history, the Church has
had to dismantle the primitive community which had a tendency to seek
salvation in the intense reciprocity with which it was shot through and on
which it drew for its own energy. Against the abstract universality of God
and the Church, sects and communities practised the `self-management' of
salvation, which then consisted in the group's symbolic exaltation, finally
turning into a deadly vertigo. The Church's sole condition of possibility is
the incessant elimination of this symbolic demand. This is also the State's
sole condition of possibility. At this point political economy enters the
arena.
[p. 146]
little withdrawn in the interests of worldly and productive accumulation,
without changing the aim of protecting itself against death.
[p. 147]
total impossibility of symbolic exchange, that is, death. Hence the absolute
impasse of political economy, which intends to eliminate death through
accumulation: the time of accumulation is the time of death itself. We
cannot hope for a dialectical revolution at the end of this process of
spiralling hoarding.
[p. 148]
of his own life. This work of mourning has fuelled Western metaphysics of
death since Christianity, even in the metaphysical concept of the death
drive.
[p. 149]
aggression in production and accumulation is characterised as constructive
Eros: Eros makes use of sublimated aggression for its own ends and, in the
movement of becoming (this applies just as much to political economy),
death is distilled as negativity into homeopathic doses. Not even the
modern philosophies of `being-towards-death' reverse this tendency: here
death serves as a tragic haunting of the subject, sealing its absurd liberty.
[92]
[p. 150]
to reproduce the non-event of a prior inorganic state of things, that is to
say, death. It is thus always as a repetitive cycle that death comes to
dismantle the constructive, linear or dialectical finalities of Eros. The
viscosity of the death drive and the elasticity of the inorganic is everywhere
victorious in its resistance to the structuration of life.
[p. 151]
the possibility of final liberation. Like the other necessities, it can be made
rational -- painless. (ibid., p. 188)
[p. 152]
and death, psychoanalysis tells us something concerning the fundamental
organisation of our culture, that when the myth is no longer told, when it
establishes its fables as axioms, it loses the `magnificent indefiniteness' that
Freud spoke of. `The concept is only the residue of a metaphor', as
Nietzsche said. Let's bet then on the metaphor of the unconscious, on the
metaphor of the death drive.
[p. 153]
science loses its footing amongst all the attempts at articulation. The nonliving
is always permanently sweeping science along into the axiomatics of
a system of death (see J. Monod, Chance and Necessity [tr. Austyn
Wainhouse, London: Collins, 1970] ).
[p. 154]
economic, energetic, topological or even the psychical apparatus itself,
useless. All the more reason, of course, for the pulsional logic it draws on,
inherited from the scientific mythology of the nineteenth century. Perhaps
Lacan guessed this when he spoke of the `irony' of the concept of the death
drive, of the unheard of and insoluble paradox that it poses. Historically,
psychoanalysis has taken the view that this is its strangest offspring, but
death does not allow itself to be caught in the mirror of psychoanalysis. It
acts as a total, radical, functional principle, and has no need of the mirror,
repression, nor even a libidinal economy. It merely meanders through
successive topologies and energetic calculi, ultimately forming the economics
of the unconscious itself, denouncing all that as well as Eros's
positive machinery, as the positive interpreting machine that it disrupts and
dismantles like any other. A principle of counter-finality, a radical
speculative hypothesis, meta-economic, metapsychical, meta-energetic,
metapsychoanalytic, the death (drive) is beyond the unconscious: it must
be wrested from psychoanalysis and turned against it.
[p. 155]
defective when death has taken it hostage, that life only exists in bursts and
in exchanges with death, if it is not condemned to the discontinuity of value
and therefore to absolute deficit. `To will that there be life only is to make
sure that there is only death.' The idea that death is not at all a breakdown
of life, that it is willed by life itself, and that the delirial (economic)
phantasm of eliminating it is equivalent to implanting it in the heart of life
itself -- this time as an endless mournful nothingness. Biologically, `[t]he
idea of a world where human life might be artificially prolonged has a
nightmare quality about it' (G. Bataille, Eroticism [2nd edn, tr, M.
Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p. 101), but symbolically above
all; and here the nightmare is no longer a simple possibility, but the reality
we live at every instant: death (excess, ambivalence, gift, sacrifice,
expenditure and the paroxysm), and so real life is absent from it. We
renounce dying and accumulate instead of losing ourselves:
[p. 156]
economy has no meaning, it is only a residue that has been made into the
law of life, whereas wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death:
sacrifice, the `accursed share', escaping investment and equivalence, can
only be annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost, then
annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value
and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.
With open eyes, self-oblivious, too ready to
Comply with what the gods have wished them,
Only too gladly will mortal beings
Speed back into the All by the shortest way;
So rivers plunge -- not movement, but rest they seek,
Drawn on, pulled down against their will from
Boulder to boulder -- abandoned, helmless --
By that mysterious yearning toward the chasm;
Chaotic deeps attract, and whole peoples too
May come to long for death
[By Xanthos once, in Grecian times, there stood
The town]
[p. 157]
The kindness of Brutus provoked them. For
When fire broke out, most nobly he offered them
His help, although he led those troops which
Stood at their gates to besiege the township
Yet from the walls they threw all the servants down
Whom he had sent. Much livelier then at once
The fire flared up, and they rejoiced, and
Brutus extended his arms towards them,
All were beside themselves. And great crying there,
Great jubilation sounded. Then into flames
Leapt man and woman; boys came hurtling
Down from the roofs or their fathers stabbed them.
It is not wise to fight against heroes. But
Events long prepared it. Their ancestors
When they were quite encircled once and
Strongly the Persian forces pressed them,
Took rushes from the rivers and, that their foes
Might find a desert there, set ablaze the town;
And house and temple -- breathed to holy
Aether -- and men did the flame carry off there.
So their descendants heard ... (Hölderlin, `Voice of the people'
[2nd version, in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, tr. and ed. Michael
Hamburger, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 178-83])
[p. 158]
and anti-reproductive. It is true that it aims at continuity, as
Bataille says, but not that of the species, which is only the continuity of an
order of life, whereas the radical continuity in which the subject is ruined
by sex and death always signifies the fabulous loss of an order. It is no more
supported by the reproductive act than desire is supported by need, no
more than sumptuary expenditure prolongs the satisfaction of needs: this
biological functionalism is annihilated in eroticism. To look for the secret
of sacrifice, sacrificial destruction, play and expenditure in the law of the
species, is to reduce it all to a functionalism. There is not even a contiguity
between sacrifice and the law of the species. Erotic excess and the
reproductive sexual function have nothing in common. The symbolic
excess of death has nothing in common with the body's biological losses.
[93]
[p. 159]
impossible to distinguish life from death. Against the representation which
sees in one the term of the other, we must try to see the radical
indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility of their autonomy in
the symbolic order. Death is not a due payment [échéance], it is a nuance of
life; or, life is a nuance of death. But our modern idea of death is
controlled by a very different system of representations: that of the
machine and the function. A machine either works or it does not. Thus the
biological machine is either dead or alive. The symbolic order is ignorant of
this digital abstraction. And even biology acknowledges that we start dying
at birth, but this remains with the category of a functional definition.
[95]
It is
quite another thing to say that death articulates life, is exchanged with life
and is the apogee of life: for then it becomes absurd to make life a process
which expires with death, and more absurd still to make death equivalent
to a deficit and an accelerated repayment. Neither life nor death can any
longer be assigned a given end: there is therefore no punctuality nor any
possible definition of death.
zuerst das Gesicht, dann die Hände, und zuletzt das Haar ...
[It happened (very slowly) that it gently slid from God's thoughts:
First her face, then her hands, and right at the end her hair.]
[`The Drowned Girl' in Bertolt Brecht: Poems and Songs, ed and tr. John Willett,
London: Methuen, 1990, p. 14]
[p. 160]
[p. 161]
Christian morality has given its powers of repression over to it, but at the same
time this superhuman power has lost any pretension to morality. It is the return
of the anguish of the Aztecs, without any celestial signs or presages. Catastrophe
has become banal and laughable because in the final analysis the Accident is only
an accident. (Conjunctions and Disjunctions, pp. 111-13)
[p. 162]
have pursued it. Hence the ever increasing fascination with the catastrophe,
the accident and the assassination attempt: reason itself is pursued
by the hope of a universal revolt against its own norms and privileges.
[p. 163]
longer be free to live as long as possible. Amongst other things, this
signifies the ban on consuming one's life without taking limits into account.
In short, the principle of natural death is equivalent to the neutralisation of
life.
[98]
The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be
reduced to quantity (and death therefore to nothing) in order to adjust it to
democracy and the law of equivalences.
[p. 164]
in Sociology, tr. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1970], pp. 139-40)
[p. 165]
[p. 166]
capitalist entrepreneur. It is the object of a mechanical refusal, of a
mechanical revolt, based on the right to life and to security, and is neither
the object nor the cause of a ludic terror.
[99]
Only the worker, as is well
known, plays too freely with his security, at the whim of the unions and
bosses who understand nothing of this challenge.
[p. 167]
a man than an animal, and more odious to make him suffer. But, in one
way or another, hanging a horse or a pig, like hanging a madman or a child,
seems more odious to us, since they are `not responsible'. This secret
equality of consciousness in law, so that the condemned always retain the
privilege of denying the right of the other to judge, this possible challenge
which is quite different from the right to a defence and which re-establishes
a minimum of symbolic opposition, no longer exists at all in the case of the
animal or the madman. It is precisely the application of a symbolic ritual to
a situation which prohibits the possibility of a symbolic response and gives
this type of punishment its particularly odious character.
[p. 168]
that man traces around himself in accordance with a mythical code
of differences, and to the contortions that shatter this line, in accordance
with the law that states that reciprocity never ends: every discrimination is
only ever imaginary and is forever cut across by symbolic reciprocity, for
better or worse.
[p. 169]
irresponsible being. On him, like the `mad' or the `sick', a great number of
the symbolic cycles are articulated. Some of this can still be detected in
Marx's formulation of the criminal as an essential function of the bourgeois
order. It is onto the king that responsibility for the crime par excellence
devolves: breaking the incest taboo (which is why he is king, and why he
will be put to death). His expiation confers on him the highest status, since
it is also what relaunches the cycle of exchanges. There is a whole
philosophy of cruelty (in Artaud's sense) here, which we are no longer
familiar with, and which excludes social infamy as it does the death
penalty: the death of the criminal-king is not a sanction, it neither
separates nor removes something rotten on the social body; on the
contrary, it is a festival and an elevation in which solidarity is renewed and
separations undone. The madman, the fool, the bandit, the hero and many
other characters from traditional societies have all played, relatively
speaking, the same role as agents of symbolic ferment. Society was
articulated on their difference. The dead were the first to play this role. Still
untouched by social Reason, traditional societies coped with the criminal
extremely well, even if it was by collective ritual death,
[102]
just like peasant
societies with their village idiots, even if it was as objects of ritual derision.
[p. 170]
l'asile). All humanist thought grows faint in the face of this demand, which
was openly realised in previous societies, and is always present, but hidden
and violently repressed, in our own (crime and death always provoke the
same secret jubilation; it is however debased and obscene).
[p. 171]
on this criterion to be able to try and to condemn. But this order has had
every opportunity to renounce the death penalty. It is still making gains in
this respect, and hence open prisons become possible. For death and the
prison were the truth of the social jurisdiction of a society that remained
heterogeneous and divided. Therapy and reform are the truth of the social
jurisdiction of a homogeneous and normalised society. The thought of the
right still refers to the first, while the thought of the left refers to the
second; both, however, obey the same system of values.
[p. 172]
miracles anywhere: death disappears or subsides when the system, for one
reason or another, has an interest in it (1830: the first extenuating
circumstances in a trial involving a bourgeois). Neither social conquest nor
the progress of Reason: just the logic of profit or privilege.
[106]
[p. 173]
will the possibility of being put to death not stop the criminal, it is rather
probable that it will add to the vertigo in which he is lost.' We know that
suicide and murder can often be substitutes for one another, with a strong
predilection for suicide.
[p. 174]
the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit. This `therapeutic
heroism' is characterised by soaring costs and `decreasing benefits': they
manufacture unproductive survivors. Even if social security can still be
analysed as `compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital',
this argument has no purchase here. Nevertheless, the system is facing the
same contradiction here as with the death penalty: it overspends on
the prolongation of life because this system of values is essential to the
strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically, however, this overspending
unbalances the whole. What is to be done? An economic choice
becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official
doctrine or practice. We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics
in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere,
and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the
`freedom' to abortion) is striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term
logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social
control. For there is a clear objective behind all these apparent contradictions:
to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth
control to death control, whether we execute people or compel their
survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form
of progressive tolerance), the essential thing is that the decision is
withdrawn from them, that their life and their death are never freely theirs,
but that they live or die according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that
their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a
type of freedom. Just as morality commanded: `You shall not kill', today it
commands: `You shall not die', not in any old way, anyhow, and only if the
law and medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be
by order. In short, death proper has been abolished to make room for
death control and euthanasia: strictly speaking, it is no longer even death,
but something completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the
rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting--planning--programming--
system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it
like health and disease under the sign of the Plan and Social Security. This
is the story of `motel-suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum,
one can purchase one's death under the most agreeable conditions (like
any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen,
even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they
kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment
and without meeting any opposition. A service operates these motel
suicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not
become a social service when, like everything else, it is functionalised as
individual and computable consumption in social input and output?
[p. 175]
centres charge for death just as the Eros centres charge for sex. The witch
hunt continues.
[p. 176]
right to destroy himself. It is against this orthodoxy of value that the suicide
revolts by destroying the parcel of capital he has at his disposal. This is
unpardonable: we will go so far as to hang the suicide for having
succeeded. It is therefore symptomatic that suicide increases in a society
saturated by the law of value, as a challenge to its fundamental rule. But
we must also take another look at its definition: if every suicide becomes
subversive in a highly integrated system, all subversion of and resistance to
this system is reciprocally, by its very nature, suicidal. Those actions at
least that strike at its vitals. For the majority of so-called `political' or
`revolutionary' practices are content to exchange their survival with the
system, that is, to convert their death into cash. There are rarely suicides
that stand against the controlled production and exchange of death, against
the exchange-value of death; not its use-value (for death is perhaps the only
thing that has no use-value, which can never be referred back to need, and
so can unquestionably be turned into a weapon) but its value as rupture,
contagious dissolution and negation.
[p. 177]
[p. 178]
labour force is frozen in fixed capital and dead labour. In other words, all
material production is merely a gigantic `character armour' by means of
which the species means to keep death at a respectful distance. Of course,
death itself overshadows the species and seals it into the armour the species
thought to protect itself with. Here again, commensurate with an entire
civilisation, we find the image of the automobile-sarcophagus: the protective
armour is just death miniaturised and become a technical extension of
your own body. The biologisation of the body and the technicisation of the
environment go hand in hand in the same obsessional neurosis. The
technical environment is our over-production of pollutant, fragile and
obsolescent objects. For production lives, its entire logic and strategy are
articulated on fragility and obsolescence. An economy of stable products
and good objects is indispensable: the economy develops only by exuding
danger, pollution, usury, deception and haunting. The economy lives only
on the suspension of death that it maintains throughout material production,
and through renewing the available death stocks, even if it means
conjuring it up by a security build up: blackmail and repression. Death is
definitively secularised in material production, where it is reproduced on a
large scale as capital. Even our bodies, which have become biological
machinery, are modelled on this inorganic body, and therefore become, at
the same time, a bad object, condemned to disease, accident and death.
[p. 179]
Keeping the accounts on survival, instead of the radical compatibility of
life and death.
[p. 180]
own lives. He would then genuinely be the Master, and the worker the
slave. As long as the exploited retain the choice of life and death through
this small resistance to security and the moral order, they win on their own,
symbolic, ground.
[p. 181]
sarcophagic practices (the devouring of flesh), which are in fact semiurguic
practices. Therefore, every thanatopraxis, even in contemporary societies,
is analysed as the will to ward off this sudden loss of signs that befalls the
dead, to prevent there remaining, in the asocial flesh of the dead,
something which signifies nothing.
[111]
[p. 182]
multiplicity of attitudes -- sardonic, languid, heads bent, fierce or timid: a
dance of death which was for a long time, before becoming the Grevin
Museum for the tourists, a place for dominical walks for the relatives and
friends who used to come to see their dead, to acknowledge them, show
them to their children with the familiarity of the living, a `dominicality' of
death similar to those of the Mass or the theatre. A Baroque of death (the
first unburied corpses date from the sixteenth century and the Counter-Reformation).
The solidity of a society capable of exhuming its dead, of
opening a route to them, half-way between intimacy and the spectacle,
of bearing without fright or obscene curiosity, that is, without the effects of
sublimation and seriousness to which we are accustomed, the theatre of
death, where cruelty is still a sign, even if this is no longer in the bloody
rites of the Tarahumaras. What a contrast with the fragility of our societies,
which are incapable of confronting death without wan humour or perverse
fascination. What a contrast with the anxious warding off in the funeral
homes.
[p. 183]
she discharged herself from hospital. When she found a dying man to speak
to, she went to find her students, but on her return she found him dead
(here, she perceived that the problem was hers and her students'). She has
subsequently succeeded: soon there will be a staff of psychologists to watch
over the dying and give speech back to them. The neo-spiritualism of the
human and psycho-social sciences.
[p. 184]
exchange on this difference, not in order to be cared for and recover, but to
give his disease so that it might be received, and therefore symbolically
recognised and exchanged, instead of being neutralised in the techniques
of clinical death and the strictly functional survival called health and
curing.
[p. 185]
death. In so doing, the sexual revolution devours itself, since death is the
real sexualisation of life.
[p. 186]
civilisation, or as an instance of truth. As for religion, this is unimaginable
other than in the Last Judgement, where God recognises his own. But the
Last Judgement is there already, realised: it is the definitive spectacle of
our crystallised death. The spectacle is, it must be said, grandiose. From
the hieroglyphic schemes of the Defense Department or the World Trade
Center to the great informational schemes of the media, from siderurgical
complexes to grand political apparatuses, from the megapolises with their
senseless control of the slightest and most everyday acts: humanity, as
Benjamin says, has everywhere become an object of contemplation to
itself.
[p. 187]
immediately, in total blindness and total ambivalence. But is it
revolutionary? If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an
end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy.
[p. 194]
5: Political Economy and Death
[p. nts]
This text clearly describes an `abduction' into the universal. The universalisation of God
is always bound up with an exclusion and reduction of the human in its originality. When
God starts to resemble man, man no longer resembles anything. What Feuerbach does
not say, because he is still too wrapped up in religion, is that the universalisation of man
also takes place at the cost of the exclusion of all others (madmen, children, etc.) in their
difference. When Man starts to resemble Man, others no longer resemble anything.
Defined as universality and as an ideal reference, the Human, just like God, is properly
inhuman and extravagant. Feuerbach has equally nothing to say concerning the act of
abduction, by which God captures the human for his own ends, in such a way that man is
nothing more than the anaemic negative of God, which, backfiring, killed God himself.
Even Man is dying from the various `inhumanities' (madness, infancy, savagery) he has
instituted.
By contrast, the primitives were not plunged, as we like to say so much, into
`animism', that is, into the idealism of the living, into the irrational magic of forces: they
privilege neither one term nor the other, for the simple reason that they do not make this
distinction.
At least in Lacan there is something other than the idealist misinterpretation of Lévi-Strauss,
for whom, in his Structural Anthropology [2 vols, tr. M. Layton, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1977-9] ), `the function of the symbolic universe is to resolve on the
ideal plane what is experienced as contradictory on the real plane'. Here (not too far
from its most degraded sense), the symbolic appears as a sort of ideal compensation
function, mediating between the separation of the real and ideal. In fact, the symbolic is
quite simply reduced to the imaginary.
Dialectical reason -- death as negativity and the movement of becoming -- succeeds this
formal and rationalist overcoming of death. The beautiful dialectic follows the upward
mobility of political economy.
The dialectic then breaks down to make room for the irreducibility of death and its
insurmountable immanence (Kierkegaard). With Heidegger, dialectical reason falls into
ruin, taking a subjective and irrational turn towards a metaphysics of despair and the
absurd which, however, does not prevent it from continuing to be the dialectic of a
conscious subject finding a paradoxical freedom in it: `Everything is permitted, since
death is insurmountable' (quia absurdum: Pascal was not so far from the modern pathos
of death). Camus: `The absurd man fixes death with an impassioned stare; this
fascination liberates him.'
The anguish of death as a test of truth. Human life as being-towards-death.
Heidegger: `Authentic being-towards-death -- that is to say, the finitude of temporality --
is the hidden basis of Dasein's historicality' (Being and Time [tr. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978], §74, p. 438). Death as `authenticity': there is in
this, in relation to a system that is itself mortifying, a vertiginous escalation, a challenge
which is in fact a profound obedience.
The terrorism of authenticity through death remains a secondary process in that, by
means of dialectical acrobatics, consciousness recuperates its `finitude' as destiny.
Anxiety as the reality principle and as `freedom' remains the imaginary which, in its
contemporary phase, has substituted the mirror of death for that of immortality. But all
this remains extremely Christian and is moreover constantly mixed up with `existential'
Christianity.
Revolutionary thought, for its part, oscillates between the dialecticisation of death as
negativity, and the rationalist objective of the abolition of death: to put an end to it as a
`reactionary' obstacle in solidarity with capital, with the help of science and technics, en
route to the immortality of generic man, beyond history, in communism. Death, like so
many other things, is only a superstructure, whose exit will be governed by the
revolution of the infrastructure.
Weissman: soma is mortal, plasma germinative and immortal. Protozoa are virtually
immortal, death arising only with differentiated metazoa for whom death becomes
possible and even rational (the unlimited duration of an individual life becomes a useless
luxury. For Bataille, death on the contrary becomes an `irrational' luxury). Death is only
a late acquisition of living beings. In the history of the species of living creatures, it
appears along with sexuality.
So also Tournier in Friday or the Other Island ([tr. Norman Denny, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984], pp. 106-7):
Sex and death. Their close association ... he insisted that this was a sacrifice of the
individual to the species, since in the act of procreation the individual loses something
of his substance. Thus sexuality is the living presence, ominous and mortal, of the
species in the essence of the individual. To procreate is to bring forth a new generation
which innocently and inexorably will thrust its predecessor towards extinction. ...
The instinct which brings the sexes together is then an instinct of death. But Nature
has thought it prudent to disguise her stratagem, transparent though it is, and what
appears to be the self-indulgence of lovers is in reality a course of mad self-
abnegation.
This fable is accurate, but demonstrates only the correlation between biological sex
and death: in fact, death's decree appears along with sexuality, since the latter is already
the inscription of a functional distribution, and therefore is immediately of a repressive
order. But this functional distribution is not of the order of the pulsion; it is social. It
appeared in a certain type of social relation. Savages do not make sexuality autonomous
like we do; they are closer to what Bataille describes: `Through the activity of organs in a
flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves ..., the self is
dispossessed' (Eroticism [2nd edn, tr. M. Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p.
18).
In its violent classical phase, which even today coincides with conservative thought,
capital plays on the discourse of conscious psychology and responsibility, and therefore
repression: this is the terrorist discourse of capitalism. In its more advanced phase,
which coincides with progressive, even revolutionary thought, neo-capitalism plays on
the discourse of psychoanalysis: unconscious, irresponsibility, tolerance and reform.
Consciousness and responsibility are the normative discourse of capital. The unconscious
is the liberal discourse of neo-capitalism.
Our capital punishment is not the inheritance of the butchery of the Dark Ages. It has
its own history. It is the residue of a jurisdiction which is contemporary with the
development of political economy, and whose fiercest period -- the Bloody Code in
nineteenth century England -- coincides with the industrial revolution. Medieval
custom reserved death for a few particularly serious offences. Bound to the
increasingly imperious defence of the right to private property, the curve began to rise
through the height of the nineteenth and up to the twentieth centuries. (`The "bloody
code"`, in Reflections on Hanging [London: Gollancz, 1956], pp. 13ff. [Baudrillard
has paraphrased and summarised rather than cited Koestler here. -- tr.])
This curve, then, also charts the ascendancy of the capitalist bourgeois class. And its
recession after 1850 is the effect not of absolute human progress, but that of the
capitalist system.
5: Political Economy and Death, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [125]-194. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents]
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