This is the book where Baudrillard sets the three orders of simulacra, the long argument about the political economy of death, and the wager on symbolic exchange into a single structure. The pieces that later circulate separately, the precession of the model over the real, the code, hyperreality, are assembled here around one claim: that the law of value has passed from its commodity form into a structural form, and that what this structural order excludes, and cannot answer, is symbolic exchange.
The argument runs on a single operation repeated across every domain. Production, the body, fashion, sexuality, death, and poetic language are each shown to be organised by a law of equivalence, and each is set against a form that the law of equivalence cannot absorb. That form is reversibility: the gift answered by the counter-gift, exchange reversed in sacrifice, the term of the langue reversed in the anagram, life reversed in death. Where there is equivalence there is accumulation, linearity, and value. Where there is reversibility there is the symbolic, and the symbolic is what every system organised by value must keep at bay.
The brief preserves the book's own order. A preface lays the thesis and the method. The first chapter takes the case of production and labour. The second sets out the three orders of simulacra and the passage into the code. The third and fourth carry the same operation into fashion and the body. The fifth, by far the longest and the book's centre of gravity, is the treatise on political economy and death. The sixth turns to Saussure's anagrams and the extermination of value in poetic language. The apparatus at the end gathers the source's anomalies preserved as printed, the places where Baudrillard states a position he will not take, and the formulations that recur across the corpus.
The Preface states the thesis in its first sentence and then states the method. The thesis is not that some societies run on symbolic exchange and others do not, but that symbolic exchange has ceased to organise the society we live in and now returns to it only as a haunting.
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Symbolic exchange is no longer the organising principle of modern society. Of course, the symbolic haunts modern social institutions in the form of their own death. Indeed, since the symbolic no longer rules these social forms, they experience it only as this haunting, and as a demand forever blocked by the law of value. Even though a certain idea of revolution has, since Marx, attempted to find a way past the law of value, it long since became a revolution in accordance with the Law. Even psychoanalysis gravitates around this haunting, which it fends off while at the same time circumscribing it within an individualised unconscious, thus reducing it, under the Law of the Father, to the obsessional fear of castration and the Signifier. Always the Law.
The opening move: symbolic exchange survives only as the repressed of the institutions that have displaced it, with both Marxist revolution and psychoanalysis named as forms that domesticate it rather than recover it.
From this the method follows. The three thinkers Baudrillard means to use are to be used against themselves, each turned past the point at which his own system stopped.
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Indeed we must switch the targets of each of these three theories, and turn Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against Saussure and Freud against Freud. The principle of reversibility (the counter-gift) must be imposed against all the economistic, psychologistic and structuralist interpretations for which Mauss paved the way. The Saussure of the Anagrams must be set against Saussurian linguistics, against even his own restricted hypotheses concerning the anagram. The Freud of the death drive must be pitched against every previous psychoanalytic edifice, and even against Freud's version of the death drive.
The program in one passage. Mauss's gift, Saussure's anagrams, and Freud's death drive are recruited as the three figures of reversibility, each radicalised against the author who first stated it.
Reversibility is then named as the single form running under every domain, and the catalogue is given in full, since the list is the argument in miniature.
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Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram. In every domain it assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself.
The master list of reversibilities. Each later chapter works one entry: production in chapter one, the langue in chapter six, life in death across chapter five.
The strategic claim is that a system run by the code cannot be opposed by the old revolutionary dialectic, which belonged to the commodity stage of value. What answers the code is disorder of a different order.
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Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibility of death, belongs to a higher order than the code. Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption in the code. Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall.
The strategic thesis: against a system organised by the code, only the reversibility of death interrupts, and the system's own drive to perfection is what carries it toward collapse.
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Simulation must go further than the system. Death must be played against death: a radical tautology that makes the system's own logic the ultimate weapon. The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, 'a science of imaginary solutions'; that is, a science-fiction of the system's reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death.
Death played against death. The strategy is not to oppose the system from outside but to push its own logic past the limit at which it reverses.
The Preface closes by qualifying the standing of the whole undertaking. Baudrillard puts the method's status on the record, and the qualification is itself a move made on the record rather than a concession wrung from him later.
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Strictly speaking, nothing remains for us to base anything on. All that remains for us is theoretical violence – speculation to the death, whose only method is the radicalisation of hypotheses. Even the code and the symbolic remain terms of simulation: it must be possible to extract them, one by one, from discourse.
The author's own account of his method. The book proceeds by the radicalisation of hypotheses rather than by demonstration, and the terms it relies on most, the code and the symbolic, are held to be themselves terms of simulation, not bedrock.
The chapter opens on what Baudrillard calls a revolution in value itself. The law of value had bound two dimensions, a referential one and a structural one, as if their coherence were natural. The revolution is the coming apart of the two, with the structural dimension freed from any reference.
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This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of the law of value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if by a natural law. Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the upper hand. The structural dimension becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension, and is instituted upon the death of reference.
The structural revolution of value, stated as the book's first move. The structural order does not supplement reference, it is instituted on its death.
The decisive twist is who performs this revolution. It is not opposition that ends the regime of production but capital itself, which abolishes its own determination by the means of production.
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The end of the era of production. It is not the revolution which puts an end to all this, it is capital itself which abolishes the determination of the social according to the means of production, substitutes the structural form for the commodity form of value, and currently controls every aspect of the system's strategy.
Capital, not revolution, ends the era of production. This reversal governs the chapter and licenses the later claim that capital only ever played at producing.
The regime that results is one of pure substitution, where every term is commutable with every other and nothing is anchored. Baudrillard's name for it is exact.
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This is the generalised brothel of capital, a brothel not for prostitution, but for substitution and commutation.
The generalised brothel of capital: total commutability as the characteristic effect of the code, distinguished from prostitution precisely because nothing is being sold, only substituted.
Labour is the first case worked in detail. Once value floats free of reference, labour ceases to be a power that could ground a reversal and becomes one sign circulating among others, exchangeable against its own opposite.
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This is because labour is not a power, it has become one sign amongst many. Like every other sign, it produces and consumes itself. It is exchanged against non-labour, leisure, in accordance with a total equivalence, it is commutable with every other sector of everyday life. No more or less 'alienated', it is no longer a unique, historical 'praxis' giving rise to unique social relations.
Labour demoted from power to sign. The point is aimed at the Marxist expectation that the truth of labour power could anchor a reversal; once labour is a sign exchanged against leisure, that anchor is gone.
This is also where the terminology of the workplace is read as a symptom. The shift in job titles registers the disappearance of the labourer into an abstraction.
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The semi-skilled worker was no longer a labourer, but merely a worker facing the total indifferentiation of labour, no longer struggling over the content of labour nor over specific wages, but struggling over the generalised form of labour and the political wage. The formation of the 'agent of production' is accompanied by his liberation from the most abstract form – much more abstract than the old semi-skilled worker, exploited to death: the mannequin of labour appeared, the lowest common denominator, the dumb waiter of labour's unreality principle.
The terminological evidence: 'agent of production' and the mannequin of labour as the names for a worker who now produces nothing and contests only the form of labour.
From here Baudrillard states the hypothesis that has made the chapter notorious, and states it with the qualification built in. He does not assert that capital decided to liquidate production. He says everything happens as if it had only ever played at it.
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I am saying that everything happens as if, because it is not completely certain that capital ever had this productivist view of itself (Marx was basically the only one who had, and he projected this phantasy onto it as an historical truth); it is more likely that it only ever played at production, even if this meant that production had to be abandoned at a later stage, were it to draw capital into fatal contradictions. Has capital ever taken production seriously? Don't be so stupid: at the height of the seriousness of production, capital is doubtless only a simulation.
Capital only ever played at production. The claim is hedged in its own grammar, 'everything happens as if,' and the productivist reading is assigned to Marx as a projection rather than refuted directly.
The chapter's final movement, the section titled Labour and Death, is where the book's deeper claim first surfaces: that what underwrites the wage relation is not exploitation but death. The strategy against such a system is the gift it cannot return.
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To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death.
The gift capital cannot answer. This is the operational form of 'death played against death' from the Preface, transposed onto capital.
Then the claim about labour and death, stated flatly. Labour power is not founded on production but on a death the worker undergoes in order to be exchangeable at all.
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Labour power is instituted on death. A man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage. But the economic violence capital inflicted on him in the equivalence of the wage and labour power is nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on him by his definition as a productive force.
Labour power instituted on death. The symbolic violence, being defined as a productive force, is ranked above the economic violence of the wage bargain.
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Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a sort of death, to the 'fulfilment of life', which is the idealist view; labour is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is the symbolic reality.
Labour as slow death, with the meaning specified against the obvious one: not exhaustion, but deferred death set against the immediacy of a violent, sacrificial death.
The account of power that follows inverts the usual picture. Power is not the right to kill. It is the monopoly over the deferral of death, the granting of a survival the subject cannot give himself.
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Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to death, but exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live – a life that the slave lacks the power to give. The master confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own.
Power redefined as the monopoly on deferred death rather than the right to kill. The master's power is the confiscation of the other's death.
The same inversion is read into the German word for employer, which Baudrillard takes literally. The one who pays is figured as the one who gives, so that the wage wards off a restitution the worker is trying to make.
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Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its labour power from the worker and extorts surplus labour), capital gives labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the capitalist). In German this is Arbeitgeber: the entrepreneur is a 'provider of labour'; and Arbeitnehmer: it is the capitalist who gives, who has the initiative of the gift.
Arbeitgeber read literally: the wage relation cast as a one-way gift, with the employer holding the initiative of the gift and the worker reduced to receiving.
The chapter ends on the system's management of mortality as an accounting problem, with the figure left exactly as printed.
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A compromise results from this, an absurd equilibrium (we can afford to keep 35 per cent of all leukaemia sufferers alive). Assessing the marginal costs of death. Anything above this level and we let them die. But this is not cynical economics, on the contrary, the economy prevents the system from following the conclusions of its own logic and barring people's access to death.
Death as a marginal-cost calculation. The figure of 35 per cent of leukaemia sufferers is preserved as printed; it returns in chapter five's account of euthanasia statistics.
The chapter sets out the periodisation the rest of the book runs on. Three orders of simulacra are keyed to three successive forms of the law of value, and the schema is stated as a list.
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There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance: The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the 'classical' period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era. Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase. The first-order simulacrum operates on the natural law of value, the second-order simulacrum on the market law of value, and the third-order simulacrum on the structural law of value.
The three-orders schema, the spine of the book. Counterfeit, production, simulation, mapped onto the natural, market, and structural laws of value.
The first order is the counterfeit, born with the Renaissance, when the bourgeois order breaks the feudal lock on signs and competition over signs of distinction becomes possible. Baudrillard refuses any nostalgia for the order that preceded it, since the clarity of signs in a caste society was a function of its cruelty.
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If we take to dreaming once more – particularly today – of a world where signs are certain, of a strong 'symbolic order', let's be under no illusions. For this order has existed, and it was a brutal hierarchy, since the sign's transparency is indissociably also its cruelty. In feudal or archaic caste societies, in cruel societies, signs are limited in number and their circulation is restricted.
A guard against misreading the strong symbolic order as utopia. The transparency of signs in caste society is one face of its cruelty, not a lost good.
The passage from the first order to the second is figured by two machines. The automaton imitates man and keeps the question of appearance open. The robot abolishes the question, since it answers only to production.
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There is nothing like this with the robot. The robot no longer questions appearances, its only truth is its mechanical efficiency. It no longer needs to resemble man, to whom it is inevitably compared. The infamous metaphysical difference which gives the automaton mystery and charm no longer exists: the robot emphasises this difference for its own benefit. Being and appearance are founded on a single substance of production and labour.
Automaton against robot, the figure for the move from counterfeit to production. The robot closes the gap between being and appearance that the automaton held open.
The third order, simulation, is governed by the code. Its model is no longer the equivalence of representation but the digital generation of the real from a model, and Baudrillard names its principle and its prophet in one line.
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After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after energy and determinacy, the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra being mere operations). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibniz's God), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the 'genesis of simulacra' today finds its completed form.
The code as the metaphysics of the third order. Digitality is its principle and the genetic code is where the genesis of simulacra is completed.
Under the code, social control no longer works by representation but by the test, the question already paired with its answer. The political form of this is the referendum, which can run only because there is nothing left to refer to.
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The test is everywhere the fundamental social form of control, which works by infinitely dividing practices and responses. We live in a referendum mode precisely because there is no longer any referential. Every sign and every message (objects of 'functional' utility just as much as fashion features or any televised information, polls or discussions) is presented to us as a question/answer.
The test and the referendum as the social form of the code. The referendum is possible precisely because the referential has gone.
The chapter's most cited image makes the duopoly the divine form of simulation, then reads it off the New York skyline. The question is famous in its own right.
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Why has the World Trade Center in New York got two towers? All Manhattan's great buildings are always content to confront each other in a competitive verticality, from which there results an architectural panorama that is the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, every building on the offensive against every other.
The question that made the book famous. The older skyline figures capital as competitive verticality, a pyramidal jungle.
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The fact that there are two identical towers signifies the end of all competition, the end of every original reference. Paradoxically, if there were only one, the WTC would not embody the monopoly, since we have seen that it becomes stable in a dual form.
The payoff. Two identical towers, not one, signify the passage from competition to the stable duopoly form of the code.
The simulation chapter culminates in the definition of the real that the later work carries off whole. The real is no longer what can be reproduced. It is what is always already reproduced.
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The very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction. It is a contemporary of science, which postulates that a process can be reproduced exactly within given conditions, with an industrial rationality which postulates a universal system of equivalences.
The real defined as the equivalently reproducible. The definition ties the real to industrial reproducibility rather than to presence.
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At the end of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: the hyperreal.
The hyperreal named. The decisive shift is from reproducible to always already reproduced.
The chapter ends on its one example of a counter-move, the New York subway graffiti of 1972, which Baudrillard reads not as the reclaiming of identity but as the turning of the code's own indeterminacy against it.
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In the spring of 1972 in New York a spate of graffiti broke out which, starting with ghetto walls and fences, finally overcame subways and buses, lorries and elevators, corridors and monuments, completely covering them in graphics ranging from the rudimentary to the sophisticated, whose content was neither political nor pornographic. These graphics consisted solely of names, surnames drawn from the underground comic strip.
The Kool Killer case, dated to the spring of 1972. The graffiti carry no political or pornographic content, only names.
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They are seeking not to escape the combinatory in order to regain an identity (which is impossible in any case), but to turn indeterminacy against the system, to turn indeterminacy into extermination. Retaliation, reversion of the code according to its own logic, on its own terrain, gaining victory over it because it exceeds semiocracy's own non-referentiality.
The graffiti read as reversion of the code on its own terrain. The pseudonym does not recover identity, it pushes the code's indeterminacy to extermination.
Fashion is the second domain Baudrillard runs the operation through, and it is the purest case of the code, since fashion refers to nothing but its own recycling. He reads it as the simulation of a becoming that has no innocence left.
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Fashion is only a simulation of the innocence of becoming, the cycle of appearances is just its recycling. That the development of fashion is contemporary with that of the museum proves this. Paradoxically, the museum's demand for an eternal inscription of forms and for a pure actuality function simultaneously in our culture.
Fashion as simulated innocence of becoming. The pairing with the museum makes the point: pure recycling and eternal inscription are two faces of the same modern status of the sign.
The key term is flotation, taken from the monetary order. Once forms are generated from the model rather than produced from their own determinations, they no longer drift between fixed points, they float, the way currencies float when cut loose from a standard.
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There is fashion from the moment that a form is no longer produced according to its own determinations, but from the model itself – that is to say, that it is never produced, but always and immediately reproduced. The model itself has become the only system of reference. Fashion is not a drifting of signs – it is their flotation, in the sense in which monetary signs are floated today.
Flotation, not drift. The analogy to floated currency is exact: the model is the only reference, so the sign never settles against anything outside the system.
This is what makes fashion, in his term, insubvertible. A domain that is its own only reference offers nothing to contradict, and the gesture of refusing it is absorbed as one more fashion. The blue jeans are his historical instance.
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There is no possible subversion of fashion since it has no system of reference to contradict (it is its own system of reference). We cannot escape fashion (since fashion itself makes the refusal of fashion into a fashion feature – blue-jeans are an historical example of this). While it is true that one can always escape the reality principle of the content, one can never escape the reality principle of the code. Even while rebelling against the content, one more and more closely obeys the logic of the code.
The insubvertible. The escape from the content is granted precisely so that the escape from the code is foreclosed; rebellion against content tightens obedience to the code.
The chapter on the body opens with the two-line epigraph that gives it its title and states the chiasmus the whole chapter works.
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A Sex is a mass grave of Signs
The Sign is a disembodied Sex
The epigraph. The body organised into sign-exchange is a mass grave of signs; the sign abstracted from the body is a disembodied sex. Both names for the same operation.
The argument is that the contemporary history of the body is a history of its marking, the covering of the body with signs until it becomes a structural material for sign-exchange, organised around the phallus as general equivalent. What presents itself as liberation runs on the logic of political economy.
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The entire contemporary history of the body is the history of its demarcation, the network of marks and signs that have since covered it, divided it up, annihilated its difference and its radical ambivalence in order to organise it into a structural material for sign-exchange, equal to the sphere of objects, to resolve its playful virtuality and its symbolic exchange (not to be confused with sexuality) into sexuality taken as a determining agency, a phallic agency entirely organised around the fetishisation of the phallus as the general equivalent.
The marked body. Sexuality as a determining agency is the form the body takes once it is organised for sign-exchange, with the phallus in the place money holds in the economic order.
The Goldfinger image is the chapter's emblem, with the homology to political economy stated inside the parenthesis.
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The James Bond film Goldfinger provides a perfect example of this. In it, a woman is painted in gold, all her orifices are blocked up in a radical make-up, making her body a flawless phallus (that the make-up should be gold only emphasises the homology with political economy), which of course amounts to death.
The gilded woman of Goldfinger. The body made a flawless phallus is the body sealed into the sign, and the gold makes the homology with the money-form explicit.
The strip-tease is read the same way, through a line Baudrillard takes from the director of the Crazy Horse cabaret, where the erotic is tied to the slowing of death rather than to exposure.
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Dream strip-tease: the space-woman. She was dancing in the void. Because the more slowly a woman dies, the more erotic it is. So I believe that this would reach its apex with a woman in a state of weightlessness.
Quoted by Baudrillard from the Crazy Horse director. The eroticism of the strip-tease is located in the slowing of death, which sets up the chapter's link between the sexualised body and the corpse.
The account of castration is where the argument is sharpest, and where the word is kept exact. To be castrated is not to lack the phallus but to be covered in its substitutes, and the woman is made to perform this on herself.
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To be castrated is to be covered with phallic substitutes. The woman is covered in them, she is summoned to produce a phallus from her body, on pain of perhaps not being desirable. And if women are not fetishists it is because they perform this labour of continual fetishisation on themselves, they become dolls.
Castration redefined as the covering with phallic substitutes. The fetishisation is self-imposed labour, and its product is the doll.
The Phallus Exchange Standard is named by analogy to the money-form, and the analogy is stated as an equation. The example is Bardot in Godard's film.
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This was made admirably apparent in the film Le Mépris, with Brigitte Bardot, examining her own body in a mirror, offering each part of it to the erotic approval of the other, the finished product being a formal addition as object: 'So, d'you love every bit of me?' The body becomes a total system of signs arranged by models under the general equivalent of the phallic cult, just as capital becomes the total system of exchange-value under the general equivalent of money.
The phallus as general equivalent. The closing clause sets the equation directly: the phallic cult is to the body's system of signs what money is to capital's system of exchange-value.
The body is then sorted into reference models keyed to the orders of value, the robot belonging to political economy and the mannequin to the political economy of the sign.
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For the system of political economy, the ideal type of the body is the robot. The robot is the accomplished model of the functional 'liberation' of the body as labour power, it is the extrapolation of absolute, asexual, rational productivity. For the system of the political economy of the sign, the reference model of the body is the mannequin. The mannequin also represents a totally functionalised body under the law of value, but this time as the site of the production of the value-sign. It is no longer labour power, but models of signification that are produced – not only sexual models of fulfilment, but sexuality itself as a model.
Robot and mannequin as the body's two reference models. The robot is the body as labour power, the mannequin the body as producer of the value-sign, mapping the body onto the second and third orders.
The chapter closes on what the whole apparatus is built to keep out. Everything Baudrillard has described can be thought except one thing.
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Only the annulment of phallus-value and the irruption of the radical play of difference remain unthinkable and inadmissible.
The chapter's limit-statement. The one move the system of the phallic general equivalent cannot admit is the annulment of phallus-value itself, the reversibility the rest of the book calls symbolic.
This is the book's centre of gravity and its longest chapter. The thesis is that political economy is built on the exclusion of death, that this exclusion is the model for every other exclusion, and that the only thing that can answer a system organised to defer death is death given symbolically. The chapter opens by making the exclusion of the dead more fundamental than any exclusion of persons, and by dating racism to the universal concept of man rather than to its supposed opposite.
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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.
Racism dated to modernity. The universal concept of man is named as the source of discrimination rather than its cure.
The exclusion of the dead is then set out as the exclusion that precedes and models all others.
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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.
The dead cease to exist. The historical claim is about symbolic circulation: the dead lose their status as partners in exchange.
Page 147
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.
Death as delinquency. The modern peculiarity is named precisely: not that the dead are mourned, but that being dead has become abnormal.
The right to immortality is shown to have a history, and to have begun as a class privilege before it was generalised.
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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.
Immortality as a class privilege generalised. The figure of the year 2000 bc and the Egyptian dynasties is preserved as printed.
The hinge of the chapter is the claim that political economy is founded on a prior operation in which life takes death hostage. Marx's separations are traced back to this one.
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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 shadow has been lost (once death is taken hostage: the pact with the Devil is only ever a political-economic pact).
Life takes death hostage. Marx's alienation is grounded in a prior separation, and the Chamisso tale is read as the political-economic pact in fable form. Note the hero is spelled Schlemil here and Schlemihl elsewhere; see the apparatus.
Death is then named as the general equivalent itself, the thing every subject faces alone in the same way each faces money alone.
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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.
Death as general equivalence. The solitude before money and the solitude before death are the same solitude, which is what makes death the model of the general equivalent.
From this the unconscious is redefined. It is not a depth but a residue, the store of a death that can no longer be exchanged.
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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.
The unconscious as accumulated equivalent death. The symbolic is defined against it, as the reversibility the unconscious forecloses.
The treatment of the death drive is one of the chapter's explicit declinings. Baudrillard takes Freud's drive as the one Western concept that touches the irreducible, then refuses it the status of truth and keeps it only as a deconstructive hypothesis.
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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.
The death drive refused the status of truth. It is kept only as a deconstructive hypothesis, valid within the deconstruction it performs and no further.
The refusal is sealed by reading the drive as myth, with Freud's own description of the drives recruited against the positivist reading.
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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'.
The death drive read as myth. Baudrillard cites Freud's line that the aim of all life is death, and Freud's own admission that the drives are mythical entities, in order to take the drive as myth rather than mechanism.
Political economy and the death drive are then set as the two faces of one operation. Political economy works by economising on death; the death drive states the same exclusion in the opposite voice.
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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.
Political economy economises on death. The death drive is its complement, not its antidote: both keep death from being exchanged.
Bataille is the figure Baudrillard works through most closely here, and the engagement is followed and then corrected. The line he keeps is the one that turns the elimination of death into the implanting of it.
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'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.
Bataille's formula, kept. The economic dream of life without death produces only death, now as an endless nothingness rather than as exchange.
The correction follows, and it is made on the record. Baudrillard marks where Bataille slides into naturalism and refuses to follow him there.
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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'.
The Bataille correction. The symbolic excess of death is held to have nothing in common with the body's biological losses, so Bataille's naturalising of discontinuity is refused even as his formula is kept.
The chapter's long second half reads the modern administration of death across its institutions. The death penalty is the set-piece, and the analysis turns on the abolitionists, who are shown to be carrying out the system's own tendency rather than opposing it.
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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. This is illogical, and above all futile, since responsibility has been dead for a long time.
The abolitionists follow the system's tendency. The argument is not for the death penalty but that its abolition completes a rationalisation the system was already performing, since responsibility, its premise, is already gone.
Euthanasia is read the same way, as the system's own logic surfacing as doctrine, and the figures are kept exactly.
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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.
Euthanasia as systemic logic. The figures of 30 per cent in France and 36 per cent in the USA are preserved as printed; they rhyme with the 35 per cent leukaemia calculation of chapter one.
Security is then defined as the industrial form of death rather than its prevention, with the image of the sarcophagus.
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Security is the industrial prolongation of death, just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution.
Security as the prolongation of death. The parallel with ecology makes the structure visible: the apparatus that promises to avert the catastrophe industrialises it.
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This is the secret of security, like a steak under cellophane: to surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you from dying. Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death.
The sarcophagus. The protected, accident-proofed subject is already dead, sealed in the technical milieu that was meant to keep death out.
The hospital furnishes the chapter's sharpest case of what the system cannot allow, the patient who wants not to be cured but to give his disease, to make it an object of exchange.
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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 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.
The exchange of disease. The demand to give the disease, rather than be cured of it, is the symbolic move the clinic is built to neutralise.
The chapter ends on the chiasmus that states the whole book's wager in a single sentence.
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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.
The closing chiasmus. Political economy as the project of ending death, and death as the only thing that ends political economy: the symmetry is the argument.
The final chapter carries the operation into language itself, through Saussure's late and abandoned research on anagrams in Latin Saturnian verse. Baudrillard takes Saussure's two laws of the anagram as the model of a language that exterminates its own value rather than accumulating it. The first law he calls the law of the theme-word.
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In the composition of the verse, the poet sets the phonemic material provided by the theme-word to work. One (or several) verse(s) contain(s) anagrams of a single word (in general a proper name, of a god or a hero) by being constrained to reproduce itself.
The law of the theme-word, the first of Saussure's two anagram laws. The dispersed name of a god or hero is what the verse is constrained to reproduce, which sets up the chapter's title figure, the name of God exterminated in its own scattering.
From Saussure's discovery Baudrillard draws the consequence Saussure refused to draw, that poetic language is the insurrection of language against its own laws.
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The poetic is the insurrection of language against its own laws. Saussure himself never formulated this subversive consequence.
The poetic as insurrection. The move is explicitly made against Saussure, who is followed to the discovery and then taken past the limit he set himself, on the Preface's instruction to turn Saussure against Saussure.
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The poetic is a process of the extermination of value. The law of the poem is in fact to make sure, following a rigorous proceedure, that nothing remains of it.
The poetic as extermination of value. The poem's law is that nothing be left over, which is the inverse of the accumulation that defines the economy of signification.
The second law is the law of coupling, which requires that every phoneme pair off and leave a remainder of zero. Baudrillard takes the maxim Saussure used to illustrate it and reads enjoyment into the cancellation rather than the addition.
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And in the emblematic citation that he gives this law – NUMERO DEUS PARI GAUDET ('God rejoices in even numbers') – it is said that in one way or another, enjoyment is inseparable not from amassing the Same, reinforcing meaning by the addition of the Same, but quite the contrary, from its cancellation by the double, by the cycle of the anti-vowel or the anti-gram.
The law of coupling and the remainder of zero. Enjoyment is located in the cancellation of the term by its double, not in the accumulation of meaning. In the surrounding passage the dismembered god is reassembled by Isis; the printed text reads Orpheus for Osiris, preserved and noted in the apparatus.
The test of a poem follows directly, and it is the test of residue. A good poem leaves nothing over; value is precisely what is left over.
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It is clear to all – enjoyment bears witness to this – that a good poem is one where nothing is left over, where all the phonemic material in use is consumed; and that, on the other hand, a bad poem (or 'not-poetry-at-all') is one where there is a remainder, where not every significant phoneme, diphoneme, syllable or term has been seized by its double.
The residue test. The poem is judged by whether anything remains unconsumed, which makes the criterion of the poetic the inverse of the criterion of value.
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Value is residue. It is the discourse of signification, our language governed by linguistics. The economy of signification and communication, where we produce and exchange terms and meaning-values, under the law of the code, rests on everything that has not been seized by the symbolic operation of language.
Value is residue. The flat equation ties the whole book together: value is whatever survives the symbolic operation unexchanged, in language as in the economy.
The chapter's account of the Witz and laughter restates the thesis in the vocabulary of enjoyment. Enjoyment is not the release of energy but its haemorrhage, the draining of value to nothing.
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Enjoyment is the haemorrhage of value, the disintegration of the code, the repressive logos. In the comic, the moral imperative of institutional codes (situations, roles, social characters) is lifted; in the Witz, the moral imperative of the identity principle of words themselves, and even the subject, is eliminated.
Enjoyment as the haemorrhage of value. Laughter and the joke are read as the draining of value rather than the discharge of energy, against the economic model of the drive.
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Reversibility is the only source of enjoyment. When we laugh or enjoy, it is because, in one way or another, a twisting or distortion of the signifier or energy has managed to create a void.
Reversibility as the only source of enjoyment. This returns the chapter to the Preface's master term, with enjoyment defined by the void reversibility opens rather than by intensity or liberation.
The chapter, and the book, close by placing the symbolic beyond the unconscious and political economy alike, then stating what a radical theory can rest on. The symbolic is not a deeper layer of either Marx or Freud.
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The symbolic is already beyond the psychoanalytic unconscious, beyond libidinal economy, just as it is beyond value and political economy. We must see that the symbolic processes (reversibility, anagrammatic dispersal, reabsorption without residue) are not at all mixed up with the primary processes (displacement, condensation, repression). They are mutually opposed.
The symbolic beyond the unconscious. Reversibility and anagrammatic dispersal are set against, not identified with, the Freudian primary processes, which keeps the symbolic from collapsing into psychoanalysis.
The last move refuses any synthesis of Marx and Freud. What a radical theory can be built on is named as the extermination of both.
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A radical theory can be based neither on their 'synthesis' nor on their contamination, but only on their respective extermination. Marxism and psychoanalysis are in crisis. Rather than supporting one another, their respective crises must be telescoped and speeded up.
The closing refusal. The two master discourses are to be driven to their respective exterminations rather than synthesised, which is the form the whole book's method takes when turned on its own sources.
Three probable slips in the translation are recorded here and left uncorrected in the body, since the wording is the evidence and the catch is part of the brief's diligence.
The book makes several of its boldest claims with the qualification built in. These are moves Baudrillard states himself, not absences inferred against him.
These are the formulations that return across the book and across the corpus, gathered so the recurrence is visible to a reader tracking Baudrillard's operative categories.
Citations follow Chicago. The primary source is listed first, then the volume's editorial apparatus, then the principal works cited within the text that this brief preserves. Where the source's own citation is anomalous, the standard form is given and the anomaly is noted.
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Revised edition. London: SAGE, 2017. Theory, Culture and Society. Originally published as L'échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). First English edition, London: SAGE, 1993.
Gane, Mike, and Nicholas Gane. "Introduction to the Revised Edition." In Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1–14. London: SAGE, 2017.
Gane, Mike. "Introduction to the First Edition." In Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 15–21. London: SAGE, 2017.
Chamisso, Adelbert von. Peter Schlemihl [The Man who Lost his Shadow]. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 151, 162. Spelled "Schlemil" on 151 and "Schlemihl" on 162; see the apparatus.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172 ("the aim of all life is death").
Freud, Sigmund. "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, 95. 1964. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172 ("Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness").
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 110.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Anagram research cited through Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 216, 219.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge, 1992. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 166, where the title is rendered "The Protestant Work Ethic"; see the apparatus.