About the Work
Forget Foucault is a short polemical book by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, written as a review-essay of Michel Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge and expanded into a pamphlet against Foucault’s entire body of work. Baudrillard sent the piece to the Parisian journal Critique—founded by Georges Bataille, on whose editorial board Foucault himself sat—in December 1976. It was never published there. Instead it appeared as a book a few months later, in 1977, from the Paris publisher Édition Galilée. The English translation first ran as “Forgetting Foucault” in Humanities in Society, and the text was eventually released in book form in English in 1987 under a double title, Forget Foucault / Forget Baudrillard, with a reversible cover designed so that one cover could seem to cancel the other out—a small piece of stagecraft meant to soften the sacrilege of the attack. The Semiotext(e) edition, published in Los Angeles and distributed by The MIT Press, gathers Sylvere Lotringer’s introduction “Exterminating Angel,” the text of Forget Foucault itself, a postface titled “Forget Baudrillard,” and an interview with Lotringer. The volume’s apparatus includes translations by Phil Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti, an introduction and interview translated by Nicole Dufresne, cover art by Josephine Meckseper, and design by Hedi El Kholti.
“Challenge is the opposite of dialogue : it creates a nondialectic, ineluctable space.”
The book is not a conventional scholarly monograph. It is a provocation—part philosophical critique, part theoretical manifesto—whose central gesture is to suggest that Foucault’s celebrated analyses of power, sexuality, and discipline describe a world that has already vanished. Baudrillard’s prose is aphoristic, spiraling, and deliberately excessive; he writes in short, dense bursts that mix argument with invective and speculation. The companion piece, “Forget Baudrillard,” is a long dialogue between Baudrillard and Lotringer, conducted in 1984, four years after the two first met in Los Angeles and discussed the project. Where Forget Foucault is a frontal assault, the dialogue is a more meandering, self-questioning performance in which Baudrillard elaborates, qualifies, and occasionally shrugs off his own positions. Together the two texts form a single gesture: an attempt to think past the theoretical frameworks—Foucault’s genealogy of power, Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, psychoanalysis, Marxism—that Baudrillard believed had become complicit with the very systems they claimed to oppose.
Context
Baudrillard wrote Forget Foucault shortly after publishing Symbolic Exchange and Death, the most sweeping exposition of his main thesis up to that point. Few readers realized how closely the two books were connected. Symbolic Exchange and Death had been released by Gallimard in the same series, Bibliothèque des Sciences humaines, as Foucault’s The Order of Things, yet it elicited no comparable reaction or controversy. It attracted little attention in France and was not published in English until twenty years later. By the time English-speaking readers encountered Baudrillard, he was famous in America for deadpan, seemingly nihilistic views of consumer society; not everyone recognized him as a powerful, idiosyncratic thinker, or realized that his paradoxical formulations derived from an impeccable philosophical core and solid scholarship.
Symbolic Exchange and Death was difficult to place intellectually. It resembled nothing else published in France at the time, as if it had fallen from outer space. Even Baudrillard’s use of the word “symbolic” was confusing, since it fit neither Claude Lévi-Strauss’s nor Jacques Lacan’s usage; his dualistic, confrontational approach seemed to reinstate the very binarism that post-Structuralist philosophers were trying to eliminate. Until then Baudrillard was known as a self-taught sociologist drawn to Situationist ideas, the author of essays unraveling the logic of consumer society—a society that exchanges signs, not goods—and of a Marxist analysis claiming to account for it, in which use value was exposed as a fiction of exchange value. In Consumer Society he had shown that ideological critique, any counter-discourse, remained immanent to what it opposed; even the Situationists were complicit with the spectacle, their experiential drifts and détournements more imaginative but hardly conclusive. Baudrillard wanted something more radical: not to suspend momentarily the semiotic code—the principle of equivalence regulating capital’s flows—but to destroy it. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign he proclaimed that only total revolution, theoretical and practical, could restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value; even signs must burn. This was easier said than done, and it became doubtful whether any class, let alone the working class, could achieve it. Forgetting revolution and “radical critique,” Baudrillard took the task into his own hands, challenging capitalism to provoke its own demise.
The immediate occasion of Forget Foucault was the Parisian publication of The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of Foucault’s history of sexuality. Baudrillard’s review-essay was not merely a critique of that book but a challenge to Foucault’s entire oeuvre. Lotringer considers Forget Foucault by far the best introduction to Baudrillard’s work. He had intended to publish it among the first three books of the new “Foreign Agents” series, started in 1983, but the attack on Foucault made this problematic, since publicly taking on a philosopher of Foucault’s stature was rare, not only in France. Instead he published Baudrillard’s Simulations, which became a best-seller, especially in the art world. Foucault’s death one year later further delayed the pamphlet.
The reception of Baudrillard’s challenge was harsh. He was ostracized for taking on Foucault, yet no one reproached Deleuze for raising many of the same questions. Deleuze made it known around Paris that he saw Baudrillard as “the shame of the profession.” Lotringer suggests it was Baudrillard’s challenge to Foucault—and to himself—that Deleuze most objected to. Contrary to Baudrillard, Deleuze had criticized Foucault’s hypotheses in friendly dialogue, though Deleuze himself said dialogues were useless, since either both parties agree, in which case there is no point, or they disagree, in which case there is nothing to expect. A year later Foucault still defended pleasure as an event outside the subject or on the edge of the subject, opposing Deleuze’s idea that pleasure must be ascribed to a subject.
Structure of the Book
The volume opens with Lotringer’s introduction, “Exterminating Angel,” which recounts the origins of the text, its publication history, and its relation to Symbolic Exchange and Death. The introduction also provides an intellectual portrait of Baudrillard, situating him against the French theoretical landscape of the 1970s and explaining why the pamphlet was received as an act of betrayal by Foucault’s admirers.
The main text, Forget Foucault, follows. It is not divided into numbered chapters but unfolds as a continuous argument in short, dense sections. Baudrillard begins by praising Foucault’s work as “perfect” and immediately qualifying that perfection as disturbing—too beautiful to be true—because Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes. From there the argument moves through a series of linked claims: that Foucault can speak so well of power only because power is dead; that sexuality, like power, is disappearing as a strong referent; that the body, desire, and the unconscious are the trash heap of political economy and the psychic metaphor of capital; that liberation and repression are two sides of the same coin; that power is not a force relation but something exchanged according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse; and that the dominated have always resisted power not through frontal opposition but through a symbolic challenge that dares power to exercise itself to the limit. The text closes with reflections on the death of God as a precedent for the disappearance of power, and on the secret that great politicians, bankers, and theologians have always known: that power does not exist, that it is only a perspectival space of simulation.
The postface, “Forget Baudrillard,” is a long interview-dialogue between Baudrillard and Lotringer, conducted in 1984. It is organized around a series of topics—gambling, appearance versus production, singularities and the universal, law versus rule, the masses and objective irony, May ’68, terrorism, Italy in political simulation, the state of emergency, nuclear deterrence, the challenge to the social, theory as event, the art of disappearance, seduction, the malice of the social, the evil genius of theory, extermination, metaphysics and metatheory, forgetting theory, myth and serials, and the media’s anti-destiny. The dialogue is less a systematic exposition than a performance of Baudrillard’s thought in conversation, with Lotringer pressing him on contradictions and Baudrillard conceding, qualifying, or deflecting as the mood takes him.
Inside the Book
Publication and Translation History
The volume opens with its publication data: Oublier Foucault first appeared in 1977 from Edition Galilee in Paris, and the translation was initially printed as “Forgetting Foucault” in Humanities in Society, reprinted by permission, with copyright held by Semiotext(e) in 2007. Semiotext(e) publishes the book in Los Angeles, distributed by The MIT Press, and it is printed in the United States. “Forget Baudrillard” is translated by Phil Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti; cover art is by Josephine Meckseper, back cover photography by Marine Baudrillard, and design by Hedi El Kholti. The volume contains an Introduction and Interview by Sylvere Lotringer, translated by Nicole Dufresne, and its contents run from the introduction “Exterminating Angel” through “Forget Foucault” and the postface “Forget Baudrillard” to an interview with Lotringer.
Lotringer’s Introduction: Origins of the Text
In December 1976, Baudrillard sent a long review-essay of Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge to the French journal Critique, founded by Georges Bataille, on whose editorial board Foucault sat. Titled “Forget Foucault,” it was not merely a critique of the book but a pamphlet challenging Foucault’s entire oeuvre. It was never published in Critique; it appeared separately as a book a few months later. Lotringer considers it by far the best introduction to Baudrillard’s work. He had intended to publish it among the first three books of the new “Foreign Agents” series, started in 1983, but the attack on Foucault made this problematic, since publicly taking on a philosopher of Foucault’s stature was rare, not only in France. Instead he published Simulations, which became a best-seller, especially in the art world. Foucault’s death one year later further delayed the pamphlet. It was finally released in English in 1987 with a double title, Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard, and a reversible cover, as if one cover could cancel the other out, making it less sacrilegious. “Forget Baudrillard” was a long dialogue Lotringer had with Baudrillard in 1984, four years after they first met in Los Angeles and discussed the project. These mishaps and postponements in France and the United States relate to the peculiar strategy Baudrillard inaugurated with the pamphlet.
Context of Symbolic Exchange and Death
Baudrillard wrote it shortly after publishing Symbolic Exchange and Death, the most sweeping exposition of his main thesis until then; few realized how closely the two books were connected. Symbolic Exchange was released by Editions Gallimard in the same series as Foucault’s The Order of Things, yet elicited no comparable reaction or controversy; it attracted little attention in France and was not published in English until twenty years later. By then Baudrillard was famous in America for deadpan, seemingly nihilistic views of consumer society; not everyone recognized him as a powerful, idiosyncratic thinker, or realized his paradoxical formulations derive from an impeccable philosophical core and solid scholarship.
Symbolic Exchange and Death was not easy to place intellectually; it resembled nothing else published in France then, as if fallen from outer space. Even his use of “symbolic” was confusing, not fitting Claude Levi-Strauss’s or Jacques Lacan’s usage; his dualistic, confrontational approach seemed to reinstate the binarism post-Structuralist philosophers sought to eliminate. Until then Baudrillard was known as a self-taught sociologist drawn to Situationist ideas, author of essays unraveling the logic of consumer society, which exchanges signs rather than goods, and the Marxist analysis claiming to account for it, in which use value was just a fiction of exchange value. In Consumer Society he showed ideological critique, any counter-discourse, remained immanent to what it opposed; even the Situationists were complicit with the spectacle, their experiential drifts and detournements more imaginative but hardly conclusive. Baudrillard wanted something more radical: not to suspend momentarily the semiotic code, the principle of equivalence regulating capital’s flows, but to destroy it. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign he proclaimed that only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value: even signs must burn. This was easier said than done; it became doubtful whether any class, let alone the working class, could achieve it. Forgetting revolution and radical critique, Baudrillard took the task into his own hands, challenging capitalism to provoke its own demise.
Recasting Symbolic Exchange
Baudrillard recast symbolic exchange in light of Freud’s death drive, which involves both the system and its counter-finality. Freud conceived the death drive as a myth telling something about the organization of our culture; the same would apply to Baudrillard’s own system. His concept of symbolic exchange could be seen as his own cultural myth, no truer a myth than Foucault’s discourse about truth. Symbolic exchange may be a hallucination of theory, an elusive anthropological construct needed to upset the discourse of generalized equivalence, which does not make it any less true. Antonin Artaud mythologized the Land of the Tarahumaras, yet his descriptions were anthropologically accurate. Baudrillard’s hallucination of theory, like Artaud’s myth of origin, occurs in a desert: for Baudrillard an American desert, a desert in the midst of a land without origin or original. He grounded his theory nowhere except on the very process of deterritorialization, on the principle of death itself, the form his theory had to take to reverse signs and values, leaving nothing behind. He wrote that nothing remains to base anything on; all that remains is theoretical violence, speculation to the death, whose only method is the radicalization of hypotheses.
Speculating on Foucault
In Symbolic Exchange, Baudrillard was fiercely critical of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thesis on desire, suspecting its savage naturality, a substitute for the good old labor force, but saw nothing wrong with Foucault’s analyses. He begins Forget Foucault praising Foucault, calling his work perfect because the text’s movement gives an admirable account of what it proposes: a powerful generating spiral, and an interstitial flowing of power. He immediately qualifies this perfection as disturbing, too beautiful to be true: Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes. His judgment is sharp: floating theories, including Deleuze and Guattari’s, now merely serve as signs for one another, exchangeable against any other at variable rates without being invested anywhere. Foucault’s thesis on sex was just a sign for Deleuze’s theory of desire. Baudrillard envisaged a book on “The Mirror of Desire” along the line of The Mirror of Production but never wrote it; in Forget Foucault, this mirror of desire was assimilated to Foucault’s interstitial flowing of power, and Baudrillard negotiated the exchange rate between the two theories within his pamphlet.
Foucault on Sex
As Foucault saw it, sex was a habit consciousness had not long been accustomed to, essentially different from sexuality, a fluid configuration adapting to social pressures and historical situations. The sublimation of sexuality through courtly love shored up the medieval system of personal allegiance. By extracting regulated oppositions, sexual differences, from sexuality, Freud shaped sex as conceived today. In The Will of Knowledge, Foucault wondered to what extent the diffuse assemblage of sexuality had been taken over by sex, leading him to dispel Freud and Wilhelm Reich’s repressive hypothesis. Instead of repression, he observed the insistent injunction to express sex everywhere, demanding disclosure in minute detail. While social diffraction of power replaced transcendent power, sexual incitation replaced old interdictions. For Baudrillard, sex’s newly ambiguous status placed it on the same floating basis as capital; liberating sex could only mean exterminating it.
Power and Desire
Foucault’s The Will to Power had a tepid reception in France; Gilles Deleuze wrote his friend a ten-page memo supporting it, yet wondered whether Foucault was miniaturizing the state in his micro-political arrangements: is the notion of power still applicable at this level, and can micro-arrangements really be described in terms of power? Baudrillard raises exactly this question with a vengeance: what if Foucault spoke so well to us of power only because power is dead? Foucault’s new version of power changed nothing; the power principle remained the same, a masterful but obsolete theory. Suspicious of desire for its Lacanian implications, desire dependent on lack, Foucault substituted pleasure, a virgin territory almost devoid of meaning. Baudrillard saw no real difference between the two, nor between repression of sex and the induced mode of speaking Foucault claimed replaced it: Foucault doesn’t want to talk about repression, but what else is that slow, brutal infection of the mind through sex, whose only equivalent in the past was the infection through the soul? Baudrillard seems to give Foucault lessons in Nietzscheism.
Ostracism
Baudrillard was ostracized for taking on Foucault, yet no one reproached Deleuze for raising many of the same questions. Deleuze made it known around Paris that he saw Baudrillard as the shame of the profession. The editor opines it was Baudrillard’s challenge to Foucault, and to himself, that Deleuze most objected to. Contrary to Baudrillard, Deleuze had criticized Foucault’s hypotheses in friendly dialogue, though Deleuze himself said dialogues were useless, since either both agree, no point, or disagree, nothing to expect. A year later Foucault still defended pleasure as an event outside the subject or on the edge of the subject, opposing Deleuze’s idea that pleasure must be ascribed to a subject.
The Perfection of Foucault’s Chronicle
Baudrillard opens by calling the perfection of Foucault’s analytical chronicle of power disturbing. He suggests, implicitly, that Foucault can speak with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, down to their most delicate metamorphoses, only because all of this is now over. Foucault can draw such an admirable picture because he works at the confines of an area, perhaps a classical age of which he would be the last great dinosaur, now collapsing entirely; such a configuration lends itself to dazzling analysis just before its terms are recalled. Baudrillard quotes Apollinaire: when I speak of time, that’s because it’s already no longer there. He asks whether Foucault spoke so well of power, in real objective terms covering manifold diffractions yet not questioning the objective point of view, a power pulverized but whose reality principle is not questioned, only because power is dead: not merely impossible to locate because of dissemination, but dissolved by reversal, cancellation, or made hyperreal through simulation.
Something happened to power that Foucault cannot retrieve from within his genealogy: for him the political has no end, only metamorphoses from the despotic to the disciplinary to the microcellular, following the same process as the physical and biological sciences. This may be enormous progress over the imaginary order of power, but nothing has changed concerning the axiom of power: it remains turned toward a reality principle and a strong truth principle, oriented toward a possible coherence of politics and discourse. Power no longer pertains to the despotic order of the forbidden and the law, but still belongs to the objective order of the real. Foucault can describe power’s successive spirals, the last marking its most minute terminations, yet power never ceases being the term, and the question of its extermination can never arise.
Baudrillard asks the same of sexuality: Foucault spoke so well of it, an analytical discourse on sex freed from the pathos of sex, with the textual clarity of discourses preceding the discovery of the unconscious, perhaps only because its form, like power, was disappearing. Sex, like man or the category of the social, may only last a while. Sex’s reality effect may be fading, giving way to other simulacra and dragging down the great referents of desire, the body, and the unconscious. Foucault’s hypothesis itself suggests how mortal sex is. Psychoanalysis seemingly inaugurates the millennium of sex and desire but perhaps orchestrates it before it disappears altogether, putting an end to the unconscious and desire, just as Marxism put an end to the class struggle, by hypostatizing them and burying them in their theoretical project. We have reached the metalanguage of desire in a discourse on sex that has outreached itself by redoubling the signs of sex to mask indeterminacy and profound disinvestment; the catchword sexual now equals an inert sexual milieu. It is the same with sex as with politics: a quoted passage from Art Press‘s issue on pornography recalls how many strikes, barricades, speeches, and cobblestones it took in ’68 for people to accept that everything is political, and says pornography will let them see that everything is sexuality. Baudrillard finds a double absurdity here, everything is political and everything is sexuality, at the very moment politics collapses and sex becomes involuted, disappearing as a strong referent in the hyperreality of liberated sexuality.
If, as Foucault states, the bourgeoisie used sex and sexuality to give itself a glorious body and prestigious truth to pass on to society as truth and banal destiny, this simulacrum could slip out of its skin and depart. Because he remains within the classic formula of sex, Foucault cannot trace the new spiral of sexual simulation in which sex finds a second existence and takes on the fascination of a lost frame of reference; a footnote adds that pornography may exist only to reactivate this lost referent, proving a contrario by its grotesque hyperrealism that there is some real sex somewhere. Even if Foucault fashions sex into a discursive configuration with internal coherence and a positive index of refraction, the operations, strategies, and schemes played out there are real: the hysterical woman, the perverse adult, the masturbating child, the oedipal family. These real historical devices, like the desiring machines in their order of libidinal energy, have been true. But Foucault cannot tell us about the simulating machines that double each original machine, nor about the great simulating mechanism winding all devices into a wider spiral, because his gaze is fixed on the classic semiurgy of power and sex; he does not see the frenzied semiurgy that has taken hold of the simulacrum. This spiral that erases all others is unlikely to be merely a new aspect of desire or power, because it breaks down all discourse into these terms. Barthes said of Japan that there sexuality is in sex and nowhere else, while in the United States sexuality is everywhere except in sex. Baudrillard asks: what if sex itself is no longer in sex? With sexual liberation and pornography, we witness the agony of sexual reason, and Foucault will only have given us its key when it no longer means anything. The same goes for Discipline and Punish, with its theory of discipline, the panoptic, and transparence, a magistral but obsolete theory.
Power, Desire, and the Reversibility of the Social
As economic reference loses its strength, Baudrillard argues, either desire or power comes to dominate the analysis. Desire, born in psychoanalysis, matures in Deleuzian anti-psychoanalysis as a shattered molecular force; power, with its far longer history, is described by Foucault as dispersed and interstitial—a grid of bodies and ramiform controls. Foucault economizes desire and history, prudently refusing to deny them, yet in his account everything returns to power, just as with Deleuze everything returns to desire and with Lyotard to intensity. These shattered notions nonetheless survive miraculously intact in current acceptance. Power, despite its pulverization, remains a structural and polar notion with a perfect genealogy and an inexplicable presence, whole in each of its microscopic points. The reversal is hard to see—the same aporia afflicts Deleuze, for whom desire’s reversion into repression is equally inexplicable. Power no longer possesses a coup de force; nothing lies on this side of it or beyond it. The passage from the molar to the molecular is, for Deleuze, a revolution of desire; for Foucault, an anamorphosis of power. What Foucault fails to see is that power is dying—even infinitesimal power—undermined by reversal, tormented by reversibility and by a death that does not appear in the genealogical process alone.
With Foucault we always brush against political determination in its last instance. One form dominates, diffracted into the models of prison, military, asylum, and disciplinary action. This form is no longer rooted in ordinary relations of production—those are modeled after it instead; it finds its procedural system within itself, an enormous advance over grounding power in a substance of production or desire. Foucault unmasks the final and causal illusions concerning power but says nothing of the simulacrum of power itself. Power is an irreversible principle of organization because it fabricates the real, always more real, effecting quadrature, nomenclature, and a dictature without appeal; nowhere does it cancel itself, become entangled, or mingle with death. Even without finality or last judgment, power returns to its own identity as final principle—the last term, the irreducible web, the last tale told. According to Foucault, this is the come-on power offers, not merely a discursive trap. What he does not see is that power is never there; its institution, like spatial perspective versus “real” space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of perspective—no more real than economic accumulation, a tremendous trap. Whether of time, value, or subject, the axiom and myth of real or possible accumulation govern us everywhere, though nothing is ever amassed; stockpiles are self-consuming like the modern megalopolis or an overloaded memory. Any attempt at accumulation is ruined in advance by the void. Something in us disaccumulates unto death, undoes, destroys, liquidates, disconnects so that we can resist the pressure of the real and live. Something at the bottom of the production system resists infinite expansion—otherwise we would all be buried. Something in power resists as well; there is no difference between those who enforce it and those who submit, not because roles are interchangeable but because power is reversible in its form. On both sides something holds out against the unilateral exercise and infinite expansion of power, as elsewhere against the infinite expansion of production. This resistance is not a “desire”; it causes power to come undone in exact proportion to its logical and irreversible extension—and it is taking place everywhere today.
The whole analysis of power needs reconsideration. To have power or not, to take it or lose it, to incarnate or challenge it: if this were power, it would not even exist. Foucault tells us power is something that functions, quoting The History of Sexuality: power is not an institution, not a structure, not a strength we are endowed with, but the name attributed to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. Neither central nor unilateral nor dominant, power is distributional; like a vector, it operates through relays and transmissions. Because it is an immanent, unlimited field of forces, we still do not understand what power runs into, what it stumbles against, since it is pure expansion and magnetization. If power were this magnetic infiltration ad infinitum of the social field, it would long ago have ceased meeting resistance. Inversely, if it were the one-sidedness of an act of submission, as in the traditional optic, it would long ago have been overthrown everywhere. Yet this has never happened, apart from a few historical exceptions. For materialist thinking this appears an internally insoluble problem: why do the dominated masses not immediately overthrow power? Why fascism? Against this unilateral theory—which survives particularly among revolutionaries who would really like power for themselves—and against Foucault’s functional vision in terms of relays and transmissions, we must say that power is something that is exchanged. Not economically, but in the sense that power is executed according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse: neither axis nor indefinite relay, but a cycle. If power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it simply disappears. Power seduces, but not in the vulgar sense of a complicit desire on the part of the dominated—that would be basing it in the desire of others, really going overboard in taking people for idiots. No, power seduces by that reversibility which haunts it, and upon which a minimal symbolic cycle is set up. Dominators and dominated exist no more than victims and executioners.
The Challenge to Power and the Secret of the Void
All forms of power have camouflaged a fundamental challenge by reducing it to force relations—dominator and dominated, exploiter and exploited—channeling resistance into a frontal relation. This conception still dominates in Foucault, where guerilla warfare has replaced the chessboard of classical battle. In force relations, power always wins, even as it changes hands through revolutions. Baudrillard doubts anyone has thought it possible to exorcise power by force. Each person knows deep down that power is a personal challenge, a challenge to the death, answerable only by a counterchallenge that breaks power’s logic or encloses it in circular logic. This counterchallenge is nonpolitical, nondialectical, and nonstrategic, yet its strength throughout history has been incalculable. It dares power-holders to exercise power to the limit, which would spell death for the dominated. No form of power dares go that far, so power breaks up facing this unanswerable challenge. There was a time when power allowed itself to be sacrificed according to this symbolic game. Since power ceased being symbolic to become political and a strategy of social domination, the symbolic challenge has haunted and undone the political. Now no one exercises power or wants it because its secret has been lost. Power need only be enclosed within power for it to burst. Power has defended itself by being democratized, liberalized, vulgarized, decentralized, and deterritorialized, but the reverse challenge ends only with power.
People always reason in terms of strategies and force relations, missing the oppressed’s desperate effort to escape oppression. The challenge is unremitting and invisible, manifesting in acts without objective, duration, or future. It is hopeless, but hope is a weak value. Challenge is the opposite of dialogue, creating a nondialectic, ineluctable space. It is neither means nor end, knowing neither middle-range nor long-term; its only term is the immediacy of response or death. Everything linear has an end; challenge alone is without end since it is indefinitely reversible, which gives it prodigious force. A footnote compares this reversibility to the feminine category’s effect on the masculine throughout sexual history: the feminine challenge of taking pleasure alone and exercising the right to pleasure and sex. Women’s right to reserve sex and deny pleasure, their reversals and refraction of sexual power into the void, have exerted incalculable pressure. Today phallocracy crumbles under this challenge, taking with it traditional sexuality—not because of social pressure from feminine liberation.
No one has seriously considered this nonpolitical side of power, its symbolic reversal. This oppositional challenge has always been at stake and has overcome power’s political definition as central, legislative, or police power. At the current stage, power appears as a curvature of social space, a summation of scattered particles, or a branching of random elements in clusters. This is power à la Foucault—conductor, inductor, strategist of speech. But Foucault’s turnaround from repressive centrality to shifting positivity is only a peripeteia. We stay within political discourse—”we never get out of it,” says Foucault—though we need to grasp the radical lack of definition in the political, its lack of existence, its simulation. We need a symbolic violence more powerful than any political violence. Considering the real history of class struggle: its only moments were when the dominated class fought on the basis of its self-denial as such, on the basis that it amounted to nothing. Marx said it should be abolished one day, but this was still political. When the class prefers to act as a radical non-class, as the lack of existence of a class, acting out its own death within capital’s explosive structure, choosing to implode suddenly instead of seeking political expansion and class hegemony—then the result is June ’48, the Commune, or May ’68. The secret of the void lies in the incalculable force of implosion, contrary to revolutionary explosion—think of the Latin Quarter on the afternoon of May 3.
Power did not always consider itself as power. The secret of great politicians was knowing that power does not exist—it is only a perspectival space of simulation, as was the pictorial Renaissance. If power seduces, it is because it is simulacrum, undergoing metamorphosis into signs and invented on the basis of signs. This is why parody, the reversal of signs or their hyperextension, can touch power more deeply than any force relation. This secret belongs also to great bankers (money does not exist) and to great theologians and inquisitors (God does not exist, God is dead). This gives incredible superiority. Power is truly sovereign when it grasps this secret and confronts that challenge. When it pretends to find a truth, substance, or representation—in the will of the people—it loses sovereignty, allowing others to hurl back the challenge of its life or death, until it dies from infatuation with itself, superstitious belief in itself as substance, and failure to recognize itself as a void or something reversible in death. At one time leaders were killed when they lost that secret. When one talks so much about power, it is because it can no longer be found anywhere—just as with God, the stage in which he was everywhere came just before the one in which he was dead.
Subjectivity, Desire, and the Dissolution of Representation
Asked whether individual subjectivity can be totally short-circuited by the event, Baudrillard holds that the problematic of the subject implies reality can still be represented, that things give off signs guaranteeing their existence and significance—in short, that there is a reality principle. All of this is now collapsing with the dissolution of the subject, the well-known crisis of representation. The collapse of this system of values, which also supported the political and theatrical scenes, does not leave a complete void but a more radical situation. The tabula rasa brings out latent cultural tendencies and clears the ground, but at a high price in emptiness and disenchantment, involving sadness and the sadness of nihilism. Baudrillard concedes that logic leads only to disenchantment and that one cannot avoid going a long way with negativity and nihilism, but suggests a more exciting, not more reassuring, world opens up, where the name of the game remains secret, ruled by reversibility and indetermination. This is what he calls radical, leaving no roots. Radicality is defined not as a sublime virtue of theory but as isolating in things whatever allows for interpretation, whatever overburdens them with meaning; the analysis gives him a curious sense of giddiness. The interlocutor asks who is there to feel giddy, noting that to exult in one’s own disappearance is a paradoxical form of subjectivity, and asks what remains once the overload of meaning is liquidated. The answer: a good deal less than one would like to admit; every system of value—in terms of energy, for example—seems to be crumbling down.
Asked why, having settled his score with Marx in The Mirror of Production, he has not written a Mirror of Desire to be done with the judgment of Freud, Baudrillard says he cannot bring himself to write on psychoanalysis; attacking its ideology frontally or proclaiming its demise would be useless—you have to allow desire to catch itself in its own trap. Desire was caught from the start; that is the reactive side of any theory. You can only reveal a phenomenon if it is already disappearing. Hysteria is now nowhere and everywhere; often the pyramid of concepts is piled sky-high on top of an empty tomb. The same sign controls appearance and disappearance. Sexuality has gone weightless, reaching the state of obscenity, while everyone conspires to mask its disappearance by setting up trompe l’oeil stage decors. Psychoanalysis pretends to cure sexual neurosis while injecting it with a semblance of reality. Foucault, though far from the Freudian point of view, still participates in that nostalgic effect of theory: paying so much attention to the genealogy of sexuality accredits the idea that it is still a space to be occupied—but it is more like Grand Central Station. Baudrillard sees no point in retracing the genealogy of sexuality.
The interlocutor remarks that American sexuality is more Foucauldian than Foucault—in sex clinics, masturbation has become a categorical imperative to reach a synthetic genitality—and compares Baudrillard’s position to Foucault’s: Foucault wrote the archeology of things; Baudrillard takes them to cryogenicization. In The Order of the Simulacra his approach was close to Foucault’s. Baudrillard replies he could have made a book of the three orders; others rushed in to find examples; he does not believe it holds up. He once believed in Foucauldian genealogy, but the order of simulation is antinomical to genealogy. Asked if this is an anti-genealogy, he says no: taken to the extreme, the logic yields the reabsorption of all genealogy; Foucault was unable to make the leap, and what interests Baudrillard is the mysterious point where Foucault stops and finds nothing more to say.
The interlocutor notes Baudrillard criss-crosses Deleuze and Guattari’s path—breaking from representation, rejecting dialectics, dismissing meaning and metaphor—but parts company on subjectivity: they put the subject in flux, he abolishes it; they make desire the basis of becoming, he sees becoming as annihilating desire. Baudrillard says he could not care less about desire, neither wanting to abolish nor consider it; he would not know where to put it. The interlocutor observes he derives energy from the collapse of values, making desire as basis redundant.
Beau Brummel and the Delegation of Wanting
Baudrillard opens the exchange by proposing that what remains, once everything is equally possible or already accomplished, is simply to display choices. He tells the story of Beau Brummel, who travelled everywhere with his manservant; in Scotland, surrounded by lakes each lovelier than the last, Brummel turned to the servant and asked, “Which lake do I prefer?” Having to choose, Baudrillard remarks, is a bore — that is precisely what servants are for, and it is not what counts. Power, Knowledge, and Will, he suggests, ought to be the responsibility of their own inventors. He finds it entirely sensible that the masses snobbishly delegate to intellectuals and politicians the business of managing, choosing, and knowing what one wants, joyously dumping burdensome categories that no one truly wants. He denies that people want to be told what they want, and doubts they want to know what they want or even desire to want at all. Socialism, he says, rests on exactly that assumption — that people ought to want this, that they are social and supposed to know themselves and their own desires. We have, he thinks, pressed beyond truth and reality.
Objective Irony and the Silent Majority
This leads Baudrillard to define what he calls “objective irony”: the masses’ offhand way of shedding responsibilities, turning power back to its fantasies, knowledge to its obsessions, will to its illusions. The silent majority is no accomplice of law and order; its silence is a dead silence. The masses are “playing dead,” and this stubborn silence and insolent reserve would sanction the disappearance of the social. Large systems of information, he argues, relieve the masses of any responsibility to know, understand, or be informed, while advertising relieves people of having to choose — something perfectly human and horrible at once. Delegating power to people is ironic, like catching them in a trap that closes on the political class itself. He sees a profound reversal of strategy by the masses: no longer subversion or revolution, but a gigantic devolution from an unwanted liberty, with an evil genius lurking within it. We are realizing how much terror lies at the heart of the paradise of communication. Beyond that, events are inconsequential, and theories even more so. Lotringer interjects that there is power in being inconsequential.
May ’68 and the Inertial Event
Baudrillard says this is what interested him about May ’68: behind the political, revolutionary, historical scene and its failure lay the power of an event that absorbed its own continuity, imploding, swallowing its own energy and disappearing. May ’68 swept down on France like an avalanche and vanished mysteriously without a trace. Asked where the energy went, he says nowhere — certainly not into socialism — and that it must have been reabsorbed, not necessarily underground waiting to reemerge. May ’68 was the first event corresponding to this inertial point of the political scene; continuity disappears, and only such things fascinate him. A list of topics follows — Going to Extremes, The Scenario of Deterrence, Terrorism and Hyperreality, The Impossible War, Fascism and Transpolitics, May ’68, Two Forms of Secret, The Ecstasy of Socialism, The Story of Sophie Calle, Ends, Means, Power Doesn’t Exist, God’s Strategy, Italy in Political Simulation, The Challenge to the Social. Lotringer says comprehension is no longer involved; Baudrillard agrees but adds that more comprehension will be re-secreted, since it is intolerable that events, desires, and theory should be inconsequential. He cites Paul Virilio’s “aesthetic of disappearance,” and says theory allows beautiful effects of disappearance. There is no difference in results, he claims, between what ended with May ’68 and what Giscard d’Estaing or Mitterand accomplished; acceleration permits another disappearance effect. He agrees with Virilio that theory goes to extremes, arguing that one must believe going somewhere is not just a metaphor; if it is a challenge there is a partner, no longer a dialectic but a rule of the game, and somewhere a limit constituting the real must exist for theory to exist.
Virilio, Deterrence, and the Nuclear Wager
For Virilio, a trend toward extremes is at work: the military class swallows civilian society before disappearing in a suicidal race. Virilio’s calculation pushes the military to an extreme absolute of power that causes its own downfall, placing it before the judgment of God and absorbing it into the society it destroys. Baudrillard credits Virilio with irony: the system devours its own principle of reality, inflating empty forms until absolute reversal. Baudrillard is less interested in military hardware than in software, but finds the form of Virilio’s idea valid. Asked about the state of emergency and nuclear extermination, he says he thinks about it but sees no fatal term; the nuclear threat is a “soft” mode of extermination by deterrence, not apocalyptic. He shares the scenario of deterrence with Virilio, who moves between the real and mythical term. For Baudrillard it is an intellectual wager; if the metaphor collapsed into reality he would stop writing. The implosive side of the nuclear threat paralyzes everything — more than deterrence, it is political tetanus. Virilio is interested in strategic vicissitudes; Baudrillard lacks the patience. He asks whether the nuclear threat has a political term or makes it disappear when the bomb hits, comparing it to the media, and doubts that political management of a “transpolitical” material is possible.
Terrorism and the Implosion of the Social
Lotringer asks about terrorism, which led Baudrillard to discard the concept of the social, citing the Red Army Faction versus the German government. Once extremes were eliminated — the Baader-Meinhof “suicides” at Stammheim — bargaining and compromise became possible; politics and history regained the upper hand. Terrorism, Baudrillard says, can have a visible, spectacular form within the historical realm, succeeded by negotiable terror. The closing dialogue then turns to theory, the social, and the media. Baudrillard recalls Simulations, where he was interested in effecting a “diversion.” He was struck that the Italians — particularly figures of the Autonomia movement — when facing an emergency, found in “your propositions,” even disenchanted ones, instruments they immediately tried to use politically. Rather than respecting “your” ends (or their absence), they took concepts as floating theoretical tools to reinvest in particular situations. They diverted “your” diversion, and Baudrillard admits he likes this practical perversion of “your” theoretical perversion.
Italy in Political Simulation
This, he says, is indeed the situation in Italy: everyone prolongs a situation that isn’t exactly political, and no one can pull the strings anymore. It is seductive because of that indecisiveness everyone plays with, often unknowingly. He likes the Italian ability to turn around an objective state that would otherwise be catastrophic — the State could have disappeared long ago, along with politics. In fact, the State has never existed there. He thinks every other country is in the same situation despite appearances: all are in political simulation, but on the sly. Italy, by contrast, exercises the simulacrum as such, seduction as such. The simulacrum supports politics instead of wiping it out. The Italians have a long tradition of this with the Jesuits and the Church, in Nietzsche’s sense: the end is always imminent, yet almost joyful resurrection is possible with each event. One couldn’t say the same of Poland. Whoever is ideologically active cannot help fantasizing about a world that would make more sense or return to sense — hence terrorism, which invokes an enormous fantasy of political order, of the State, the better to murder it. But terrorism makes no more sense than the State; they are accomplices in a circular setup. In Germany as in Italy (neither ever unified or centralized), terrorism helps the State appear. It is a partner more than an adversary. Events play out on a conscious level of adversity, war, incompatible ideologies, but underneath, who would dream the situation becomes so terroristic it joins its other extreme? He doesn’t see how it can end; it is not objectively representable. In the terrorist act, as in nuclear confrontation between the Great Powers (in fact State terrorism), there is not an explosive phenomenon but the point at which the social implodes.
The Challenge to the Real
Lotringer challenges him: what is “the social”? Baudrillard hypostatizes a complex reality into an abstraction, then sends it back to unreality and proclaims its end — isn’t that too easy? Baudrillard replies that he takes the social as already hypostatized: “From hypostasis to ecstasy!” Lotringer objects that if the social doesn’t exist, it can’t implode. Baudrillard concedes this is plausible, but offers the hypothesis that at a given moment the social did exist — not as a representation of society nor positively, but as a challenge to the reality of things, as a virulent myth. This is how Georges Bataille saw sociology: as a challenge to the nature of the social and to society. History also existed in that sense. But that isn’t really existence, because when history begins to exist, there is quickly nothing left but to treat it as an instance of jurisdiction and meaning. He has never resolved that ambiguity between being and existence; he believes it insoluble. A section heading lists further topics: The Challenge to the Real, A Geoseismic View of Things, Theory as Event, The Art of Disappearance, The Vortex of Implosion, Seduction, The Malice of the Social, The Slipperiness of Forms, The Evil Genius of Theory, Extermination, Metaphysics and Metatheory, “Forgetting” Theory, Myth and Serials, The Media’s Anti-Destiny.
Theory as Challenge to the Real
Lotringer asks: for Nietzsche the philosopher must decipher action and evaluate forces; Baudrillard conceives the social as the depletion of an empty form — so what role for theory? Must it be a virulent myth as for Bataille? If the social is weightless, what does myth attack, and for what cause? Baudrillard admits the question troubles him. Where is theory situated today? Is it satellized, wandering in realms with nothing to do with real facts? As long as you consider there is a real world, there is a possible position for theory — a dialectical one — where theory and reality can be exchanged, and theory transforms the world. That is not his position anymore, and never was, though he never succeeded in formulating it. In his opinion theory is simply a challenge to the real, a challenge to the world to exist, often a challenge to God to exist. Religion, in its former heretical phase, was always a negation — at times violent — of the real world, which gave it strength; afterward it became reconciliation rather than a pleasure or reality principle. This holds for theory: it can attempt to reconcile the real with itself, or maintain a principle of antagonism — absolutely irreconcilable, almost Manichaean. One maintains a position of challenge, different from unreality. Lotringer suggests that is exactly what Baudrillard does: make stakes unreal by pushing them to the limit. Baudrillard says he holds no position on reality; reality remains an unshakeable postulate toward which one relates either adversarially or reconcilingly. The real — perhaps it exists, no, it doesn’t — is the insurmountable limit of theory, the point at which theory can do nothing. That doesn’t make theory a failure; the real is a challenge to the theoretical edifice. Theory can have no status other than challenging the real.
Main Arguments
Baudrillard’s central argument is that Foucault’s analyses of power, sexuality, and discipline are magistral but obsolete. Foucault can speak with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline—down to their most delicate metamorphoses—only because all of this is now over. He works at the confines of an area, perhaps a “classical age,” of which he would be the last great dinosaur, an area now collapsing entirely; such a configuration lends itself to dazzling analysis just before its terms are recalled. Baudrillard quotes Apollinaire: “When I speak of time, that’s because it’s already no longer there.” He asks whether Foucault spoke so well of power—in real objective terms covering manifold diffractions yet never questioning the objective point of view, a power pulverized but whose reality principle is not questioned—only because power is dead: not merely impossible to locate because of dissemination, but dissolved by reversal, cancellation, or made hyperreal through simulation.
Something happened to power that Foucault cannot retrieve from within his genealogy. For Foucault the political has no end, only metamorphoses from the “despotic” to the “disciplinary” to the “microcellular,” following the same process as the physical and biological sciences. This may be enormous progress over the imaginary order of power, but nothing has changed concerning the axiom of power: it remains turned toward a reality principle and a strong truth principle, oriented toward a possible coherence of politics and discourse. Power no longer pertains to the despotic order of the forbidden and the law, but still belongs to the objective order of the real. Foucault can describe power’s successive spirals, the last marking its most minute terminations, yet power never ceases being the term, and the question of its extermination can never arise.
The same goes for sexuality. Foucault spoke so well of sex—an analytical discourse on sex freed from the pathos of sex, with the textual clarity of discourses preceding the discovery of the unconscious—perhaps only because its form, like power, was disappearing. Sex, like man or the category of the social, may only last a while. Its reality effect may be fading, giving way to other simulacra and dragging down the great referents of desire, the body, and the unconscious. Foucault’s hypothesis itself suggests how mortal sex is. Psychoanalysis seemingly inaugurates the millennium of sex and desire but perhaps orchestrates it before it disappears altogether—putting an end to the unconscious and desire, just as Marxism put an end to the class struggle, by hypostatizing them and burying them in their theoretical project. We have reached the metalanguage of desire in a discourse on sex that has outreached itself by redoubling the signs of sex to mask indeterminacy and profound disinvestment; the catchword “sexual” now equals an inert sexual milieu. It is the same with sex as with politics: it took many strikes, barricades, speeches, and cobblestones in ’68 for people to accept that everything is political, and pornography will let them see that everything is sexuality. Baudrillard finds a double absurdity here—everything is political, everything is sexuality—at the very moment politics collapses and sex becomes involuted, disappearing as a strong referent in the hyperreality of “liberated” sexuality.
If, as Foucault states, the bourgeoisie used sex and sexuality to give itself a glorious body and prestigious truth to pass on to society as truth and banal destiny, this simulacrum could slip out of its skin and depart. Because he remains within the classic formula of sex, Foucault cannot trace the new spiral of sexual simulation in which sex finds a second existence and takes on the fascination of a lost frame of reference. Pornography may exist only to reactivate this lost referent, proving a contrario by its grotesque hyperrealism that there is some real sex somewhere. Even if Foucault fashions sex into a discursive configuration with internal coherence and a positive index of refraction, the operations, strategies, and schemes played out there are real: the hysterical woman, the perverse adult, the masturbating child, the oedipal family. These real historical devices—like the “desiring machines” in their order of libidinal energy—have been true. But Foucault cannot tell us about the simulating machines that double each “original” machine, nor about the great simulating mechanism winding all devices into a wider spiral, because his gaze is fixed on the classic “semiurgy” of power and sex; he does not see the frenzied semiurgy that has taken hold of the simulacrum. This spiral that erases all others is unlikely to be merely a new aspect of desire or power, because it breaks down all discourse into these terms. Barthes said of Japan: “There, sexuality is in sex and nowhere else. In the United States, sexuality is everywhere except in sex.” Baudrillard asks: what if sex itself is no longer in sex? With sexual liberation and pornography, we witness the agony of sexual reason, and Foucault will only have given us its key when it no longer means anything. The same goes for Discipline and Punish, with its theory of discipline, the “panoptic,” and “transparence”—a magistral but obsolete theory. Control by an objectifying gaze, even pulverized into micro-devices, is passé; with the simulation device we are as far from the strategy of transparence as the latter is from the immediate symbolic operation of punishment Foucault describes. A spiral is missing, one at whose threshold Foucault halts, never crossing into a current revolution of the system.
Baudrillard then develops his own counter-thesis. The body we constantly refer to has no reality other than that of the sexual and productive model. Capital, in one and the same movement, gives birth both to the energetics of labor power and to the body we today dream of as the locus of desire and the unconscious. This body serves as a sanctuary for psychic energy and drives; dominated by these drives and haunted by primary processes, it has itself become primary process—thus an anti-body, the ultimate revolutionary referent. Both are conceived simultaneously in repression, and their apparent antagonism is yet another effect of repression. To rediscover in the secret of bodies an unbound “libidinal” energy opposed to the bound energy of productive bodies, and to rediscover a phantasmal, instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital. Desire and the unconscious are thus the trash heap of political economy and the psychic metaphor of capital. Sexual jurisdiction is the ideal means—a fantastic extension of the jurisdiction governing private property—for assigning each individual the management of a certain capital: psychic, libidinal, sexual, unconscious capital. Each individual is accountable to himself for his capital, under the sign of his own liberation.
This, Baudrillard says, is what Foucault tells us in spite of himself: nothing functions with repression, everything functions with production; nothing functions with repression, everything functions with liberation—but it is the same thing. Any form of liberation is fomented by repression: liberation of productive forces is like that of desire; liberation of bodies is like that of women’s liberation. No force or liberated form of speech escapes the logic of liberation; each constitutes one more turn in the spiral of power. “Sexual liberation” unites in one revolutionary ideal the two major effects of repression: liberation and sexuality. Historically this process has built up for at least two centuries, but today it is in full bloom with the blessing of psychoanalysis—just as political economy and production advanced with Marx’s sanction. This conjecture dominates us completely today, even through the “radical” contestation of Marx and psychoanalysis. The political critique of Marx against bureaucratic perversion by revolutionary parties, and against economistic infrastructural perversion of class struggle, merely generalizes the axiomatic of production. Likewise the oedipal critique of psychoanalysis against perversion of desire by the signifier, the law, castration, and the oedipal model only glorifies the axiomatic of desire and the unconscious in its purest form. The purified axioms of Marxism and psychoanalysis converge in today’s only “revolutionary” catchword—the “productivity” of “desire.” The “desiring machine” fulfills in one movement the positive destiny of Marxism and psychoanalysis, coming together under less naive auspices than Reich’s, which were still marked by the Oedipus complex, the proletariat, repression, and class struggle. Reich aimed too soon; his mixture is archaic and his interpretation does not hold up. Today, on the basis of a productivity cleansed of its contradictions and a libido cleansed of the Oedipus complex and repression, the collusion may be accomplished: the mirror of production and that of desire will refract each other endlessly.
The category of the sexual and sexual discourse were born as the category of the clinical and the clinical gaze came into being—where before there was nothing but uncontrolled, senseless, unstable, or highly ritualized forms, and therefore no repression either. We condemn earlier societies as repressed, non-“liberated,” not even knowing the unconscious. Psychoanalysis cleared the way for sex by telling what was hidden—Baudrillard calls this the racism of truth, the evangelical racism of psychoanalysis. Other cultures know neither repression nor the unconscious because they do not know the category of the sexual. We act as if the sexual were repressed wherever it does not appear in its own right—our way of saving sex through the “sex principle.” Our moral system hides behind the hypothesis of repression. To talk of repressed or sublimated sexuality in feudal, rural, and primitive societies is utter foolishness. On that basis one can say with Foucault that there has never been any repression in our culture either—but in the sense that there has never truly been any sexuality. Sexuality, like political economy, is only montage; it is a simulacrum which experience has forever crossed up and surpassed. The coherence of homo sexualis has never had more reality than that of homo oeconomicus.
A long process establishes the psychic, the sexual, and the “other scene” of fantasy and the unconscious, as well as the energy produced there. Psychic energy is a direct effect of the “scenic” hallucination of repression, through which energy is hallucinated as sexual substance, then metaphorized and metonymized according to various topical and economical instances and modalities of secondary, tertiary repression. Baudrillard calls this a marvelous edifice on the part of psychoanalysis, the loveliest hallucination of the world unseen, as Nietzsche would say. What matters is not whether the economic, biological, or psychic bears the cost of this mise-en-scène, nor whether we refer to the “scene” or the “other scene”—it is the scenario that counts; psychoanalysis in its entirety as a model of simulation must be questioned.
As economic reference loses strength, either desire or power becomes preponderant. The reference of desire, born in psychoanalysis, matures in Deleuzian anti-psychoanalysis as shattered molecular desire. The reference of power, with a long history, is discussed by Foucault as dispersed, interstitial power—a grid of bodies and ramiform controls. Foucault economizes desire and history, prudently not denying them, yet everything returns to power; with Deleuze everything returns to desire; with Lyotard to intensity. These shattered notions remain miraculously intact in current acceptance. Desire and intensity remain force/notions; with Foucault power remains, despite pulverization, a structural and polar notion with perfect genealogy and inexplicable presence, whole in each of its points or microscopic dots. Reversal is hard to see; the same aporia appears in Deleuze, where desire’s reversion into repression is inexplicable. Power no longer has a coup de force—nothing else on this side or beyond it. Foucault does not see that power is dying, even infinitesimal power, undermined by reversal, tormented by reversibility and death not appearing in genealogical process alone.
With Foucault we always brush against political determination in its last instance. One form dominates, diffracted into models of prison, military, asylum, disciplinary action. This form is no longer rooted in ordinary relations of production; these are modeled after it. It finds its procedural system within itself—enormous progress over establishing power in a substance of production or desire. Foucault unmasks final and causal illusions concerning power but says nothing of the simulacrum of power itself. Power is an irreversible principle of organization because it fabricates the real, always more real, effecting quadrature, nomenclature, dictature without appeal; nowhere does it cancel itself, become entangled, or mingle with death. Even without finality or last judgment, power returns to its own identity as final principle—the last term, irreducible web, last tale told; it structures the indeterminate equation of the word.
According to Foucault, this is the come-on power offers, not simply a discursive trap. What Foucault does not see: power is never there; its institution, like spatial perspective versus “real” space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of perspective—no more reality than economic accumulation—a tremendous trap. Whether of time, value, subject, or other, the axiom and myth of real or possible accumulation govern us everywhere, though nothing is ever amassed; stockpiles are self-consuming like modern megalopolis or overloaded memories. Any attempt at accumulation is ruined in advance by the void. Something in us disaccumulates unto death, undoes, destroys, liquidates, disconnects so we can resist the pressure of the real and live. Something at the bottom of the production system resists infinite expansion—otherwise we would all be buried. Something in power resists as well; no difference between those who enforce it and those who submit: this distinction has become meaningless, not because roles are interchangeable but because power is reversible in its form—on both sides something holds out against unilateral exercise and infinite expansion of power, as elsewhere against infinite expansion of production. This resistance is not a “desire”; it causes power to come undone in exact proportion to its logical and irreversible extension.
The whole analysis of power needs reconsideration. To have power or not, take it or lose it, incarnate or challenge it: if this were power, it would not even exist. Foucault tells us power is something that functions; he quotes The History of Sexuality: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. Neither central, nor unilateral, nor dominant, power is distributional; like a vector, it operates through relays and transmissions. Because it is an immanent, unlimited field of forces, we still do not understand what power runs into and against what it stumbles, since it is expansion, pure magnetization. If power were this magnetic infiltration ad infinitum of the social field, it would long ago have ceased meeting resistance. Inversely, if it were the one-sidedness of an act of submission, as in the traditional “optic,” it would long ago have been overthrown everywhere, collapsed under antagonistic forces. Yet this has never happened, apart from a few “historical” exceptions. For “materialist” thinking this appears an internally insoluble problem: why don’t “dominated” masses immediately overthrow power? Why fascism? Against this unilateral theory, which survives particularly among “revolutionaries” who would really like power for themselves, against this native vision, but also against Foucault’s functional vision in terms of relays and transmissions, we must say that power is something that is exchanged. Not economically, but in the sense that power is executed according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse—neither axis nor indefinite relay, but a cycle. And if power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it simply disappears. We must say that power seduces, but not in the vulgar sense of a complicit form of desire on the part of the dominated—this comes down to basing it in the desire of others, really going overboard in taking people for idiots. No, power seduces by that reversibility which haunts it, and upon which a minimal symbolic cycle is set up. Dominators and dominated exist no more than victims and executioners.
All forms of power have camouflaged a fundamental challenge by reducing it to force relations—dominator/dominated, exploiter/exploited—channeling resistance into a frontal relation. This conception still dominates in Foucault, where guerilla warfare has replaced the chessboard of classical battle. In force relations, power always wins, even as it changes hands through revolutions. Baudrillard doubts anyone has thought it possible to exorcise power by force. Each person knows deep down that power is a personal challenge, a challenge to the death, answerable only by a counterchallenge to break power’s logic or enclose it in circular logic. This counterchallenge is nonpolitical, nondialectical, and nonstrategic, yet its strength throughout history has been incalculable. It dares power-holders to exercise power to the limit, spelling death for the dominated. No form of power dares go that far, so power breaks up facing this unanswerable challenge.
There was a time when power allowed itself to be sacrificed according to this symbolic game. Since power ceased being symbolic to become political and a strategy of social domination, the symbolic challenge has haunted and undone the political. Now no one exercises power or wants it because its secret has been lost. Power need only be enclosed within power for it to burst.
