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Vivisecting the 90s: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard

Caroline Bayard and Graham Knight

The interview was conducted in French and translated into English by Professors Caroline Bayard and Graham Knight at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

CTHEORY: Your relation to McLuhan is interesting, the more so since few critics have analysed it, although they have often commented on it. What is the role of the strong presence of the visual, so real in your texts, in relation to the notion of distance, or of obscenity, and in relation to irony as distance? It is clear that the visual would be necessary to separate and distance an imaginary on which sense is founded. But how does one treat the question of the differentiation of image and sound, the latter being a much more supple, fluid, floating medium than the latter?

Jean Baudrillard: I have some difficulty replying to this question because sound, the sphere of sound, the acoustic sphere, audio, is really more alien to me than the visual. It is true there is a feeling [word spoken in English] about the visual, or rather for the image and the concept itself, whereas sound is less familiar to me. I have less perception, less analytic perception, of this aspect. That is not to say that I would not make a distinction between noise and sound, but ultimately, in terms of this ambient world's hyperreality, this noosphere, I see it much more as a visualization of the world rather than its hypersonorization.

What can I say about the difference between the two? I have the impression that cutting across the world of McLuhan - he too is very much oriented to the visual, of course, in spite of the fact that he was, I believe, a musician - there is a small problem, which is that the different sensorial, perceptual registers tend, in this media noosphere, to conflate, to fuse together into a kind of depolarization of sensory domains. We speak quite rightly today of the audio-visual; we couple them together in some sort, some kind of amalgam or "patchwork". Perhaps I am led to view space in this way by my lesser sensitivity to the acoustic, but it seems to me that everything is summed up in a logistic which integrates all the perceptual domains in a way even more undifferentiated than before. Everything is now received in a manner that is indistinct, virtually indistinct, in fact.

The virtual is the kind of concept that is a bit cosmopolitan, if one can call it that, or postmodern, I do not know. In that respect, it is not about the gaze but the visual, it is not about the acoustic, but the audio. Besides, for McLuhan in fact, everything is ultimately reduced to the tactile. Tactility is really that register of sense which is of the order of contact, not of physical or sensual contact of course, but a sort of communication contact where, right now in fact, there is a short-circuit between receiver and sender. I mean directly in individual perception, not only in the world of the media but in our bodily way of living, there is a form of indistinction, of amalgamation, of indifferentiation where all the perceptions arrive en bloc and are reduced to a tactile ambiance. In the latter there would be a lesser differentiation of registers, a lesser singularity of the gaze, a lesser singularity of sound, of music.

So, that is all one can say. That said, within this state of affairs of course there is perhaps still a way to master the tactile world. I think that McLuhan himself thought so in every way; he thought that there really was a strategy of the tactile world, and that it is not just any one. It is not at all a question of saying that it is insignificant, but simply that it is more undifferentiated.

CTHEORY: I remember what you wrote about Westmoreland and Coppola in Simulacres, but re-reading your text some thirteen years later, I wonder whether the real question may not be somewhere else. If, quite simply, neither one (Westmoreland), nor the other (Coppola), had the last word because there is no such thing as the last word, because history continues, just as stories do and our history may be just this, a long rewriting process, prolonged ad infinitum, strewn with glosses/counter-glosses. With John Johnston, on the other hand (in Gane, 161), you read History as the re-actualisation of a past in which we all are accusers and defenders, as well as complicitous. Later, in Cool Memories II, you interpret it as a stoic temptation, that of a Marcus-Aurelius, neither resigned, nor hurried in his late Antiquity, waiting by the sea. Are all of those two facets a reflection of your sensitivity? Which of the three is closer to you presently?

Jean Baudrillard: I am not a historian. I do not have an historical perception of events. But I would say that I have a mystical reading of them and that history for me, would be a long narrative which I tend to mythologize. Curiously, I am going back here to an interesting hypothesis, that of an English naturalist of the 19th century, called Philip Henry Gosse, who was a paleolontologist and archeologist. He was studying fossiles found in geological sediments and his hypothesis, as he was a Christian and a reader of the Bible, was that creation had taken place ex-nihilo and the world created as such five thousand years before his time. Thus God had created at once fossiles, geological sediments, exactly as they were in the 18th century, and he had created them as simulacra, as a trompe-l'oeil in order to provide humanity - which might have been traumatized by such a brutal creation - with a history, hence a past. Therefore God would have provided human beings with a retrospective past by creating fossiles and geological sediments. And he would have created them as such, with utmost exactitude so that people may study them scientifically, although their past had thus

been invented. This brings me specifically to Russell's paradox, which suggests that the world as such, could have been created yesterday and everything in it could be interpreted as retrospective simulation. Of course, this is a paradox, but for myself I would tend to use such a paradox. This where one ends up in a real or hyper-real situation, that of the history of historical narratives, of historiography which do pose a historical question about the reinvention of past history through the historian's discourse, a discourse which, by definition is a re-construction. In a way, that reconstruction is also necessarily artificial.

The tendency today is not to regress, but to go back to the those moments which preceded that history, as if it were taking us backward, a process which allows questions as cruel as: "Did the Holocaust actually take place, did gas chambers really exist?" One question, latent within our contemporary imagination, is its incapacity really to understand history, to capture its responsibility, its finality and therefore to ask such a query which is absurd, but which constitutes the ultimate test about a past event. Did it actually take place? What proof do we have about it?

Of course we have a multitude of objective, real proofs, but what does one do with historical reality in a system which itself has become virtual?

As for history, well I cannot situate it within a realistic framework, nor can I integrate it within a moral, or even political reference system. There may be a philosophical moral of history, but I do not know what my position would be on that score. It would have to be one of undecidability about what history is. As history today enters into the same domain of indeterminate, undefined interpretations or into the principle of indeterminacy. And this not only applies to the past, but also to the future as well as to the present. At the moment, we live in a sort of uninterrupted time, especially as we move towards the crystallisation of time in each instant, as we keep losing our sense of any objective reference. I do not want to defend history, I only observe a series of problems.

CTHEORY: I might be tempted to say that your simultaneously ironic and perspicacious scrutiny of the social and political effects of simulation has been your gift to the end of this century. What made such a scrutiny vulnerable, for some, has not been the epistemological fallibility upon which it grounded itself (as that could be as a demonstration of humility coming from the end of an empire, assuming such is the case with the western world), but rather, it has been your refusal to recognize that CNN, the Murdochs and Maxwells of this world, dead or alive, do exert a remarkable control over the images which our eyes look at day after day, whatever those media empires' powerlessness to resolve even our most insignificant problems be. Yes this did puzzle a number of us. While I do recognize that our referents have been transformed by these images' interaction, I have enormous difficulty to admit that reference itself could have sunk below the horizon of our collective anomie. Bodies are killed, entire cities, or small

towns and communities disappear, between Sarajevo and southern Iraq. No one denies the simulation effect which our information networks rely upon, but it is your denial of reality, of personal experience initiated by those simulations which disturbs me. Had you been in Bagdad in February 1991, or in Sarajevo these past two years, might you not have hesitated before casting reference into the dustbin of history?

Jean Baudrillard: Yes, I would not be irresponsible enough to claim an extra-territorial position. When I speak, I do so from a given place. I do have roots. Obviously, all radicals do. I have mine, but those are not ideological references.

Sarajevo, since you are talking about it, reminds me of a media incident, precisely. BernardHenri Levy went there to do a TV programme during one of the worst bombings and he interviewed a woman, a librarian, who spoke to him and said: "I wish Baudrillard were here to see what transparency really is." Well, she was doing me a great honour, remembering what I have written about the transparency of evil, the trans-apparition of evil, specifically in a universe which pretends to be a New World Order whence evil, at least theoretically, has been eliminated. She felt this was a further illustration of what I have written about the transparency of evil. Let us talk about this. Such a perspective may arouse a certain misunderstanding. Of course, she is flattering me when she remembers that I have written about the transparency of evil, about the trans-apparition of evil in a universe which defines itself as a new world order, from which evil, at least theoretically, is supposed to be eradicated. One finds oneself within the virtuality of goodness, of positivity, whereas, on the contrary, within such a system evil transpires everywhere. And that is the trans-apparition of evil. Evil is not that through which one sees, but that which sees through everything, which goes through, transpires through Good, as well. And at that specific time, one notices a perverse conversion of all positive effects, of all political constructions which finally, through some perverse and magical effect, become evil. So that, ultimately, all of those events taking place in Central Europe, the liberation of these countries, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Sarajevo, are a terrifying demonstration of this catastrophic, recurrent scheme wherein evil takes place. And I do not understand evil as suffering, as pain. I define it, rather, as negativity, as the diabolical nature of things when they are reversed into their opposite, so that they never reach their finality, nor even go beyond it and thus become, at that specific time, monstrous. A good part of monstrosity, in our banality, is just that: all phenomena become extreme. Because of the media, our scientific means, our knowhow, progress all take an uncontrollable, inhuman dimension. Evil, for me is just that form.

I do not interpret it on the level of experienced pain, in which case I have nothing to say, any more than anybody else, except from a moral viewpoint, but I do not want to consider that. I interpret it not by bracketing it off, but by relativizing it. And I can only write while doing this in my own life. But I do not want to be more specific. There is a logic about writing, about thought, about philosophizing, yes, a stoic logic in that sense. One cannot add pathos, a

subjective dimension, nor a collective sense of things to the vision one may have of the world, as well as of nature. Although, of course, when I say this I am quite aware that such a position is provocative, paradoxical and ultimately unacceptable. I do understand people's anger against such a position. And it is also true that of all this does not leave me indifferent. One can participate physically and morally in collective grief and since we are talking about this, I also believe that it is a Stoic's duty, if there is one, not to sublimate, not to abstract, not to distance oneself, but to say: such is the rule of the game and this is how I play it. To maintain this ultimate ironic possibility may be the essence of grief, the obsession of grief, the therapeutic obsession to dispose of evil, but those may not constitute the last word of history. I cannot say much more about it although I do recognize that such a position exposes itself to very serious charges.

CTHEORY: The question which most easily to mind in line with what Caroline was asking you relates to what I would call the morning after. To offer one's eye may well be seductive, overlooking the physical discomfort of the initial moment, but what happens the next day when one finds oneself blind in one eye? Is not the choice obvious between the suffering of seduction and eternal infirmity? Bodies do obliterate other losses.

Jean Baudrillard: Stories do not have a day after; they are made to be used up. There too, if you take things literally that becomes unacceptable. Ultimately, right, one is in the realm of cruelty, in a certain sense. And what now could happen the next day if not vengeance? In every respect sacrifice has no final end in that sense. It has no day after, in the sense that it has no end since it reproduces itself. Each extends it. In every way, we know well enough that it is a little game, like money that one wins or loses in a game. Money won in a game does not leave the game. It must be burnt up, consumed like that, in the game. And it seems to be the same thing in a system of gift-giving, of sacrifice, where there is no day after, no point at which one would settle accounts. No point at which one would say: "So, I have been robbed. I am the loser. I have been sacrificed and I must avenge myself." No, one keeps on playing. One can perhaps reply to your question, "what happens the day after?", by saying that at that point one rips out the other eye, and solves the problem!

CTHEORY: How is the concept of strategy used? It is implicit that it connotes a form of subjectivity, and yet it is used in such a way that subjectivity is undermined, or placed in a context where it is made volatile or fragile. Moreover, strategy being originally a military metaphor, to what extent does it retain today martial connotations which complicate its sense even more?

Jean Baudrillard: Yes, there I agree with you. The term strategy represents an opportunity because it is apt. It is a nice term. It has form, it speaks to the imaginary. It has a form of mastery and, at the same time, it is deployed within space. But it no longer means anything

great in my opinion, because, for there to be a strategy, there has to be a subject of the strategy, someone who has a will, a representation of the outcome. There has to be a finality. If the strategy has to become logistically chancy, it is no longer a strategy properly speaking. Thus, one can still use this term in a metaphorical sense perhaps, but it has certainly lost its military reference, and perhaps even its reference to a finality.

When I use it in the expression "fatal strategies", it is clear that it no longer has any finality in itself. It is a type of fatal process, a process in which there is certainly no more subject, no more subjectivity. Fatal strategy for me is a strategy of the object. Which means nothing, to be sure! How could an object have a strategy? It would be absurd. But all the same, I like to apply things that are paradoxical. I also speak of objective illusion. Illusion, if it is contrary to a truth principle, cannot be based on objectivity. But I like to bring these two terms together all the same to create a clash between them. Thus fatal strategy is, effectively, an expression which describes a process, a reversibility that is in the order of things, and this is, at the moment, truly delirious, fatal. We are all inside it, but we are nevertheless a vectorial element of the thing, though not in the sense of subjects. At this point it has to be said that this supposes such relativity in the subject-object relation that it is that which becomes fatal.

We witness the loss of subjectivity on the one hand, and the intervention of the object itself in the game in a fatal, decisive and determinant way. And the fact that it is no longer the subject that possesses things when, properly speaking, there is only a strategy of the subject, the fact of speaking of the strategy of objects is a paradox, a kind of metaphorical transfer of things. But, as discourse itself is so grounded in subjectivity in this sense, we do not have an objective discourse available in the sense I intend it, which has nothing to do with scientificity, but which would be the discourse of the object. Well, we do not have it. What we have is the event itself, the flow of the world itself, and there is there, if not a strategy, at least a rule of the game. Regardless, I think that there is a rule. But I am not the one who is going to say that. It is truly unreadable; it is a secret. But somewhere there is a logic in the unfolding of things, even if it is a crazy logic. Let us call it strategy. Why not! It is, all the same, the way that the discourse of sense tries to describe non-sense. But clearly, one will always remain between the two. There will not be any objectivity there in the scientific sense of the term. That is not possible.

CTHEORY: It seems clear at this point that a younger generation of philosophers, such as Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, of social critics, such as Michel Maffesoli, or even of less young ones, such as Alain Touraine (Retour de l'acteur, 1988, trans. The Return of the Actor, 1990; Edgar Morin, Pour un nouveau commencement, 1991), have focused on the return of this same subject. Certainly not in the same terms as their humanist predecessors, or their foundationalist ones, but upon the subject nevertheless, let us leave it undefined for the moment... I found it quite striking that in your Cool Memories (1987), you began to sketch some of his/her defining features ("What has been exuberantly demolished is being reconstructed sadly"). Except that, in this particular case, sadness is yours only and the authors mentioned above do not appear

to share your grief. Are you interpreting their efforts as a self-delusional journey? Or alternatively, are you interpreting them as a curious ecological process and a re-cycling temptation for the end of a century: a bit of postmodernity, a sprinkle of liberalism, a dab of Kantian ethics with, at the end, a solid dose of optimism while facing the grief of the rest of the world? Maffesoli and Ferry are notably more optimistic than their elders, Morin and Touraine are more prudent. What is your position upon this so-called return of the subject?

Jean Baudrillard: In Maffesoli's case, you are dealing with a very specific subject, since the latter is inscribing his position within a form of tribality. To me it looks like a tribal resurgence in which the subject has become the expression of a specificity, of a singularity. One observes a tribality and a singularity conjoined, in a way. For myself, I am inclined to think that such tendencies are not residual, but represent an elaboration upon or around vestigial elements which may well be alive, which function as the scattered fragments of a totality, a globality capable, in spite of everything to organize the world and the subject as the convenor of that world. This subject had created a form of philosophy, of the "becoming-subject" of the world. We do not need to invoke Hegel here, but all the same, his texts signalled a certain power, specifically a conceptual power, and as everyone knows it does not exist today. My view is that what you are describing today is a form of reparation, that we all are involved in such reparations today, in the S.O.S. subject, or in the S.O.S. subjectivity [The term S.O.S has recently been used in the context of social and political activism, e.g., S.O.S. Racisme, an organisation founded by Harlem Desir concerned with combatting racism against nonEuropean immigrants has mobilized considerable attention -transl]. Such a subject, moreover, does not appear to be a divided one, a really alienated one drawing all of its energies from its alienation, but, rather a reconstituted one, a re-synthesized one within which you cannot discern this pull, this divisiveness with all the consequences they entail upon symbolic and imaginary levels. Such a subject is the standard figure, robot of a reconstituted subject trying to re-coup its residual vestiges, or whatever is left of them. It could be an ecological subject, and then one would witness the ecology of the subject, the saving of the subject, since it is quite evident that it has been threatened by a very simple evidence and symptom: the disappearance of its object. If it did not die purely and simply, this subject as well as that which it pretended to objectify, to master, now presently escapes it just as its position of power, of mastery, escapes it too. That subject is not even supposed to know, to be able to believe in anything, it cannot even believe in itself. And among those who reactivate this subject, who turn it into an actor, even those people know that it has lost its integrity as a subject, its conviction to adhere to its own effort to change the world. It does not believe in it anymore; it pretends to, it is a form of strategy, a posthumous strategy. That subject is a survivor and one witnesses the survival of the subject or the revival of the subject. Of course it is all about subjectivity, as it is in the interest of all those disciplines right now, sociology, psychology, philosophy to save their subject. Then it might be the case that, given the disappearance of this active subject and its passive counterpart, one presently witnesses the effects of a subject which attempts to reconstitute around itself the elements of a willpower, of a vision of the world. I really do not believe this. But this being said, there might be an effect of re-innovation, of renovation after a long period of philosophical, or may be structuralist destructuring of the subject. It is not mine, but that does not matter. It may also be possible that we are observing

a pendulum effect, the weighing scales tilting one way since in the history of ideas one could witness an internal phenomenon, a reactional one, vis-a-vis the history of the world. Because in fact it appears that the subject is only a vanishing point at the moment, to such an extent that it may have reached its fading point and what you are describing may only be a resurgence in the philosophical world. I certainly do not look upon it as a credible phenomenon, not for myself in any case.

CTHEORY: Sometime in France, after the socialist victory of 1980, light-years in a way, I noticed a very healthy reaction on your part, on that of Lyotard as well (The Intellectual's Grave), when you both stressed that intellectuals should not speak in anyone's name, except in their own. But such were the times in the early eighties when the Left finally had access to power there. It is also clear that you did express such discomfort in your interview with Shevtsova (Gane, 79). Nevertheless, some fourteen years later, British and American intellectuals, such as Tony Judt and Susan Sontag have enunciated interesting reminders to French intellectuals. They did so without any moralizing intent, but firmly. Since you were mentioned let us talk about the latter. Sontag, in particular, enunciated discomfort about the French intelligentsia on the line of fire if you wish, in Sarajevo where she produced the first act of Waiting for Godot. This otherness which she invoked was a humble, physical choice, a presence which did not force itself, did not operate in a grandiloquent manner, a-la Glucksmann so to say (he descended upon the burning city for a few hours, just to explain while quoting you, that wars are made, won, or lost on TV). Sontag, with her defiance, is determined to return to that city, to produce this play with actors who want to live, to survive, to play, even if they occasionally need to lie down on the floor as they are too tired, too hungry or too ragged. "Because I want to finish that play, I had to be there with them" says she. In 1993, it probably is a desperate choice, a form of refusal against the worn-out pragmatism of Vance and Owen, an act deprived of any illusions about our collective cowardice and yet essential to remind a blind Europe it should minimally come out of its anomia if it wants Bosnia to survive.

The questions I would like to ask you are the following: first, the realist abjection you were mentioning in The Illusion of the End, rather than an insistence upon actual interventions, may well be the acceptance of an inevitability which does not cost us anything and leaves us prostrated as couch potatoes in front of our screens. Then if people as Sontag were not doing what they're doing, who would do it? How do you define the role of individuals, be it waterengineers, intellectuals, pall-bearers, writers or surgeons in those micro-spaces which presently constellate our planet?

Jean Baudrillard: I would like to agree with you. I would love it if there were the simple possibility to finish off this pain. Because if, when one does what Sontag does, it is with no illusion whatsoever, beyond any objective, independently from any goal, any result, to save, to save what? Whatever it is, a form of conscience, pride, a sort of: "I do it in spite of everything", then I can see that. And it is a heroic act, in the sense that heroism has always been without

illusions. Real heroes, are always in that sense tragic. They do not exactly foresee the result of their actions. But that is the same thing, one cannot be heroic alone, in that sense I am almost collectivistic. To me, an act does not have meaning by itself, except in an absurd context. Maybe suicide does, maybe in fact what we are looking at here is a form of suicide. I am not sure. But for a choice such as Sontag's to be meaningful, even if it is without illusion, it has to have repercussions upon other consciences, and especially within the conscience of those to whom it is destined, such as the people from Bosnia, or the others.

And this is where the clockwork breaks down, because the absorption of all this, by the resonance of the sounding board on which it falls, as it is completely perturbed, falsified, mediatised, this anticipated absorption, through the precession of whatever you do, that is what distresses me. I understand one doing it anyway, to save one's own illusions, the illusion of one's will. But is it meaningful to do it? If there is no intellectual world operating as a sounding board, one which would be in solidarity with such an act and which would be capable of extracting a meaning from it, why do it? If one cannot create repercussions, reverberations for such an act to bring it back within history, so that it *were an event*, then there is no point in doing it. In that sense I would be extremely, not opportunistic, but realistic, it is realpolitik I would invoke and suggest that if one does this, chooses to do this, it has to be an event. Not that it should be important, but it should create a rupture within the information continuum. Did it, or did it not, create a rupture? Everything hinges upon this. Otherwise it is hard to assess it as a rupture. Of course, one may entertain the idea that if everyone does one's bit, all of this will produce a primitive accumulation of courage, actions and will ultimately produce an event. But today I do not believe it. Now we are, as Paul Virilio has put it, living in real time, and real time means fatality. Actions have no antecedent, even when they refer to other revolutionary periods, they do not have any finality, even in a long term context, as no one knows where this is coming from and it all happens within real time. And such a real time manages to set it all up in a state of total ephemerality. Susan Sontag's act is limited. It cannot operate incognito, it is automatically mediatised, that is for sure. This in itself does not represent a radical objection, but it points out a tendency. Information is not what it used to be a long time ago. In the past, something would take place, then one would know it had taken place, then others would hear about it. Now, one knows everything before it has even taken place, and incidentally, it does not even have the time to take place. Mediatisation is a precession, you could call it the precession of simulacra within time. One is in a world where, in order to respond to a reality, to the importance of things, one needs to be far ahead, in an extreme way, one would need to precede the precession itself, to anticipate those simulacra, otherwise the clockwork, the system will be present before we are there. The simulacra will be ahead of us everywhere.

This was the situation of the Prague student and his double. His double was always there before him. Whenever he would go and meet someone for a duel for instance, the other had come before him, his adversary had been killed. So there was no reason for him to exist. We now live in such a system. Can one move forward? In a global situation, one is hostage,

complicitous even with such a situation. Such is the effect of the Stockholm syndrome: within such events, victims and executioners become in some way complicitous. It is monstrous, but real. Between the hostage and hostage-takers a form of complicity establishes itself.

In order to be able to have a bearing upon that immediate event, which is already devoid of its meaning, one would need to be far ahead of the game, in a state of extraordinary anticipation. One can try to do so, through one's intellect, or one's writing, although today it is remarkably harder to do so in practical terms. Sontag's gesture, and this is not a value judgment, or a judgment on her courage, because there was a real virtue in doing what she did, but virtues are something else. Strategically, if one uses that word, then there, I would be more cynical. There is division of labour that should be respected. Even if there are any intellectuals left and I am not sure I am one of them, even if I appear to share in such a life, appear to share a specific discourse - I do not share in that complicity of intellectuals who perceive themselves as responsible for *something*, as privileged with a sort of conscience-radicalness used to be the privilege of intellectuals and now it has been moved on to another space. Subjects such as Susan Sontag cannot intervene anymore, even symbolically, but once again this is nota prognosis or diagnosis.

CTHEORY: Would it be possible to say that the hyperreal is a state where there is too much reality and not enough ideology? Have we become ideological paupers? Not in the sense that we still believe in it, in fact rather the opposite, in the sense that it used to be our alibi, our excuse on the terrain of subjective irony, something in fact in which not to believe. Interestingly, it has even become difficult to be cynical these days!

Jean Baudrillard: Yes, it is true, since in every respect nobody believes in it any longer. And there lies the problem, when nobody believes in it any more. And not only in relation to ideology, but to indifference as well. Indifference was a fantastic quality, something almost stoical. It was very good to be indifferent in a world which was not, where there were differences, conflicts. So this kind of indifference, of a strategy of indifference, created a privileged situation. But in a world that has become completely indifferent what would it serve? It would be necessary to become different again in order to differentiate oneself from a world which has, objectively, become indifferent. That history is very pernicious.

It is the same thing for art with its power of illusion. What does this become in a world which itself ends up being totally illusory, even random? It becomes very difficult to find a form of intervention like that. So ideology... yes, the world is now so totally ideologized where everything passes through the narrative of ideology that it no longer serves any purpose to have any. Out of that follows the situation, the transcendence if you like, of ideology which actually, in fact, no longer exists.

I had an experience with simulation and the simulacrum. Nowadays I have had enough of it 20 years of it, or almost, is enough! Something interesting happened to me recently on this subject, in relation to Japan. There was an erudite Japanese who had come to interview me and I asked him why for a number of years he had been translating my books I had not received any word of it. I had been translated there several times before, and I had been told at that time "Ah, simulation and the simulacrum! In Japan you are an important spokesman." So I asked him why I no longer heard about readers' reactions and he told me, "But it is very simple, very simple you know. Simulation and the simulacrum have been realized. You were quite right: the world has become yours... and so we no longer have any need of you. You have disappeared. You have been volatilized in reality, or in the realization of hyperreality. It is over. In terms of theory, we no longer need you, and there is no longer a need to defend your theories." That is the paradox of utopia made real; it clearly makes every utopian dimension perfectly useless.

So I do not know if that answers your question, but ideology seems to me now to be so old a word that in some respects I do not even like to talk about it. In short, if it were true what Marx said, that it is the effect of a reaction of the superstructure on the infrastructure, a mode that reflects the conflictual relation of superstructure and infrastructure... but clearly one can no longer give it a fundamental interpretation today except to produce a referential discourse which itself no longer has the effect of a real clash in the reality of the infrastructure, but is the legacy of a conceptual discourse that is already archaic/ancient. It becomes a kind of ideological zombie of itself, an artefact of itself. But then, without knowing it because everybody eventually takes up the language of ideology, everybody ideologizes things, it becomes our anchor.

As for me, I believe deeply that no one truly believes in it any longer at all. But it will always be there, and that is still the role, unfortunately, of the intellectual class, the political-intellectual class, which maintains the fiction of ideological discourse. Everyone pretends all the same to consume it since otherwise there would be panic. But at a profound level all this has no more credibility. This is what makes everything suddenly collapse, some day or other. It is a collapse that takes place because for a long time there is no longer been any credible basis to the thing at all. We have always wondered why, in the East, everything happened so fast, without, apparently, any possible foreshadowing of the collapse. Well, it is simply that everything had been completely devitalized for a long time, and the discourse was no longer anything more than a parody of itself. Eventually, a reality that is only a parody of itself will cave in without resistance. There is not even any need to give it a push. Moreover, this new type of event is interesting, arising effectively out of indifference and no longer out of a will to action but out of a long inertia which has sapped the system. And then sooner or later, it implodes.

CTHEORY: Given the allusions to the Manichean nature of your strategy, irony is a rather isolated term here. It functions well with parody, but the latter hardly appears in your texts. Why not? Is it because the contradiction between then is already contained within irony?

Jean Baudrillard: You say parody does not appear very much? Though I like the term well enough, parody is still perhaps a little too theatrical, too specular, in spite of everything. The parodic still has a certain power. It is true that I use the term irony a lot more, and what is more, I do not use it in the subjective sense any more. It is no longer subjective or romantic irony, nor humour in that sense. Rather it is a form of irony that is pataphysical, but objective. Before, it was subjective irony. It was to some extent connected to critique, to a critical, romantic, negative point of view, to a form of disillusion. The new irony seems to me rather to be an excess of positivity, of reality. And that is why I call it pataphysical because pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's Ubu is precisely that. It is the too full, the too much of itself, it is an absolute, total over-awareness, positivity without fault. Ubu's big gut will clearly explode one day. And that is metaphysical irony, the irony of our world, and it is related to a kind of protuberance and excrescence of the system. It is no longer ridiculous in the classic theatrical sense, it is pataphysical. Ubu swallowed his own superego.

Everything is at the same time untouchable and non-existent, and that is the irony of nonexistence, of in-significance. It is more radical than the Other. The Other was still, and that, moreover, is what gave it beauty and charm, complicity in the object, whereas irony now pertains to events themselves. The events in the East, where all of a sudden, at a time when one could have believed in the fall of capital, we witness the fall of communism. And that seems to be an ironic event to me, perfectly unforeseeable, and nevertheless dependent on a fantastic logic. It is that irony, rather, that I would insist on now. But it is difficult to thematize because it no longer lends itself to laughter, nor even to a smile really! Perhaps there is an object somewhere that smiles, but we do not know it.

CTHEORY: There are times when you almost speak as an Albigiensis.

Jean Baudrillard: An Albigiensis, yes a Manichean. Certainly Manichean in The Transparency of Evil.

CTHEORY: There is a paradox which captures my attention in all this. On the one hand I hear a certain Albigiensianism, which sooner or later is read as a form of prophetic interpretation, it could be Jeremiah in the old Testament, or even Job on his garbage heap, in other occasions you almost sound as Ecclesiates. The paradox, for me, hinges around the fact that while I know you feel a perfect repulsion for moralistic rigorism, is it possible to behave as a prophet,

especially as accurately as you have sometimes turned out to do without being also a rigorous moralist?

Jean Baudrillard: rigorous... yes, to an extent that is a quality, although rigourism is a flaw, rigour, an extreme rigour is a strength. I would be in favour of extreme rigour. Radicalism is also a form of rigour as well. A rigourous logic seems to be necessary. Pity, mercy towards reality are not exactly my choice. I would rather go in the opposite direction. And, in a way, that is true, this could be perceived as a prophetic moralism. Prophetic... well, I am not sure, I guess one can extrapolate. I, in a way, love to extrapolate, take an idea to its utmost limit, to its extreme. Is this being prophetic? Sometimes, it happens to be right, but not necessarily. I do remember that someone had tried to make a inventory of all the inane comments I had made, well maybe not inane, but at least illusory and they had found quite a few. It was a newspaper which had done this, I think it was the Globe-Hebdo, or some such publication. In a way, it provided me with some publicity for things which had indeed taken place. But I had not uttered those prophecies out of a moralistic sense, although I am not sure whether I am devoid of it, I might have inherited some from my ancestors, who were peasants. So that my rigour would be of such a kind. It might come from a sense of repulsion, rather than moralism. Indeed I may be moral in the sense that everything I describe, I do from a sort of distance, cynicism, objectivity, from a paradoxical stance also. I do entertain deep repulsions, simultaneously with some attractions. Of course morals are being sustained by resentments and repulsions. And I must confess that I do feel an objective repulsion towards a number of things. In order to describe something you need to be nasty, to be propelled by the energy of repulsion. The Beaubourg architecture, the Beaubourg aesthetics aroused that in me and I described them with a degree of loathsomeness. But ultimately, when one ends up giving the object its monstrous dimension, its scale, or scope strikes you. And in order to find them or to express them, you need to absorb this object and identify with it as well as reject it, violently even. Writing also comes from that locus. It is an acting-out, as we were saying yesterday. Morals also reprove, reject, forbid although I am not certain that the analogy holds the same primitive reference, that the primitive scene would be the same.

CTHEORY: If you had to describe yourself, today, in a quick shot, would you describe yourself as The Accidental Tourist of the end of this century: little luggage, few illusions and gifted with that psychic stoicism the end of a millenium leaves us with at dawn?

Jean Baudrillard: Tourist... well that is not very positive. I guess a form of speculation, a capacity for crossing, traversing yes. A tourist goes through, demonstrates a certain transversality, no doubt, goes to the end of things, or around them. If going around an object or looking at it from multiple viewpoints, defines the tourist, yes that is true. But there is also the fact that tourists avoid, let off, abandon a number of belongings and I did strive to do that. Why? because I probably was the happy owner of valuable gear and I tried to get rid of it. I tried not to refer to all of the history of ideas, philosophy even, to all of that richness I admired

the most. Somewhere they are still close to me, but I did try not to make references to them, I chose to forsake them, to abandon objects, that is true. Did I try to create a power vacuum? I do not know whether the term tourist has that meaning, but it invokes a comparable mobility, the absence of primitive, or secondary accumulations, that is me. I tried to avoid accumulations, rather than lean towards expanding. I am not a gambler, not a spendthrift, but one needs to be able to sacrifice in order to re-create a vacuum, and not the other way around, that is clear.

CTHEORY: I was thinking about The Accidental Tourist, when asking you this question, as in Cool Memories you delineate beautiful meanders around the subject of exile, which you describe as a wonderful and comfortable structure, marked by unreality and the end of the world. Have you been looking for those as fragments to be reached outside of a France filled with greyness and chagrined undecisiveness?

Jean Baudrillard: Exile, yes of course. I am quite aware that I operate from a prejudiced position against nationalism, from one which is anti-nationalist, or even anti-cultural. Somewhere within me there is a distancing away from what is closer to the bone, for that which is closer to one's own culture, one's country, family is that from which one cannot escape. Such a promiscuousness I perceive as dangerous and therefore I have always tried to distance myself from it, sometimes with some partiality about what is the closest to me. And yet, I do value intimacy, roots, ancestry. It is maybe because I have those roots within me that I can afford to become the perfect cosmopolitan since I know I will always have that form, that substance which solidity confers upon oneself and that I will never lose those elements. Therefore I never look upon the world as a lost object and I can afford to loose sight of it, especially that which is closer to me, territory or country. That is true as far as France is concerned, where I have always had an anti-cultural prejudice, clearly I have never forgiven culture, it contains too many unacceptable elements and the world becomes increasingly unacceptable because it "culturalizes" itself at full-speed. Everything has now turned into culture and it has even become very difficult to go beyond one's own culture since one finds it everywhere. There will even be a moment when one will not be able find any deserts. Deserts are a metaphor for disappearing objects, evanescence beyond culture. Now they have become increasingly culturalized they are virtually impossible to find.

Patagonia has become a new frontier, absence as much as the locus of absence, have become extremely difficult to access. The real danger, that is true is to end up wallowing in an obsessional negativity vis a vis the others' culture and the rest of the world. And it is true that I have developed my own biased distance, but I think it is better that way, rather than the other way around.

CTHEORY: In the interviews you have given, from Paris to Australia via California, you often speak of the cinema, of the plastic arts, architecture, painting. What place do the other four senses occupy in your life - taste, smell, touch, hearing?

Jean Baudrillard: Ah, we have almost come back to the opening question! How shall I put it? I have not had any musical culture, or acculturation to music, practically none. These are things which later on, in adulthood, you definitely miss. As for painting, the situation was a little bit autodidactic, but ultimately there I know where this is all coming from. Cinema much more because I really was a bit of a cinema fan at a certain point in my life, while I am much less so today because I no longer happen to find myself there and no longer see what it is any more, that is true. And then lastly architecture? Yes, that much more so because of friends in architecture, because of a milieu I knew well, though not through any initial intervention on my part. And so, then, I have finished up with photography which was and still is exactly a register which is completely intimate and profound for me. Not a profoundness of substance, but perhaps on the surface, though very intense all the same. I have not practised it for very long, perhaps a dozen years, which makes photography as intense for me as writing, though in a completely different way. Yet perhaps it has given me pleasures, even more intense than writing.

Is it a relationship with an image, and can you call it an image? It is perhaps for me something else. It is more magical than the real thing. It is the object that, right from the start, has deeply intrigued and obsessed me. I began with the object, after that perhaps the Object with a capital letter, or even the metaphysical object which can be anything one wishes, then perhaps the object as radical otherness, like radical exoticism. For me, the photographic image is a little bit like that, and that is different from cinema. I am not the only one to think that the photographic image is superior to the cinematic image because cinema, in relation to photography, is a loss in terms of illusion, the power of illusion. Of course, it is a progression, an objective one if you like, but like all progress it can very well be precisely, objectively, a loss. Cinema itself, right inside its practice, has lost the force of illusion. It has lost it through colour, by all the improvements that have been made which have, in fact, always seems highly problematic to me. So the photographic image restores a sort of absolute moment. What Barthes says about it is very nice, though perhaps too nice. I have not really thought about it. It is a raw element, evidently, and I try to keep it that way, harsh, and to practise it harshly, a dimension I recognize quite willingly. For the other senses, even art and painting, I have never been involved in them except at a remove, and rather episodically. I have never really addressed things from that point of view, although sometimes I have found myself involved in these spaces in spite of myself, with New York artists and the simulationists. And that was an extremely ambiguous adventure. I found myself taken in there like a referent, a referential hostage. I was badly treated. One minute I found myself praised to the skies, and then cut down maliciously. Fine, none of that was my doing. It was an unwitting destiny.

Choice, desire, investments, these would be in the area of the image, effectively, in the domain of the image, and more precisely in that of photography. I cannot really explain why; it is where I have found a sort of, not of alternative but of a total alternation with writing. Not to have anything but writing makes you really an intellectual, even if you do not like it all the same. Writing is, nonetheless, related more to discourse while photography can be done with a total singularity that is external, alien. Of course there is still a danger there that people end up identifying you as a photographer anyway, and then you find yourself co-opted once again. But for the moment, things are still O.K.!

Caroline Bayard is a professor of French and an Associate member of the Department of Philosophy at McMaster University. She will be working as a Research Fellow at the Center for Theoretical Studies in Prague next year. Her works include New Poetics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989; More Than Two Hundred Years of Solitudes, Toronto: ECW Press, 1992; and Transatlantiques postmodernites, Montreal: Balzac, 1996 (forthcoming).

Graham Knight teaches sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His interests lie primarily in the areas of contemporary social theory, mass communications and popular culture.

The French version of this interview with Jean Baudrillard will be published in Research in Semiotic Inquiry/Recherches semiotiques, Volume 16, No. 1-2, Spring 1996.

Baudrillard on the Web

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Entre le cristal et la Fume Jean Baudrillard

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Les Humains associs : Jean as-tu une bonne nouvelle nous annoncer ?

Jean Baudrillard (rires) : Non, pas d'vangiles, non il n'y en a pas beaucoup. C'est bien de prendre un thme paradoxal. Une amie qui s'occupe de la collection morale aux ditions Autrement, me disait au sujet de la revalorisation thique des valeurs : "Ce n'est pas possible, nous sommes alls au bout de l'immoralit, nous avons touch le fond de la mauvaise nouvelle, d'une certaine faon".

La bonne nouvelle ce serait qu'il se produise une rversion, une sorte de rsurrection, par la force des choses. En quelque sorte, on ne peut plus qu'esprer la rversibilit fatale des processus (rires).

Alors, ce n'est pas une bonne nouvelle parce que nous ne sommes pas responsables de cela, nous sommes ct de la responsabilit vritable.

Cependant, il n'est pas possible que le pire arrive, ce n'est jamais vrai. Il n'y a pas vritablement de logique ou alors elle peut s'inverser. a se joue toujours quitte ou double.Mais ce n'est vraiment pas la mme chose que l'espoir. C'est plutt une bonne nouvelle fatale comme la mauvaise nouvelle.

C'est--dire qu'elle doit arriver, qu'il y a une ncessit ce que quelque chose arrive. Cela vient de cette sorte de vide qui s'opre, qu'il soit social, politique, psychologique, etc.

Dans le vide, un moment donn, il est forc que quelque chose, un vnement, se passe. Lequel ? C'est trs difficile augurer. Tout ce qui nous reste, c'est le pressentiment.

C'est difficile, mais ce n'est pas impossible. Tout ne va pas mal partout. Ne parler que du mauvais ct sert se d-responsabiliser. On entend de plus en plus : " quoi bon faire trop d'efforts, puisque c'est la crise !" Et cela nous donne le climat morbide dans lequel nous vivons. Cependant, la vie est aussi trs belle.

Oui, mais c'est toujours un peu la mme chose. Il y a deux formes de nihilisme. Il y a le constat dpressif d'une situation et, un moment donn, il est forcment pathologique.

Pathologique, parce qu'il en fait un pathos, un psychodrame total. Et il y a, comme le disait Nietzsche, un nihilisme actif. C'est mme une sorte d'existence plus prenante.

Moi ce que je suspecte un peu dans la bonne nouvelle, le bonheur, le bien-tre, c'est que justement l, on se sent trs peu exister. Il y a plus d'existence dans le revers.

Par exemple la haine, j'en ai parl dans le Magazine Littraire (Baudrillard (Jean), "La Haine, ultime raction vitale", Magazine Littraire, Ndeg.323, p. 18-25), en disant que finalement elle est une vritable passion vitale.

On retrouve aujourd'hui beaucoup plus d'altrit dans la haine. Dire : "J'ai la haine", c'est l'ide que l'autre existe assez pour que je puisse le dtester, qu'il y a des choses qui sont assez prenantes pour que je puisse les rejeter. Donc, nous avons affaire une passion ngative, mais au moins c'est une passion.

Alors que du ct du constat des choses, nous sommes dans une indiffrence grandissante. La mauvaise nouvelle, c'est l'indiffrence, la lthargie. Une bonne nouvelle c'est tout ce qui pourrait rveiller une passion, un vnement, une intensit, une nergie, etc. Non pas forcment l'avnement de quelque chose d'heureux, mais une remise en jeu des choses.

Il est possible qu'en ce moment mme quelque chose soit en train de se remettre en jeu, mais il est trs difficile de le savoir, parce que c'est sans doute autre chose que les valeurs traditionnelles.

Pour moi, l'aveu de "je ne sais plus rien", est une excellente nouvelle. Parce que cela veut dire que quelque chose "finit" et qu'une autre, inconnue, commence, donc c'est nouveau. Ah oui ! Mais attends ! quoi penses-tu ?

Je pense que si ponctuellement tout semble sens dessus dessous, la cause en est une remise en question qui touche toutes les strates de notre existence, notre faon de vivre, notre perception des choses. La cration d'outils de plus en plus performants, la matrise d'nergies toujours plus puissantes, au lieu de nous aider mieux saisir le sens de la vie, nous a mis face un chaos. Mais ce chaos, en ce qui me concerne, annonce l'mergence de quelque chose de nouveau. Mon sentiment, est que cet inconnu qui nous arrive ne peut pas tre pire que le "connu" dans lequel nous sommes plongs. Et qu'est-ce qui te fait dire a ? Tu n'as pas de critres pour dire ce qui sera mieux ou pas. Ce sera une autre donne. Dans la redistribution d'un jeu, tu as d'autres cartes et tu ne peux savoir si ce sera bien ou mal, la question n'est plus l.

Je n'ai que mon exprience pour te rpondre. Il y a de plus en plus de gens qui ne veulent plus tricher, de tous ges, de tous milieux, les sans-domicile-fixe inclus, qui disent que la seule chose qui leur reste, c'est d'tre eux-mmes, c'est--dire d'tre authentiques. En me basant sur ces faits, et parce que moi- mme je suis parvenue cette rsolution, je peux donc discerner dans ce chaos-l, "au-del de la fin", des lments qui m'amnent penser que ce qui nous arrive est somme toute une bonne nouvelle. tre ce qu'on est, au moment o on est. Devenir ce qu'on est ? Mais cela est une problmatique qui a toujours exist. Ce n'est pas nouveau, cela a toujours t...

Disons, d'aprs ce que je vois, que le phnomne a pris une autre ampleur... Je suis d'accord avec toi, il y a eu toutes sortes d'thiques, de philosophies, de religions, etc. qui voulaient pratiquer l'ascse. Mais on pratiquait cette ascse personnelle au nom d'une cause, d'une instance, pour tenter de retrouver une vocation, une inspiration.

Maintenant, le dpouillement est fait par l'volution des choses elles-mmes. L'volution du monde a tout ratiss, a tout raval. Le dpouillement est en quelque sorte objectif.

Et nous nous retrouvons un degr zro, par une sorte d'ironie objective des vnements. Ce n'est mme plus une ascse personnelle, nous nous retrouvons nus et nous ne connaissons plus la rgle du jeu.

Et a, ce n'est pas forcment rjouissant, ni rconfortant. Mais oui, c'est passionnant (rires). Le moment n'est pas encore venu de jouer, mais seulement de savoir s'il y a encore une rgle du jeu, va-t-on la dcouvrir ? C'est un moment flottant d'incertitude radicale.

Mais l'incertitude radicale, d'une certaine faon, fait aussi partie de l'ascse traditionnelle. Ce qu'il y a maintenant, c'est qu'elle est collective et je ne vois plus les voies de l'ascse personnelle, ni comment l'authenticit personnelle pourrait s'y retrouver.

Il y a un enjeu qui touche forcment toute une culture, o les refuges traditionnels, religieux, transcendants, ou autres, sont plus ou moins vacillants. Disons que les remdes traditionnels n'existent plus, et qu'il faut en inventer d'autres.

Je ne suis pas sr qu'on trouve quelque chose la fin, quelque chose qui serait l, cach, secret, disponible au fond de soi, dans la profondeur.

L'authenticit est un terme qui me laisse un peu perplexe. Cela ne me semble pas aujourd'hui tre une valeur, une idologie trs forte. Qu'est-ce que l'authenticit d'une chose qui a justement perdu son tre ? Alors, tu me diras : "peut-tre qu'il vaut mieux", je n'en sais rien.

C'est un peu comme la ralit, c'est la valeur de ce qui a perdu son illusion, c'est--dire sa forme symbolique forte. Aujourd'hui, nous sommes vous la ralit, au constat objectif d'exister. J'existe, c'est tout.

Aujourd'hui, tout ce que nous pouvons essayer de faire, c'est de donner la preuve de notre existence. Et tout le monde le fait, travers le travail, ou n'importe quoi... Mais l'authenticit est aussi fonde sur une sorte d'autarcie, d'autonomie originelle fondamentale. Et je ne suis pas sr qu'elle existe encore.

Quand je dis authenticit, c'est dans le sens de naturel, sans faux-semblants. Par nature, je n'entends pas le retour aux sources, la recherche du paradis perdu, mais naturellement humain. C'est- -dire cette sincrit qu'ont les enfants de dire les choses comme elles sont, et d'tre ce qu'ils sont. Par exemple de dire je t'aime quand c'est je t'aime, ou merde quand c'est merde. Oui, il y a sans doute encore de la franchise, un petit peu de navet, au sens fort du terme et aussi une recherche dsespre de l'authenticit.

Je dis dsespre, parce que c'est quand mme une valeur humaniste de penser qu'il y a une subjectivit originelle fondamentale.

Comme moi par exemple, c'est a ? (rires) Exactement (rires). Mais je te dirais brutalement : aucun critre ne permet de distinguer entre une authenticit vraie, par plonasme, et une authenticit parfaitement hystrique.

Ce n'est pas une dngation de l'hystrie. L'hystrie est une trs, trs grande valeur. Mais, en mme temps, l'hystrie c'est ce qui se projette partir de quelque chose qui n'existe pas.

D'ailleurs, l'hystrique au fond n'est rien. Mais elle peut ou il peut - mais plus souvent c'est elle - tre une multiplicit de choses, parce que justement elle n'a pas de noyau existentiel, dfinitif.

Il y a un jeu, il y a une rgle du jeu, et l'hystrique est authentique, authentique dans le jeu, et elle joue toujours. Peut-on vritablement savoir ce que nous sommes ? Savoir ce que l'on veut ? C'est--dire l'exprimer en terme de : a ? Merde ! a ? Oui ! etc.

Une sorte de franchise, de radicalit expressionniste. Pour cela, il faut savoir ce que l'on est et ce que l'on veut. Et je ne suis pas sr qu'on le sache.

Je ne dis pas que les gens que j'ai rencontrs le savaient. Ce que j'ai constat, c'est qu'ils cherchaient savoir qui ils sont. Quant au distingo entre authenticit vraie et authenticit hystrique, je pense que le phnomne observable dpendra toujours de l'observateur... C'est vrai qu'aujourd'hui, nous avons affaire une situation o nous sommes assaillis par un nombre incalculable de modles, de comportements obligs, impratifs, catgoriques, moraux, etc, moins de dvelopper soi-mme son propre vide, mais cela ne se passe jamais ainsi.

Le plus souvent, la vie se passe, soit dans une conformit totale, soit dans une rsistance de tous les instants. Dans un rejet : non ! il n'y a rien o je veuille fixer ma volont, je ne veux pas tre ceci, ni cela, parce que ce sont des modles de simulation qui sont tout prts.

O est l'identit dans cette histoire, dans cet environnement compltement assig par des modles ? On peut les repousser, c'est vrai qu'il y a un acting-out (passage l'acte) qui consiste en la dngation de tous les modles.

Au moins, c'est dj quelque chose, mais cela ne va pas donner la ralisation harmonieuse de quelque chose qui aurait dj t et qui, malgr tout, trouve s'affirmer de nouveau.

J'ai l'impression que nous sommes dans une situation o le plus clair de notre nergie passe dans la dngation, le refus, la rsistance, etc., o ne s'exprime pas vraiment une authenticit, mais une forme de dfi : je ne serai pas celui que vous voulez !

Qui dit dfi, dit comptition, et je n'ai pas l'impression que ceux dont je parlais et moi-mme soyons en comptition avec nous-mmes. Et s'il y a combat, ce serait un combat pour "l'ange". Ouverture sans imposition, avec un maximum de propositions, acceptation de notre contradiction, relativit de tous les modles de pense, respect mutuel, o nous pouvons sincrement tre d'accord pour ne pas tre d'accord; passer du modle l'original, et raliser aussi que notre vie est faite de quotidien et que les bonnes nouvelles peuvent aussi tre un niveau personnel, car des milliards ne sont que l'addition de 1+1+1... Absolument ! Disons qu'effectivement dans les choses de la vie, il y en a de trs heureuses, mais je n'arrive pas du tout les extrapoler, faire que cela prenne une quelconque allure de style de vie, une valeur de modle.

Si tu trouves de bonnes relations professionnelles ou affectives etc., a n'a aucune valeur collective. Tu les arraches au collectif en crant des microclimats subjectifs o tu peux exister, o tu n'es pas somm de faire la preuve tout le temps de ton existence.

Ds que tu sors de tes propres limites, de ton propre petit circuit, tu es soumis la pression existentielle et sociale et l, il n'y a pas de bonnes nouvelles.

Nous tombons dans un domaine qui est la fois celui de l'excitation, de l'exacerbation des choses et de l'indiffrence totale. En dehors de cela, je me sens indiffrent - lorsque je dis "me", c'est impersonnel - je ne parviens plus trouver qu'il y ait un jeu qui vaille la peine d'tre jou, selon des rgles du jeu dont je me sentirais ventuellement responsable, en dehors de mon petit cercle.

Ce n'est pas une histoire de repli, de "je me protge". Non, je reconnais objectivement que pour l'instant je n'ai pas envie de jouer. a ne m'empche pas de faire un certain nombre de choses.

Ce n'est pas un jugement de valeur, mais vous tes quelques uns tre couts, aims ou has, et vous comptez pour beaucoup de gens, que cela te plaise ou non. Dans la situation que nous vivons, tu es quelqu'un qui pense, qui a pens, qui a fait des propositions ou des contrepropositions et, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire, des gens te suivent. Si tu prends mon cas, admets que je n'ai pas vraiment donn aux gens beaucoup de raisons d'esprer dans tout ce que j'ai pu crire.

Ni de dsesprer. Non ! Ce n'est pas du dsespoir, mais une forme de radicalisation. C'est les forcer renoncer leurs espoirs les plus communs. Mais les gens attendent a aussi !

Tu leur as donn la satisfaction que procure une extrme lucidit... Peut-on appeler cela une bonne nouvelle ?

Cela peut tre une bonne nouvelle pour certains que de constater que les choses se passent exactement comme tu l'avais dit il y a une dizaine d'annes. Par consquent, cela veut dire qu'on peut envisager les choses et que cela mrite que l'on prenne la peine de penser. Trs bien, mais tout cela ne peut pas constituer un message. En tous cas pas une bonne nouvelle...

c'est plutt exactement la mauvaise nouvelle. Dans l'antiquit, le messager tait confondu avec le message, et on le tuait afin d'liminer la mauvaise nouvelle. C'est un peu la mme chose avec moi et cela est trs bien ainsi.

La bonne nouvelle c'est aussi l'ange. Grce ton travail, on passe de ce que reprsente la nouvelle la jouissance d'tre initi. Oui, mais cela est une jouissance secondaire. Secondaire non dans le sens qu'elle a moins de valeur que l'autre, mais parce que c'est une jouissance qui est au-del du contenu du message mme.

C'est la lucidit, c'est le fait de savoir que tout va mal. Si tu sais que tout va mal, effectivement tu n'es pas dans le pire, a c'est clair. Il y a au moins une prime de lucidit, et aussi une prime de plaisir, a je suis d'accord.

Si quelqu'un est capable de pr-voir le pire, il est aussi capable d'agir afin que cela soit le moins pire possible. Quoi qu'on en dise, tout est loin d'tre perdu... Ah! non !

2.

Au-del de la fin Jean Baudrillard Philosophe et sociologue.

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Les Humains Associs: Dans votre dernier ouvrage (L'Illusion de la fin ou la grve des vnements, Galile, Paris, 1992), vous parlez de ces phnomnes qui aujourd'hui nous touchent particulirement, comme si l'histoire tait devenue cyclique, comme si nous tions dans une dimension de totale reversibilit. Pourriez-vous nous en parler? Jean Baudrillard: Oui, le livre l'Illusion de la fin est parti d'une dsillusion, il pourrait aussi s'appeler "Dsillusion de la fin" ou "La fin de l'illusion", enfin on peut tourner la chose comme on veut (rire); c'est--dire qu'il y a toujours eu une sorte d'espoir, d'esprance, de perspective sur: les choses ont une finalit, l'histoire a une finalit, le progrs, enfin toutes les valeurs, nous portent vers un accomplissement futur. L, il y a une espce d'utopie qui est vive, en tout cas dans la culture occidentale, et il m'a sembl que toutes ces finalits, toutes ces valeurs, on les avait dj dpasses, que nous tions passs au-del, que nous sommes au-del de la fin.

C'est une situation paradoxale qui voudrait dire qu'au fond, toutes les utopies ont t en quelque sorte ralises, l'utopie de la libration, l'utopie du progrs, l'utopie de la production massive, enfin l'utopie de l'information, etc. Tout a est en place, et nous n'en voyons plus la finalit, parce que nous avons peut-tre simplement dpass la fin, nous sommes alls ou trop loin ou de l'autre ct. Nous nous trouvons dans un espace instable, o il n'y a plus exactement de rgle du jeu. C'est--dire que la perspective linaire du temps, la perspective de l'histoire ne fonctionne plus, et qu'il y a paradoxalement une curieuse rversion des choses, qui fait peut-tre qu'tant alls au-del, tant dans une sorte de vide de la finalit, de vide de la fin, tout revient sur ses propres traces pour les effacer.

C'est cela qui m'avait un peu proccup. Cela vient d'une situation trs curieuse et il est difficile d'en parler justement parce que c'est comme un systme qui se serait emball, qui serait pass au-del de ses propres fins, et en mme temps avec une espce de nostalgie de tout ce qui a t dpass, de ce qu'on a laiss et qui est en quelque sorte perdu. On n'arrive pas trouver notre fin, et en mme temps, on l'a dj dpasse. Nous sommes dans un tat tout fait paradoxal, qui se traduit je crois par une frayeur, une sorte de panique collective devant cette situation o tout est dj arriv, o les utopies sont ralises, o en ralit nous sommes dans la dsillusion totale. Il y a une forme de vertige rtrospectif qui nous fait redescendre l'histoire pied pied, revenir sur nos propres traces, une espce de rcurrence vers... je ne sais pas jusqu'o, mais jusqu' une origine introuvable. On voit bien aujourd'hui, partout la proccupation de l'origine, de retrouver jusqu'au big bang, d'essayer de remettre en place le point zro, d'essayer de savoir d'o nous sommes partis, pour savoir o nous sommes arrivs, ou plutt o nous ne sommes pas arrivs.

J'ai l'impression qu'il y a une forme de rversibilit des choses, qu'en tout cas, nous n'tions plus dans la forme linaire de dveloppement, qu'il y a un mouvement peut-tre pervers, je ne sais pas, qui est aussi propre notre culture. Il faut prendre quelques prcautions dans cette histoire de reparcourir les stades antrieurs pour peut-tre essayer de les corriger, de les blanchir. Nous sommes dans une phase de blanchiment intense, de rvisionnisme, et on a l'impression qu'on va faire la mme chose avec notre histoire, reprendre tous ces vnements violents, meurtriers, etc., et essayer de les corriger, d'en faire les procs ou de remettre les compteurs zro, pour repartir, je ne sais vers quelle autre histoire.

Alors, c'est cette chose-l que j'avais appele "l'illusion de la fin", dans la mesure o, nous n'avons plus de fin, en fait, nous croyons et nous esprons que les choses vont finir, parce qu'au fond, si on arrivait trouver la fin, a voudrait dire que quelque chose a eu lieu, et si quelque chose a eu lieu et que cela prend fin, on a l'impression que plus rien n'a vraiment lieu, plus rien ne parvient trouver son but, son objectif, sa fin, que toutes les choses sont un petit peu confuses. Mais cette illusion de la fin est la fois une perte de l'illusion et une perte de l'utopie de la fin, on est forc de se dbrouiller avec un tat transfini - c'est un terme que je ne matrise pas, il est mathmatique - instable, hyper-rel. L'histoire elle-mme, c'est--dire mme le pass qui en principe a rellement eu lieu, se trouve reprise dans la mme instabilit; il faut arriver faire la preuve de ce qui a eu lieu. On voit bien a avec les procs rtrospectifs de l'histoire, qu'est-ce qui a vraiment eu lieu? Y compris les questions poses sur la guerre, sur les camps de concentration, etc. Nous sommes obsds par faire la preuve que le pass a rellement exist.

Si nous pouvions faire la preuve du pass, nous aurions encore droit au futur. Et la mmoire devient de plus en plus impalpable, nous sommes dans une socit "sans mmoire"; nous avons de plus en plus de mmoires artificielles, d'ordinateurs, etc., et de moins en moins de mmoire vivante de ce qui a eu lieu, et du coup nous avons aussi de moins en moins de perspectives possibles. Le problme origine-fin, c'est--dire une linarit, une continuit des choses qui permettrait d'en trouver le sens, c'est cela qui, en quelque sorte, nous chappe.

C'est une trange sensation que l'on vit de retour vers le pass, o l'on voit les grands vnements de notre poque tre blanchis. Cela dmontre quelque part que l'histoire est cyclique?... Ah non! Non, non, ce n'est pas un cycle, ce n'est pas le retour d'un cycle, ce n'est pas une ternit qui se reproduirait. Non! C'est vritablement un retour en arrire. Ce n'est pas une

rgression non plus, parce que a voudrait dire qu'elle est aussi linaire, comme la progression. Nous ne sommes plus dans un temps linaire, nous sommes peut-tre dans un temps un peu chaotique, o il y a des rcurrences, des turbulences, etc. Mais non, non, ce n'est certainement pas un temps cyclique, ce n'est plus le temps linaire, continu et projectif de l'histoire traditionnelle.

Alors, sommes-nous encore dans l'histoire? De l'histoire il n'y a pas de dfinition, elle n'est pas aussi vieille que a, il faut dire que les bases simplement thoriques de l'histoire ne sont vieilles que de quelques sicles. Peut-tre que ces postulats ont cess d'exister et, qu' ce moment-l, c'est autre chose qui a lieu, c'est--dire une perte de polarit du temps, une forme aussi d'acclration. Il y a trop d'vnements, et l'histoire n'est pas dfinie par des vnements, elle se nourrit quand mme d'enjeux vnementiels et maintenant, avec l'information et les mdias, l'vnement est multipli; il est lui aussi centrifug et projet dans une diffusion mondiale, il est immdiatement rpercut et immdiatement volatilis aussi d'une certaine manire. Il perd son sens dans sa diffusion mme; a c'est l'effet mdiatique, c'est un effet de disparition. L'information, contrairement ce qu'on croit, est une sorte de trou noir, c'est une forme d'absorption de l'vnement, de diffusion, de transmission, c'est l'vnement haute dilution, il perd sa concentration, donc son sens.

Pour qui les vnements ont-ils encore un sens? Et cela nous y sommes confronts tous les jours. Les vnements actuels, Yougoslavie, guerre du Golfe, etc., tout le monde a su, a t inform, superinform et en fait n'en a rien su, parce que la vritable exprience d'un vnement, ou le vritable sens qu'on peut en tirer, chappe finalement tout le monde, puisqu'il se dilue dans une forme d'information gnralise. C'est une des formes, presque chaotique de notre univers, il y a une sorte d'acclration, et l'histoire meurt par l'acclration mme, par la centrifugation des vnements. Elle meurt aussi par ralentissement, mais l c'est plus compliqu, parce qu'au fur et mesure que cette information tombe dans la masse, elle fait masse elle aussi. Tous les messages que nous recevons font masse, au sens o ils deviennent une forme de dchets inertes que nous n'arrivons plus traiter ou recycler... (rire).

Nous avons l'impression que l'information est fluide, qu'elle passe par des rseaux, qu'elle circule, c'est sa dfinition. Mais en ralit elle tombe, et l o elle tombe, elle reste, parce qu'elle n'est plus transfigure, mtabolise, etc. On parle de dchets industriels videmment, et matriels, mais il y a un norme dchet informatif, communicatif, informationnel, qui est aussi une masse inerte, c'est une force d'inertie en quelque sorte, qui pse sur l'vnement

mme. Alors, soit par acclration, soit par inertie, l'histoire a bien du mal passer au travers, au sens o elle ne peut exister que s'il y a, la fois bien sr, une nergie et une volont historique, une possibilit de reprsentation de l'histoire, et c'est celle-l qui nous chappe un peu aujourd'hui. Les lments qui forment l'histoire - y compris le rcit qu'on peut en faire, parce qu'il n'y a pas d'histoire sans rcit, sans possibilit de la narrer, de la rciter - nous chappent un peu aussi parce que l'information s'empare trop vite de ce qui se passe, cela passe de plus en plus par l'image et non plus par le texte, ou par des mmoires crites, ou trs peu et c'est trop fugace, trop volatile et cela se dilue dans un espace qui n'est plus tout fait le ntre.

Nous sommes passs au-del de ces points dont parlait Queneti, quand il disait: "Peut-tre que l'espce humaine a franchi un point aveugle au-del duquel rien n'est plus ni vrai, ni faux, ni historique, ni non-historique, et qu'au-del on ne sait pas vraiment ce qui se passe, on ne connat pas vraiment les rgles du jeu". Bien sr, il y a toujours plus d'vnements, mais il ne suffit pas d'vnements pour faire de l'histoire; il y a de plus en plus de violence, mais ce n'est plus une violence historique comme l'analysait Marx, nous avons affaire autre chose. Au-del de ce point, c'est un peu la panique; d'o, sans doute, l'impulsion collective de reculer, de retourner en arrire, pour essayer de retrouver le point en de duquel il y avait de l'histoire, il y avait de la vraie violence, si je puis dire (rire), o il y avait de vritables vnements, o il y avait... des rvolutions, des contradictions, enfin des choses qui faisaient qu'il y avait un enjeu, alors que maintenant il se passe beaucoup de choses, mais l'enjeu a un peu disparu l'horizon de l'histoire.

Dans les annes soixante-dix, la relation entre socit et intellectuels tait beaucoup plus filtre par les partis politiques. partir des annes quatre-vingt - marques par la crise des grands mouvements idologiques - la prsence des intellectuels est devenue plus personnelle. Il y a paradoxalement des matres penser qu'on ne sait pas o situer. Faites-vous partie de cette catgorie? Mais, est-ce qu'il y a encore des matres penser? Justement, on a l'air de regretter qu'il n'y en ait plus; les partis politiques n'existent plus tellement non plus (rire). De toutes faons, toutes les parties sont en train de plus ou moins disparatre... mais la relation intellectuels-partis politiques tait fonde quand mme sur un mouvement de l'histoire. Il est vident que l'histoire prsentant ces symptmes alarmants, la relation se dfait, mais j'ai l'impression qu'elle se dfait au dpens des deux. D'une part, la classe politique a bien du mal exister dans son enfermement, dans son immunit, coupe de la socit ou du corps social, et aujourd'hui elle crve en quelque sorte de cette indiffrence. D'autre part, les intellectuels sont aussi dans une mauvaise passe, puisqu'il n'y a plus exactement d'histoire dans ce sens-l, comment peuvent-ils tre la conscience historique ou la conscience morale, lorsque les rgles

thiques, morales et politiques prsentent cette confusion, cette instabilit, lorsqu'on n'est plus sr des distinctions, etc.?

J'ai l'impression que l'intellectuel avait une case, avait une bonne niche, et n'avait pas de problme tant qu'il y avait encore une possibilit de reprsentation. Aujourd'hui, la reprsentation politique est durement touche, et la reprsentation au sens intellectuel tant dans la conscience de cette socit, pouvant la reprsenter, c'est cette possiblit critique qui a aujourd'hui disparu, c'est--dire, ce monde o il n'y a plus de recul, tout se passe l aussi peuttre trop vite, il n'y a plus la distance qu'il faut, le temps qu'il faut, pour le jugement critique, pour le jugement moral, etc.

Mais je ne suis pas tellement sr, de toute faon, que l'intellectuel ait jamais exist, c'est un terme qui m'a toujours chapp (rire). la fin, il s'est donn le statut d'intellectuel; une forme de complicit a t orchestre et on a fini par croire que les intellectuels reprsentaient une sorte de classe trs privilgie. mon avis, aujourd'hui cette classe intellectuelle, comme la classe mdiatique, comme la classe politique, est en train de dprir derrire le mur qu'elle a dress elle-mme, derrire l'immunit qu'elle s'est donne. Tout le problme aujourd'hui c'est d'arriver, en fait pour toute cette classe politique, se dsimmuniser (petit rire), c'est--dire faire tomber le mur qui la spare de la socit relle. L'intellectuel a aussi son privilge et il essaye aujourd'hui de le ngocier, de le remettre en jeu, de retrouver une espce de cordon ombilical avec le monde rel ou avec les vnements.

3.

Ttulo: A alucinao coletiva do virtual

Autor: Jean Baudrillard Fonte: Jornal Folha de So Paulo, caderno Mais!, 28/01/1996 Link: http://www.uol.com.br/fsp

Resumo: Nova hegemonia elimina o tempo histrico e suprime at mesmo a possibilidade do apocalipse A poltica perdeu seu princpio de ao e sua realidade Hoje no pensamos o virtual, o virtual que nos pensa. E essa transparncia imperceptvel que nos separa definitivamente do real nos to incompreensvel quanto pode s-lo para a mosca o vidro contra o qual ela se choca sem compreender o que a separa do mundo exterior. A mosca nem sequer imagina o que pe fim a seu espao. Do mesmo modo, nem sequer imaginamos o quanto o virtual j transformou, como por antecipao, todas as representaes que temos do mundo.

Somos incapazes de imagin-lo porque da natureza do virtual pr fim no apenas realidade, mas tambm imaginao do real, do poltico, do social _no apenas realidade do tempo, mas tambm imaginao do passado e do futuro (a isso d-se o nome, com uma boa dose de humor negro, de "tempo real").

Ainda estamos muito longe de compreender que a entrada em cena da mdia impede a evoluo da histria, que a subida ao palco da inteligncia artificial impede o avano do pensamento. A iluso que guardvamos de todas essas categorias tradicionais, inclusive a iluso de nos "abrir ao virtual" como a uma extenso real de todos os mundos possveis, a prpria iluso da mosca que incansavelmente toma distncia para de novo chocar-se contra o vidro.

Ainda acreditamos na realidade do virtual, apesar de o prprio mundo virtual j ter apagado virtualmente todas as pistas do pensamento. Para pr um pouco de ordem nessa confuso, tomarei um exemplo delicado, justamente porque representa o prolongamento do fato mais assustador e incompreensvel da histria moderna: o extermnio e aqueles que negam sua existncia, os negacionistas.

A proposio negacionista em si mesma absurda; seu despropsito to evidente que a questo crucial passa a ser: por que temos de defender a verdade contra eles? Como a questo da existncia das cmaras de gs pde sequer ser formulada? Ela jamais o seria em outros tempos. Aqueles que contestam o negacionismo no se indagam sobre a prpria possibilidade dessa polmica e contentam-se com uma veemente indignao. Ora, a prpria necessidade de defender a realidade histrica das cmaras de gs como uma causa moral, a necessidade de defender a "realidade" em geral com base numa espcie de engajamento poltico revela muito dos descaminhos da objetividade e da mudana de registro na verdade histrica.

No tempo histrico, o evento ocorreu e as provas de fato existem. Mas no estamos mais no tempo histrico, estamos no tempo real _e no tempo real no h mais provas, sejam elas quais forem.

O negacionismo, portanto, absurdo em sua prpria lgica. Seu carter peculiar esclarece o advento de uma outra dimenso, chamada paradoxalmente de "tempo real", mas em cujos limites a realidade objetiva est ausente _e no apenas a realidade do acontecimento atual, mas tambm dos acontecimentos passados e futuros. Todos os elementos esgotam-se numa tal simultaneidade que as aes no recobram mais seu sentido, os efeitos no remontam mais a suas causas e a histria j incapaz de neles ser refletida.

O tempo real uma espcie de buraco negro onde nada penetra sem antes perder sua substncia. De fato, os prprios campos de extermnio tornam-se virtuais e figuram apenas na tela do mundo virtual: todos os testemunhos, o Holocausto e a Shoah, precipitam-se, a despeito deles e a despeito de ns, no mesmo abismo virtual.

No se diz com isso, no entanto, que, em sua sinceridade absoluta, os prprios testemunhos e os filmes (como imagens que esgotam o horror na atualidade da imagem) no contribuem para essa memria impossvel: o extermnio real est condenado a um outro extermnio, o do virtual. Eis aqui a verdadeira soluo final.

Exatamente nisto que consiste a derrota do pensamento _do pensamento histrico e do pensamento crtico. Na verdade, porm, no sua derrota: a vitria do tempo real sobre o presente, sobre o passado e sobre todas as formas de articulao lgica da realidade.Nem mesmo o futuro est a salvo no tempo real (este o sentido da proposio paradoxal de que no haver ano 2000). Caberia aqui discutir a viso de Paul Virilio sobre o "Acidente final", sobre o "Acidente dos acidentes", o "apocalipse do virtual", que ele vislumbra ao termo dessa evoluo, ou melhor, dessa involuo de nosso mundo em tempo real. Nada menos certo, porm, do que esse apocalipse (at mesmo essa certeza nos escapa!...).

Sonhar com o "Acidente final" significa prender-se iluso do fim. Significa esquecer que a prpria virtualidade virtual e que, por definio, seu advento definitivo, seu apocalipse, jamais ser capaz de ganhar fora de realidade.

No haver apocalipse do virtual e do tempo real porque, justamente, o tempo real aniquila o tempo linear e a durao, ou seja, a dimenso em que poderiam desenvolver-se at seu

extremo limite. No h uma funo linear exponencial do Acidente, e seu termo ltimo permanece aleatrio.

A soluo radical de continuidade do real instaurada pelo virtual, a sncope ou o colapso do tempo instaurada pelo tempo real felizmente nos preserva do termo final do extermnio. O sistema do virtual, a exemplo de todos os outros, est condenado a destruir suas prprias condies de possibilidade.

No devemos, portanto, sonhar com um apocalipse futuro, assim como no devemos nos deixar prender por uma utopia qualquer, seja ela qual for: o apocalipse ou a utopia jamais tero lugar no tempo real, pois o prprio tempo sempre lhes faltar.

Se h efetivamente uma revoluo do virtual, preciso compreender seu sentido e deduzir todas as suas consequncias, mesmo se nos reservamos a liberdade de recus-lo pela raiz. Se no h apocalipse (e, virtualmente, j nos encontramos dentro dele: basta constatar a devastao de todo o mundo real), isso vale tambm para as demais categorias.

O social, o poltico, o histrico e mesmo o moral e o psicolgico _todos os acontecimentos dessas esferas so virtuais. Ou seja, intil buscar uma poltica do virtual, uma tica do virtual etc., pois a prpria poltica tornou-se virtual, a prpria tica tornou-se virtual, no sentido de que ambas perderam seu princpio de ao e sua fora de realidade.

O mesmo ocorre com a tcnica: falamos de "tecnologias do virtual", mas na verdade h (ou em breve haver) somente tecnologias virtuais. Ora, no existe mais o pensamento do artifcio num mundo em que o prprio pensamento torna-se artificial. Podemos dizer, nesse sentido, que o virtual nos pensa, e no o contrrio.

Toda essa interrogao sobre o virtual tornou-se hoje em dia ainda mais delicada e mais complexa devido extraordinria impostura que o rodeia. O excesso de informaes, o bombardeio publicitrio e tecnolgico, a mdia, o entusiasmo ou o pnico _tudo concorre para uma espcie de alucinao coletiva do virtual e de seus efeitos. Windows 95, Internet, as autoestradas da informao _tudo isso consumido cada vez mais por antecipao, no discurso e na fantasia.Ser esse talvez um modo de unir os efeitos em curto-circuito, fazendo-os irromper na imaginao? Disso, porm, no estamos certos. A prpria impostura e a intoxicao no fazem parte do virtual? No sabemos. Sempre a velha histria da mosca que se choca contra a evidncia incompreensvel do vidro.

"Certitude does not exist", diz uma pichao de Nova York. - "Are you sure?"

4.

O espetculo do terror, segundo notas do filsofo Baudrillard Pensador francs analisou efeito das imagens do ataque de 11 de setembro

Associated Press Osama bin Laden sorri ao falar sobre a diferena de tempo entre o choque de um avio e outro contra as torres gmeas

MOACIR AMNCIO

O pensador francs Jean Baudrillard publicou em novembro um texto brilhante no Le Monde. O objetivo do artigo to corriqueiro nos ltimos tempos quanto iluminador. Ele procura explicar o "esprito do terrorismo".

Comea com uma ferroada na conscincia ocidental, que tende a responsabilizar a TV pelo espetculo repetitivo das imagens das torres gmeas do World Trade Center virando p no dia 11 de setembro. A ferroada vai por conta do que seria uma ressentida relao imaginria dos cidados ocidentais com a superpotncia norte-americana e fantasias de destruio - lembram o verso de Drummond sobre Manhattan?

Uma relao pornogrfica. Porque os discursos e os comentrios revelam fascnio pelas imagens-fato. "A condenao moral, a unio sagrada contra o terrorismo" tm contrapartida no espetculo da destruio, ou melhor, de autodestruio da superpotncia, num espelho. "Pois ela que, ao lado de seu poder insuportvel, que fomenta toda essa violncia infusa pelo mundo, e, da, essa imaginao terrorista (sem sab-lo) que nos habita."

A fora do terrorismo, de acordo com Baudrillard, contraposta ao poder poltico e militar, est na capacidade de criar smbolos que se gravam to fortemente no pblico-alvo. Ao poder dos msseis, cujo resultado de repente pode ser comparado ao esforo da montanha para dar luz alguns piolhos, o terror ope a "arma absoluta" da morte. o que se viu nos Estados Unidos, o que se v na Palestina, numa rotina infernal. O terrorismo mundial "como a sombra de todo sistema de dominao", que pode se "revelar como um agente duplo. No h mais linha de demarcao que perrmita discerni-lo, ele est no prprio corao dessa cultura que o combate..."

Descontando um pouco da retrica - como outros grandes escritores, Baudrillard s vezes se enreda no virtuosismo estilstico - seu texto procura ventilar um pouco a parede de poeira que ficou. Para ele, no se trata de um "choque de civilizaes nem de religies e isso ultrapassa de longe o Isl e a Amrica, sobre as quais tenta-se focalizar o conflito para dar iluso de um enfrentamento visvel e de uma soluo de fora". O antagonismo "fundamental, mas designa, atravs do espectro da Amrica (que pode ser o epicentro, mas no de toda a encarnao da globalizao nela mesma) e atravs do espectro do Isl (que no mais a encarnaa do terrorismo), a globalizao triunfante ..." o quadro da quarta guerra mundial. A primeira acabou com a supremacia europia e o colonialismo. A segunda deu fim ao nazismo. A terceira foi a fria, com a imploso do comunismo. Agora a vez da "guerra fractal de todas as clulas, de todas as singularidades que se revoltam sob a forma de anticorpos. (...) ela que odeia toda a ordem mundial, toda dominao hegemnica - se o Isl dominasse o mundo, o terrorismo se levantaria contra o Isl. Porque o prprio mundo que resiste globalizao." Que no confundam as coisas mais ainda.

Baudrillard v a fragmentao ps-moderna como passagem libertria.

O clima de terror deslumbrado pelo fato-imagem que no ocorreu no Afeganisto, pois o revide no tem a fora simblica do ataque a no ser que corra na mesma faixa suicida, sacrificial. Ele assinala, mais para o fim:

"...nesse acontecimento singular, nesse filme-catstrofe de Manhattan se conjugam no mais alto nvel os dois elementos de fascinao da massa do sculo 20: a magia branca do cinema e a magia negra do terrorismo. A luz branca da imagem e a luz negra do terrorismo." O ensaio foi comentado, apropriadamente, por Thierry Jousse, na edio da Cahiers du Cinma deste ms. Jousse assinala que Baudrillard foi mais longe do que todo mundo "na percepo e na anlise dessas imagens. No mais do que um comeo..."

Outro captulo acrescentou-se histria, com a exibio de um "novo" vdeo de Bin Laden, na quinta-feira. O deboche, a zombaria, a reduo disso a private joke podero garantir o sucesso da audincia.

5.

A Conjuration of Imbeciles

Jean Baudrillard

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic" elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is, let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist discourses - moved to the left?

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency. But today the left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely moralistic lawmaking structure, a representative of universal values, a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left (which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic rights,

and good conscience, having thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political, the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence), the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past, whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of morality and order, you could always count on the left, always attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils, just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that

his opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation? What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society (recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this inextricable and complex process of exclusion. There is something typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and is all the more virulent since people think that they have

eradicated the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body. Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared (by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left. Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound, they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which, in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to mean something.

What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid falling for the viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some extent, taken from us?

This article originally appeared as "La conjuration des imbeciles" in Liberation on May 7, 1997.

Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.

6.

A Conjuration of Imbeciles

Jean Baudrillard

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic" elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is, let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist discourses - moved to the left?

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency.

But today the left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely moralistic lawmaking structure, a representative of universal values, a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left (which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political, the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence), the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past, whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of morality and order, you could always count on the left, always attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils, just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation? What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society (recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this inextricable and

complex process of exclusion. There is something typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body. Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared (by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left. Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound, they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which, in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to mean something.

What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid falling for the viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some extent, taken from us?

This article originally appeared as "La conjuration des imbeciles" in Liberation on May 7, 1997.

Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.

7.

A Conjuration of Imbeciles

Jean Baudrillard

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic" elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is, let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist discourses - moved to the left?

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency. But today the left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely moralistic lawmaking structure, a representative of universal values, a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left (which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political, the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence), the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past, whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of morality and order, you could always count on the left, always attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils, just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of

corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation? What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society (recently,

exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this inextricable and complex process of exclusion. There is something typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body. Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared (by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left. Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound, they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which, in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if everyone

else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to mean something.

What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid falling for the viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some extent, taken from us?

This article originally appeared as "La conjuration des imbeciles" in Liberation on May 7, 1997.

Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.

8.

Reversion of History

Jean Baudrillard

Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history took a turn in another direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once it reached the peak of the curve in its evolution, its solstice of history, a sliding back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in the case of cosmic space, historical space-time would also have a curvature. By way of the same chaotic effect in time as in space, things go faster and faster as they approach their culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up mysteriously as it approaches the waterfall. In the Euclidean space of history, the fastest route from one point to another is a straight line, the one of Progress and Democracy. This however only pertains to the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, a malevolent curvature invincibly reroutes all trajectories. The phenomenon is doubtlessly linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century just like the earth is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or to the subtle distortion of the field of gravity.

Segalen says that on an Earth become a sphere, every movement distancing us from a point also brings us closer to that same point. This is true with respect to time as well. Every noticeable movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer to its antipode, indeed to its point of departure. This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if there is no future, neither is there an end anymore. And yet this is not what is meant by the end of history. What we have to deal with is a paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.

By means of this retroversion of history to infinity, through this hyperbolic curvature, the century eludes its own end. By way of this retrospective effect of events, we escape before our own death. Metaphorically speaking therefore, we will not even attain to the symbolic end of things, the symbolic culmination of Year 2000.

Can we avoid this retro-curvature of a history that backtracks on its footsteps and effaces its own traces; can we sidestep this fatal asymptote which in some way rolls back modernity in the way one rewinds a tapedeck? We are so accustomed to viewing all films over and over again, the fictitious ones as well as those pertaining to our lives; we have been so thoroughly contaminated by a retrospective technique that we are quite capable, under the blow of contemporary vertigo, to rethread history as one threads a film wrong side up.

Have we perhaps, propelled by the vain hope to evade our "abiding in our present destruction", as Canetti says, given ourselves up to a retrospective melancholy in order to relive and, make up for, everything; to relive for the sake of elucidating (as if the shadow of psychoanalysis is cast over all our history - as if the same events, the same circumstances were reproduced in nearly the same terms; as if the same wars broke out between the same people, and; all that had been stolen would resurge as if moved by an irrepressible fantasy so that the oeuvre itself would be perceived as the form of the unconscious, as primary process at work); are we to invoke all past events for the sake of comparison, to re-teach everything in terms of process? A delirium with process has quite recently gotten hold of us and, at the same time, a seizure or delirium with responsibility, precisely because it is becoming increasingly elusive. To remake history proper - to whitewash all the monstrosities: underlying the proliferation of scandals there is a vague (res)sentiment that history itself, too, is a scandal. A retro-process that will steer us to a delirium with/of origin, to this side of history, to a conviviality driven by instincts (animale), to the primitive niche, which is already the way things stand in the ecologic flirt with an impossible origin.

The only way to avoid this, to cut the chord tying us to this recession and obsession, is to place ourselves straightaway on an alternative temporal orbit, to leave our shadow, the shadow of

the century, to take an elliptic short-cut and go beyond the end by not allowing it time to take place. This, at least, will help preserve what remains are left of history instead of subjecting it to a harrowing revision and then dispense it to those who will do an autopsy on the cadaver the way one does an autopsy on one's childhood in never-ending analysis. This would at least provide us with the possibility of retaining the memory and glory, and under the auspices of revision and rehabilitation we could begin cancelling each and all the events that have come before, forcing them to repent.

If we could circumvent this moratory of the end of the century, this retarded culmination of things which, strangely enough, resembles a labour of mourning, a misdirected or misfired (rate) labour of mourning that wants to review, re-write, restore and facelift everything in order to produce, seemingly in a paranoiac fervour (elan), a perfect book-keeping of the end of the century, a universally balanced budget, democracy everywhere, complete eradication of all conflicts and, if possible, the dismissal of all our memories of all "negative" events - if we could forego or desist this venture in bleaching, in international varnishing for which all nations of today are vying to conspire, if we could spare ourselves this democratic extreme-ity (extremeonction) from where the New World Order speaks, we would at least be left with events that have preceded us with their glory, their character, their meaning, their uniqueness. Consequently, we are so much in a hurry to mask the worst of our deposit into our account (everyone is secretly afraid of the appalling balance we are about to carry over and offer to the Year 2000) that there remains nothing of our own history at the end of the millennium, nothing of its illumination, of its factual violence. If there is any distinct trait to the event, that which in fact comprises the event and hence has value in history, is its irreversibility, i.e., that there is something in it that always exceeds meaning and interpretation - which is exactly the opposite of what we see today: all that has happened in this century in terms of progress, of liberation, of revolution, of violence is currently under a well-meaning review process.

The question is this: is the movement of modernity reversible, and is this reversibility itself, in turn, irreversible? How far can this retrospective activity, this dream of the end of the millennium go? Isn't there a "wall of history", analogous to that of sound and speed, from which its abjuring (palinodique) movement cannot steer clear?

Originally published in French as part of Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements, Galilee: Paris, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas, York University, Canada.

Up to CTHEORY

9.

Global Debt and Parallel Universe

Jean Baudrillard

An electronic billboard in Times Square displays the American public debt, an astronomic figure of some thousands of billions of dollars which increases at a rate of $20,000 a second. Another electronic billboard at the Beaubourg Center in Paris displays the thousands of seconds until the year 2000. The latter figure is that of time, which gradually diminishes. The former figure is that of money, which increases at a sky-rocketing speed. The latter is a countdown to second zero. The former, on the contrary, extends to infinity. Yet, at least in the imaginary, both of them evoke a catastrophe: the vanishing of time at Beaubourg; the passing of the debt into an exponential mode and the possibility of a financial crash in Times Square.

In fact, the debt will never be paid. No debt will ever be paid. The final counts will never take place. If time is counted [si le temps nous est compte], the missing money is beyond counting [au-dela de toute comptabilite]. The United States is already virtually unable to pay, but this will have no consequence whatsoever. There will be no judgment day for this virtual bankruptcy. It is simple enough to enter an exponential or virtual mode to become free of any responsibility, since there is no reference anymore, no referential world to serve as a measuring norm.

The disappearance of the referential universe is a brand new phenomenon. When one looks at the billboard on Broadway, with its flying figures, one has the impression that the debt takes off to reach the stratosphere. This is simply the figure in light years of a galaxy that vanishes in the cosmos. The speed of liberation of the debt is just like one of earth's satellites. That's exactly what it is: the debt circulates on its own orbit, with its own trajectory made up of capital, which, from now on, is free of any economic contingency and moves about in a parallel universe (the acceleration of capital has exonerated money of its involvements with the everyday universe of production, value and utility). It is not even an orbital universe: it is rather ex-orbital, ex-centered, ex-centric, with only a very faint probability that, one day, it might rejoin ours. That's why no debt will ever be paid. At most, it can be bought over at a bargain price to later be placed back on a debt market (public debt, national debt, global debt) where it will have become a currency of exchange. Since there is no likely settlement date, the

debt has an incalculable [inestimable] value. As long as it hangs like that over our heads with no reference whatsoever, it also serves as our only guarantee against time. Unlike the countdown which signifies the end of time, an indefinitely deferred debt is the guarantee that even time is inexhaustible... And we really need a virtual time insurance since our future is about to dissipate in real time.

Clearing the debt, settling the accounts, cancelling the payments by the Third World... Don't even think about it! We only live because of this unbalance, of the proliferation and the promise of infinity created by the debt. The global or planetary debt has, of course, no meaning in the classical terms of stock or credit. But it acts as our true collective credit line, a symbolic credit system whereby people, corporations, nations are attached to one another by default. People are tied to each other (this goes for the banks too) by means of their virtual bankruptcy, just as accomplices are tied by their crime. Everyone is certain to exist for the other in the shadow of an unamendable and insolvable debt for, as of today, the total amount of the global debt is much larger than the total amount of available capital. Thus, the debt no longer has any meaning but to unite all civilized beings to a same destiny served on credit. A similar thing takes place with nuclear weapons whose global capacity is much bigger than what is needed to destroy the entire planet. Yet, it remains as a way of uniting all of humankind to a same destiny marked by threat and deterrence.

At least, it is easier now to understand why the Americans are so eager to advertise their domestic debt in such a spectacular manner. The Times Square initiative is designed to make the state feel guilty about the way it runs the country, and intended to warn the citizens about the imminent collapse of the financial and public spheres. But, of course, the exorbitant figure deprives the billboard of any meaning (even figures have lost their credit line). In fact, this is nothing more than a gigantic advertising campaign and, by the way, this is why the neon "billboard" is made to look like a triumphant stock exchange quotation that has gone over the top. And people stare at it, fascinated by the spectacle of a world performance (in the meantime, people rarely look at the numerical time clock at Beaubourg to witness the gradual ending of this century). People are collectively in the same situation as that Russian test pilot who, until the very last second, was able to see his airplane drop and crash on the video system of his Tupolev jet. Did he have the ultimate reflex to look at the image before dying? He could have imagined his last living moments in virtual reality. Did the image survive the pilot, even for a tenth of a second, or vice versa? Does virtual reality live on after the catastrophe of the real world?

Our true artificial satellites are the global debt, the flows of capital, and the nuclear loads that circle around the earth in an orbital dance. As pure artifacts, with a sidereal velocity and an instantaneous capacity of reversal, they have found their true place. This place is even more extraordinary than the Stock Exchange, banks, or nuclear stockpiles: it is that of the orbit, where they rise and set like artificial suns.

Some of the most recent of these exponentially developing parallel worlds are the Internet and the many worldwide webs of information. Each day, in real time, the irresistible growth (or outgrowth perhaps) of information could be measured there, with numbers representing the millions of people and the billions of operations that they cover. Information now expands to such an extent that it no longer has anything to do with gaining knowledge. Information's immense potential will never be redeemed and it will never be able to achieve its finality. It's just like the debt. Information is just as insolvable as the debt and we'll never be able to get rid of it. Collecting data, accumulating and transporting information all over the world are the same thing as compiling an unpayable debt. And here too, since proliferating information is larger than the needs and capacities of any individual, and of the human species in general, it has no other meaning but that of binding humankind to a destiny of cerebral automation and mental underdevelopment. It is clear that if a small dose of information reduces ignorance, a massive dose of artificial intelligence can only reinforce the belief that our natural intelligence is deficient. The worst thing that can happen to an individual is to know too much and, thus, to fall beyond knowledge. It is exactly the same thing with responsibility and emotional capacity. The perpetual intimation of the media in terms of violence, suffering, and catastrophe, far from exalting some sort of collective solidarity, only demonstrates our real impotence and drives us to panic and resentment.

Caught in their autonomous and exponential logic, all these parallel worlds are like time bombs. It is more obvious with nuclear weapons, but it is also true of the debt and capital flows. The smallest intrusion of these worlds into ours, the least noticeable encounter between their orbits and ours, would immediately disrupt the fragile equilibrium of our exchanges and economies. This would (or will) be the same with the total liberation of information, which could transform us into free radicals desperately searching for our molecules in a scanty cyberspace.

Reason would probably insist that we include these worlds into our homogeneous universe: nuclear weapons would have a peaceful use, all the debts would be erased, all the flows of capital would be reinvested in terms of social well-being, and information would contribute to knowledge. This is, no doubt, a dangerous utopia. Let these worlds remain parallel to ours, let their threats hang up in the air: their ex-centricity is what protects us. For, no matter how parallel and ex-centric they may be, they are in fact ours. We are the ones who created them and placed them beyond our reach, as an ersatz of transcendence. We are the ones who placed them on their orbits as some sort of catastrophic imaginaries. And it is perhaps better this way. Our society was once solidified by a utopia of progress. It now exists because of a catastrophic imaginary.

"Global Debt and Parallel Universe" was originally published in French by Liberation, Paris.

Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.

11. Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery

Jean Baudrillard

As a watermark of unexpected, but also in view of other unforeseen events, the idea was conceived at the dawn of the nineties among a few friends to set up an Agency that would be invisible, anonymous and clandestine, Stealthy Agency, equally labelled as:

ANATHEMATIC ILLIMITED TRANSFATAL EXPRESS VIRAL INCORPORATED INTERNATIONAL EPIDEMICS

Seeking to hunt down unreal events with which to disinform the public, it itself has remained unreal. In this sense, it perfectly fulfilled its role, as it managed to escape all radar detection to become a unique formula that is never virtual.

What this implied is that there were no longer ideas that had anything to do with facts - this was the "utopia" of the sixties and seventies - that there were no longer any actors involved in events, no intellectuals occupied with meaning. Instead, there was an insignificant upheaval of events, lacking real actors and authorized interpreters: action [l'actio] simultaneously disappeared with the auction [l'auctoritas]. All that remains are "current events", a kind of cinematographic "action", an "auction", i.e., the price-tagging of the event in an overbid of information. The event is taken up not only in action but in speculation and, eventually, in a

chain reaction that links facticity to extremes in such a manner that no interpretation can be rejoined to it.

Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by artificial montage and non-sense. It is the putting up for auction of the event through radical disinformation, the price-tagging of the event instead of gambling with it, instead of investing in the stakes of history. If, on the other hand, should there be a stake in this, it remains occult, enigmatic, and resolved in events that have never really taken place. And I am not talking about ordinary events, but of the events of the East [Eastern Europe], of the Gulf War, etc. What the Agency otherwise specifically aimed at was to oppose this simulation with a radical dissimulation, to lift the veil from this non-happening of events. It has also occultized and enigmatized itself in their image in order to open up and clear to the way to a particular void, to a certain non-sense - unlike the media which remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. Its aim was to manoeuvre itself in the void of events like Chuang-Tzu's butcher proceeds in the interstitial void of the body. This surreptitious, sly intervention in the meaning of the void against grotesque infatuation with information and the political scene, evidently could not amount to more than a dream and because of its assumed occult and enigmatic nature, it ended up not taking place like the events themselves. It fell into the same black hole, into the same virtual space as the non-events which it should have addressed (secretly however, and without anyone knowing, it remained operational in the image of these new events which were either mediatized or not). An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea, though, is not dead.

Stealthy Agency responded to the strike of events, to the strike of history. Like history, it, too, subscribed to absent events, looking for a way to furnish the most exact non-information on the absence of events; on this illimited strike with respect to the occupation of history; on void space over which the phantoms of Power still hover, similar to the empty space of Work strikers occupy in a factory, over which the phantom of Capital continues to hover.

It is as if the events had adopted the vocabulary of the order of strike. Step by step, everything forsook and defected from its time reconfiguring itself into a present/current void where only a visual psychodrama of information was left lingering behind. And this strike of events brings with it the lock-out of history. The fact that events no longer generate information [rather, it is the other way round], prompts incalculable consequences. All the negative work disappears on the horizon of the media precisely in the way that labour disappears on the horizon of capital. There too, relations become inverted: it is no longer labour that serves the reproduction of capital, it is capital that produces and reproduces labour. An enormous parody of the relations of production.

This deregulation of effects and causes no longer raises or incites critical consciousness, only singular objective irony. The Agency therefore had to withstand not only the temptation of information with respect to events on strike, it also had to abstain from offering a critical discourse so that it could capture the originality of this non-event which is that of objective irony. The radical irony of our history is that things no longer happen, everything has an air about it - contrary to the traditional cunning of history that made sure essential changes were produced without any air about them.

One only has to contemplate how the events of Eastern Europe had been taken at face or cash value, with their weight-in-gold freedom and "democratic values", or how the Gulf War spawned its weight-in-gold of human Rights and the New World Order. How, in fact, these events were priced beyond their value, at the scene of which history became similar to that of an art auction or bazaar today. In opposition to this speculative inflation which leaves everyone enervated, overexcited and indifferent, tetanic [convulsive] as well as apathetic, with respect to the gidouille of events, worthy of the name The Great Gidouille1 of History, one had to come up with a form of ironic deregulation of information, a form of idle writing in response to the idling facticity of our times while at the same time with a subtly catastrophic form that would correspond to the reckoning or redemptive nature of the end of the century. One had to recover amidst the strike of events the filigree or watermark of dissuasion, the deceptive form that guides the nullity of our times.

Dissuasion is a rather particular form of action: it is that which causes something not to happen. This governs the period we presently live in, which is not so much interested in producing events as it is to ensure they do not take place, and all this performed with an air or under the auspices of an historical event. Or, it could be that certain things took place instead of others which did not. Dissuasion also touches on war, history, the real, the passions. It allows for (!) strange events which do not in any way advance history, instead play it backwards by wedding an inverse, unintelligible curvature to our sense of history (i.e., that one cannot have any sense of history unless one falls in line with what is being forwarded as historical sense); one that no longer discloses any negative power (progressive, critical, revolutionary), consequently their only negativity would be the fact that they would not have happened. Disturbing.

The realm of dissuasion extends over the past as well. It can obliviate all certainty of facts and testimonies. It is able to destabilize memory just as well as it can destabilize all foresight. This is a diabolic power intent on burning passage to the real act of the event or, if it is allowed to take place, if, in fact, it did take place, would destroy its credibility.

Maybe this curvature implying that things have neither meaning nor a linear end is nothing but a depression in the meterological sense of the term - the void we feel may not be due to

defection in meaning or memory but would perhaps be retraceable to a strange attraction that had come upon us from somewhere. Could it be that this lifelessness or catatonia that we are living is to be interpreted inversely, not in the sense of a void abandoned by the ebb of past events, but as a void owing its effect to aspiration, to the suctional pull of a future event, to the proximity of a factual mass which, through anticipation draws to itself all the oxygen that we breathe, brutally depressurizing thereby the social, political, cultural and mental sphere?

Pataphysic hypothesis, that of anti-gravity, of anti-density, of a science of imaginary solutions that arise beyond physics and metaphysics. In Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, Jarry had already described the profile of this strange attraction that stems from the reversal of the principles of physics: "Science today founds itself on the principle of induction: most people have most often seen this phenomenon preceded or followed by that one, and conclude that that's the way it will be forever ... But instead of declaring the law of falling bodies towards a centre why wouldn't one prefer that ofthe rise of the void towards the periphery, the void conceived of as unity of non-density, a hypothesis much less arbitrary than the one that opts for a concrete unity of positive density".

An inverse attraction of the void, instead of the full attracting the full. This is perhaps what would give our events this particular colour, this taste or, rather, this vapidity. At the moment of their arrival they have already become vanishing events with little meaning, if any, as they already come to align themselves with the void. In opposition to the old physics of meaning: a new gravitation, the true and only attraction of the void - undoubtedly the most fundamental natural law.

This would certainly explain the anomalies, including the mental universe and the field of "psychology". Our forms of action therefore, instead of being bearers of positive pulsion, are much more conveyors of expulsion and repulsion, i.e., the centrifugal mobility of particles that seek their liberation from density - to rejoin what? A mysterious periphery of space, an antigravity. Would this be the way to escape the heavy form, the gravity of "desire" conceived of as positive attraction, i.e., through a much more subtle eccentricity of seduction which would be, to take up the old cosmogonies that never lacked in charm, elusive beauty, out-of-body, much lighter molecules that only know of one way out, that of the void (like poetic language where every particle finds its resolution in anagrammatic resonance).

As for the new events, one could say that they plough a void in front of themselves as they go along, wherein they also get swallowed up. It seems that everything jostles ahead in a haste to be forgotten. These events leave no place for interpretation, if not for all interpretations simultaneously, and where they skirt all the intent of meaning and the heavy/weighty attraction of a continued history as they enter on the light orbit of a discontinued history. They arrive faster than their shadow - unforeseen for the most part - however, do not have any

consequences. Meteoric events that bank on the same chaotic inconsequence as do the formation of clouds. With respect to the events of Eastern Europe therefore, one gets the impression of a long and sustained negative accumulation accompanied by a sudden resolution as the obvious and instantaneous conclusion of operations that are beyond our grasp. Under these conditions and with respect to events that are nevertheless significant, there is a strange taste left in the mouth of a deja- arrive, a retrospective development where one cannot see anything worthwhile with respect to its future. Our only astonishment is not to have foreseen it; our only reg

12.

onversaciones con Jean Baudrillard

Mara Elena Ramos

Presidenta del Museo de Bellas Artes

En 1994, el pensador francs Jean Baudrillard vino a Venezuela para dictar tres conferencias en la Sala Mendoza de Caracas. Estas conferencias llevaron por ttulo "La ilusin y la desilusin estticas", "La simulacin en el arte" y "La escritura automtica del mundo", y han sido recogidas en un libro que prximamente publicar Monte vila, conjuntamente con la Sala Mendoza y la Embajada de Francia en Venezuela. A continuacin reproducimos algunos fragmentos de una serie de conversaciones que Mara Elena Ramos, presidenta del Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, sostuvo con Baudrillard a raz de su visita, las cuales han sido incluidas, como apndice, en el mencionado volumen.

Jean Baudrillard es autor de una extensa obra de importancia capital para comprender nuestra poca actual. Entre sus ttulos fundamentales se encuentran La economa poltica del signo, De la seduccin y El intercambio simblico y la muerte, este ltimo disponible en el fondo editorial de Monte vila.

Fotos de Ariel Jimnez

MARA ELENA RAMOS: [...] En el libro La Sparizione dell'Arte, usted considera que no se debera poder practicar el arte, que no se debera poder pasar del lado encantado de la forma y la apariencia, sino despus de haber resuelto todos los problemas. Se entendera aqu que se refiere a los problemas del hombre, la salud, la poltica, la economa, el amor. Usted asegura all adems que el arte supone resueltos ya todos los problemas, que no es la solucin a los problemas reales y llega a decir que el arte en su definicin ideal es slo la solucin a problemas que no existen. Mi pregunta es cules son en el fondo y en sntesis los problemas por los que usted opta? Y esos problemas son en verdad ajenos al arte?

JEAN BAUDRILLARD: Es cierto, no logro plantearlo como una actividad separada. De todos modos, donde est el discurso, el discurso se ocupa de los problemas discursivos, de lo racional, de todos los problemas que exigen y que esperan una solucin. Pero lo que me interesa es lo que no debe tener y encontrar solucin, lo que es enigmtico, lo que es insoluble. Y el arte, y el pensamiento tambin, es una manera de mantener las cosas en su carcter insoluble, de resistir a la explicacin y a la solucin precisamente. Pero en cambio, y aqu hay un juego de palabras, no es una solucin: es una resolucin. Resolucin es otra cosa, no da una clave. Las formas se resuelven unas dentro de las otras. Es la resolucin de una forma por otra, eso es el arte. Digamos, no es la solucin de un problema por una ecuacin, por ejemplo. Yo estoy a favor de la idea de que la tarea del arte y del pensamiento radical es la de hacer el mundo todava ms ininteligible. Hay que devolver las cosas centuplicadas: eso es el intercambio simblico. Hay que devolver ms de lo que hemos recibido. Hemos recibido un mundo ininteligible, tenemos que volverlo ms ininteligible todava.

MER: A pesar de todo el entusiasmo con que habla de la seduccin, no quiere sucumbir a la seduccin especfica del arte, al menos eso lo dice en La Sparizione dell'Arte. Es que le tiene miedo?

JB: No... eso es verdad. Bueno, quizs... Tal vez porque soy demasiado sensible a la seduccin del arte, es por lo que me creo a m mismo esta autodefensa.

MER: Una autodefensa parecida a la de los cristianos.

JB: Es iconoclastia. Soy iconoclasta pero tambin agnstico, estoico, hasta quizs moralista.

MER: Ya que usted confiesa ser un iconoclasta y moralista, quisiera recordar aqu cmo la experiencia artstica ha tenido mala reputacin, ha sido entendida como peligrosa por una

tradicin filosfica que ha puesto el nfasis en la cara negativa del arte, entre ellos Platn, San Agustn, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, que han sido llamados, incluso, los grandes puritanos de la historia de la filosofa. Recordemos por ejemplo la frase de Platn: "Los poetas mienten". Sin embargo, Platn es quizs el ms poeta de todos los filsofos. Pero usted no podra ser considerado como un gran puritano precisamente. Sus textos no lo indican. Usted es un amante de lo bello, del lenguaje de la seduccin, etc. En cuanto al arte, usted confiesa que sus influencias son las de Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Warhol, influencias que de una manera u otra marcan un respeto por lo artstico, la misma seduccin que antes confesaba temer. Cmo se ve usted dentro de esa tradicin en donde hay un amor y un temor, una ambigedad ante lo bello y ante el fenmeno artstico, donde hay pnico y a la vez fascinacin? Fascinacin de lo bello y pnico a lo bello, eso que llama el filsofo contemporneo Jauss "la ambigedad y rebelda ante lo bello".

JB: No es rebelin. Bueno, s puede haber un aspecto un poco puritano, estoy de acuerdo, es posible que haya una defensa contra... A m me parece pertenecer a una cultura noble, esto ya se parece a Bourdieu, una cultura de segundo nivel. No es realmente puritanismo moral, es ms bien la exigencia de una cultura que sera ms radical, ms total que el arte, donde no cabra esa separacin arte-filosofa, por ejemplo. En el fondo es la nostalgia de una cultura no primitiva, sino radical. El arte no aparecera como arte, no habra especificacin del arte todava y entonces esto nos lleva de nuevo a lo sagrado y a cosas as. Pero para m, la obsesin inicial es el objeto, mi punto de partida. Y para m, el objeto no es esttico. Por eso la ambigedad, la ambivalencia, tal vez incluso una forma de rechazo, proviene de esta exigencia ms radical. Hay un tipo de objeto puro, o acontecimiento puro, que es, en s, pura seduccin y que no pasa por la forma esttica... S, creo que sera eso.

MER: Ya en este punto, a m me gustara sobre todo conocer la diferencia, si es que hay alguna diferencia, entre ese no querer sucumbir a la seduccin del arte y ese amor por la otra seduccin, la que est en el resto de las cosas y a la que usted parece dar la bienvenida como una manera de soportar estos tiempos que usted llama de sobrevivencia indefinida.

JB: Es como decir que la otra seduccin es sobre todo como un reto: yo empleo siempre los trminos reto, reversibilidad, antagonismo. Lo que est en juego con la seduccin es, en ltima instancia, la prdida de la identidad. No slo en el campo amoroso y sexual, en otros campos tambin. Esto es verdad tambin para el arte, pero hay en el arte (al menos en el arte tal como se constituye en un algo que se da como casi definitivo) algo que ya no est abierto a la relacin dual. Ah ya no hay reto: dentro de una cierta institucin del arte slo queda una especie de xtasis o contemplacin. Mientras que la seduccin no es un xtasis. Es, cmo dira, de la identidad, hay algo que no se puede poner en tela de juicio. Es una forma soberana de la ilusin, pero definitiva. Entonces, yo tengo ganas de hacer estallar esta ilusin demasiado bella.

MER: Hay una frase que quiero retomar y que supongo que es parte de esas cosas que usted dice slo por provocar, por estimular, por sugerir. Dice "forzar la realidad, forzar las apariencias a travs de la propia desaparicin, el arte no ha hecho nunca ms que eso". Me interesa la palabra nunca.

JB: Yo tomo el arte segn la definicin que le ha sido dada desde el Renacimiento. "Jamais", nunca, no se refiere a siglos... es ms bien cuando empieza a haber una conciencia reflexiva del arte y una especie de legitimidad, si se quiere. A partir del momento en que se afirma como actitud legtima, yo lo interpreto as. Entonces, evidentemente, "nunca" no se refiere a las sociedades donde no hay arte propiamente dicho, donde la actividad artstica no existe. Pero, a partir del momento que existe, es verdad que es la tentativa de desafo de lo real, de negacin de lo real, de inventar otro mundo, otra escena. Tal vez ya no lo hace ahora.

Por eso digo que a lo mejor ya no estamos en el arte tal como era cuando haba la obra. Hoy no es sino una manipulacin de lo real, en fin, de los vestigios de lo real.

MER: A m, claro, me interesaba confrontar la palabra "nunca" con, por ejemplo, la escultura griega clsica, o con una catedral gtica, o con todo el buen arte del Renacimiento. Y claro, era ah donde pensaba que la palabra "jams" es apenas otra de las palabras-estmulo y no necesariamente un concepto que se puede defender hasta el final.

JB: Ah hay una forma retrica. Es parte, para m, del anlisis de esta forma, de esta formulacin paradjica de las cosas, que tal vez no corresponde a una exposicin lgica, racional.

MER: El arte fue pasando desde un enfrentamiento directo, ontolgico, con el objeto del mundo y con la naturaleza, a una torsin gnoseolgica, a una intentio segunda, reflexiva, y, ms an, autorreflexiva. Al llegar a una radicalizacin de esas fuerzas autorreflexivas, el arte empieza a romperse a s mismo, se rompe fsicamente, se hace inmaterial, se rompe con la irona, se rompe con el distanciamiento fro, analtico, etctera. Pero muchos sentimos que a partir de esa ruptura, y dentro de la misma ruptura, hay un nuevo constituirse que requiere de nosotros actitudes distintas. Por ejemplo, requiere una absoluta capacidad de movilizacin de nuestra visin (visin sensible y visin interior) as como usted sugiere con su propio lenguaje: una movilizacin permanente de los puntos de vista. Requiere de nosotros una aceptacin de la ruptura del lmite entre un lenguaje artstico y otro lenguaje artstico. Requiere una cierta disponibilidad al peligro, eso que Walter Benjamin tanto trabaj: el peligro necesario para el cual encontraba que en la ciudad y en el cine el ser humano del siglo xx tena una especie de

entrenamiento. Era como un temor y a la vez una necesidad de adaptacin. Pero, tambin implicaba un sacar algo despus y desde el peligro. No cree que aqu, ms que de este vanishing point del arte al que usted se refiere con frecuencia, se trata ms bien de un movimiento permanente y desconcertante de los puntos de vista?

JB: Yo prefiero la perspectiva del vanishing point, es decir, de mi punto de vista, en ltima instancia, donde las reglas del juego del arte el arte como juego con una regla, incluyendo su propia reflexividad en un momento dado se deshacen, y ms all ya no se sabe lo que pasa. Yo prefiero esta perspectiva, la de un vanishing point ms all del cual ya nada es bello ni feo, es decir, ya no se responde a un juicio esttico.

MER: Es una preferencia personal en todo caso.

JB: Es una preferencia casi lgica, dira hiperlgica en cierto modo. Es ms bien una especie de exigencia de ir a ver hasta la catstrofe, no conformarse con una especie de crisis, de fase crtica del arte. Porque eso, la fase crtica, el arte lo ha soportado, lo ha vivido y en cierta forma lo ha absorbido, ha absorbido la crtica. Pero yo prefiero ver qu ocurre con la catstrofe, no en el sentido apocalptico sino en el sentido de una forma catastrfica: reversibilidad, turbulencia, recurrencia, en fin, qu ocurre a partir del momento en que el astro A explota y ya no quedan sino asteroides que dan vueltas. Para eso hay una buena parbola, a lo mejor ya la ley en otros libros, yo ya la utilic. Es una frase de Canetti sobre el fin de la historia. Dice: es posible que en cierto momento todo el gnero humano sea pasado ms all de alguna lnea, ms all de la cual ya nada es verdadero o falso. Sin darnos cuenta, pasamos ms all de la historia, y entramos a un campo donde ya no conocemos las reglas del juego. Y dice: a menos de volver atrs y encontrar de nuevo ese punto de determinacin, habr que continuar en la destruccin actual. Yo pienso que, si bien l lo dice para la historia, eso se aplica tambin al arte.

MER: S, en este sentido usted ira en una lnea ms adelante y ms radical que Benjamin, mucho ms all que la necesaria adaptacin de Benjamin al peligro...

JB: Aqu s es cierto que es una forma de prejuicio. Es una apuesta decir: yo trazo una lnea, una lnea de vanishing y por curiosidad quiero ver qu pasa ms all. Yo quiero pasar a ese ms all.

MER: Usted cierra el libro La Sparizione dell'Arte con la idea de que el arte tal vez llegue a ser un parntesis en la historia de la humanidad. Cmo seran las caractersticas de antes del parntesis, pero sobre todo, me interesan ms, las caractersticas despus del parntesis?

JB: Bueno, no lo s. Yo slo puedo abrir y cerrar el parntesis. Por ejemplo, antes del parntesis estara lo que podramos llamar las culturas fuertes, simblicas, primitivas, arcaicas. Ahora bien, nunca sabremos la verdad sobre ellas, no se podr decir porque ya se acab, no las tendremos. El parntesis borra de cierta forma... es un problema de lgica temporal, es decir, mientras estamos en una lgica lineal, la de la historia del arte por ejemplo, existe antes, mientras y despus. Pero en esta nueva configuracin ya no existe ms esta linealidad del tiempo, por lo cual ya no se puede hablar de antes, despus, etctera. El despus es totalmente imprevisible, y eso es verdad para la historia toda, para otras cosas adems del arte.

MER: Usted no solamente se ha mostrado sorprendido por el inters que despierta su pensamiento en el medio artstico, sino que ha reconocido que tiene muy pocos vnculos directos con artistas y reconoce a Warhol muy particularmente, y a pocos ms, Hooper entre ellos. Pero uno siente que le hara falta mucho ms anlisis de otros artistas del siglo para llegar a conclusiones tan radicales en relacin con la desaparicin del arte.

JB: Eso es verdad, totalmente.

MER: Porque, por ejemplo, qu pasa con Picasso, que tambin es del siglo xx, o con Chagall, Matisse, Dubufett? Pero sobre todo, qu pasa con un Kiefer, por ejemplo? Se podra reconocer en Kiefer tambin un vanishing point del arte, se podra decir que esa obra "fabrica una profusin donde no hay nada que ver"? Podra hablarse all de una "genial banalidad de un arte que ya no existe", como deca Warhol? O hay una creacin artstica que recupera las dos situaciones clave del arte: por una parte la seduccin de lo sensible; por otra, el sentido?

JB: S, quizs es posible que haya dos trayectorias, yo estara totalmente de acuerdo en decir que hay dos trayectorias: una que lleva hasta sus ltimas consecuencias la lgica de la desaparicin, y otra que no voy a decir que reconstruye el arte, pero es muy posible que haya una divisin del trabajo en el universo artstico en general y que haya una lnea de presencia y una lnea de ausencia. No s, no s si son realmente contemporneas. Por ejemplo, hay una lnea que yo veo: la del trompe-l'il a travs de la historia del arte. Bueno, es una lnea relativamente independiente de la historia del arte, est siempre ah, hay como un trabajo mgico sobre la realidad y la apariencia y el trompe-l'il es ahistrico, parece atemporal. Entonces, hay tal vez en el fondo algo as, es decir, una historia del arte que contina a lo

mejor contina a lo mejor con su propia evolucin orgnica, y luego una lnea que la niega totalmente, que es la denegacin de esto, y que sera la lnea de la desaparicin. Y a partir de ese momento habra que ver si incluso en el arte clsico no hay ya antecedentes de esta ausencia, de esta desaparicin. Esto me interesa bastante, ver ms en esta lnea. Y estaran dos trayectorias que no tienen exactamente la misma curvatura, que reaccionan una a la otra. Porque pienso que incluso en las vidas individuales, en nuestras vidas, hay dos cosas: una lnea fatal, segn la cual la misma situacin se reproduce fatalmente, y luego una lnea en donde hay una historia, con causas, antecedentes, una lnea sicolgica si se quiere. Hay as una lnea en la cual tenemos una historia, y una lnea en la cual tenemos un destino. Y pienso que las dos lneas a veces se cruzan y entonces se producen efectos muy violentos, pero que la mayora del tiempo, estoy seguro, se combinan as. As es que estoy de acuerdo en decir que hay dos trayectorias. Es una solucin, no?

MER: Eso es muy importante, llegar a algo parecido a... no al optimismo, pero por lo menos a una zona de permanente presencia del arte, s.

Yo quisiera profundizar ahora en esa idea suya acerca de que hoy en da el mercado del arte es en s mismo una obra de arte. Habra dos tipos de mercado, aqu. Uno basado en la tasacin tradicional, aunque siempre sea especulativo, y el otro totalmente incontrolable, en una rbita bancaria de los grandes capitales sin ninguna justificacin que lo sustente con base en la calidad de las obras, los smbolos, la historia del arte. Hasta dnde cree que puede llegar esta hiperinflacin pura, esa especulacin pura?... Porque estamos hablando de dinero y, si bien otras cosas no tienen lmite, el dinero s tiene lmites, hay que suponer qu circunstancias tendran que darse para que llegue el lmite de esa hiperinflacin. Acaso solamente una depresin econmica?

JB: Bueno, el lmite slo podra ser el crack... a partir del momento en que la especulacin es una forma de destruccin del valor: aqu tambin, por hipermanipulacin, por hipercirculacin, se da el hecho de que en cierto momento ya no corresponde a nada, quiero decir, ya no hay ningn tipo de equivalencia, y ya no veo sino una forma catastrfica, es decir, un efecto catico. Por cierto es un poco lo que se produjo en el mercado del arte estos ltimos aos, una forma catica. Aunque no s si se podra decir, pero es lo que yo digo: aqu tambin hay dos lneas. Hay un mercado clsico del arte, las cosas se venden y se compran, pero dentro de un valor, una cuota, un mercado verdadero, esto es el concepto de mercado, incluso en economa, mientras que la especulacin ya deja de ser un mercado. Ya no es un mercado para nada. Es otra cosa. Es un juego, es un pquer, y en este sentido es apasionante, por eso digo que en cierto momento esta especulacin se vuelve algo que ya no tiene nada que ver con el valor, es una forma de destruccin del valor, un gran juego de destruccin del valor como el pquer, y es la misma cosa para la economa, en la especulacin financiera esto pone fin a la regularidad del mercado. Pero es tambin un fenmeno extremo que de todas formas es

sintomtico, un lmite absoluto. Entonces, ser que en algn momento todo puede pasar de este lado? No lo creo. Podramos entrar en la especulacin pura, total? Aparentemente no.

Ms de Jean Baudrillard en Internet:

* A Conjuration Of Imbeciles * Disneyworld Company * Entre le cristal et la Fume (entrevue) * Global Debt and Parallel Universe * Hystericizing The Millenium * No Reprieve For Sarajevo * Pataphysics Of Year 2000 * Radical Thought * Reversion Of History * Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery * Strike Of Events * Thawing Of The East

MonteAvila Editores

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10009.

1.

Da Seduo - Baudrillard, Jean Por Lara Haje

Uma revoluo pressupe uma transformao radical de uma estrutura poltica, econmica e social. No livro Da Seduo, o filsofo francs Jean Baudrillard tenta demonstrar que a dita revoluo sexual no foi de fato uma revoluo, pois apenas deu continuidade sexualidade anatmica e flica preconizada por Sigmund Freud.

Este psicanalista afirmava que, em se tratando de sexo, a anatomia o destino. Dizia que s existe uma nica sexualidade, uma nica libido - a masculina, sendo todo o feminino absorvido pelo masculino. Pois a sexualidade exatamente essa estrutura forte, discriminante, centrada no falo. Na revoluo liberal, a mulher tenta recusar esse destino - flico por definio pregando a difrao das zonas ergenas, uma erogeneidade descentrada. Porm, no faz mais do que reafirm-lo, pois continua usando a palavra anatmica (ou pelo menos, orgnica e ergena), a palavra do corpo.

O feminino, ao invs de se opor anatomia como destino, tenta apropriar-se dessa sexualidade, proclamando seu direito ao gozo. O resultado uma "polivalncia ertica, infinita potencialidade do desejo, ramificaes, difraes, intensidades libidinais, que acabam por gerar a indiferenciao da estrutura e sua potencial neutralizao". Isso porque, para Baudrillard, em matria de sexo, "a proliferao est prxima do total desperdcio, pois o desejo s se sustenta na falta. Quando se operacionaliza sem restrio e passa totalmente para a demanda, torna-se sem realidade porque sem imaginrio."

Para se opor realmente anatomia como destino, ao invs de tentar apropriar-se do poder sexual, a mulher deveria reafirmar o seu prprio poder, que outro - o poder da seduo ("O feminino no se ope ao masculino, mas seduz o masculino") . Segundo o autor, somente a seduo contraria radicalmente sexualizao distintiva dos corpos e inelutvel economia

flica dela resultante. A mulher, porm, em nenhuma parte trata dessa seduo, do trabalho do corpo pelo artifcio e no pelo desejo, do corpo entregue s aparncias.

As mulheres envergonham-se da seduo, como de uma encenao artificial de seu corpo, como de um destino de vassalagem e de prostituio. Ela combatida como desvio artificial da verdade da mulher, que tem de estar inscrita no seu corpo e no seu desejo. Influenciada de certa forma pela Igreja, que sempre colocou a seduo como diablica, nossa moral reprova a constituio da mulher em objeto sexual pelo artifcio do rosto e do corpo.

O autor, no entanto, considera o poder de seduo igual e superior a todos os outros, pois, "enquanto o poder sexual ou poltico representa apenas o domnio do universo real, a seduo representa o domnio do universo simblico".

"Ora, a mulher nada mais que aparncia. E o feminino como aparncia que pe em xeque a profundidade do masculino. Ao invs de se insurgirem contra essa forma "injuriosa", as mulheres fariam bem em se deixar seduzir por essa verdade, pois a reside o segredo de seu poder, que esto quase a perder, levantando a profundidade do feminino contra a do masculino." (...) "De nada serve jogar ser contra ser, verdade contra verdade; eis a a armadilha de um subverso dos fundamentos, quando basta uma ligeira manipulao das aparncias".

Quando as mulheres se opem estrutura falocrtica, Baudrillard considera isso "uma tentativa de apagar o imenso privilgio de nunca ter tido acesso verdade, ao sentido, e de ter permanecido senhor absoluto do reino das aparncias". Era um privilgio porque "somente as aparncias so reversveis; somente nesse nvel os sistemas so frgeis e vulnerveis".

"No exatamente o feminino como superfcie que se ope ao masculino como profundidade; o feminino como indistino da superfcie e da profundidade." (Nota-se que o feminino aqui no precisamente o sexo, mas qualquer sexo, qualquer poder insexual e sedutor). O feminino ao mesmo tempo uma constatao radical da simulao e a nica possibilidade de ultrapassar a simulao - precisamente pela seduo.

Portanto, o poder de seduo s assume forma de servido na histria de sofrimento e opresso imputada s mulheres pela revoluo sexual. O recalque est justamente na narrativa da misria sexual e poltica das mulheres, na qual se exclui qualquer outro modo de poder e de soberania.

O autor sugere que talvez essa histria de dominao patriarcal, de falocracia, seja at mesmo inventada, j que a hiptese inversa - de que o feminino nunca foi dominado, mas sempre foi dominante - tambm perfeitamente plausvel. Porque o masculino apresenta todos os signos da fortaleza e, por isso mesmo, da fraqueza, pois precisa se defender s custas de supresses, instituies, artifcios. "Vive apenas das muralhas de uma sexualidade manifesta, de uma finalidade do sexo que se esgota na reproduo ou no gozo".

Num esforo sobre-humano, os homens erigiram seu poder e instituies para contrariar os poderes originais superiores da mulher. O autor nega Freud aqui ao dizer que no a inveja do pnis o motor, mas o cime do homem pelo poder de fecundao da mulher. Inventou-se, ento, uma ordem social, poltica e econmica masculina, onde esse privilgio natural pudesse ser diminudo.

Isso tudo perdido, no entanto, quando o feminino institudo como sexo, mesmo e sobretudo para denunciar sua opresso. Ao proclamar o direito ao gozo, a mulher ignora que pode haver uma intensidade superior na ausncia ou negao do gozo, que no mais que uma pulso, energia em busca de seu fim. "O gozo o usufruto industrial dos corpos, um produto de extrao, produto tecnolgico de uma maquinaria de corpos, de uma logstica de prazeres."

Essa sexualidade destinada nica e exclusivamente ao gozo - que sugere uma obrigao de fluxo, de liquidez e de ciruculao acelerada do psquico, do sexual e dos corpos - uma rplica da lei que rege o valor mercantil: preciso que o capital circule, que no haja ponto fixo, que a cadeia de investimento seja incessante, que o valor se propague sem trgua. Em lugar de uma forma "sedutiva", tem-se, ento, uma forma produtiva, uma "economia do sexo", um funcionamento maqunico, em que o importante a realizao imediata e imperativa de um desejo, a pulso.

Na ordem simblica, a seduo quem est l primeiro, o sexo e o gozo ocorrem apenas por ser seu resultado por acrscimo, mas no necessariamente. E nossa "liberao" parece ter invertido os termos. Com o fim sexual aleatrio, porm, pode surgir algo alm, chamado prazer (ou seduo) ; a lgica pura do desejo, que mais que uma pulso, uma paixo. E amar nada tem a ver com pulso - "amar um desafio e uma aposta: desafio ao outro de amar de volta - ser seduzido desafiar o outro a s-lo. No h outro limite para esse desafio que no o de ser ainda mais seduzido ou de amar mais do que eu amo seno a morte."

muito simplista e sexista imaginar a mulher como alienada e depois liberada no seu desejo. A mulher sempre teve sua estratgia, incerta e secreta, cuja expresso maior a seduo. A dita

revoluo e conseqente promoo do feminino como sexo integral, mais uma das facetas da cultura do tudo falar e tudo gozar. A liberao sexual isso: a imposio, superexposio e encenao do gozo feminino. O feminino institudo como sexo e o gozo a prova multiplicada do sexo. A feminilidade torna-se, ento, visvel.

Essa exaltao do gozo feminino talvez seja o instrumento perfeito de uma extenso dirigida da razo sexual, pois corta rente todas as racionalizaes liberadoras. "Se at aqui nada se ensinara s mulheres para lev-las a nada desejar, no se lhes ensina hoje a tudo exigir para nada desejar?". A passagem do desejo inteiramente para a exigncia foi a catstrofe tambm para a mulher, cuja promoo como sujeito veio acompanhada de um recrudescimenteo de seu estatuto como objeto, ou seja, de uma pornografia generalizada.

A pornografia promove de forma exarcebada o gozo feminino. Seja a mulher sujeito (exige o gozo "pela tomada de conscincia da racionalidade de seu prprio desejo") ou objeto (oferecese ao gozo num estado de prostituio total), por toda a parte se prope a culminncia de sexo, voracidade hiante, devorao. No por acaso que todo o porn gira em torno do sexo feminino. Numa sexualidade intimada a dar suas provas e a se manifestar sem interrupo, a posio marcada masculina frgil.

Portanto, a assuno do feminino corresponde ao apogeu do gozo e catstrofe do princpio de realidade do sexo, agora hiper-real. Pois o porn faz o sexo mais real que o real, o que causa sua ausncia de seduo. Faz um acrscimo de realidade ao exagerar o pitoresco dos detalhes anatmicos. V-se o que nunca se viu, o excesso de realidade. No h espao para o imaginrio nesse espao de mais-verdade, mais-exatido. A seduo perseguida fora da visibilidade. Do-nos tanto, a cor, o contorno, o sexo em alta fidelidade, que no h mais nada a acrescentar, ou seja, a dar em troca. a represso absoluta: dando-nos um pouco demais, cortam-nos tudo.

Tudo o que oculto e que ainda goza proibio ser exumado, entregue palavra e evidncia. As aparncias j no tm segredo. O real aumenta, amplia-se. Almeja-se alta fidelidade - mas no se sabe nem mesmo a que objeto ela fiel, pois ningum sabe onde comea e onde acaba o real.

O problema da infelicidade nunca o da impotncia sexual ou alimentar, com seu cortejo de razes e no-razes psicanalticas, mas o da impotncia quanto seduo. Desafetos, neuroses, angstia, frustrao, tudo o que a psicanlise encontra sem dvida provm do fato de no se poder amar ou ser amado, de no se poder gozar ou proporcionar gozo, mas o desencantamento radical provm da seduo e de seu fracasso. S so doentes os que esto

profundamente fora da seduo, mesmo que ainda sejam perfeitamente capazes de amar e de gozar. E a psicanlise, que pensa tratar as doenas do desejo e do sexo, na verdade trata as doenas da seduo (as quais ela mesma contribuiu para colocar fora da seduo e encerrar no dilema do sexo). O dficit mais grave sempre fica do lado da atrao, e no do gozo; do lado do encantamento, e no da satisfao vital ou sexual. A nica castrao a da privao da seduo.

O que seduo?

Poder de atrao e de distrao, poder de absoro e de fascinao, poder de destruio no s do sexo mas do real em seu conjunto, poder de desafio - nunca uma economia de sexo e de fala, mas um lance de graa e violncia, uma paixo instantnea a que o sexo pode chegar, mas que tambm pode se esgotar em si mesma.

A seduo aquilo que desloca o sentido do discurso e o desvia de sua verdade. Ser seduzido ser desviado de sua verdade. Seduzir desviar os outros de sua verdade. Essa verdade, a partir de ento, forma um segredo que lhes escapa.

A seduo tem a fora de um enigma a resolver - o outro um enigma e, para seduzi-lo, preciso se tornar um outro enigma para ele. Um duelo enigmtico, em que a seduo sua resoluo sem que o segredo seja revelado.

O segredo. Qualidade sedutora, inicitica, daquilo que no pode ser dito porque no tem sentido, daquilo que no dito e que, apesar disso, circula. Assim, eu sei o segredo do outro, mas no digo, e ele sabe que eu sei, mas no levanta o vu. A intensidade entre os dois nada mais que o segredo do segredo. Essa cumplicidade nada tem que ver com uma informao oculta. Ademais, se os parceiros quisessem revelar o segredo, no poderiam, pois no h nada h dizer.

No h ativo nem passivo na seduo, no h sujeito ou objeto, nem interior ou exterior; ela atua nas duas vertentes, e ningum as limita ou separa. Ningum, se no for seduzido, seduzir os outros, ser seduzido a melhor maneira de seduzir

Como a seduo nunca se detm verdade dos signos mas sim ao engano e ao segredo, inaugura um modo de circulao secreto e ritual, uma espcie de iniciao imediata que s obedece regra de seu prprio jogo. Para apreender a intensidade da forma ritual, desfazer-se da idia de que toda a felicidade vem da natureza, de que todo o gozo vem da satisfao de um desejo. O jogo, a esfera do jogo, revela-nos, ao contrrio, a paixo pela regra, a vertigem da regra, o poder advindo de um cerimonial e no de um desejo.

Mas seduzir no a mulher se produzindo como mulher - porque tudo aquilo que se produz, recai no registro do poder masculino. Todo poder masculino o poder de produzir. A seduo no o terreno de jogos e astcias sexuais, mas "uma forma irnica e alternativa, que quebra a referncia do sexo, espao no de desejo, mas de jogo e desafio".

Mas, se tudo sexualidade e a se encontra uma espcie de jogo e de aventura, se todos os discursos so como que um comentrio eterno de sexo e de desejo, nesse sentido pode-se dizer que todos os discursos tornaram-se discursos de seduo. Mas uma seduo branda, cujo processo vem a ser sinnimo de tantos outros: manipulao, persuaso, gratificao, ambiente, estratgia do desejo... Uma seduo difusa, sem encanto, sem aposta, esse espectro de seduo que persegue nossos circuitos sem segredos, nossos fantasmas sem afetos, nossas redes sem contato. No a seduo-desafio, dual e antagnica, da aposta mxima, mesmo secreta, da seduo mtica, fascnio e sortilgio mortais. Est em toda a parte, mas numa simulao generalizada.

Quanto s redes, nessas predomina a funo ftica, funo de contato, o contato pelo contato, que torna-se uma espcie de auto-seduo vazia da linguagem, quando j no h nada que dizer. Falando-se verifica-se apenas que existe outro na linha, pois, na pura alternncia do sinal de reconhecimento, j no h emissor nem receptor. Simplesmente dois terminais, e o sinal de um terminal a outro apenas verifica que "isso" passa, portanto, que no se passa nada.

O grupo conectado ao vdeo apenas seu prprio terminal. Ele se registra, autoregula-se e se autogere eletronicamente. Autoligao, auto-seduo. O grupo erotizado pela constatao imediata que recebe de si mesmo. "Ama a teu prximo como a ti mesmo: esse velho problema do Evangelho est resolvido - prximo sou eu mesmo. O amor ento total. A total auto-seduo

2.

Au mme titre que Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Virilio, Lacan, Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard appartient sans aucun doute cette catgorie de penseurs franais dont les thories ont profondment marqu le monde dans la seconde moiti du XXime sicle. Parmi eux il occupe une place privilgie parce que ses crits, en particulier ceux des annes 80, ont exerc sur l'volution de l'art une influence si forte et ont donn un apport si fcondant qu'ils ont provoqu l'closion immdiate de nombreuses coles, allant de l' "Appropriation Art" de Louise Lawler Sherrie Levine, des simulationnistes de Peter Haley Allan Mc Collum New York. Il serait pourtant faux de prtendre, au regard de l'importance qu'a prise l'uvre de Jean Baudrillard dans le domaine de l'art dans les annes 8O, ne voir en lui que le philosophe peuttre le plus important des annes 8O ou le diagnostiqueur d'une poque et le philosophe contemporain la mode. Ce que dit Susan Sontag son propos sera toujours d'actualit: "Au fil du temps, la rsonance de Baudrillard ira croissant." Nous allons devoir tous nous faire l'ide que, dans l'uvre de Baudrillard, c'est toujours la production plus rcente qui offre une signification du plus grand intrt, puisque le monde tend de plus en plus se mettre au diapason de ses crits. En effet, il n'est pas un sujet, ni une problmatique affectant lourdement notre socit que n'ait diagnostiqu prcocement Baudrillard, bien avant les autres, avec brio et pertinence. Mme ses thses, soi-disant trs provocantes, sur l'agonie du rel, la disparition de la politique, la puissance des mdias, le terrorisme, la simulation, la socit de consommation, ont t vrifies au bout de quelques annes ou de quelques dcennies, et se sont avres tre des scenarii prcis qui font partie dsormais du domaine de la vulgarisation. Ses thories, apparemment les plus effroyables, ont toujours t rejointes par la ralit. Et comme toujours, on a confondu le messager de la mauvaise nouvelle avec le message luimme, et le constat, souvent effroyable, que Baudrillard a fait du monde, le monde a jug bon de le lui attribuer. Ainsi on l'a trait d'enfant terrible, alors qu'il ne faisait qu'analyser les choses terribles qui se passent dans ce monde. Et toujours ces mmes questions: "Baudrillard est-il un cynique, un nihiliste, un mlancolique, un fataliste, un agnostique? Est-il le dernier homme, un simulateur, un tre virtuel, un mtaphysicien ou un sducteur?" Ces questions sont le fait d'un dcalage, d'un acte mtonymique issu de cette confusion; elles traduisent bien plus l'tat du monde que Baudrillard dcrit qu'elles ne dcrivent Baudrillard lui-mme. Baudrillard a crit non seulement ses thories sur la communication paradoxale et la sduction, mais galement toutes ses analyses dans une langue particulirement paradoxale et non dpourvue de sduction. Les titres de ses livres et de ses essays: Les stratgies fatales, La fin de la ralit,

La fin du panoptique, La fin du social, L'illusion de la fin, L'illusion de la guerre, L'ordre de la simulation, L'hyperralisme de la simulation, La prcession des simulacres, Requiem pour les mdias, La transparence du mal, Le transpolitique, L'change symbolique et la mort, Le flottement libre des signes, La catastrophe smiotique, ne reprsentent pas seulement un programme ou une analyse, une critique ou une conjuration, une formule ou un tiquetage, mais sont la preuve que Baudrillard ne rdige pas uniquement une prose d'ides, mais potise la pense. Ainsi, alors que, en dpit de sa formation universitaire et de sa carrire de professeur de sociologie l'Universit de Nanterre Paris, Baudrillard se drobe toute classification scientifique, ne se dfinit ni comme un philosophe, ni comme un sociologue, prfrant le titre de thoricien, nous pouvons, au regard de ses crits, dire de lui qu'il est un magicien de la langue, un pote et, au regard de ce livre, un magicien de l'image, un artiste. A propos de l'artiste, il note dans "Le crime parfait" (1985): "C'est l'histoire d'un crime - l'assassinat de la ralit et l'anantissement d'une illusion, l'illusion radicale et vitale du monde. L'lment rel ne disparat pas dans l'illusion, c'est davantage l'illusion qui disparat dans la ralit intgrale". Et plus loin il ajoute: "L'artiste lui aussi est toujours sur le point de commettre le crime parfait, pourtant il s'en carte et son uvre est la trace de cette imperfection criminelle. Selon Michaux, l'artiste est celui qui rsiste de toutes ses forces au dsir lmentaire de ne pas laisser de traces." Selon cette dclaration de Michaux, Baudrillard serait un artiste qui laisse des traces, comme le montrent ses photographies. Je tiens exprimer ici ma profonde gratitude l'gard de Jean Baudrillard pour l'honneur qu'il nous fait, en exposant titre personnel ses photographies et en les publiant pour la premire fois dans un catalogue dense.

3.

Ttulo: A alucinao coletiva do virtual

Autor: Jean Baudrillard Fonte: Jornal Folha de So Paulo, caderno Mais!, 28/01/1996 Link: http://www.uol.com.br/fsp Resumo: Nova hegemonia elimina o tempo histrico e suprime at mesmo a possibilidade do apocalipse A poltica perdeu seu princpio de ao e sua realidade Hoje no pensamos o virtual, o virtual que nos pensa. E essa transparncia imperceptvel que nos separa definitivamente do real nos to incompreensvel quanto pode s-lo para a mosca o vidro contra o qual ela se choca sem compreender o que a separa do mundo exterior. A mosca nem sequer imagina o que pe fim a seu espao. Do mesmo modo, nem sequer imaginamos o quanto o virtual j transformou, como por antecipao, todas as representaes que temos do mundo.

Somos incapazes de imagin-lo porque da natureza do virtual pr fim no apenas realidade, mas tambm imaginao do real, do poltico, do social _no apenas realidade do tempo, mas tambm imaginao do passado e do futuro (a isso d-se o nome, com uma boa dose de humor negro, de "tempo real").

Ainda estamos muito longe de compreender que a entrada em cena da mdia impede a evoluo da histria, que a subida ao palco da inteligncia artificial impede o avano do pensamento. A iluso que guardvamos de todas essas categorias tradicionais, inclusive a iluso de nos "abrir ao virtual" como a uma extenso real de todos os mundos possveis, a prpria iluso da mosca que incansavelmente toma distncia para de novo chocar-se contra o vidro.

Ainda acreditamos na realidade do virtual, apesar de o prprio mundo virtual j ter apagado virtualmente todas as pistas do pensamento. Para pr um pouco de ordem nessa confuso, tomarei um exemplo delicado, justamente porque representa o prolongamento do fato mais assustador e incompreensvel da histria moderna: o extermnio e aqueles que negam sua existncia, os negacionistas.

A proposio negacionista em si mesma absurda; seu despropsito to evidente que a questo crucial passa a ser: por que temos de defender a verdade contra eles? Como a questo da existncia das cmaras de gs pde sequer ser formulada? Ela jamais o seria em outros tempos. Aqueles que contestam o negacionismo no se indagam sobre a prpria possibilidade dessa polmica e contentam-se com uma veemente indignao. Ora, a prpria necessidade de defender a realidade histrica das cmaras de gs como uma causa moral, a necessidade de defender a "realidade" em geral com base numa espcie de engajamento poltico revela muito dos descaminhos da objetividade e da mudana de registro na verdade histrica.

No tempo histrico, o evento ocorreu e as provas de fato existem. Mas no estamos mais no tempo histrico, estamos no tempo real _e no tempo real no h mais provas, sejam elas quais forem.

O negacionismo, portanto, absurdo em sua prpria lgica. Seu carter peculiar esclarece o advento de uma outra dimenso, chamada paradoxalmente de "tempo real", mas em cujos limites a realidade objetiva est ausente _e no apenas a realidade do acontecimento atual, mas tambm dos acontecimentos passados e futuros. Todos os elementos esgotam-se numa tal simultaneidade que as aes no recobram mais seu sentido, os efeitos no remontam mais a suas causas e a histria j incapaz de neles ser refletida.

O tempo real uma espcie de buraco negro onde nada penetra sem antes perder sua substncia. De fato, os prprios campos de extermnio tornam-se virtuais e figuram apenas na tela do mundo virtual: todos os testemunhos, o Holocausto e a Shoah, precipitam-se, a despeito deles e a despeito de ns, no mesmo abismo virtual.

No se diz com isso, no entanto, que, em sua sinceridade absoluta, os prprios testemunhos e os filmes (como imagens que esgotam o horror na atualidade da imagem) no contribuem para essa memria impossvel: o extermnio real est condenado a um outro extermnio, o do virtual. Eis aqui a verdadeira soluo final.

Exatamente nisto que consiste a derrota do pensamento _do pensamento histrico e do pensamento crtico. Na verdade, porm, no sua derrota: a vitria do tempo real sobre o presente, sobre o passado e sobre todas as formas de articulao lgica da realidade.Nem mesmo o futuro est a salvo no tempo real (este o sentido da proposio paradoxal de que no haver ano 2000). Caberia aqui discutir a viso de Paul Virilio sobre o "Acidente final", sobre o "Acidente dos acidentes", o "apocalipse do virtual", que ele vislumbra ao termo dessa evoluo, ou melhor, dessa involuo de nosso mundo em tempo real. Nada menos certo, porm, do que esse apocalipse (at mesmo essa certeza nos escapa!...).

Sonhar com o "Acidente final" significa prender-se iluso do fim. Significa esquecer que a prpria virtualidade virtual e que, por definio, seu advento definitivo, seu apocalipse, jamais ser capaz de ganhar fora de realidade.

No haver apocalipse do virtual e do tempo real porque, justamente, o tempo real aniquila o tempo linear e a durao, ou seja, a dimenso em que poderiam desenvolver-se at seu extremo limite. No h uma funo linear exponencial do Acidente, e seu termo ltimo permanece aleatrio.

A soluo radical de continuidade do real instaurada pelo virtual, a sncope ou o colapso do tempo instaurada pelo tempo real felizmente nos preserva do termo final do extermnio. O sistema do virtual, a exemplo de todos os outros, est condenado a destruir suas prprias condies de possibilidade.

No devemos, portanto, sonhar com um apocalipse futuro, assim como no devemos nos deixar prender por uma utopia qualquer, seja ela qual for: o apocalipse ou a utopia jamais tero lugar no tempo real, pois o prprio tempo sempre lhes faltar.

Se h efetivamente uma revoluo do virtual, preciso compreender seu sentido e deduzir todas as suas consequncias, mesmo se nos reservamos a liberdade de recus-lo pela raiz. Se no h apocalipse (e, virtualmente, j nos encontramos dentro dele: basta constatar a devastao de todo o mundo real), isso vale tambm para as demais categorias.

O social, o poltico, o histrico e mesmo o moral e o psicolgico _todos os acontecimentos dessas esferas so virtuais. Ou seja, intil buscar uma poltica do virtual, uma tica do virtual etc., pois a prpria poltica tornou-se virtual, a prpria tica tornou-se virtual, no sentido de que ambas perderam seu princpio de ao e sua fora de realidade.

O mesmo ocorre com a tcnica: falamos de "tecnologias do virtual", mas na verdade h (ou em breve haver) somente tecnologias virtuais. Ora, no existe mais o pensamento do artifcio num mundo em que o prprio pensamento torna-se artificial. Podemos dizer, nesse sentido, que o virtual nos pensa, e no o contrrio.

Toda essa interrogao sobre o virtual tornou-se hoje em dia ainda mais delicada e mais complexa devido extraordinria impostura que o rodeia. O excesso de informaes, o bombardeio publicitrio e tecnolgico, a mdia, o entusiasmo ou o pnico _tudo concorre para uma espcie de alucinao coletiva do virtual e de seus efeitos. Windows 95, Internet, as autoestradas da informao _tudo isso consumido cada vez mais por antecipao, no discurso e na fantasia.Ser esse talvez um modo de unir os efeitos em curto-circuito, fazendo-os irromper na imaginao? Disso, porm, no estamos certos. A prpria impostura e a intoxicao no fazem parte do virtual? No sabemos. Sempre a velha histria da mosca que se choca contra a evidncia incompreensvel do vidro.

"Certitude does not exist", diz uma pichao de Nova York. - "Are you sure?"

4.

A Conjuration of Imbeciles Jean Baudrillard Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of thinking. What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called

"democratic" elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is, let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist discourses - moved to the left? There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency. But today the left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely moralistic lawmaking structure, a representative of universal values, a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left (which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law. With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political, the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence), the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past, whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of morality and order, you could always count on the left, always attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy. If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be

abandoned to the murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils, just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil operates, of the way politics itself operates. Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment which turns evil against itself. All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation? What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim? Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived itself of. Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society (recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this inextricable and

complex process of exclusion. There is something typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body. Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of analysis when it comes to the social body. To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared (by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left. Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound, they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which, in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to mean something. What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid falling for the

viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some extent, taken from us?

This article originally appeared as "La conjuration des imbeciles" in Liberation on May 7, 1997. Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.

5.

Strike Of Events Jean Baudrillard What has been lost is the glory of the event, its aura, as Benjamin would say. Over the centuries, history lived under the sign of glory, under the sign of a quite strong illusion that had played on the durability of time which one inherited from the ancestors and then passed onto descendants. This passion today would seem rather pathetic. What we are after is no longer glory but identity, no longer an illusion but, on the contrary, an accumulation of evidence anything that can serve as a testimony to a historical existence, whereas the task once was to lose oneself in a prodigious dimension, in an "immortality" Hannah Arendt speaks about, and the transcendence of which would equal God (glory and salvation have long been the topic of discussion among people, like passion and compassion, rivals in the face of the Eternal). The prodigious or phenomenal event which cannot be measured either in terms of its causes or its consequences and which creates its own scene, its own dramaturgy - no longer exists. Little by little, history has shrunk back into the probability of its causes, of its effects and, more recently, into the field of its present, into its effects measured in "real time". Events will not go any further than what their anticipated sense, their programming, and their diffusion will allow. This strike of events in itself constitutes a true historical manifestation, this refusal to signify whatever there may be, or even the capacity to signify whatever comes our way. This is the true end of history, the end of the Reason or Logic of history. Then again, it would be too nice if we could be finished with history. For it is possible that not only has history disappeared (no more negative labour, no more political reasoning, no more prestige of the event) but that we have now succeeded in nourishing its end. Things go on as if we were still constructing history, and in the process of amassing signs of the social, signs of the political, signs of progress and change, we are doing none other than feeding the end of history. Cannibalism and necrophagous, whichever you prefer, always demand newer victims, newer events to finish them off just a little bit more. Socialism is a nice example where, after

the failure of historical reason which it sought or pretended to embody, the buck was passed into its hands to make-do whatever it could with this gestation of the end of history, with this diet of the end. We have been asking ourselves ever since, 'what could possibly come after the orgy mourning or melancholy'? Plainly, neither this nor that, instead an incessant face-lifting of all the episodes of modern history, of its processes of liberation (of peoples, sexes, dreams, art and the unconscious - briefly, of all the constituents of the orgy of our times) under the sign of a premonition with respect to an apocalyptic end to it all. As if in an advance escape we preferred a retrospective apocalypse and the revisioning of everything - all our societies have become revisionist, they sweetly rethink everything, they whitewash their political crimes, their scandals, they lick their wounds, they nourish their end. Celebration and commemoration themselves are nothing but the soft forms of necrophagous cannibalism, the homeopathic form of killing us softly. This is the work of the heirs whose resentment of death is unending. The museums, the jubilees, the festivals, the complete works, the lesser unedited fragments - all these testify to the fact that we are entering upon a vital era of resentment and repentance. Exuberant and commemorative attitudes will no doubt become part of this collective flagellation. We are particularly spoiled in France, where actual rituals of mourning and condolences weigh down on our public life. All our monuments are mausoleums: the Pyramid, the Arc, the Orsay Museum, the chamber of the pharaoh, the Grand Bibliotheque - the cenotaph of culture. And this is not to mention the Revolution, a monument in and of itself, whose bicentennial created the greatest factual simulation of the end of the century. There are two types of forgetting: either through slow or violent eradication of memory or via the advancement of spectacle, the passing of historical space into the space of advertising, the site where the media have acquired and, themselves have become, a temporal strategy of prestige. This is the way in which we have constructed ourselves in countlessly reinforced advertising images, in a memory of synthesis that serves as our primitive point of reference, as our founding myth and, above all, distances us from the real event of the Revolution. "The Revolution is not on the agenda in France today because the great Revolution had already taken place and has served as an example for all others over the last two centuries. In all our dealings in France today, we proceed as if there were no revolution" (Louis Mermaz). It happened, it's over and will therefore never again take place. Our complete system rests on this negative anticipation. Not only are we unable to produce new history anymore, we can no longer even ensure its symbolic reproduction. We fashion our opera in the style of the Bastille - a pathetic attempt at reinstatement where royal music is played to the people. On the other hand, no other music would be played at a scene that the cultivated visit and where, through art and other forms of pleasure, the principle is reinforced that it is the lot of the privileged to voluntarily consecrate places that others had paid for with their lives. Could one suggest that people storm the opera and dismantle it on the symbolic date of July 14? Could one insinuate that they march around with the bloody heads of our modern ministers of culture at the tip of their pikes?

But the fact is that we no longer make history, we have been reconciled with it and protect it as if it were a masterpiece in danger. Times have changed. Today we have a "vision" of a Revolution perfectly pious in the way it alludes to human Rights - not even a nostalgic vision, instead, one that is recycled in postmodern intellectual comfort(ing) terms. A vision that allows the elimination of Saint-Just from The Dictionary of the Revolution [Dictionnaire de la Revolution]. "Overrated rhetoric" says Francois Furet, the perfect historian of the repentance of Terror and glory. There are those who let the dead bury the dead, and then there are those who will never grow weary digging them up in order to fix them. Unsuccessful both at the level of symbolic murder and mourning, death cannot be the end of the line as they have to unearth the dead in order to impale them - this is the Carpentras complex (after Timisoara [Roumania]: the rigged televising of dead bodies), the complex of profanation. Nothing is more favourable for this operation than the one hundredth anniversary of their death - Rimbaud, van Gogh, Nietzsche, the year 91 would have been exceptionally qualified for cheap profanatory works. There is a kind of suicidal attitude in this compulsive effort on the part of the cultural and intellectual elite to exalt thinkers who had only contempt for them and who were the living examples of their denunciation: Celine, Artaud, Bataille, Nietzsche. Taking the form of an instinctual fault or failure which Nietzsche had already diagnosed a hundred years ago, this suicidal attitude provides the characteristics of a species that is eventually doomed due to its inability to judge what is good for it. If the left were a species and if culture obeyed the laws of natural selection, it should have disappeared a long time ago. Instead, the left flirts with that which negates it, dying of the total contradiction between its critical faculty and its presence in power as it made culture into a mode of government. All this already comprises the forms of repentance. Only terrorists have yet to repent. The intellectuals have paved the way for them - the Sartrians and others, since the fifties, have supplied us with the avant-garde of repentance. Today, the whole century repents, the repentance of class (or of race) everywhere rises above the pride and conscience of class. This is the sign under which the century has been intellectualized, an intellectualization today as if it had already embourgeois-d [s'est embourgeoise] a century. Furthermore, the term "intellectual" will disappear one day just like "bourgeois" did, and no longer is any ridicule in store for it, save for the person who actually uses the term. This self-dissolving, typical of the West as it is of the East, can be seen in the degradation of the structures of power and representation (in other words, the more the political sphere is intellectualized, the more it secretly negates its will to govern or rule and this premonition about itself is the source of all corruption), and also in the numerous strategies aimed at the re- enchantment of values, cultures, difference[s]. We expend all its energy in the resistance to our own end, in which we have neither jouissance nor vertigo. It would probably be better to have a gigantic eve of August 4th, a big night of human rights where all humankind would surrender itself just like the aristocrats formerly renounced their rights - a relinquishing act in excess. What could possibly befall us in this pull towards a harkening back to our culture?

It seems that we are summoned to conduct an infinite retrospective of all that has gone before. What is true of politics and morals, also seems to apply to art as well. All movement in painting has withdrawn from the future and is now displaced towards the past. Art today is engaged in reappropriating works of either recent or of the more distant past, even contemporary works. This is what Russell Connor calls the kidnapping or rapture of modern art. Similar to loose threads that come undone from threadbare weft [woof], this is a kind of irony that could only result from the disillusionment of things, a fossilized irony. The twinkling of any eye that places the nude of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe [Dining on the grass] in front of Cezanne's Joueurs aux cartes [Cardplayers], much like the head-dressing of a monkey in an admiral's hat, is none other than the irony of advertising that swamps the world of art today. This is the irony of repentance and of resentment vis-a-vis one's own culture. Repentance and resentment, no doubt, comprise the final state of the history of art since they encompass, according to Nietzsche, the ultimate state in the genealogy of morals. This is a parody, or rather a palinode [recantation] of art and the history of art (an episode that reflects on a very brief history) - a parody of culture performed on itself in a vengeance typical of radical disillusionment. It's as if history constructed its own bins and began seeking its redemption foraging among the debris. Alas! The end of history is also the end of the bins of history. Or perhaps the creation of even more bins to bury old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to toss Marxism which actually invented the bins of history? (By the way, there seems to be a justice here since those who had invented the bins were the ones who fell into them.) Conclusion: if there are no more bins of history, it is because History itself has become a bin. It has become its own bin, similar to the planet which is currently in the process of becoming one big bin. Once ice freezes, all excrement moves to the surface. Once the dialectic freezes, all the sacred excrement of the dialectic is made visible. When the future thaws out, and even the present by now, one can observe the resurfacing of all the excrement of the past. The problem is that of diminution. This does not only apply to physical substances, including atomic particles, but also to defunct ideologies, completed utopias, dead concepts, fossilized ideas that continue to pollute our mental space. These historical and intellectual waste products give rise to more serious concern than industrial waste. Who will do us the favour of cleaning out all the sedimentation of secular idiocy? According to history, this live waste, this languishing monster keeps dilating even after its death, like the bodies of Ionesco [Romanian president after Ceaucescu] - and how can one escape from that? The environmental imperative states that all waste must be recycled otherwise it will just circulate indefinitely like satellites revolving around the Earth as they themselves turn into cosmic waste. History in a way prefigures this dilemma: either burst open the undegradable waste of great empires, of great narratives, of great systems given to decay under their gigantic proportions or simply recycle all waste in a synthetic form of sundry history, similarly to what we are producing today under the sign of Democracy and Human Rights which always amounted to a full-scale muddled reprocessing of all the residues of history - residues of brutal grinding over which ethnic, linguistic, federal and ideological phantoms of bygone societies still hover. Amnesia, anamnesis, anachronic revival of all kinds of characters of the past - royalty,

feudality - have these ever really disappeared? Even democracy, this proliferating form, this smallest common denominator of all our liberal societies, this planetary democracy of Human Rights is to freedom what Disneyland is to the imaginary [fancy]. What it offers with regard to the modern need for freedom is very similar to the attributes required for the recycling of paper. In reality, there is no insolvable problem for waste. The problem is resolved via the postmodern invention of recycling and the incinerator. From the ashes of the Great Incinerators of history, one resurrects the Phoenix of postmodernity! One has to take into account that all that was non- degradable, non-extinguishable is recycled today. And why? Because there is no final solution. We cannot escape the worst, to comprehend that History will not have an end because all of its components - the Church, communism, democracy, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies - continue on an indefinite course of recycling. What is truly incredible is that as much as we had thought to have gone beyond history, none of it has really been surpassed, none of it has disappeared - they are all there ready to resurface, all the archaic, anachronic forms quite intact and atemporal like the virus in the furthest recesses of the body. In an attempt to rescue itself from cyclic time, all that history has managed to accomplish was to relapse into the order of recyclables.

Originally published in French as part of Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements, Galilee: Paris, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas, York University, Canada.

6.

Entre le cristal et la Fume Jean Baudrillard

Les Humains associs : Jean as-tu une bonne nouvelle nous annoncer ?

Jean Baudrillard (rires) : Non, pas d'vangiles, non il n'y en a pas beaucoup. C'est bien de prendre un thme paradoxal. Une amie qui s'occupe de la collection morale aux ditions Autrement, me disait au sujet de la revalorisation thique des valeurs : "Ce n'est pas possible,

nous sommes alls au bout de l'immoralit, nous avons touch le fond de la mauvaise nouvelle, d'une certaine faon". La bonne nouvelle ce serait qu'il se produise une rversion, une sorte de rsurrection, par la force des choses. En quelque sorte, on ne peut plus qu'esprer la rversibilit fatale des processus (rires). Alors, ce n'est pas une bonne nouvelle parce que nous ne sommes pas responsables de cela, nous sommes ct de la responsabilit vritable. Cependant, il n'est pas possible que le pire arrive, ce n'est jamais vrai. Il n'y a pas vritablement de logique ou alors elle peut s'inverser. a se joue toujours quitte ou double.Mais ce n'est vraiment pas la mme chose que l'espoir. C'est plutt une bonne nouvelle fatale comme la mauvaise nouvelle. C'est--dire qu'elle doit arriver, qu'il y a une ncessit ce que quelque chose arrive. Cela vient de cette sorte de vide qui s'opre, qu'il soit social, politique, psychologique, etc. Dans le vide, un moment donn, il est forc que quelque chose, un vnement, se passe. Lequel ? C'est trs difficile augurer. Tout ce qui nous reste, c'est le pressentiment. C'est difficile, mais ce n'est pas impossible. Tout ne va pas mal partout. Ne parler que du mauvais ct sert se d-responsabiliser. On entend de plus en plus : " quoi bon faire trop d'efforts, puisque c'est la crise !" Et cela nous donne le climat morbide dans lequel nous vivons. Cependant, la vie est aussi trs belle. Oui, mais c'est toujours un peu la mme chose. Il y a deux formes de nihilisme. Il y a le constat dpressif d'une situation et, un moment donn, il est forcment pathologique. Pathologique, parce qu'il en fait un pathos, un psychodrame total. Et il y a, comme le disait Nietzsche, un nihilisme actif. C'est mme une sorte d'existence plus prenante. Moi ce que je suspecte un peu dans la bonne nouvelle, le bonheur, le bien-tre, c'est que justement l, on se sent trs peu exister. Il y a plus d'existence dans le revers. Par exemple la haine, j'en ai parl dans le Magazine Littraire (Baudrillard (Jean), "La Haine, ultime raction vitale", Magazine Littraire, Ndeg.323, p. 18-25), en disant que finalement elle est une vritable passion vitale. On retrouve aujourd'hui beaucoup plus d'altrit dans la haine. Dire : "J'ai la haine", c'est l'ide que l'autre existe assez pour que je puisse le dtester, qu'il y a des choses qui sont assez prenantes pour que je puisse les rejeter. Donc, nous avons affaire une passion ngative, mais au moins c'est une passion. Alors que du ct du constat des choses, nous sommes dans une indiffrence grandissante. La mauvaise nouvelle, c'est l'indiffrence, la lthargie. Une bonne nouvelle c'est tout ce qui pourrait rveiller une passion, un vnement, une intensit, une nergie, etc. Non pas forcment l'avnement de quelque chose d'heureux, mais une remise en jeu des choses.

Il est possible qu'en ce moment mme quelque chose soit en train de se remettre en jeu, mais il est trs difficile de le savoir, parce que c'est sans doute autre chose que les valeurs traditionnelles. Pour moi, l'aveu de "je ne sais plus rien", est une excellente nouvelle. Parce que cela veut dire que quelque chose "finit" et qu'une autre, inconnue, commence, donc c'est nouveau. Ah oui ! Mais attends ! quoi penses-tu ? Je pense que si ponctuellement tout semble sens dessus dessous, la cause en est une remise en question qui touche toutes les strates de notre existence, notre faon de vivre, notre perception des choses. La cration d'outils de plus en plus performants, la matrise d'nergies toujours plus puissantes, au lieu de nous aider mieux saisir le sens de la vie, nous a mis face un chaos. Mais ce chaos, en ce qui me concerne, annonce l'mergence de quelque chose de nouveau. Mon sentiment, est que cet inconnu qui nous arrive ne peut pas tre pire que le "connu" dans lequel nous sommes plongs. Et qu'est-ce qui te fait dire a ? Tu n'as pas de critres pour dire ce qui sera mieux ou pas. Ce sera une autre donne. Dans la redistribution d'un jeu, tu as d'autres cartes et tu ne peux savoir si ce sera bien ou mal, la question n'est plus l. Je n'ai que mon exprience pour te rpondre. Il y a de plus en plus de gens qui ne veulent plus tricher, de tous ges, de tous milieux, les sans-domicile-fixe inclus, qui disent que la seule chose qui leur reste, c'est d'tre eux-mmes, c'est--dire d'tre authentiques. En me basant sur ces faits, et parce que moi- mme je suis parvenue cette rsolution, je peux donc discerner dans ce chaos-l, "au-del de la fin", des lments qui m'amnent penser que ce qui nous arrive est somme toute une bonne nouvelle. tre ce qu'on est, au moment o on est. Devenir ce qu'on est ? Mais cela est une problmatique qui a toujours exist. Ce n'est pas nouveau, cela a toujours t... Disons, d'aprs ce que je vois, que le phnomne a pris une autre ampleur... Je suis d'accord avec toi, il y a eu toutes sortes d'thiques, de philosophies, de religions, etc. qui voulaient pratiquer l'ascse. Mais on pratiquait cette ascse personnelle au nom d'une cause, d'une instance, pour tenter de retrouver une vocation, une inspiration. Maintenant, le dpouillement est fait par l'volution des choses elles-mmes. L'volution du monde a tout ratiss, a tout raval. Le dpouillement est en quelque sorte objectif. Et nous nous retrouvons un degr zro, par une sorte d'ironie objective des vnements. Ce n'est mme plus une ascse personnelle, nous nous retrouvons nus et nous ne connaissons plus la rgle du jeu. Et a, ce n'est pas forcment rjouissant, ni rconfortant. Mais oui, c'est passionnant (rires). Le moment n'est pas encore venu de jouer, mais seulement de savoir s'il y a encore une rgle du jeu, va-t-on la dcouvrir ? C'est un moment flottant d'incertitude radicale.

Mais l'incertitude radicale, d'une certaine faon, fait aussi partie de l'ascse traditionnelle. Ce qu'il y a maintenant, c'est qu'elle est collective et je ne vois plus les voies de l'ascse personnelle, ni comment l'authenticit personnelle pourrait s'y retrouver. Il y a un enjeu qui touche forcment toute une culture, o les refuges traditionnels, religieux, transcendants, ou autres, sont plus ou moins vacillants. Disons que les remdes traditionnels n'existent plus, et qu'il faut en inventer d'autres. Je ne suis pas sr qu'on trouve quelque chose la fin, quelque chose qui serait l, cach, secret, disponible au fond de soi, dans la profondeur. L'authenticit est un terme qui me laisse un peu perplexe. Cela ne me semble pas aujourd'hui tre une valeur, une idologie trs forte. Qu'est-ce que l'authenticit d'une chose qui a justement perdu son tre ? Alors, tu me diras : "peut-tre qu'il vaut mieux", je n'en sais rien. C'est un peu comme la ralit, c'est la valeur de ce qui a perdu son illusion, c'est--dire sa forme symbolique forte. Aujourd'hui, nous sommes vous la ralit, au constat objectif d'exister. J'existe, c'est tout. Aujourd'hui, tout ce que nous pouvons essayer de faire, c'est de donner la preuve de notre existence. Et tout le monde le fait, travers le travail, ou n'importe quoi... Mais l'authenticit est aussi fonde sur une sorte d'autarcie, d'autonomie originelle fondamentale. Et je ne suis pas sr qu'elle existe encore. Quand je dis authenticit, c'est dans le sens de naturel, sans faux-semblants. Par nature, je n'entends pas le retour aux sources, la recherche du paradis perdu, mais naturellement humain. C'est- -dire cette sincrit qu'ont les enfants de dire les choses comme elles sont, et d'tre ce qu'ils sont. Par exemple de dire je t'aime quand c'est je t'aime, ou merde quand c'est merde. Oui, il y a sans doute encore de la franchise, un petit peu de navet, au sens fort du terme et aussi une recherche dsespre de l'authenticit. Je dis dsespre, parce que c'est quand mme une valeur humaniste de penser qu'il y a une subjectivit originelle fondamentale. Comme moi par exemple, c'est a ? (rires) Exactement (rires). Mais je te dirais brutalement : aucun critre ne permet de distinguer entre une authenticit vraie, par plonasme, et une authenticit parfaitement hystrique. Ce n'est pas une dngation de l'hystrie. L'hystrie est une trs, trs grande valeur. Mais, en mme temps, l'hystrie c'est ce qui se projette partir de quelque chose qui n'existe pas. D'ailleurs, l'hystrique au fond n'est rien. Mais elle peut ou il peut - mais plus souvent c'est elle - tre une multiplicit de choses, parce que justement elle n'a pas de noyau existentiel, dfinitif.

Il y a un jeu, il y a une rgle du jeu, et l'hystrique est authentique, authentique dans le jeu, et elle joue toujours. Peut-on vritablement savoir ce que nous sommes ? Savoir ce que l'on veut ? C'est--dire l'exprimer en terme de : a ? Merde ! a ? Oui ! etc. Une sorte de franchise, de radicalit expressionniste. Pour cela, il faut savoir ce que l'on est et ce que l'on veut. Et je ne suis pas sr qu'on le sache. Je ne dis pas que les gens que j'ai rencontrs le savaient. Ce que j'ai constat, c'est qu'ils cherchaient savoir qui ils sont. Quant au distingo entre authenticit vraie et authenticit hystrique, je pense que le phnomne observable dpendra toujours de l'observateur... C'est vrai qu'aujourd'hui, nous avons affaire une situation o nous sommes assaillis par un nombre incalculable de modles, de comportements obligs, impratifs, catgoriques, moraux, etc, moins de dvelopper soi-mme son propre vide, mais cela ne se passe jamais ainsi. Le plus souvent, la vie se passe, soit dans une conformit totale, soit dans une rsistance de tous les instants. Dans un rejet : non ! il n'y a rien o je veuille fixer ma volont, je ne veux pas tre ceci, ni cela, parce que ce sont des modles de simulation qui sont tout prts. O est l'identit dans cette histoire, dans cet environnement compltement assig par des modles ? On peut les repousser, c'est vrai qu'il y a un acting-out (passage l'acte) qui consiste en la dngation de tous les modles. Au moins, c'est dj quelque chose, mais cela ne va pas donner la ralisation harmonieuse de quelque chose qui aurait dj t et qui, malgr tout, trouve s'affirmer de nouveau. J'ai l'impression que nous sommes dans une situation o le plus clair de notre nergie passe dans la dngation, le refus, la rsistance, etc., o ne s'exprime pas vraiment une authenticit, mais une forme de dfi : je ne serai pas celui que vous voulez !

Qui dit dfi, dit comptition, et je n'ai pas l'impression que ceux dont je parlais et moi-mme soyons en comptition avec nous-mmes. Et s'il y a combat, ce serait un combat pour "l'ange". Ouverture sans imposition, avec un maximum de propositions, acceptation de notre contradiction, relativit de tous les modles de pense, respect mutuel, o nous pouvons sincrement tre d'accord pour ne pas tre d'accord; passer du modle l'original, et raliser aussi que notre vie est faite de quotidien et que les bonnes nouvelles peuvent aussi tre un niveau personnel, car des milliards ne sont que l'addition de 1+1+1... Absolument ! Disons qu'effectivement dans les choses de la vie, il y en a de trs heureuses, mais je n'arrive pas du tout les extrapoler, faire que cela prenne une quelconque allure de style de vie, une valeur de modle. Si tu trouves de bonnes relations professionnelles ou affectives etc., a n'a aucune valeur collective. Tu les arraches au collectif en crant des microclimats subjectifs o tu peux exister, o tu n'es pas somm de faire la preuve tout le temps de ton existence.

Ds que tu sors de tes propres limites, de ton propre petit circuit, tu es soumis la pression existentielle et sociale et l, il n'y a pas de bonnes nouvelles. Nous tombons dans un domaine qui est la fois celui de l'excitation, de l'exacerbation des choses et de l'indiffrence totale. En dehors de cela, je me sens indiffrent - lorsque je dis "me", c'est impersonnel - je ne parviens plus trouver qu'il y ait un jeu qui vaille la peine d'tre jou, selon des rgles du jeu dont je me sentirais ventuellement responsable, en dehors de mon petit cercle. Ce n'est pas une histoire de repli, de "je me protge". Non, je reconnais objectivement que pour l'instant je n'ai pas envie de jouer. a ne m'empche pas de faire un certain nombre de choses. Ce n'est pas un jugement de valeur, mais vous tes quelques uns tre couts, aims ou has, et vous comptez pour beaucoup de gens, que cela te plaise ou non. Dans la situation que nous vivons, tu es quelqu'un qui pense, qui a pens, qui a fait des propositions ou des contrepropositions et, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire, des gens te suivent. Si tu prends mon cas, admets que je n'ai pas vraiment donn aux gens beaucoup de raisons d'esprer dans tout ce que j'ai pu crire. Ni de dsesprer. Non ! Ce n'est pas du dsespoir, mais une forme de radicalisation. C'est les forcer renoncer leurs espoirs les plus communs. Mais les gens attendent a aussi ! Tu leur as donn la satisfaction que procure une extrme lucidit... Peut-on appeler cela une bonne nouvelle ? Cela peut tre une bonne nouvelle pour certains que de constater que les choses se passent exactement comme tu l'avais dit il y a une dizaine d'annes. Par consquent, cela veut dire qu'on peut envisager les choses et que cela mrite que l'on prenne la peine de penser. Trs bien, mais tout cela ne peut pas constituer un message. En tous cas pas une bonne nouvelle... c'est plutt exactement la mauvaise nouvelle. Dans l'antiquit, le messager tait confondu avec le message, et on le tuait afin d'liminer la mauvaise nouvelle. C'est un peu la mme chose avec moi et cela est trs bien ainsi. La bonne nouvelle c'est aussi l'ange. Grce ton travail, on passe de ce que reprsente la nouvelle la jouissance d'tre initi. Oui, mais cela est une jouissance secondaire. Secondaire non dans le sens qu'elle a moins de valeur que l'autre, mais parce que c'est une jouissance qui est au-del du contenu du message mme.

C'est la lucidit, c'est le fait de savoir que tout va mal. Si tu sais que tout va mal, effectivement tu n'es pas dans le pire, a c'est clair. Il y a au moins une prime de lucidit, et aussi une prime de plaisir, a je suis d'accord. Si quelqu'un est capable de pr-voir le pire, il est aussi capable d'agir afin que cela soit le moins pire possible. Quoi qu'on en dise, tout est loin d'tre perdu... Ah! non ! 7.

Disneyworld Company Jean Baudrillard In the early 80s, when the metallurgical industry in the Lorraine region entered its final crisis, the public powers had the idea to make up for this collapse by creating a European leisure zone, an "intelligent" theme park which could jumpstart the economy of the region. This park was called Smurfland. The managing director of the dead metallurgy naturally became the manager of the theme park, and the unemployed workers were rehired as "smurfmen" in the context of this new Smurfland. Unfortunately, the park itself, for several reasons, had to be closed, and the former factory workers turned "smurfmen" once again found themselves on the dole. It is a somber destiny which, after making them the real victims of the job market, transformed them into the ghostly workers of leisure time, and finally turned them into the unemployed of both. But Smurfland was only a miniature universe. The Disney enterprise is much bigger. To illustrate, it should be known that Disney "Unlimited," having taken over one of the major US television networks, is about to purchase 42nd Street in New York, the "hot" section of 42nd Street, to transform it into an erotic theme park, with the intention of changing hardly anything of the street itself. The idea would be simply to transform, in situ, one of the high centers of pornography into a branch of Disney World. Transforming the pornographers and the prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into extras [figurants] in their own world, metamorphosed into identical figures, museumified, disneyfied. By the way, do you know how General Schwarzkopf, the great Gulf War strategist, celebrated his victory? He had a huge party at Disney World. These festivities in the palace of the imaginary were a worthy conclusion to such a virtual war. But the Disney enterprise goes beyond the imaginary. Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process of capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast "reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park. The transfusion of the real is like a blood transfusion, except that here it is a transfusion of real

blood into the exsanguine universe of virtuality. After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version. At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN's instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death. The New World Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney is not alone in this mode of cannibalistic attraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel], in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion. If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information. Similarly, it is useless to keep searching for computer viruses since we are all caught in a viral chain of networks anyway. Information itself has become viral; perhaps not sexually transmissible yet, but much more powerful through its numerical propagation. And so it does not take much work for Disney to scoop up reality, such as it is. "Spectacular Inc.," as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in a society of spectacle, which itself has become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle that alters reality, but rather the contagion of virtuality that erases the spectacle. Disneyland still belonged to the order of the spectacle and of folklore, with its effects of entertainment [distraction] and distanciation [distance]. Disney World and its tentacular extension is a generalized metastasis, a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary but in a viral and virtual

mode. We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras [figurants interactifs]; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge "reality show." It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of disincarnation; no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all our cells; an enterprise of radical deterrence of the world from the inside and no longer from outside, similar to the quasi-nostalgic universe of capitalistic reality today. Being an extra [figurant] in virtual reality is no longer being an actor or a spectator. It is to be out of the scene [horsscene], to be obscene. Disney wins at yet another level. It is not only interested in erasing the real by turning it into a three-dimensional virtual image with no depth, but it also seeks to erase time by synchronizing all the periods, all the cultures, in a single traveling motion, by juxtaposing them in a single scenario. Thus, it marks the beginning of real, punctual and unidimensional time, which is also without depth. No present, no past, no future, but an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single atemporal virtuality. Lapse or collapse of time: that's properly speaking what the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension] is about. It is the dimension of the virtual, of real time; a dimension which, far from adding to the others, erases them all. And so it has been said that, in a century or in a millennium, gladiator movies will be watched as if they were authentic Roman movies, dating back to the era of the Roman empire, as real documentaries on Ancient Rome; that in the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, a pastiche of a Pompeian villa, will be confused, in an anachronistic manner, with a villa of the third century B.C. (including the pieces inside from Rembrandt, Fra Angelico, everything confused in a single crush of time); that the celebration of the French Revolution in Los Angeles in 1989 will retrospectively be confused with the real revolutionary event. Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal utopia by producing all the events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, and by inexorably mixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult, from our real world perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension].

This is a translation of Jean Baudrillard's "Disneyworld Company", published on March 4, 1996 in the Parisian newspaper, Liberation. Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University.