Ligottem ;)

We begin our journey with with the story of “Death at Samarkand”

Baudrillard ‘90 (“Death in Samarkand” Jean Baudrillard, Trans. Brian Singer, Accessed 11/1/19
https://web.archive.org/web/20131218041654/http://insomnia.ac/essays/death_in_samarkand/)
An ellipsis of the sign, an eclipse of meaning: an illusion. The mortal distraction that a single sign can cause instantaneously. Consider the story
of the soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him make a menacing
gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king's palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he
might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace
and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies: "I didn't mean to
frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow,
in Samarkand." Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the more surely by seeking to escape it. Yes, everyone seeks
his own death, and the failed acts are the most successful. Yes, signs follow an unconscious course. But all this
concerns the truth of the rendez-vous in Samarkand ; it does not account for the seduction of the story ,
which is in no way an apologue of truth . What is astounding about the story is that this seemingly inevitable rendez-
vous need not have taken place. There is nothing to suggest that the soldier would have been in
Samarkand without this chance encounter, and without the ill-luck of Death's naive gesture, which acted
in spite of itself as a gesture of seduction. Had Death been content to call the soldier back to order, the story
would lose its charm. Everything here is hinged on a single, involuntary sign. The gesture does not appear
to be part of a strategy, nor even an unconscious ruse; yet it takes on the unexpected depth of seduction, that is,
it appears as something that moves laterally, as a sign that, unbeknownst to the protagonists (including Death, as well as the soldier), advances
a deadly command, an aleatory sign behind which another conjunction, marvelous or disastrous, is being enacted. A conjunction that gives the
sign's trajectory all the characteristics of a witticism. No one in the story has anything to reproach himself with - or else the king who lent his
horse, is as guilty as anyone else. No. Behind
the apparent liberty of the two central characters (Death was free to
make his gesture, the soldier to flee), they were both following a rule of which neither were aware. The
rule of this game, which, like every fundamental rule, must remain secret, is that death is not a brute event, but only occurs
through seduction, that is, by way of an instantaneous, indecipherable complicity , by a sign or signs that
will not be deciphered in time. Death is a rendez-vous, not an objective destiny. Death can not fail to go since
he is this rendez-vous, that is, the allusive conjunction of signs and rules which make up the game. At the same time, Death is
an innocent player in the game. This is what gives the story its secret irony, whose resolution appears as a stroke of wit [trait
d'esprit], and provides us with such sublime pleasure - and distinguishes it from a moral fable or a vulgar tale about the death instinct. The
spiritual character [trait spirituel] of the story extends the spirited character [trait d'espritgestuel] of Death's gesture, and the two seductions,
that of Death and of the story, fuse together. Death's
astonishment is delightful, an astonishment at the frivolity of
an arrangement where things proceed by chance : "But this soldier should have known that he was expected in Samarkand
tomorrow, and taken his time to get there..." However Death shows only surprise, as if his existence did not depend as much as the soldier's on
the fact that they were to meet in Samarkand. Death lets things happen, and it is his casualness that makes him appealing - this is why the
soldier hastens to join him. None of this involves the unconscious, metaphysics or psychology. Or even strategy. Death
has no plan. He
restores chance with a chance gesture; this is how he works, yet everything still gets done . There is nothing
that cannot not be done, yet everything still preserves the lightness of chance, of a furtive gesture, an accidental encounter or an illegible sign.
That's how it is with seduction... Moreover, the soldier went to meet death because he gave meaning to a
meaningless gesture which did not even concern him. He took personally something that was not addressed to him, as one might
mistake for oneself a smile meant for someone else. The height of seduction is to be without seduction . The man seduced is
caught in spite of himself in a web of stray signs. And it is because the sign has been turned from its meaning or "seduced",
that the story itself is seductive. It is when signs are seduced that they become seductive. Only signs without
referents, empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs, absorb us

Vote neg for the status quo, to blow out the candle—the aff’s nuclear war
impacts provide the possibility of a nuclear winter, the ultimate nirvana, which
is the only way to permanently end suffering
Dolan ‘02 [John Dolan, “The Case for Nuclear Winter”, the eXile, April 21, 2002,
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6495&IBLOCK_ID=35, UcLab]

There are no nihilists -- but suppose there were. What would they say? Once you dare to consider this
question, the answer seems obvious: if there were any real nihilists, they would praise nuclear weapons
as the means to bring an end to the world via nuclear winter . They would sing hymns to the warheads,
seeing in them the first weapon we have ever obtained against the universe which has brought us into
being to suffer and die. Even if these imaginary nihilists were too squeamish to advocate nuclear winter outright, they
would be compelled to praise nuclear winter as the first real CHOICE any organism has ever had about
whether to continue in the fated cycle of birth, pain, and death . 10 Things We'll Miss Least When We're Dead 1.
Intestinal cramps 2. Homeless people 3. Hagfish 4. Beer 5. Nursing Homes 6. Masturbating 7. Eurosport Channel 8. Humidity 9. Auto shops 10.
Memories But of course no one has said anything like this -- because there are no nihilists. The confrontation at
the bowling alley at the end of Big Lebowski summarizes ethical philosophy at the end of the twentieth century: brainless Americans
confronting even stupider Germans, one of whom brandishes his great-grandfather's cavalry saber, a slapstick relic of the mad daring with
which the Europeans entered the twentieth century. The Germans mouth nihilist cliches ("Ve beliefs in nossink!"), while the Americans say
simply "What's mine is mine!" The Americans win because they, at least, mean what they say: their chump change is theirs, and they'll fight to
the death for it. The Germans don't even understand, let alone mean, their nihilist bluster; they are "laughable, man!" as the Jesus-Man would
put it, their claims merely a cover for their pitiful state as parasites on the culture which wrested the world away from them. It's not that they
believe in nothing; they ARE nothing. There are no nihilists any more. That fact is the most damning evidence of a great betrayal which has
happened in the last half century. In1945, when the Bomb gave us the option of quitting this dirty, rigged game of
Darwinian strip poker, we learned that not one of the anti-life artists meant what they said. In a few
years, all the anti-life art of the early twentieth century vanished. The artists who had made their
careers documenting the horrors of life on earth and denouncing the cycle of animal existence yelped
away like scared puppies the moment a real chance to end the suffering appeared. They saw that
magnificent mushroom cloud and instead of falling down to worship it, they ran to the nearest church or
Christian Science Reading Room or Socialist meeting hall. After convincing thousands of adolescents to
kill themselves in the name of holy despair, these sleazy careerists ran to hug the knees of GAIA, the
bloody mother. They Chose Life -- the swine! Go ahead, pick a culture, any culture! Any culture you can
name, during any historical period you choose, will furnish hundreds of examples of anti-life rhetoric
which was taken very, very seriously -- up until the moment when it actually meant something. Take, say,
Europe in the nineteenth century, that cheery and bustling period. OK; here's its greatest philosopher on the subject: "If you imagine...the
sum total of distress, pain and suffering which the sun shines upon, you will be forced to admit that it
would have been better if the surface of the earth were still as crystalline as that of the moon....For the
world is Hell, and men are on the one had the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it. " That was
Schopenhauer, telling the Germans in their bristly abstract way what Darwin told the English in their fussier, more detailed language: there is
no point but suffering. There is no hidden redemptive meaning in any of this. It's just an unfortunate
industrial accident, organic life. Both Schopenhauer and Darwin resorted to animal examples to convey
the horror which summed up the world . They were trying to overcome the popular heresy that somehow, it all must "balance
out" somehow. It doesn't, because it was never designed to do so: "compare the pleasure of an animal engaged in eating another animal with
the pain of the animal being eaten." By
the beginning of the twentieth century, Schopenhauer and Darwin were in
play in the higher European circles, mixing and strengthening each other. It was the bravest moment in
the history of our species; something truly dangerous, a final anti-life epiphany, seemed ready to
happen. This is what poor sweet Nietzsche meant with his heartbreaking faith in "the men who are
coming." Nihilism's one great weakness was that it had always been an elite cult, not considered transmissible to the
masses. This was in fact why Buddhism was replaced by a mindless demotic cult like Hinduism in India: Nirvana was too cold a doctrine for
peasants who equated fecundity with happiness. But
in the early twentieth century, a demographic anomaly
appeared: the elite was big, and getting bigger. They brought their cult with them; art began serving as
the propaganda wing of Nihilism. What we call "Modernism" was actually a multimedia offensive which
was beginning to make Nihilism palatable to the masses. The fuzzy "Modern/Postmodern" distinction is best seen as a
change in popular religion: from 1910-1945, art did an honorable job of preparing the masses to abandon their attachment to the biosphere;
from 1945 to the present, art borrows Nihilist images, diction and narrative without the least intention of employing them to free us from
attachment to organic life. The
echoes of that dangerous early twentieth-century art are still audible: "I've
always been surprised by everyone's going on living." Birth, and copulation and death. That's all the facts
when you come to brass tacks: Birth, and copulation, and death. I've been born, and once is enough. You
don't remember, but I remember, Once is enough. It's sad for the dog. He lives only because he was
born, just like me.... So they sang. And many believed them. Maybe a few of them really meant it -- Schopenhauer especially.
What would Schopenhauer have said about nuclear weapons? My guess is he'd be all for them ; he was a
serious man, an honorable man. But the rest -- they never meant it, and only talked so grandly against Life because they knew there was no
alternative, no way to end the world. When the cat's away, the mice will ham it up. But since 1945, they self-censored themselves, to the effect
that no matter how many Nihilist images you may borrow, you will do nothing truly dangerous -- nothing that could make anyone press that
nuclear trigger. You can wear all the black you want; you can worship suicide -- individual suicide, that is -- ; you can write songs about how life
sucks; but you can't mean it. Of course, not everybody's in on the double-talk scam. Those
dangerous anti-lifers are still floating
around, infecting those naive enough to listen to them . Cobain and Courtney are the classic example : both
wore the rags, the scowls, the sulk; both screamed and ranted against life; but only one of them ever believed it.
He, poor bastard, took it all seriously; she, a much more typical representative of the treacherous 20th-
century avant garde, knew better. When you think of poor Cobain now, it all seems inevitable, from the
moment he chose that fatal name for his band. "Nirvana": a quaint Buddhist term, taken by most
American bohemians to mean something like "nice peaceful feeling." But that's not what it means at all:
"nirvana" means, literally, "the blowing out of a candle." Extinction, a return to stillness . Poor Cobain! He took
it seriously, and made Nirvana for himself...and Courtney inherited, pouting all the way to the bank. They're all Courtneys, the ones who still
live. Lou Reed, who invented black, wrote hymns to heroin as the best available anti-life, and provided the soundtrack for God knows how many
thousands of adolescent suicides, showed up recently at a memorial service for John "All You Need Is Love" Lennon. There he was, up on the
stage with a dozen other rich old popstar vampires, singing treacly Beatles songs. They were praying, really -- praying to be granted another few
years of life. "Choose life!" That's a vulture's favorite proverb, and these wrinkled undead were singin' it with feeling. The ones who meant it,
even a little -- they die. Sid died because he believed it; John Lydon said so, giggling at his dead comrade's stupidity in a recent interview. Sid, he
explained, took all the punk stuff seriously, and died of it. Lydon knew better, he explained from poolside. He looked over at his pool frequently
during the interview -- scanning his LA mansion, just overjoyed with his good sense and deriving an especially piquant satisfaction from the
thought of poor old Sid. Johnny chose life. It's not hard to see why a popstar chooses life; his life comes at the expense of everyone else's. A
vampire universe feels great -- to a vampire. But what about the rest of us , the nobodies? The feeding
cows? What do we have to lose? There's always been a lot of preaching against suicide. In some way,
any choice to choose non-life frightens the ruling vampires . Their favorite argument is, of course, guilt:
"Think of the pain you leave behind you!" I remember a scraggly hippie mystic on Sproul denouncing suicide as "a slap in the
face to everybody who loves you," and adding, "Even the worst bum on Skid Row has somebody who loves him." It impressed me at the time; I
thought he must have had some special knowledge of the affectional backgrounds of bums which I didn't possess. It was several years before I
knew for certain that he was simply preaching, another damn Christian-without-Christ babbling the ruling vampires' cliches. Suicide
is
unpatriotic; that's why it offends them. It deprives the vampires of a jugular to sip. How can you not like
this boneyard? This is the finest torture-chamber in the universe! How dare you opt out of it! But since
1945, the vampire lords have had another, much stronger reason to fear the idea of suicide: individual
suicide is only Nuclear Winter writ small. Nuclear Winter is universal Nirvana. And that makes it utterly
different from individual suicide -- because there will be no survivors to mourn and grieve. There will be
no mourning and grief at all, ever again. Thus nuclear winter offers a true cure for suffering -- which the
sermons against suicide do not. OK; you decide not to kill yourself because it will hurt your parents,
friends, pit bull, roommates, chess club pals, whatever. So what? You're gonnna go anyway, and in some
way much more agonizing than a bullet to the head: cancer, car wreck, genetic glitch, rafting accident,
heart valve pop. And when you do, that suffering of the survivors will begin , the ten billionth wail of grief
heard on Earth. And the grieving die in their turn, and when they go another wail sets up.... It's not just
horrible -- it's silly. Just plain dumb. Squint at it -- draw your head back just a little and squint at it -- and
it's truly "laughable, man": these creatures whose life consists of a ride down a conveyor belt towards a
meat grinder, making a continual wail of surprise as another one goes over the edge. Every one a
surprise. "Oh! He went in! How could this happen?" "Ah, she fell! My God!" Well Duh. What'd you
expect? That's what suffering is: going over the edge one at a time. The experience of individual death
while the world grinds on. What would happen in the Nuclear Winter scenario is utterly different: all
jump into the meatgrinder at once. No one is left to suffer or mourn. When some die and some live,
there is suffering; when all die, blown out like a candle, there is no suffering . There is something else,
something for which we have no name. But one thing is clear: it is not suffering. "We shall not suffer, for
we shall not be." It has been done on a small scale -- communal suicide, oblivion. The Old Believers; Jonestown;
and some of the tribes hunted for sport by the Europeans. The Carib -- the last Carib jumped off a cliff rather than be taken. As did the last few
bands of Tasmanians. They saw the suffering of their children ahead, and took the kids with them over the cliff. Are they were right. Imagine
the prospects of a Tasmanian child in the hands of the British colonists who had killed its parents for sport. Life as a souvenir, mascot, bum-boy
or -girl, stuffed exhibit in a museum...for what? So that in ten generations, one of its partial descendants might live to collect a guilt-dole from
the Australian government? So that in another two generations, an even more attenuated descendant could pen a jargon-stuffed "indictment"
of the crime, hoping for publication and a tenure-track affirmative-action job at a new regional polytech? The cliff-edge has more dignity and
sense.We have given other species the gift of oblivion, sent them over the cliff: the Mammoth, the Moa
Eagle, the Tasmanian Wolf...all the finest species, really, are going or gone. A hundred years from now,
when all the big cats are gone, no one will understand how we thought the life of a hundred million
Tamils worth that of even one Bengal Tiger. Life on earth hit its peak during the Ice Ages, and we are
now killing off the few species from that period who survived our first coup, ten thousand years ago. We
have very little to lose, destroying the remaining fauna, now that the best is gone. The lives of all the
horrible humans in Houston are not worth even one Columbia Mammoth. So we have guides sent ahead
of us into oblivion. When we pull the plug, press the button, drop the nuclear dime on ourselves, we will
suffer no more than the Mammoth suffers. We owe them; let's join them. We can make our first act in
the afterlife a formal apology to the Tasmanian Wolf, the Cave Bear, the Mammoth. But at least their
suffering is over now. The Mammoths' suffering ended when the last calf, watching its mother being
hacked to death by ugly apes wearing caribou skins, trumpeted in shock and pain and tried to run -- and
was hacked to death, screaming, then silent. And when its life went out -- the blowing out of a candle --
the suffering of all Mammoths ceased, gave way to something entirely different: Nirvana. The Nirvana of
the Mammoths, where they wait for us now. But we have to be sure of one thing: that it will be oblivion,
death for all, rather than another partial slaughter. That would be worse even than the present. The
thought of a post-nuke world of wretched survivors is the only real argument against detonation now.
That's why the notion of Nuclear Winter is crucial. If, say, a nuclear war killed even five billion of us, it
would leave a billion sobbing, burned survivors; and their offspring, mutant children limping across a
boneyard; and hundreds of billions of mammals, birds, and reptiles mourning their kin. This is not
Nirvana. Agreed. But that argument has been specious since the early 1980s, when a team of physicists
including that annoying geek Carl Sagan suggested that a major nuclear war would create a cloud of ash
which would blot out the sun for decades, blocking 99% of solar energy for a period of three to 12
months, and thus extinguishing the photosynthetic engine which runs this big green torture chamber
called Earth. Here's their scenario: "Nuclear explosions will set off firestorms in the cities and surrounding forest areas. The small particles
of soot are carried high into the atmosphere. The smoke will block the sun's light for weeks or months. The land temperatures would fall below
freezing. This combination of reduced temperatures and reduced light levels would have catastrophic ecological consequences. Average light
levels would be below the minimum required for photosynthesis during the first 30-40 days after the explosion and most fresh water would be
frozen. '...the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded.' This effect is similar to what may have killed the dinosaurs."
You know you feel the pull of it already. How much of our alleged "fear" of nuclear war is longing -- lust for Nirvana, disguising itself as pious
horror? In Berkeley, avid hobbyists went around spraypainting the sidewalks in a circle a half-mile around the Campanile, showing the range of
"total destruction" from a nuclear blast over the campus. I remember seeing one of them at work -- a skinny hippie who would've looked good
in a pilgrim hat and black coat -- laboring over his stencil, biting his lip in what I then took for concentration but now seems more like...pleasure.
He was having The Dream: that bomb-bay camera shot of a dull static city suddenly jolted by the first blast, a hemisphere of fire, a half-sun
umbrella over downtown...then the upwash, the stalk which will flatten out in the upper air to form the toadstool cap...now cut to houses
sucked inward to fuel the blast, no sooner vacuumed toward the epicenter than the full blast whipsaws them outwards, roofs and cars and
windows blown out by the great breath...and then, the post-coital smoke: pillars of it, from the few ruins which have enough energy left to
burn. A city of chimneys and rubble. The
Japanese, the only ones to have felt the breath of oblivion, are more
honest than we in acknowledging its beauty. No Anime is complete without at least one annihilation of a city by atomic
weapons. In Akira you get a bonus: you get to see Neo-Tokyo destroyed not once but twice by mushroom cloud. There is no pretense, in Akira,
that this is a bad thing; it is magnificent, a consummation devoutly to be wished. If any of what I am saying has truth, then one would expect
the ruling committees to work for the destruction of all nuclear weapons, so that they can rule with the same security as the thousands of other
cruel tribal elites, pre-1945. And in fact, that's what's happening now, focused on the neutralization of the nukes in the former USSR. Nuclear
Winter will occur only if there is a major detonation -- a real, Cold-War style genocidal war. It cannot be
accomplished by small-scale nuclear war: the erasure of a city here or there, a few missile bases melted,
the boili0ng of a sea or two in order to cook a few enemy subs. It must be the US-USSR scenario. Now you
see why so many artists who were in love with little wars feared that one so much. A small war is material for a million artists and writers and
songsters. Take Vietnam: they can't shut up about it. It was the classic evil little war: a lot of killing in a fecund jungle, with no chance at all of
ending the world. But none of the artists who loved little wars wanted to endorse The Big One; that was bad for business. That meant canceling
the whole season. They sang, painted, wrote, and tap-danced down the streets against it. Or thought they were doing so; because their
depictions of that sacred mushroom cloud were often beautiful in spite of the artist's conscious intention. The lust for Nirvana
shone
from them, unnoticed as the porn aspect of a nineteenth-century nude statue. Now there's a push, a big one, encompassing all the bought
artists, the spooks, the rich, the governments, to buy up and destroy the Russian nukes. It's not like they're against nukes; the West has no
intention of giving them up. They like to play with them, like suburban dads who clean their guns on the weekend. But they don't want the
world to end. So they will do anything to buy up the Russian nukes. All those movies in the past ten years about Russian nukes "falling into the
wrong hands" were cover for the real process, which involved those nukes falling into the wrongest hands of all: the people who plan to
DESTROY those nukes, people who like this world and want it to continue. For the first time in history, we can vote against the incumbent. For
the first time in the history of organic life -- the first time in over three billion years of "birth and
copulation and death" -- the pitiful animals crawling over the surface of the planet have the power to
choose to exist or to cease to exist. Imagine a prisoner condemned to be tortured to death, huddling in a cell waiting for the next
call to the bloody floor where his teeth are extracted, one by one. One day someone slips a knife under the door of his cell. For the first time, he
has the option of ending a life of pain. And, like a true slave, he throws the knife away in horror, hands it over to the guards so that he may
continue to be dragged out and tortured at their pleasure. We
are not the only lives at stake. We have a duty to the
dead-and to the unborn. Life reached its peak at the edge of the glaciers; when they receded, we, ugly
tropical scavengers, killed all the great mammals who had walked the colder and grander world. They
are waiting for us: the mammoths, the last Siberian Tiger and the Tasmanian Wolf -- and the
Tasmanians, the Caribs, and the other billions of lives we can erase and avenge and join, with a single
step, over the cliff, a few seconds of rushing air, and then Nirvana.
Consciousness is the root cause of all suffering. The knowledge of our own
inevitable, painful demise causes limitless agony that we attempt to repress,
but can never displace. Suffering and terror are the inevitable counterparts of
existence.
Ligotti ‘12 (Thomas (2012-06-23). The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
(Kindle Locations 111-126). Hippocampus Press. Kindle Edition)

Established: Consciousness is not often viewed as being an instrument of tragedy in human life. But to Zapffe, consciousness would long past have proved fatal for
human beings if we did not do something about it. “Why,” Zapffe asked, “has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly
minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living— because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” Zapffe’s answer: “ Most people learn to save

themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness .” From an evolutionary viewpoint, in Zapffe’s observation, consciousness
was a blunder that required corrections for its effects. It was an adventitious outgrowth that made us into a race of contradictory beings— uncanny things that have
nothing to do with the rest of creation. Because of consciousness, parent of all horrors , we became susceptible to thoughts

that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that
are collected and reassuring. Our minds now began dredging up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities,
enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-soiling consternation should they go
untrammeled. This potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be put to use to keep us
balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species. While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution
— so one theory goes— this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us. As Zapffe concluded, we need to

hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we
do not want to see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is
“the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.” Whether or not one agrees that there is a “brotherhood of suffering between everything alive,” we can
all agree that human beings are the only organisms that can have such a conception of existence, or any conception period. That we can conceive of the phenomenon of

suffering, our own as well as that of other organisms, is a property unique to us as a dangerously
conscious species. We know there is suffering, and we do take action against it, which includes downplaying it by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” Between taking action against and
downplaying suffering, mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly sullied our existence. As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and
those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a “brotherhood of

We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working
suffering between everything alive” would disable us from getting anywhere.

toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach
one marker, we advance to the next— as if we were playing a board game we think will never end,
despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness
and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet. Undoing I For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about

three things: survival, reproduction, death— and nothing else. Butwe know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing,
dying— and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer
during our lives before suffering— slowly or quickly— as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge
we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature . And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there
to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the
paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are — hunks of spoiling flesh on
disintegrating bones. Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible
to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For
us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense
mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical

imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must
cease reproducing. Nothing less will do, per Zapffe, although in “The Last Messiah” the character after whom the essay is named does all the talking about human
extinction. Elsewhere Zapffe speaks for himself on the subject. The sooner humanity dares to harmonize itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means
to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct
when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding
and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarization is the doctrine that the individual “has a duty” to suffer
nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of revulsion being directed at the world-order engendering of the situation. To any

no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of

independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things;

a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead
toward new bland sensations and mass deaths . (“ Fragments of an Interview,” Aftenposten, 1959) More provocative than it is astonishing, Zapffe’s thought is perhaps the
most elementary in the history of philosophical pessimism. As penetrable as it is cheerless, it rests on taboo commonplaces and outlawed truisms while eschewing the recondite brain-twisters of his forerunners, all of whom
engaged in the kind of convoluted cerebration that for thousands of years has been philosophy’s stock in trade. For example, The World as Will and Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer lays out one of the most absorbingly intricate metaphysical systems ever contrived— a quasi-mystical elaboration of a “Will-to-live” as the hypostasis of reality, a mindless and untiring master of all being, a
directionless force that makes everything do what it does, an imbecilic puppeteer that sustains the ruckus of our world. But Schopenhauer’s Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the
proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe’s principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors or practitioners of philosophy, who

While commentators
typically circle around the minutiae of theories and not the gross facts of our lives. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable. Evidence:

on Schopenhauer’s thought have seized upon it as a philosophical system ripe for academic analysis,
they do not emphasize that its ideal endpoint— the denial of the Will-to-live—is a construct for the end
of human existence. But even Schopenhauer himself did not push this as aspect of his philosophy to its
ideal endpoint, which has kept him in fair repute as a philosopher.

Death, and specifically causing future deaths is good – it is only way to ensure
freedom and satisfaction for those who would otherwise be doomed to a life of
torment
Castronovo ‘2K (Russ, Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison, author of Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom
and Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States
and coeditor of Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. “Political Necrophilia”
Boundary 2 27.2 MUSE)

Infanticide not only defeats the slaveholder, who views motherhood as the reproduction of capital; it also thwarts history. Forcibly
releasing her child from the struggles of existence, the slave mother ensures that he or she will never
accrue historical weight, instead remaining innocent of experience, memory, and trauma . The poet-as-slave
mother idealizes infant purity in an effort to withstand the traffic of worldly context. Death extricates the innocent from an
institutional circulation that leaves the flesh scarred and the spirit ‘‘marr’d.’’ Rescued from physical
existence before the disorderly accumulation of slave experience sets in, the subject of this poetic address
achieves emancipation through a severe final estrangement. Emancipation occurs when there is no
subject left to emancipate. Within the lines of this poem and within the limits of ideology, freedom is readily realized
because the infant’s life itself lacks realization . A morbid politics holds out the promise of returning the subject to an absolute
existence; in psychoanalytic terms, death defines an inorganic state impervious to change where satisfaction is
permanent. Freud’s idea of the death instinct as ‘‘the most universal endeavor of all living substance’’ can be honed to provide insight into
the political desire that freights the drive death within emancipatory rhetoric.24 Whereas Freud offers thanatos as a transcendent key to
human behavior, an understanding of death as inescapably historical and discursive impedes the naturalization of liberty as a matter of instinct
or choice. Death, as an abstract final category, attracts
citizens because it abnegates the constant struggle to secure
freedom as well as the enduring anxiety that this freedom will vanish . This oscillation expresses fort /da: the
dismaying recognition that the source of pleasure is gone (fort ) alternates with the satisfaction that the source of pleasure is here (da). In
death, no need exists to play this fort /da game because the
inorganic state ensures that no source of pleasure will ever
disappear, as pleasure itself has been removed beyond a dynamic world of change and fluctuation .
Thanatos so infuses the citizen’s desire because death makes freedom irrelevant by locating the subject in a realm
beyond striving or contention. Death offers noncontingent political satisfaction by promising that the
subject will not have to enter a material world that historicizes, modifies, and makes liberty conditional.
Death exempts the slave mother’s child from the institutional fort /da game he [or she] is destined to lose; his
original freedom suffers no abridgment from the daily demands of masters and overseers. Death secures ‘‘absolute
repose,’’ ensuring that neither law nor custom will impinge on ‘‘innate’’ rights.25 The slave child’s
freedom never becomes semantic; it never accrues texture or weight, and instead remains as pure as the
sublime heights of Emerson’s verse. For the slave child, freedom is uncompromised, but it is necessarily also without substance,
purely a question of syntax.

No one who was never born ever suffers. We have to take action into our own
hands --- the suffering of infinite future generations is at stake, and people will
never make the choice for themselves.
Ligotti ‘12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE CONSPIRACY
AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 178-180, UcLab]
To contest Zapffe’s philosophy, or any philosophy like it, would be as facile as to contest that of any other philosopher whose reasoning does
not suit your predilections. If his analysis of human existence appears secure in a certain light, it may be flouted with little exertion by anyone
thus motivated. Zapffe did not discover the New World, with a handful of dirt to prove it. He was someone who thought he had worked out
why humankind should go extinct, knowing that we would never make that choice, whatever he and his Last Messiah had to say.
Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species will still look to the future and see no need to
abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves . What a
laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That our lives might be a paradox and a horror would not really be
a secret too terrible to know for minds that know only what they want to know. The hell of human consciousness is only a philosopher’s
bedtime story we can hear each night and forget each morning when we awake to go to school or to work or wherever we
may go day after day after day. What do we care about the horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die … the
horror of shadows without selves enshrouding the earth … or the horror of puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky
like lost balloons? If that is the way you think things are, go shout it from the rooftops and see where it gets you. We are staying put, but you
can go extinct if you like. We can make more little puppets like you, but we do not call them that. We call them people who have indivisible
selves and stories that are nothing like yours. Being somebody is rough, but being nobody is out of the question. We must be happy, we must
imagine Sisyphus to be happy, we must believe because it
is absurd to believe. Day by day, in every way, we are getting better
and better. Positive illusions for positive persons. They shoot horses, don’t they? But as for shooting ourselves—ask Gloria Beatty,
ask Michelstaedter, ask Weininger, ask Hemingway. But do not ask Mainländer or Bjørneboe, who hanged themselves. And do not ask Jean
Améry, author of Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976), who made his exit with a drug overdose. Améry survived
Auschwitz, but he did not survive his survival. No one does. With our progenitors and the world behind us, we will never
hold this life to be MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our existence.
Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, “The stopwatch has started.” The infant may
cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of us to take care
of. Then all will be as it was before we put down roots where we do not belong. There will come a day for each of us—and then for all of us—
when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the
very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, with generations falling into the future like so many bodies into
open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of
waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the
complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or
simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Why do so many of us bargain for a life
sentence over the end of a rope or the muzzle of a gun? Do we not deserve to die? But we are not obsessed by
such questions. To ask them is not in our interest, nor to answer them with hand on heart. In such spirit might we not bring to an end
the conspiracy against the human race? This would seem to be the right course: the death of tragedy in the arms of nonexistence.
Overpopulated worlds of the unborn would not have to suffer for our undoing what we have done so
that we might go on as we have all these years. That said, nothing we know would have us take that
step. What could be more unthinkable? We are only human beings. Ask anybody

Viviocentrism is the root cause of every impact and creates the possibility for
violence in the first place – the burden is on them to justify physical existence
Heisman ‘10 (Mitchell, The opposite of a bullshitter, suicide practitioner, & University at Albany
bachelor's degree in psychology, 2010 [Suicide Note, online @ http://www.suicidenote.info/, loghry]

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently
preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate
mythologies of the human species. This prejudice against death , however, is a kind of xenophobia. Discrimination
against death is simply assumed good and right. Absolutist faith in life is commonly a result of the unthinking conviction that existence or
survival, along with an irrational fear of death, is “good”. This unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass
delusion. Life
is the “noble lie”; the common secular religion of the West . For the conventional Westerner,
the obvious leap of faith to make here is that one’s “self” and its preservation constitute the first
measure of rationality. Yet if one begins reasoning with the unquestioned premise that life is good, or
that one’s own life or any life is justified, this is very different from bringing that premise itself to be
questioned rationally. Anyone who has ever contemplated his or her own mortality might question the ultimate sanity of the premise of
self-preservation. Even if it is possible to live forever, moreover, this makes not an iota of difference as to the question of the value of existence.
Most people are so prejudiced on this issue that they simply refuse to even consider the possibilities of
death. Humans tend to be so irrationally prejudiced towards the premise of life that rational treatment
of death seldom sees the light of day. Most people will likely fall back on their most thoughtless convictions, intuitions, and
instincts, instead of attempting to actually think through their biases (much less overcome them). Yet is choosing death “irrational”? For what
reason? For
most people, “irrationality” apparently refers to a subjectivity experience in which their fear of
death masters them — as opposed the discipline of mastering one’s fear of death. By “irrational”, they mean that they
feel compelled to bow down before this master . An individual is “free”, apparently, when he or she is
too scared to question obedience to the authority of the fear of death. This unquestioned slavery to the most
common and unreasonable instincts is what, in practice, liberal-individualists call rationalism. Most common moral positions justify and cloak
this fear of death. And like any traditional authority, time has gathered a whole system of rituals, conventions, and customs to maintain its
authority and power as unquestionable, inevitable, and fated; fear of death as the true, the good, and the beautiful. For
most people,
fear of death is the unquestionable master that establishes all other hierarchies — both social
hierarchies, and the hierarchies within one’s own mind. Most are humbly grateful for the very privilege
of obedience and do not want to be free. I propose opening your mind towards the liberation of death ;
towards exposing this blind faith in life as a myth, a bias, and an error. To overcome this delusion, the
“magic spell” of pious reverence for life over death must be broken . To do so is to examine the faith in
life that has been left unexamined; the naïve secular and non-secular faith in life over death . Opening
one’s mind to death emerges from the attempt to unshackle one’s mind from the limitations of all
borders. It leads to overcoming all biological boundaries, including borders between the “self” and the
larger world. It reaches towards the elimination of biologically based prejudices altogether, including
prejudice towards biological self preservation. The attempt to go beyond ethnocentrism and
anthropomorphism leads towards overcoming the prejudices of what I call viviocentrism, or, life-
centeredness. Just as overcoming ethnocentrism requires recognition of the provincialism of ethnic values, overcoming viviocentrism
emerges from the recognition of the provincialism of life values. Viviocentric provincialism is exposed through an enlarged view from our
planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and the limits of our knowledge of the larger cosmos we live in. Overcoming
the prejudice
against death, then, is only an extension and continuation of the Western project of eliminating bias,
especially biologically based biases (i.e. race or sex based biases). The liberation of death is only the next
step in the political logic that has hitherto sought to overcome prejudices based on old assumptions of a
fixed biological human nature. Its opposite is an Aristotelian, teleological conception of nature; a
nature of natural slaves, natural aristocracy, natural patriarchy, natural inferiority of women, natural
racial kinds, natural heterosexuality and, finally, natural self-preservation. This older, teleological view suggests
that individual self-preservation is an expression of a fixed biologically based nature that culture and/or reason is incapable of changing,
altering, or overcoming. Just as it was considered unnatural or even insane that men be loosed from “natural” subordination to their king, or
that women be unchained from “natural” subordination to their fathers and husbands, today
it is considered unnatural that
death be liberated from its “natural” subordination to the tyranny of life . From this point of view, one can recognize
that the pro-choice stance on abortion and the right to die stance on euthanasia have already opened paths over conventional pro-life
superstitions. These developments towards the liberation of biological death may lead to what may be the highest fulfillment of egalitarian
progress: the equality of life and death. Further
liberations of death should challenge one’s convictions in the same
way that egalitarianisms of the past have challenged common assumptions and convictions: the equality
of all men, the equality of the races, the equality of the sexes, the equality of sexual orientations, the
equality of the biological and physical, and the equality of life and death . Overcoming the “will to live”,
then, represents one of the final steps in overcoming the provincial and “primitive” life instincts
probably inherited from our evolutionary past, i.e. inclinations towards patriarchy, authoritarianism,
sexism, kinism, and racism. It is not only a contribution to civilization but a culmination of the progress of civilization, that is, the
application of reason to human existence. Only when the will to live itself is civilized, can one be free to
acknowledge that reason itself does not dictate a bias towards life .

Prefer the precautionary principle – It is always safer to presume someone will

regret being brought into physical existence because no one suffers when they
are not brought into physical existence.
Benatar ‘6 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to
Have Been, pg 153-155)

It is not true, of course, that everybody is glad not to have been aborted. Professor Hare considers the challenge
such people pose to his argument. However, he argues that they must wish that had they been glad to have been
born, then nobody should have aborted them. The problem with this response is that it assumes that the
preference to have been born is the moral touchstone. Had he taken the preference not to have been
born as the standard, then it could be said that those who are glad to have been born must wish that
had they not been gIlad, then somebody should have aborted them . It is obvious that had either kind of person had
the opposite preference to the one he does have, the Golden Rule argument would produce the opposite conclusion to the one it does produce
when his preference is the way it actually is. Thus Professor’s Hare’s response to the case of those who are not glad to have been born will not
do. How might we decide which preference—for or against having been born—should prevail? One argument that may be advanced for
favouring the preference for having been born is that most fetuses develop into people that have this preference. Thus, working on the
presumption that this preference will result is statistically more reliable. However, there are two reasons why, statistical reliability
notwithstanding, this preference should not predominate. First is a principle of caution. Followers of this principle recognize that nobody
suffers if one mistakenly presumes a preference not to have been born, but people do suffer if one
mistakenly presumes a preference to have been born. Imagine that one presumes that a fetus will develop into somebody
who will be glad to have been born. One therefore does not abort the fetus. If one’s presumption was mistaken, and this
fetus develops into somebody who was not glad to have been born, then there is somebody who
suffers (for a lifetime) from one’s having made the wrong presumption . Imagine now that one makes
the opposite presumption—that the fetus will develop into somebody who will not be glad to have
been born. Therefore one aborts that fetus. If this presumption was mistaken, and this fetus would
have developed into somebody who would have been glad to have been born, there will be nobody
who suffers from the mistaken presumption . It might be objected that there is somebody who suffers
from the latter presumption—namely the fetus that is aborted . There are two points that can be made in response.
First, this line of reply is not open to Professor Hare. He believes that where an abortion will be performed the ‘foetus does not have
now, at the present moment, properties which are reasons for not killing it, given that it will die in any
case before it acquires those properties which ordinary human adults and even children have, and
which are our reasons for not killing them’.²8 Professor Hare’s argument is explicitly about the potential of the fetus rather
than any properties it has as a fetus. Secondly, to claim (contrary to Professor Hare) that a fetus does now possess properties that can make it
the victim of abortion is to undercut the point of a potentiality argument, such as the Golden Rule argument, against abortion. The entire point
of an argument from potentiality is to show that abortion can be wrong even if the fetus does not, as a fetus, have properties that are reasons
for not killing it. A second reason for favouring a
preference not to have been born is that coming into existence , as I
argued in Chapters 2 and 3, is always a serious harm. If those arguments are sound then people who think that they were benefited
by being brought into existence are mistaken and their preference to have come into existence is thus based on a mistaken belief. It would be
quite odd to employ a Golden Rule (or Kantian) argument that rests on a mistaken premiss. If a preference is uninformed why should it dictate
how we should treat others? Imagine, for example, a widespread preference for having been introduced to cigarettes, which was based on
ignorance of the risks of smoking. Employing Professor Hare’s rule, people with such a desire could reason: ‘I am
glad that I was encouraged to smoke, and thus I should encourage others to smoke.’ Such reasoning is
troubling enough when the preference for having been encouraged to smoke is formulated in the full
knowledge of the dangers of smoking. But where the preference is uninformed it cannot even claim to be an (accurate) all things
considered judgement and is thus even more troubling. Similarly, that many people are glad to have come into existence
is not a good reason for bringing others into existence, especially where the preference for existence
arises from the mistaken belief that one was benefited by being brought into existence .

The AFF’s understanding of death as the biological end of life is violent and the
condition of possibility for all forms of violence in the world – makes their
impacts more likely.
Robinson ‘12 /Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social
and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death”, March 30,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism . Baudrillard sees a
change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced
by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle,
immanence to transcendence. Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s
view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In
turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the
regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is
derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into
the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level . It subtly
shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same.
Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be
accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange .
However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being
unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated . States must not collapse. Capitalism thus
introduces the irreversible into social life , by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests
on an obsession with the abolition of death . Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It
tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life ). But this is bound to
fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the
system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude , facing their own death. Life itself is
fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation
also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time , and of
stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology
rests on the separation of living and non-living . According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis.
For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be
concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced
from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-
value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist
exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this
kind of equivalential exchange or calculation . And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible
aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which
produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death
drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to
theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning,
which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault,
Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression . It is an effect of the denial of the
symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the
unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or
by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies . This social life is an effect of the symbolic . Baudrillard
therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks
that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which
operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies .
This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere . It is only after this repression has occurred that a
politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding
energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities . However, he is concerned that
capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy , disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect
to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-
binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by
the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to
exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet,
vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the
repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the
‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real.
Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of
radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the
unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact
with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous
groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of
symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern
forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion
and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system . This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks
the system can survive defections or exodus . It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the
dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to
offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay . The affective charge of death
remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation . The Church
and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of
suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange.
Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated,
partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice –
this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the
relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is
a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and
energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not
suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is
bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer
inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the
repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic
exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death Death plays a central
role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange . According to Baudrillard, what we have lost
above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death
should not be seen here in purely literal terms . Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an
event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value –
which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking,
suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations ,
the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different
categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and
communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation
replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the
grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change,
subjective transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as
social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And
they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does
not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange .
For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the
sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in
the splitting of life into binary oppositions . For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original,
founding opposition on which the others are founded . After this first split, a whole series of others have been
created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities , women and
so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time .
Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as
abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or
archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so
on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard
suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The
modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function . A machine either
functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or
does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated
by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it
tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions .
In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the
dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer
know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the
idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner
would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also
individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others . The symbolic haunts the code as
the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions
of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death .
The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories . In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the
dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death . We no longer have living, mortal relationships
with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental . It is as if we have a transparent veil between us.
Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are
invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows
concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their
‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary
aspirations; the “Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In
separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard,
any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. “ We all” become dead, or
mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power.
Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become
prohibited. The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life . People are compelled
to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically
been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing,
and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed
outside society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a
result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’. It
can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never done by
someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death,
of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol . The system now commands that we must not die – at
least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health
and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-
converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested
from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies.