1NC

Case
We’re impact turning human extinction –
A. Humans kill and torture billions of sentient beings every year, which far
outweighs their impact, B. Humans destroy the environment, which makes
extinction now better than later, and C. imagining the possibility of human
extinction allows us to re-evaluate the ideology of flawed humanist value-
systems.
Kochi and Ordan 8 (Tarik, lecturer in the School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast,
Northern Ireland, and Noam, linguist and translator, conducts research in Translation Studies at
Bar Ilan University, Israel, 'An argument for the global suicide of humanity', Borderlands,
December) JB
The version of progress enunciated in Hawking's story of cosmic colonisation presents a view whereby
the solution to the negative consequences of technological action is to create new forms of
technology, new forms of action. New action and innovation solve the dilemmas and consequences of previous action.
Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, an ecologically devastated Earth is an example at hand. Such an approach
involves a moment of reflection--previous errors and consequences are examined and taken into account and efforts are made to make
things better. The idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and action. However, is the form of reflection
offered by Hawking broad or critical enough? Does
his mode of reflection pay enough attention to the
irredeemable moments of destruction, harm, pain and suffering inflicted historically by human
action upon the non-human world? There are, after all, a variety of negative consequences of
human action, moments of destruction, moments of suffering, which may not be redeemable or
ever made better. Conversely there are a number of conceptions of the good in which humans do not take centre stage at the
expense of others. What we try to do in this paper is to draw out some of the consequences of reflecting
more broadly upon the negative costs of human activity in the context of environmental
catastrophe. This involves re-thinking a general idea of progress through the historical and
conceptual lenses of speciesism, colonialism, survival and complicity. Our proposed conclusion is that the only
appropriate moral response to a history of human destructive action is to give up our claims
to biological supremacy and to sacrifice our form of life so as to give an eternal gift to
others. From the outset it is important to make clear that the argument for the global suicide (death) of
humanity is presented as a thought experiment. The purpose of such a proposal in response to Hawking
is to help show how a certain conception of modernity, of which his approach is representative, is
problematic. Taking seriously the idea of global suicide is one way of throwing into question an
ideology or dominant discourse of modernist-humanist action. [3] By imagining an alternative to
the existing state of affairs, absurd as it may seem to some readers by its nihilistic and radical
'solution', we wish to open up a ground for a critical discussion of modernity and its negative
impacts on both human and non-human animals, as well as on the environment. [4] In this respect,
by giving voice to the idea of a human-free world, we attempt to draw attention to some of the
asymmetries of environmental reality and to give cause to question why attempts to build bridges
from the human to the non-human have, so far, been unavailing . Subjects of ethical discourse One dominant
presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political attitudes towards technology and creative human action is that of
'speciesism', which can itself be called a 'human-centric' view or attitude. The term 'speciesism', coined by psychologist Richard D.
Ryder and later elaborated into a comprehensive ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which humans value their
species above both non-human animals and plant life. Quite typically humans conceive non-human animals and plant life as
something which might simply be used for their benefit. Indeed, this conception can be traced back to, among others, Augustine
(1998, p.33). While many modern, 'enlightened' humans generally abhor racism, believe in the equality of all humans, condemn
slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still think and act in ways that are profoundly 'speciesist'. Most
individuals may not even be conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would simply assume that their attitude falls within the
'natural order of things'. Such an attitude thus resides deeply within modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a
profound role in the way in which humans interact with their environment. The possibility of the destruction of our habitable
environment on earth through global warming and Hawking's suggestion that we respond by colonising other planets forces us to ask a
serious question about how we value human life in relation to our environment. The use of the term 'colonisation' is significant here as
it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much of the globe by white, European peoples. Such actions were often
justified by valuing European civilisation higher than civilisations of non-white peoples, especially that of indigenous peoples. For
scholars such as Edward Said (1978), however, the practice of colonialism is intimately bound up with racism. That is, colonisation is
often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which the right to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an
assumption of racial superiority. If
we were to colonise other planets, what form of 'racism' would underlie our
actions? What
higher value would we place upon human life, upon the human race, at the
expense of other forms of life which would justify our taking over a new habitat and altering it to suit our prosperity and
desired living conditions? Generally, the animal rights movement responds to the ongoing colonisation of animal habitats by humans
by asking whether the modern Western subject should indeed be the central focus of its ethical discourse. In saying 'x harms y', animal
rights philosophers wish to incorporate in 'y' non-human animals. That is, they enlarge the group of subjects to which ethical relations
apply. In this sense such thinking does not greatly depart from any school of modern ethics, but simply extends ethical duties and
obligations to non-human animals. In eco-ethics, on the other hand, the role of the subject and its relation to ethics is treated a little
differently. The less radical environmentalists talk about future human generations so, according to this approach, 'y' includes a
projection into the future to encompass the welfare of hitherto non-existent beings. Such an approach is prevalent in the Green Party in
Germany, whose slogan is "Now. For tomorrow". For others, such as the 'deep ecology' movement, the subject is expanded so that it
may include the environment as a whole. In this instance, according to Naess, 'life'
is not to be understood in "a
biologically narrow sense". Rather he argues that the term 'life' should be used in a comprehensive non-
technical way such that it refers also to things biologists may classify as non-living . This would include
rivers, landscapes, cultures, and ecosystems, all understood as "the living earth" (Naess, 1989, p.29). From this perspective the
statement 'x harms y' renders 'y' somewhat vague. What occurs is not so much a conflict over the degree of ethical commitment,
between "shallow" and "deep ecology" or between "light" and "dark greens" per se, but rather a broader re-drawing of the content of
the subject of Western philosophical discourse and its re-definition as 'life'. Such a position involves differing metaphysical
commitments to the notions of being, intelligence and moral activity. This blurring and re-defining of the subject of moral discourse
can be found in other ecocentric writings (e.g. Lovelock, 1979; Eckersley, 1992) and in other philosophical approaches. [5] In part our
approach bears some similarity with these 'holistic' approaches in that we share dissatisfaction with the modern, Western view of the
'subject' as purely human-centric. Further, we share some of their criticism of bourgeois green lifestyles. However, our approach is to
stay partly within the position of the modern, Western human-centric view of the subject and to question what happens to it in the field
of moral action when environmental catastrophe demands the radical extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings. That is, if
we stick with the modern humanist subject of moral action, and follow seriously the extension of ethical obligations to non-human
beings, then we would suggest that what we find is that the utopian demand of modern humanism turns over into a utopian anti-
humanism, with suicide as its outcome. One way of attempting to re-think the modern subject is thus to throw the issue of suicide right
in at the beginning and acknowledge its position in modern ethical thought. This would be to recognise that the question of suicide
resides at the center of moral thought, already. What survives when humans no longer exist? There continues to be a debate over the
extent to which humans have caused environmental problems such as global warming (as opposed to natural, cyclical theories of the
earth's temperature change) and over whether phenomena such as global warming can be halted or reversed. Our position is that
regardless of where one stands within these debates it is clear that humans have inflicted degrees of harm upon non-human animals
and the natural environment. And from this point we suggest that it is the operation of speciesism as colonialism which must be
addressed. One approach is of course to adopt the approach taken by Singer and many within the animal rights movement and remove
our species, homo sapiens, from the centre of all moral discourse. Such an approach would thereby take into account not only human
life, but also the lives of other species, to the extent that the living environment as a whole can come to be considered the proper
subject of morality. We would suggest, however, that this philosophical approach can be taken a number of steps further. If the
standpoint that we have a moral responsibility towards the environment in which all sentient creatures live is to be taken seriously,
then we perhaps have reason to question whether there remains any strong ethical grounds to justify the further existence of humanity.
For example, if one considers the modern scientific practice of experimenting on animals, both the notions of progress and speciesism
are implicitly drawn upon within the moral reasoning of scientists in their justification of committing violence against nonhuman
animals. The typical line of thinking here is that because animals are valued less than humans they can be sacrificed for the purpose of
expanding scientific knowledge focussed upon improving human life. Certainly some within the scientific community, such as
physiologist Colin Blakemore, contest aspects of this claim and argue that experimentation on animals is beneficial to both human and
nonhuman animals (e.g. Grasson, 2000, p.30). Such claims are 'disingenuous', however, in that they hide the relative distinctions of
value that underlie a moral justification for sacrifice within the practice of experimentation (cf. LaFollette & Shanks, 1997, p.255). If
there is a benefit to non-human animals this is only incidental, what remains central is a practice of sacrificing the lives of other
species for the benefit of humans. Rather
than reject this common reasoning of modern science we argue
that it should be reconsidered upon the basis of species equality. That is, modern science needs to
ask the question of: 'Who' is the best candidate for 'sacrifice' for the good of the environment and
all species concerned? The moral response to the violence, suffering and damage humans have
inflicted upon this earth and its inhabitants might then be to argue for the sacrifice of the human
species. The moral act would be the global suicide of humanity.
 1
The resolution's call to “limit the conditions under which a defense pact can
be activated” mirrors the military imaginary to create the “conditions ... that
affect the employment of military capabilities.” The affirmative’s investment
in the depiction, planning, and ontology of war is not neutral, but operates
insidiously by installing itself into current military doctrine as a self-
perpetuating process that generates war itself --
Öberg 2019 – Dan Öberg is Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence
University (“Requiem for the Battlefield,” https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-
for-the-battlefield/)
To grasp this disposition and its consequences we need to ponder the fact that it is no coincidence that the operational dimension
emerges at precisely the time when the traditional battlefield is starting to disappear. As The Eye of War outlines, global targeting is
enabled by a logistics of perception. However, the demand for maps and images as well as the attempts to make sense of the
battlefield arguably receives its impetus and frame of reference from elsewhere. It finds its nexus in standard operating procedures,
regulations, instructions and manuals, military working groups, administrative ideals, organisational routines, and bureaucratic rituals.
And, as the battlefield is managed, coded, and homogenised , it simultaneously starts to become an
external point of reference, enacted through operational analysis and planning far from the
battlefield itself. Let us not forget here that “to analyse” literally means “to dissolve”, as the perception of the operational
analyst subsumes the field of battle into compartmentalised objects and relations. Moreover, as Carl von Clausewitz reminds us,
operational planning is necessarily a reductive enterprise. [2] That is, it subtracts from the world,
when reducing this said world to a theater of war. We may therefore say that the battlefield receives
its force of reality through operational analysis and planning and appears as an “alienated” entity
dominated by range, trajectories and a territory coded through a military grammar. Nevertheless, it seems that when
the battlefield reappears as a concept or scenario, that is, as a model, it also starts to vanish.
Therefore, it is arguably in the development of operational models of warfare : the doctrinal handbooks, the
logistical apparatus, and the staff meetings on what to target, we find a corresponding erasure of the battlefield . If
we return to the introductory quote, particularly to the insistence that the real world begins with the invention of an Archimedean point
outside the world, we may say that it is with the introduction of the operational level of war that military practice and theory find and
substantiate its own external point of reference. It finds it at the start of the Napoleonic wars, in the introduction of an operational
military machinery which gradually starts to think warfare independently of the army in the field. It substantiates it through a code that
strives to make war an efficient and integrated version of its own programmatic execution. This code outlines how to arrange and
rearrange, compose, coordinate, and manufacture targets and effects. It also works as a method through the tasking and
employment of tactical units, the translation of rules and diagrams into select weapon systems, and the integration of protocols into a
concentration of force, making fires and bomb drops preplanned responses to problem situations. In the final
chapter of The Eye of War we encounter a battlefield that is spatially and temporally boundless, what the author calls a “Global
Imperium of Targeting”. What relationship between targeteer and target characterises this limitless battlefield? I will end by briefly
introducing two alienating reference points that I have discussed elsewhere: the operational environment and the battle-rhythm as
examples of a military modelling of space and time. According to the military imaginary, the operational
environment consists of: ‘the composite of the conditions, circumstances, and influences that
affect the employment of military capabilities’ (see military doctrine). This term imposes a
set of spatial relations that are conditioned through military concepts and functions: logistical routes
and lines of communication, the range of weapon-platforms, perceived centres of gravity, the margining of targets, their
weaponeering, and so forth. This spatial concept transmits relations through reductive doctrinal denominators such as “target-sets”,
“undesirable systems” or “future end-states,” often visualised through PowerPoints. Corresponding to the remits of the operational
environment, the ‘battle rhythm’ is the ‘combination of procedures, processes, and actions which
facilitates extended continuous operations’. It is synchronised zulu-time: a coordinated 24 hour universal clock time
enabling warfare to endure in real-time and coordinate fires and manoeuvres into tactical effects. The battle-rhythm is
anticipatory, relating to ideas of dynamic actions, particularly in so called dynamic targeting. But it is also
pre-planned as it forecasts and codes future time to shape its unfolding and becoming in
accordance with the preparation and execution of warfare. So, as the traditional battlefield and
its conceptualisation and contestation by crossbowmen and arquebusiers alike disappears due to the operationalisation
of a martial gaze, what reappears is an abstract model of military space/time . This model perceives of
the battlefield as that which facilitates military capabilities as extended operations as it targets for action. This means, I think, that in
the Global Imperium of Targeting that The Eye of War portrays, the soldiers embodying the martial gaze
assumes the roles of managers over our world as if it were this abstract and homogenous
space/time. This points to a world that is indeed, a ‘battlespace in potentia’ watched over by ‘glacially indifferent machines’, as
the author so eloquently puts it. However, it also points to the role of the military imaginary which oversees
this gaze and which refines the modelling of space and time to impose a point of view on that
which it sees. In short, the traditional battlefield may be dead, but we continue to live under the eye
of its operational model.

That will to peace produces endless violence through shadow forms

of engagement that are located beyond the cognitive maps of their
conception of military presence as a solely material process
Öberg 14 (Dan Öberg, senior lecturer of war studies at the Swedish National Defence
College, PhD from Yokohama National University, May 2014, “Introduction: Baudrillard
and War,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies Volume 11 Number 2, footnote 5
included in curly braces) gz
Up to now we have seen that Baudrillard’s critique illustrates how the Cold War, due to nuclear arms and deterrence, the
changing role of media and IT, and high-tech weaponry force war to split into a real and a virtual mode. One important
example of this is the way the Gulf War, waged as a business or advertising campaign, enables simulated models and
The end of the Cold War therefore signifies how
technological processing to appropriate war’s being.
particular aspects of deterrence continue through other means and in so doing give
rise to new effects. To Baudrillard, one of the most important effects is a constant policing of
singularities, events, or any kind of potential political subversion. Baudrillard first identified
this tendency in the Vietnam War (see below) but a more recent example which is equally relevant is the
alleged shift from ‘enemy centric’ to ‘population centric’ counter-insurgency (see
Kilcullen 2007). This illustrates an overlap between his thought and recent discussions on policing in critical War Studies.
This discussion has engaged with the way war and policing intersects in contemporary Western
interventions. It particularly focuses on understanding war as ordering, othering, and spatializing
logics which force the distinction between war and policing to break down (Holmqvist
2014 and Bachmann et.al. 2014). So what is Baudrillard’s take on war as policing in relation to this particular debate?

Baudrillard identified the Vietnam War as a means to violently reshape the social (a
“generative” aspect of war which has also been debated in critical War Studies, see Barkawi and Brighton 2011). To him
the Vietnam War was interesting first and foremost in how it masked both a peaceful coexistence
between two blocks (East and West) and how it aimed to liquidate ‘savage’ and
archaic societal structures. He argues that the war took place as long as there was a
wild subversive element to the uprising (illustrated by the Viet Cong). But as soon as
Vietnam as a country ‘showed’ the world that it was no longer unpredictable, the
war ended (Baudrillard 1994a: 36-37). Therefore, the war in Vietnam masks not only the status
quo of the Cold war but also the fact that:
(B)ehind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes,
the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else,
unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal
complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian,
precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic
 organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in
war – and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but
the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social – the
murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist
or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two
adversaries…for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social
relations (Baudrillard 1994a: 37, my emphasis).
Baudrillard therefore reads the
Vietnam War as one illustration of a kind of global policing which
not so much revolved around the two adversaries opposing each other but rather on the
way in which deterrence enabled liquidating, reshaping, and domesticating social
relations. This is also evident in the Gulf War as the aim there was to ‘impose a general
consensus by deterrence’ (Baudrillard 1995: 83) which is no longer the bipolar deterrence
of the Cold War but a monopolistic deterrence ‘under the aegis of American power’
(Ibid.: 84). Such a policing through war works as a way to eradicate the possibility of
subversion in everyday life and thereby police not only the Gulf but also the heart of
Europe (Ibid.: 52). More than anything this is a matter of policing the simulation of democratic
consensus as consensus. A matter which Baudrillard ominously invokes as a continuation of war
through a violent conditioning of the social: ‘…(T)omorrow there will be nothing but
the virtual violence of consensus, the simultaneity in real time of the global consensus:
this will happen tomorrow and it will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow’
(Ibid.: 84).

And here we might pause and ask, are the Russian wars in Chechnya or Georgia, the second
Israeli war in Lebanon or interventions in Gaza, the interventions in Afghanistan
(2001-) and Libya in 2011, not possible to see in terms of such policing? This would
indicate a breakdown of the distinction of peace and war in which the same police-
style violence is evident in both (Baudrillard,1998a: 17). But also, it would indicate that these
are wars which aim to police the simulacrum of liberal order itself. If seen in this way we
might appreciate how Baudrillard outlines a type of policing which goes towards the spatial through
controlling a population and an area (linking it to the debate on policing in critical War Studies). But, more
importantly, Baudrillards critique of war as policing points to the way interventions attempt to (1) police the
past by whitewashing events so as to justify them retrospectively and (2) police the
future through policing the consensus. Baudrillard reads the invasions in Iraq and
Afghanistan as having 9/11 as focal point and thereby becoming what he calls ‘rituals of
exorcism’ which tries to justify the event and the trauma of the past. But also in the sense that
interventions aim to police the future through a systematic reprogramming and
neutralization of not only possible crimes (or subversive movements) but of every
possible future friction that might challenge the order of things (2005a: 118-119; 2007a:
114, 118).

If war continues through policing, one of its “side effects” – Abu Ghraib – also, perhaps,
suggests that “war as policing” necessarily gives rise to “war as incarceration”. Andreja
Zevnik’s ‘War Porn: an image of perversion and desire in modern warfare’ (2014, this special issue) picks up on
Baudrillard’s analysis of Abu Ghraib and the images of torture which became overexposed in the media around 2005.
She engages with Baudrillard’s essay ‘War Porn’ (2005b: 205-209) by looking at the way underlying ideologies and logics
make such simulations possible, as well as help to reproduce them. By coupling notions of porn and obscenity with the
Lacanian notions of law and perversion, the article illustrates how war’s violence has a tendency to perpetuate its own
principle. And indeed, if we follow Baudrillard’s diagnosis, it is precisely as a mirror and an allergy to the violence
perpetuated by this ‘unbearable power’ (Baudrillard, 2002a: 18, 5) that events like 9/11 occur.
Terrorism would thereby be a virus caused by the sickness of globalism, indicating a
type of war: ‘no longer between peoples, states, systems, and ideologies, but
rather, of the human species against itself (Interview with Baudrillard in Der Speigel 2004). Baudrillard
argues:

With each succeeding war we have always moved close to a single world order.
Today that world order, which has virtually reached its end, finds itself grappling,
in all the current convulsions, with the antagonistic forces spread throughout the
global dimension itself. A fractal war of all cells, of all singularities, rebelling
in the form of antibodies. A clash so elusive that the idea of war has to be
rescued from time to time by spectacular set-pieces like the Gulf War (Baudrillard
2003: 63, my emphasis).5

{5.Baudrillard’s statements might be far-fetched for the mainstream student of war. But
paradoxically, the idea that the system creates the condition for possible retaliation is
also evident in military science. For example, it is often stated in theory on insurgency and
counterinsurgency that warfare is an assymetric phenomenon which aims at ‘targeting
vulnerabilities and of doing the radically different’ (Thornton 2007: 2).}
The suggestion that contemporary wars function as masquerades to obscure the
fractal war against a “globalist” world order might be the most overtly political aspect
of Baudrillard’s thought on war. If the appropriation of the real through the virtual
indicated a shift in Baudrillard’s thinking from war as a derivative of the capitalist system
(the Marxist view) to war as its own simulation (as outlined in part II of this introduction), this would
indicate that this simulation hides a war which ‘haunts every world order, all
hegemonic domination…for it is the world, the globe itself which resists
globalization’ (Baudrillard 2002a: 12).6
Several articles in this special issue engage with this fractalization of war. William Pawlett (2014, this special issue)
provides a reading of Baudrillard’s position on complicity and collusion particularly in relation to the notion of (and as a
means to defy) hegemonic domination. Samuel Strehle (2014, this special issue) argues for a War Studies that take the
undecidability of thinking (and the challenge to theory that this implies) as its founding principle, and in the epilogue Gerry
Coulter (2014, this special issue) discusses Baudrillard’s war against cultural homogenization and sameness. Arguably
Pawlett, Strehle, and Coulter all elucidate aspects of how to think ‘fractal war’ in relation to global policing of events and
singularities. Moreover, Astrid Nordin (2014, this special issue) further investigates the implications of Baudrillard’s
challenge as she inquiries into whether his thought might be extended to understanding the wars of “Others”.
Engaging with China’s participation in the global “war on terror”, particularly the way
contemporary Chinese rhetoric places itself as a (peaceful) alternative to the West and
represents itself through war in relation to its neighbors, Nordin shows convincingly that there is no respite from our
dividing lines between
problems in the thought of ‘the Other’. Following Nordin and Coulter we realize that
self and other do not run between the West and China, but rather in relation to the
fractal particles at war in each and every one of us. As the texts illustrate, regardless of whether
we agree with, or oppose Baudrillard’s critique against western globalism, it is important to notice (Coulter 2014, this
special issue) that this critique is not a matter of simple ‘anti-Americanism’. William Merrin argues that Baudrillard in his
challenge sets his eyes on a wider target: the entire Western semiotic culture (2005: 106). However, as Nordin
convincingly shows this target might be less ‘Western’ than Baudrillard would acknowledge.
The will to project the self into a coherent position of opposition naturalizes
the false binary choice of being for or against war – these banal oppositional
stances reinforces fantasies of democratic deliberation and destroy agency –
refuse the coercive false choice of war porn which reproduces militarism.
Shapiro 14. Alan Shapiro, senior lecturer at Offenbach Art and Design University in Germany,
"Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War,"
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
Unlike other thinkers such as Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges (whose positions are highly valuable in their own right), Jean
Baudrillard is not ‘against war’. Baudrillard’s position is rather that of being ‘neither for nor
against’ contemporary hyper-real mediatized wars, and seeing the imperative of choosing
whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ war as being something of a forced and imposed
simulacrum. To say that one is ‘against’ a specific war, or even all wars, would be to
implicitly acknowledge the ‘reality’ of war(s), which have , to the contrary, drifted
increasingly into the fakeness of virtuality, simulation, and an indeterminate hyperspace.
Baudrillard, in his orientation of being ‘neither for nor against’ war, finds a strong predecessor in another great writer and
thinker who wrote in French: Albert Camus. In his political theory and activist engagements, Camus was an independent
hybrid anarchist-liberal (the very notion of hybrid, with which one can retrospectively illuminate Camus’ politics, has only
emerged as a well-known concept in recent times, in the wake of, for example, Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory). Camus was a
serious thinker who – like Plato, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Philip K. Dick – had deep insights into the genealogy of
image-making simulacra in and of Western culture. As a major figure of twentieth century French intellectual history, Albert
Camus appears now in retrospect to have been way ahead of his time in his positions on ethics, aesthetics, virtuality, and
political philosophy. The intention of this essay is not to claim that Baudrillard and Camus had ‘the same position’ on war or on
simulacra. It is, rather, to make an initial attempt to outline important affinities between the two thinkers, hinting at a sort of
‘alliance’ between these two intellectual figures which has not been previously articulated in the academic literature in
Baudrillard or Camus studies. The essay indicates certain key starting points for substantiating the affinity/alliance, but it
should also be read in the spirit of suggesting fruitful directions for future research. The
stance of opposition to a
war undertaken by America’s ’military-industrial complex’ (MIC), as President Dwight D.
Eisenhower termed it in his Farewell Address to the nation on January 17, 1961 after
spending 8 years as President, seems to be based on the assumption of the discursive
viability of projecting oneself into the imaginative space of being a sort of ‘shadow
government of truth-speakers’, empowered by democracy into the democratic position
of being able to make ‘better’ decisions for the body politic of democracy than those
who hold institutional power in political economy and government. Most political
discourse in the U.S., including the anti-war stance, seems to take for granted the idea that
we should clarify ‘our politics’ by imaginatively putting ourselves ‘in the shoes’ of
national strategists choosing among the policy options available. Jean Baudrillard expands
our sense of what is history because he does not operate with a strict separation between what are
‘the facts’ and what are the engaging stories that we as a culture have written and enacted
about important ‘historical’ events. Much of what we know about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the
Vietnam War comes from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War that we have
seen. In his essay on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now, Baudrillard writes that
Coppola’s masterpiece is the continuation of the Vietnam War by other means. “Nothing else in the world smells like that,”
says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore – played by Robert Duvall – in the 2 hour and 33 minute film. “I love the smell of napalm in the
morning… It smells like victory.” The high-budget extravaganza was produced exactly the same way that America fought in
Vietnam, says Jean Baudrillard of the film made by director Francis Ford Coppola (Baudrillard 1981: 89-91). “War
becomes film,” Baudrillard writes of Coppola’s spectacularly successful cinematic creation. “Film becomes war,
the two united by their shared overflowing of technology” (Ibid.: 89). There is implosion or mutual
contamination between ‘film becoming Virtual Reality’ and War. Think also of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998):
total immersion in the
Virtual Reality of combat – an aesthetics of VR different from ‘critical
distance’ – as a new kind of ‘testimonial position’ with respect to war and atrocities. In
Vietnam-slash-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip and a God Trip, a psychedelic and
pornographic carnival (Baudrillard 2010), a savage cannibalism practiced by the Christians, a film before the shooting
and a shoot before the filming, a vast machine of excessive special effects, a ‘show of power’, a territorial lab for testing new
weapons on human guinea pigs, and the sacrificial jouissanceof throwing away billions of dollars – all these aspects alluded to
or mentioned by Baudrillard. Coppola’s film, according to Baudrillard, is the carrying on of an undeclared, unfinished and
unending War. An interminable Heart of Darkness. Jean Baudrillard
is not ‘against war’, not even against
specific wars like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says this explicitly in “Le masque de la guerre,”
published in the Parisian daily newspaper Libé ration, just prior to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ni
pour ni contre. Neither for nor against. “This war
is a non-event,” writes Baudrillard, “and it is absurd to take
a stance on a non-event (Baudrillard 2003).” The non-events of the Iraq War and the War on
Terror opposed themselves to the event of September 11th, 2001. Baudrillard’s two most explicit
texts about war are The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), written just before, during, and just after the Persian Gulf War of
1991 that was initiated by President George H.W. Bush, and The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), written just after 9/11. At the very
beginning of the essay “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” the first of the three essays that comprise The Gulf War Did Not
Take Place, Baudrillard explains that non-war – which is what the military-industrial complex or the
(non-)war machine has become very adept at carrying out in the age of virtuality – “is
characterised by that degenerate form of war which includes hostage manipulation and
negotiation (Baudrillard 1995: 24). The Eisenhower-coined term of the military-industrial complex is used by Baudrillard
in his essay "No Reprieve For Sarajevo," published in Libé ration, January 8, 1994. He sees the MIC as still operative
yet in need of conceptual upgrading. “Hostages and blackmail,” Baudrillard continues in “The Gulf
War Will Not Take Place,” “are the purest products of deterrence. The hostage has taken the place
of the warrior. He has become the principal actor, the simulacral protagonist, or rather, in
his pure inaction, the protagoniser (le protagonisant) of non-war” (Baurillard 1995: 24). And we, the
television viewers of the non-war, are all in the situation of hostages, “all of us as information
hostages on the world media stage” (Ibid.). Hostages of the screen, of the intoxication of the
media, dragged and drugged into a logic of deterrence, "we are no longer in a logic of the
passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the
virtual” (Ibid.: 27). The post-structure [the successor to a sociological structure with less stability and with less of a
center] of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has properties of
binary/digital, simulation/modeling, viral metastasis, and complex intricate paradoxical
topology. Let us consider all four of these properties as aspects of a Baudrillardian theory of war (or a theory of war in
honour of Jean Baudrillard). First of all, the post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of
media virtuality has the property of binary/digital. It presents itself to us through the
dualistic structure of a forced binary choice, where the system obliges each of us to take
a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ war, or ‘for’ or ‘against’ particular wars, as waged, for example,
by the Pentagon, the EU ‘humanitarian’ forces, or the surveillance state’s War on Terror. It
is this very binary logic of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that is the news media discourse, the rhetoric of
politicians, and the hybrid virtual-and-real-killing of the screen and the bomb. Today, of course,
the Internet has superceded television as the prevailing universal media (although there is much convergence and
combination of the two). And the Internet is much more interactive and participatory. There is much more response. There is
much less of a ‘spectacle’ than there was when Guy Debord and the Situationists conceptualized their media theory in the
1960s. Yet everywhere that the ‘news media’ and the
(non)-war machine still prevail, everywhere that
they are still massively influential, everywhere that they still exercise their power, we are
not quite liberated from the ‘speech without response’ described by the early Baudrillard. When
Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was brutally killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, during the Libyan
Civil War, the event, having been filmed by a cell phone, was presented to worldwide viewers by almost all of the ‘news media’
as some kind of triumph for ‘justice’, even though it was clearly a loss for democratic principles and the possible coming to
light of priceless information about the decades of atrocities committed by Gaddafi’s regime during a public trial which would
never take place. The later Baudrillard develops the powerful idea that the
only authentic communicative exchange that
is possible today in the context of over-saturation with, of and by simulacral media pseudo-
exchanges is an ‘impossible exchange’. In the chapter “Living Coin: Singularity of the Phantasm” in the book ImpossibleExchange (1999),
Baudrillard elaborates his idea of a generalized economy (not the same as Bataille’s principle of solar expenditure or the basing of a general economy on a solar

the reinvesting of the sphere of all exchange by that which cannot possibly be
economy): “

exchanged” (Baudrillard 2001: 122-131, see also Baudrillard 1976). There is something of no-value at the heart of the
economic order. Baudrillard provides the example of the film Indecent Proposal (1993), in which the billionaire character John Gage, played by Robert
Redford, in the setting of a Las Vegas casino, purchases the sexual-amorous favours of the married woman character Diana Murphy, played by Demi Moore, for the sum
of one million dollars. As Baudrillard interprets the film, Redford seeks to possess the “unexchangeable part of this woman,” that portion of herself that is outside of the
exchange nexus for the simple reason that she herself does not own and therefore cannot sell what she is. Baudrillard calls this “obliterating wealth in and through the
sign of wealth (Baudrillard 2001: 123-124). In the moment of their first meeting, Gage asks Murphy to bet a million dollars at the roulette table for him. She and his chips
are wagered, thereby establishing the shared valuelessness – in the sense of being outside the system of value – of both the cliché d legendary sum of one million dollars

Baudrillard notes the

and the enjoyment of and by this singular woman. The Model Precedes the Real In writing about the Persian Gulf War in 1991,

victory of the model which precedes ‘the real’, the triumph of ‘war processing’ (on analogy with ‘data
processing’ and ‘word processing’), the predomination of virtual technologies. The post-structure of the

(non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of simulation/modelling. There is the simulacrum
of the disappeared “historical” referent of war, and the triumph of informational and gaming technologies. Baudrillard writes in “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking

Place?”:“The victory of the model is more important than victory on the ground. Military success consecrates
the triumph of arms, but the programming success consecrates the defeat of time. War-processing, the transparency of the model

in the unfolding of the war, the strategy of relentless execution of a program” (Baudrillard 1995: 55-56).
In that non-war that ‘did not take place’, there was the emergence of an abstract, electronic, speculative, informatic space. “Just as wealth is no longer
measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by

its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in
which capital moves” (Ibid.: 56). In addition to careful management of images and information content, the true devastation of
war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies ranging from the televisual screen
to the military ‘smart weapons’ deployed from altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During months of preparation for the ‘war’, viewers
experience endless military experts paraded across their screen, endlessly analyzing
scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or the gunner in his high-tech tank, is surrounded
by a virtual environment and motion-dependent images which are the same whether he is in a war game
training exercise or a ‘real engagement’. A Non-Euclidean Spacetime The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media
virtuality has the property of complex intricate paradoxical topology. There is the “non-Euclidean” spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace

At a certain speed, the speed of

beyond any classical geometry. In “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” Baudrillard (1995: 49-50) writes:

information, things lose their sense… War implodes in real time, history implodes in real time, all
communication and all signification implode in real time… The space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple
refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean. To understand the complex non-Euclidean informational space of non-war, we need a new
mathematics, a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space is a set where a specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and
implemented. Three-dimensional Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space that belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality’ as it was originated
by the Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive understanding’ of space. 1991 Persian Gulf War Shortly before 7 PM on the evening of January 16, 1991
(January 17, early AM, in the Gulf), Network nightly news viewers were informed that heavy bombing of strategic targets inside Iraq had been initiated. At 9 PM,
President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically told the viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Pentagon spokespersons explained that massive
pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes against carefully selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis entirely off guard. Reports of great success
came in. The nation rejoiced. It was our grand celebration. We feted our triumph in the Cold War. The glamorous high-tech weapons, developed and paid for over years,
could finally be used in the real thing, and the Soviets were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching stalemate of Vietnam, we could finally start again.

The enemy was an inert physical installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically
darkened [eliminated]. The Fourth Order of Simulacra The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of viral
metastasis. There is the news media becoming part of the terror. There are the surveillance policies of the state becoming part of the terror. In the essay “After the Orgy”
in the book The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes of the “epidemic of simulation,” a networked mode of fractal or viral dispersal. Updating his famous theses of
“the three orders of simulacra” (in Symbolic Exchange and Death) and “the precession of simulacra” (in Simulacra and Simulation), he seeks to introduce “a new particle
into the microphysics of simulacra (Baudrillard 1993: 5): The first of these stages had a natural referent, and value developed on the basis of a natural use of the world.
The second was founded on a general equivalence, and value developed by reference to a logic of the commodity. The third is governed by a code, and value develops
here by reference to a set of models. At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions…
(Ibid.: 5, 7). This is the fractal or viral stage of fourth-order simulacra. In Baudrillard’s post-simulation epistè me or "epidemic of simulation," value - if that term is still
appropriate - radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is "no relationship between cause and effect, merely viral relationships between one effect and
another” (Ibid.: 108). All spheres of society pass into their free-floating, excessive, and ecstatic form. September 11, 2001 In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” the first essay of
the book The Spirit of Terrorism(2002), Baudrillard writes of the event of September 11, 2001: The more concentrated the system becomes globally, ultimately forming
one single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Filipino hacker had managed, from the the dark recesses of his portable

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere.

computer, to launch the ‘I love you’ virus, which circled the globe devastating entire networks)…

There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though
it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a

demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it… Terrorism
is the shock wave of this silent reversion (2002: 8-9, 10, 11). After each terrorist attack, there is a
feeling in the air of panic and confusion in the news media as the police and Federal Investigators identify and catch the perpetrators,
and the information society scrambles to find out ‘who did it’. Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse This is how the
English-language Wikipedia article on “Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse” begins: During the War in Iraq, human rights violations, committed from late 2003 to
early 2004, in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, reports of rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison
(currently known as the Baghdad Central Prison) came to public attention beginning in early 2004 with Department of Defense announcements. These acts were
committed by military police personnel of the United States Army together with those of additional US governmental agencies.1 On May 19, 2004, Jean Baudrillard
published the essay “Pornographie de la guerre” in the Parisian daily newspaper Libé ration. (published as “War Porn” in English) The philosopher, sociologist, and
media theorist writes: World Trade Center: shock treatment of power, humiliation inflicted on power, but from outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is
worse, it is the humiliation, symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on itself – the Americans in this particular case – the shock treatment of shame

To keep the hyper-reality of cyberwar going,

and bad conscience. This is what binds together the two events (Baudrillard 2004).

the ghost-people must continue to exercise a certain ‘minimal’ function in the real. To lend
the game its requisite weight or support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect
through the chalking up of their disappearance. A certain number of victims of torture, rape,
and murder are required to provide data (‘fresh meat’) to keep the electronic killing game
going, especially if they can be photographed, and then the images sent out on the universal
image-viewing network. Baudrillard continues in “War Porn”: This is where the truth of these images lies; this is
what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.

Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true or false… There is
no longer the need for ‘embedded’ journalists because soldiers themselves are immersed in the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are definitively
integrated into the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgment…(Ibid.). Media images in general – in advertising,
for example – signify the excess of wealth that we as citizens of the West have the prerogative of partaking in. The abject and disgusting images of the Abu Ghraib torture

Beyond the epistemology of true and false, the digital

and prisoner abuse atrocity are the dark underside of media culture.

technology image has inscribed within itself the tautological reasoning of the self-fulfilling
prophecy, inheriting from advertising and the classical era of consumer culture the mastery of the art of rendering things true by saying that they are. For
Baudrillard, all images in contemporary culture tend towards the pornographic. The visual culture of stylized images is obscene and pornographic at every level – from
hard-core porno to ‘music television’, from swimsuit magazines to commonplace TV commercials.

The will to reality is the generative point of violence. The attempt to

sublimate the Evil of irrationality and mystery terminates in its opposite. We
are gorged with meaning and it is killing us. Hyperreality is the proverbial
wall blocking our access to the real. The world-snake Ouroboros has taken
the first gulp of its own tail, and it will drag everything along with it into
destruction. The attempt to enclose the globe within semiotic reality begets
implosive violence against all singularities. The amassing of facts and
evidence – and especially truth – only makes the world more unreal. Instead,
we need to relocate the nexus of global violence from particular geopolitical
events to the representational domain.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnical Institute,
“The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2
(May, 2014)
The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about
a violence of another sort. In
the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the
demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of
terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivityor what may be called implosive
violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have
much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to
find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after . This is, perhaps,
what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through . Implosive
violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and
representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why
implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror , for example) and on mobilizing war
machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that
no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject,
or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new
Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven,
representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they
are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that
meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that
must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As
information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be
instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be
discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take
over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred
to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to
create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases”
(Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the
product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of
course death as the ultimate form of singularity. […] It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to
violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must
disappear  […] Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of
violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it
destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist " (2003; our italics).

The alternative is a semiotic insurrection of poesis the combats the will to

reality that writes graffiti on the affirmative even as it writes the resolution as
graffiti. We meet the production of war signs with the anti-semiotic
counterforce of radical thought. The role of theory is not to accede to the
form of reality. It should scramble it and force it to disappear back on itself.
We direct the implosive violence of the disappearance of military presence
back on itself, pushing the form of positivity of the affirmative to its own
vanishing point.
Strehle 14. Samuel Strehle, fellow in the DFG research training group “The Real and
Modern Culture” at the University of Konstanz, Germany, MAs in sociology and
philosophy from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany, researcher in the
department of anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany, currently pursuing a
PhD in sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, “A Poetic Anthropology of War:
Jean Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf War,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The production of war signs is linked to the issue of war not only in matters of content,
but also in matters of form. Content-wise, war is just one of many fields in which reality
signs are produced; regarding its form, however, it is the pure logic of war itself that
works in this industry. The production of reality for Baudrillard is a kind of warfare
itself: Not only is it a monologue of power, a “speech without response”, as he states in
Requiem for the Media (1971: 172); even more, the “terrorism of the code” (ibid.: 179)
is a war-like attack on our senses. We, the viewers, are targets of a bombardment
of signs and images. “Semiocracy”, Baudrillard (1976: 78) calls this terror in his writing
on the New York Graffiti scene: we live under a dictatorship of signs (against which
the Graffiti raise their anti-semiotic counterforce). The war sign industry is just one of
many subdivisions of a society-wide ‘reality sign industry’ that floods our lives with
all kinds of spectacular products and information. “We are all hostages of media
intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the
revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to
quarters. We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which
we are virtually bombarded day by day” (Baudrillard 1991b: 25). Finally now, this is
where Baudrillard’s genuine theoretical intervention takes place. Like the Graffiti
writers, Baudrillard attempts to fight back against the terrorism of the code and its
work of purification—somehow continuing Graffiti writing by other means.
Baudrillard is leading his own war, his own counter-guerilla warfare against the
reality principle. What are his spray cans? Which are the walls on which he puts his
‘mark on society’? It is the holy walls of theoretical discourse that Baudrillard defaces
with a low tech weapon called “theoretical terrorism”, as he called it once
(Baudrillard 1983a: 91, my translation)—a thinking made to oppose, to challenge the
hegemony of reality. The idea of ‘theoretical terrorism’ is strongly linked to his concept
of “reversibility”13 —a key term in Baudrillard’s thinking. The term may be characterized
by two main aspects: At first, it refers to the reciprocity of gift exchange in which there is
no closure of exchange but an endless changing and challenging of sides. In this regard,
it is a name for the symbolic fluidity of power.14 At second, it refers to a principle of
changing a situation by radically reversing its viewing angle—“poetic transference of
the situation”, as Baudrillard calls it in Impossible Exchange (1999: 85). Being a rather
“phantastic principle” (Zapf 2010: 145, my translation), the concept of reversibility is
linked with the most powerful and yet most clandestine subtext in Baudrillard’s oeuvre:
’Pataphysics. The idea behind this absurd science of “imaginary solutions” is as simple
as it is mysterious: It is an attempt to create a different reality through
imagination.15 Pataphysicians fight reality through the use of imaginary forces,
through creating illusion and deceit. It is easily overlooked how central this
pataphysical approach has been for Baudrillard; even his most serious book, Symbolic
Exchange and Death, is surprisingly full of pataphysical statements, especially in the
dense, programmatic introductory pages: “The only strategy against the hyperrealist
system is some form of pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary solutions’; that is, a
science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the extreme limit of
simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction”
(Baudrillard 1976: 4 f.). How can “science-fiction” shatter the system of reality?
Baudrillard explains his strategy later in The Perfect Crime (1995), especially in the
section on “Radical Thought”, and in Impossible Exchange (1999). Ideas, he claims, can
create their own reality, since thinking is a performative act that builds its own
‘parallel world’: “Thought […] does not seek to penetrate some mystery of the
world, nor to discover its hidden aspect—it is that hidden aspect. It does not
discover that the world has a double life—it is that double life, that parallel life”
(Baudrillard 1999: 149). In the performative “act of thinking” (ibid.: 115), reality is not so
much depicted but challenged. The purpose of theory for Baudrillard is the exact
opposite of what we normally would expect: It should not recognize and analyze
reality, instead it must deny and contradict its hegemony. It has to create illusion
and establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the path of reality. The
“value of thought”, claims Baudrillard (1995: 94), “lies not so much in its inevitable
convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it from
truth.” Only in awareness of those abstract ’Pataphysics can we distill any sense out of some of the oddest remarks in
Baudrillard’s oeuvre, for example his “delirious self-criticism” from Cool Memories where he accuses himself of “having
surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality” and of “having systematically opposed the most obvious and well-
founded notions” (Baudrillard 1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and reading
them in a “realist version”: “Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation
exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have abolished
Baudrillard suggests that even his most
reality, etc.” (Ibid.: 227). Instead of this “realist version”,
prominent terms can be regarded as pataphysical attempts to seduce his readers
through fictitious ideas, for example when he admits to having “put forward the idea of
simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it”
(Baudrillard 1995: 101). Apparently he understands his thinking to be something like a
playful simulacrum itself, for also theory can precede—and thereby seduce—reality:
“The theoretical ideal would be to set in place propositions in such a way that they could
be disconfirmed by reality, in such a way that reality could only oppose them
violently, and thereby unmask itself. For reality is an illusion, and all thought must
seek first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself advance behind a mask and
constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth. [...] Reality must be
caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality” (ibid.: 99). In this sense,
Baudrillard’s writing is “theory-fiction” (Baudrillard 1991c: 202) rather than theory, as
he borrows a term from Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 92 f., cp. Blask, 2002: 133). Like
all ’Pataphysics, this notion of “theory-fiction” may be traced back to the surrealists and
their “poetic anthropology”, as Dietmar Kamper (1981, my translation) has called it.
Such an anthropology is “poetic” because it refers to the art of writing, but also
because it touches the original notion of “poiesis”, meaning to create something.
‘Poetic anthropology’ does not seek to describe a reality that lies out there,
instead it aims to autopoietically produce the subject it writes about through its
own act of description. Theory for Baudrillard is a “paradoxical political
intervention” (Zapf 2010: 241, my translation). Thinking itself has to become the
ambiguous kind of “singularity” (Baudrillard 1995: 96) and “event” (ibid.: 104) that is
eliminated from almost any other sphere of the system: “Cipher, do not decipher.
Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is
clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself
unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic
confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a
radical disillusioning of the real.” (Ibid.: 104). Maybe this is the most unique aspect of
Baudrillard’s thinking altogether. He is a thinker who tries to think the world different
from what it actually is. He sees himself as something like a smuggler or drug
dealer, pushing forbidden items on a “black market in thought” (Baudrillard 1999:
104), promoting “a clandestine trade in ideas, of all inadmissible ideas, of
unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s” (Baudrillard
1995: 104 f.). If Baudrillard is the drug dealer of sociology, what does this imply for his
analysis of war and his reference to the principles of symbolic exchange and the duel
form? If we want to believe Baudrillard that he is not interested in rehabilitating older
wars, we should read his reference systematically rather than historically 16—there
might have never been any historical war as glamorous and honorable as portrayed
by Clausewitz anyway. Hence, the introduction of symbolic exchange and the duel
principle into the analysis of war might be more like a strategy to introduce a different
view of things into the common perception of war. It delivers the necessary contrast
against which the aestheticized, whitewashed reality of the war can be scrutinized
and deconstructed as not the only possible reality of war. Only in the light of its
radical other can the reality of war be denaturalized and revealed as a self-display
of power and hegemony. In this regard, Baudrillard has always remained a critical
thinker who seeks to intervene into reality instead of just observing it. To the same
degree he is neither a cynic nor a fatalist, that is—a resigned thinker. On the contrary, in
an interview on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center he even aligns himself with
the ideas of the Enlightenment: “Fatalism offers an unpalatable interpretation of the
world, for it leads to resignation. I don’t resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid
consciousness. When we know the rules of the game, then we can change them. In this
respect, I am a man of the Enlightenment” (Baudrillard 2002b). There is one major
difference, though, between Baudrillard and the classical Enlightenment: He wishes for
“clarity” and lucidity, he wants to “know the rules of the game”, but he does not seek the
truth; he wants to “change” the rules of the game by diverting the game from its
truth. It does not seem to matter so much to Baudrillard if his instance of contrast—
symbolic exchange and the duel principle—is more fictitious or real, illusionary or true;
most possibly it has something of both sides, being undecidable like a simulacrum in
the strongest sense. When Baudrillard writes about the Gulf War, he creates an odd
mixture of lucid observations on the one hand and theoretical seductions on the
other. If there could ever be something like ‘war studies’ in the spirit of Baudrillard, they
would have to dare not to eliminate this undecidability, otherwise they would lose
the spirit. What matters the most for Baudrillard is the effort to break open the
uniform process of reality production and shatter its seeming self-evidence into
pieces. Theory according to Baudrillard is an attempt to reverse our view of the world
—shifting our perspective by introducing something new and unsettling into the
order of things. What seemed natural before, now starts to look artificial; what
presented itself as a glorious triumph suddenly appears stale; what was evident
becomes shady. Baudrillard’s theories are like evil ghosts: They haunt reality by
staging its excluded other—no matter if this other really exists or if it has to be
feigned.