What do you think?
Rate this book
Exiles from Dialogue
Not long ago, two friends Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other from nowhere, met in Paris. They had a long discussion without any precise aim. It was, rather, a way of rubbing up against metaphysics without risk of contagion. They called it Exiles from Dialogue as a mirrored homage to Bertolt Brecht and shortly afterwards they parted company and went their separate ways. In this remarkable new book based on this gnomic meeting, Baudrillard and Noailles range over the entirety of philosophy and thought underpinning Baudrillards unique work, from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) to his recent writings on 9/11. Philosophically, the book takes in its breadth Heraclitus to Wittgenstein by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzche. Its literary sources are Gracian and Saul Bellow, Hlderlin and Stanislaw Lec; and the theories of Fukuyama, Barthes and Kristeva are weighed, considered and analysed. With his usual incandescent brilliance, Baudrillard discusses the central themes of his thought as (non-prophetic) anticipation; tragic acceptance of the world; the disappearance of the world into simulation; the death of the social (and with it the Left). Vitally, Baudrillard corrects some of the misconceptions that plague his work (about his fatal strategies, for example), qualifies some of his bolder pronouncements (notably softening his position on the question of the virtual) and pushes other lines of thinking further than ever before. Razor-sharp, volatile and capacious, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Baudrillard and those interested in the theories and philosophies that currently abound and rebound in the social sciences and humanities.
152 pages, Paperback
First published October 9, 2007
About the author
Jean Baudrillard
210 books2,058 followersJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 21, 2025
“ENRIQUE VALIENTE NOAILLES: I'd like to begin our conversation by referring to Giorgio Manganelli, the Italian writer. He says he believes in God, but that God himself is an atheist ...
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: If God doesn't believe in God, perhaps he's never existed. Like reality. It exists only if you believe in it. But perhaps reality doesn't believe in it itself. If put on a lie-detector, it would perhaps admit it doesn't exist.”
B:”The act of thought is, in fact, furtive. Like the photographic act, it's an act of disappearance. An act in which you eclipse yourself at the same time as you capture things.”
N: “It's the same with Zen, which says: 'Before studying Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. During the learning of Zen, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. Once you've learned Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers.' Between the first and the third instances, things are radically different, but you state them in the same way. When you say, "The mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers,' then perhaps, in Heideggerian terms, what you understand by 'being' isn't the same thing. 'Being' in the first instance is a kind of petrified identity”
N:”As in Fragment 12 of Heraclitus ('As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them'). There's a symbiosis between what he says and the way he says it; the river and the flow are in the rhythm of the language”
B: “The deepest horror would be to allow the word 'be' to be complicit with a static meaning. The world would abominate any form that could arrest itself in itself.”
N:”hypothesis bentha
ever constituting itself. Pure appearance and illusion are there; they would never take a second step, they are in a kind of pure being-outside-of-them-selves (ekstatikon), never completing themselves. I think of Heraclitus and his famous 'Panta rhei' (Everything flows'). It isn't a process at all, a succession; it isn't temporality at all (Heidegger said that time doesn't appear at all in Heraclitus). It would, rather, be an openness of things, an emulsion of being, but one that never manages to materialize in terms of identity.
B:Yes, but I don't know whether we can imagine the world that radically, whether we can imagine a literal universe in its literalness. It can only be a great play of forms, the great play of becoming as Heraclitus saw it.
Illusion, in that sense, has no history. Illusion isn't the opposite of reality or the opposite of truth. It's a game that in no way asks itself the question of truth or reality - very Heraclitean in fact: it plays itself out, and that's all there is to it. Being initiated into that game is like being initiated into the cos-mogonic play of the natural elements - water, fire, air and light - and their metamorphosis into one another. I believe the field of illusion is that of meta-morphosis. We must distrust the trap of representation which makes us see illusion in a figure as static as the figure of truth. Illusion is a transfiguration.
N:Yes, we may tend at times to fall into the trap of stratifying illusion.
Nevertheless, once we reach the point of what you call integral reality, that virtual and absolutely overrealized form of the world, from which allillusion virtual and absolutely over-realized form of the world”
N: “The over-realization of the real is, ultimately, what completely interrupts the circulation of forms, and this coagulation of the world might perhaps be said to create at the same time an effect of coagulation of illusion, since illusion is such only if it sets itself in play in the world, as you were saying before. As for the term meta-morphosis', couldn't it wrongly give the idea of a 'meta-', of a beyond?
The 'meta' of metamorphosis isn't that of metaphysics. It's a dimension of transference, of transfusion of one form into the other, without any higher instance than the game itself.
At any rate, a thing that transforms itself into another and that doesn't have its otherness within itself, so to speak, is perhaps in itself a mirage. It's difficult to conceive how otherness could be 'outside of whatever it may be, since that whatever it may be' lacks identity; how could a thing have its otherness 'this side of it', since it has no limits, no inside and outside? I prefer the term 'transfiguration', because it gives the sense of a figure that never completes itself, a movement that's unceasing, yet never arrives at identity.”
N:”Would it be possible to think of a strange necessity for illusion to abandon its 'condition', even if we take the view that illusion is nothing outside the game itself? Might not the fact that it allows itself to be invested by the real be part of its very play? The real might thus be seen as a moment of the becoming of the world, as an immanent relinquishment of illusion?
Can one conceive a self-challenge as an implicit movement on the part of illusion?
B: Being outside itself I like, and that's doubtless the most immediate figure of alterity. But for illusion to wish to be outside itself would mean it is unbearable to itself. Now, it's already in itself a form of radical otherness. How would it want to become outside itself? If we take the singularity, it doesn't strive to be outside itself, it has its own set of rules. The game itself has its rules and doesn't try to externalize all the rest, nor annex it to itself.”
B:”if the 'unbearable' hasn't always been so for everyone, it becomes difficult to identify the moment at which - and the reason why - a species sees itself suddenly terrorized by its symbolic universe, the moment at which it feels compelled to replace vision by representation (can we conceive that it's the fatal attraction of illusion, the fear of collapsing into it once and for all, the terrifying homologation with it, that leads us constantly to murder it and develop a will for its opposite?)“
N:”Even if we can try to speak of the world as Apollinaire did in his Calligrammes: to speak of a horse he traced its outline with the poem; to speak of rain he had it fall in lines...
B: Discourse is, in fact, discursive by definition. In other words, it's linear and non-reversible. But without going so far as the poetic mode, you can subsume the philosophical paradox in a kind of spiral. Consciousness analyses the world, but itself forms part of the world, and hence its claim to analyse it is itself part of the very operation of the world. Thought is, therefore, by homology, part of the general illusion by virtue of this enfold-ing, this embedding, of the one in the other. However far you go in objective analysis, you still remain in an operation that's itself part of appearances: that is to say, an operation that has no basis of any kind in a consciousness external to the world. This is where the secret lies, in this involuntary complicity, of a true - and I would even say poetic - grasp of the phenomenon of the world.
B:”All irony, all distance has disappeared from the intellectual field. The cult of the real, of the lost object, dominates us with all its bad conscience.
N: Yes, in the eyes of realist thought, everything is functional: by the very fact of exploring the scene of the crime, radical thought lays itself open to being charged with the murder. The strategy consists in deflecting exploration from another hypothesis: that of an assisted suicide of the real, a suicide from an incapacity to tolerate the overload of meaning.“
B: “But, beyond the strategic and political conflict, all wars ultimately have this objective and this main effect: the destruction of singular cultures and of everything that resists the global order and generalized exchange. Anthropological genocide.”
B:”In the past, the virtual had the possibility of becoming actual [réel]. Actuality was even its destination. There was, then, possibility. Today, when the virtual is winning out over the real, there's no longer any possibility, since everything is immediately realized. We have, then, here again, if you like, an absolute coextensiveness, though not, as in Spinoza, by ideal adequation, but rather, by confusion and mutual cancelling. In the virtual, there's no longer any actual, since any other actual is simultaneously possible; there's no longer any possible, since all the possibilities are immediately realized. The result is acceleration into the void... the desert, as I put it. The Real is the desert, and the Real is growing like the desert. "Welcome to the desert of the real; as they say in Matrix, that perfect illustration of virtual reality. The metaphysical immanence of Spinoza has given way to the operational immanence of the virtual.
N: Once arrived at the point of a pure operational immanence, without dis tance, transcendence or signification, then we may wonder whether illusion might ultimately be destructible.”
B:”Everyone's agreed on rescuing the imaginary of politics, but, in the end, the political has fallen into the sphere of the floating signifier, as Lévi-Strauss would say: a changeable, random space, as witness the fluctuations of Right and Left or the American elections, for example. This is all reinforced by opinion polls that claim to report on a hazy reality and are themselves even hazier than the reality.”
B:”Even the bank refused to exchange them for cash. I had to pay them into my account and transform them into virtual money before they'd give them back to me as real money.
There's no faith in the money-sign any longer (though that itself is an abstrac-tion); only the digital counts. At bottom, value, like signs, can now realize itself successfully only within a very narrow window. For things to circulate as quickly as possible, value must no longer have the time to realize itself, signs must no longer have the time to signify.”
B: “If there are two different human species, there's no universality.
When one of the two is eliminated, the remaining one becomes universal.
That was how we became the sole and unique universal human being! - at the risk of becoming Neanderthals again, or seeing them re-emerge. For we still are secretly a little Neanderthal. The spectre of the Neanderthal is always there!
All that's been repressed, all that's been eradicated, carries on obscurely along its parallel path. We carry it within ourselves like the dead twins in mythologies. Of the two twins, there's always one who has to die. But he's still there, inside, and life is an immense labour of de-twinning. I have my own little theory, on the fringes of psychoanalysis, about the fundamental separation. It isn't the separation from parents, but the break with one's original twin. In the beginning, we're always two, and we have to get rid of our twin. And we only really exist from the moment we get rid of him. It's very difficult. Some never manage it. There's always this buried otherness or, rather, buried 'sameness', and all problems of identity, of neurosis, come much more profoundly from this breaking of twinness or the failure of that break, than from the parental drama.
N: I like this theory': perhaps the labour of a life consists in washing away the bloodstains of this sacrifice. It's the term of the duality that was eliminated that becomes your destiny.
It resurfaces involuntarily, one way or another. If you eliminate it, you find yourself with countless twins (clones are an illustration of this) - a reming twinness which is simply the endless metastasis of the being that was eliminated at the beginning. So, all the virtual egos eliminated at birth by the constrution. of a single ego - all these other egos - make up our profound otherness,
Either you respect duality, so to speak, even lost duality, or you create a unity that metastasizes.
B: Unless you manage to bring twinness back into play. But almost all the stories of mythological twins have a tragic ending. It's a destiny that leads, one way or another, to death. We choose to eliminate one of them from the outset, which brings us back to Neanderthal man, who seems like the monstrous twin we really had to get rid of. Today, when we can no longer pride ourselves so assuredly on the universality acquired at his expense, we're turning back to him with some nostalgia, as we are to all the cultures or species that have been sacrificed. Retrospectively, we're no longer very sure of the universality of the human race, but it's no use mourning, since we are, in any case, going to offload it on to an artificial species that won't even remember it.”
N:”Might language be a form of despair about what is disappearing, while at the same time being an agent of that disappearance? Does language, like the world, hover between the retrieval of what is disappearing and the annihilation of what sees itself as unilaterally real“
N: “Perhaps it's the emptiness of something that calls on language to name it; when it nears its end, it's the emptiness that proposes...
B:... and language that disposes. In other words, it's when things disappear that you seek to verify them, that the whole machinery of verification through language gets going. And the more you verify, the more reality fades. It's a paradoxical, perverse effect of which reason knows nothing.
It knows only how to prove and provide evidence. But that within truth which is only truth is of the order of illusion. Things present their credentials through language. But that merely holds up a mirror to their disappearance.”
N:”There are two wagers. The first, as we were saying before, is that all the big concepts - the unconscious, history, etc. - are invented; they aren't discovered. But your argument goes even further: by the time language arrives, what it names has already disappeared.
According to Heidegger, nihilism is the forgetting of the nothing: perhaps the essence of nihilism lies in not taking the question of nothingness seriously.. What are we to say, then, if the omission of this question regarding the essence of nothingness was the reason why Western metaphysics has fallen into nihilism?' he asks.
Nietzsche, it seems to me, is different because, in his view, nihilism is the devaling of all values and the triumph of the reactive forces. And Heidegger says further: "How does it come about that being has primacy everywhere and claims for itself all that "is", whereas what is not an essent, everywhere and claims for itself all that "is", whereas what is not an essent, the nothing understood as Being itself, is forgotten?" We might wonder. then, whether true nihilism wouldn't be to forset the nothing by material.- Nihilism might be said to be the systematic elimination of the nothing in the analysis of things.
BAUDRILLARD: But we should differentiate the nothing from that which is worthless (nul) - by maintaining the idea that what is worthless is precisely that which has forgotten the nothing. You see this in great systems like political economy, which is based ultimately on the exchange of the nothing, on the multiplication of zero-sum exchanges. Exchange is exchange for the nothing, and it's the nothing that's exchanged beneath the apparent exchange of value. We have here the twofold aspect of impossible exchange.
In the interstices of exchanges squints the nothing, and we squint at the nothing (convergent strabismus). Most of the time, it's worthlessness that rules, the equivalence of the nothing. But, from time to time, the nothing draws attention to itself as what it is'; the absent term of every exchange resurfaces in the breakdown, the accident, the crisis of generalized exchange.
We may note two things, then. Everything is exchanged for nothing - this is 'traditional' nihilism. By contrast, nothing is exchanged, the nothing is inexchangeable - this is impossible exchange, though here we have the superlative dimension, the poetic dimension of impossible exchange. This is the opposite of nihilism. It's the resurgence of the nothing at the heart of the essent, at the heart of the something. Warhol talked, for example, of bringing out the nothingness at the heart of the image. And Barthes's punctum in photography is this too; the blind spot, the non-place at the heart of the image. What, then, would the opposite of nihilism be?
N: “Duality perhaps. That which leaves the dual principle of things intact, and isn't intent on exterminating the nothing.”
B: “I entirely agree. It's the dual form that creates the void and preserves the void, whereas oneness, being always the oneness of the whole, of the something, no longer leaves space for the nothing. Antonio Machado says that we always credit God with having created the world ex nihilo, with having created something out of nothing, but we ought to acknowledge in him a much higher power, that of having created nothingness out of something.”
N: Yes, and we could perhaps draw here on the story of the worm that ate its parasite, even though it was vital to it. At some point, we really did eat the nothing; we made it disappear and realized the world completely.”
B: “We could go back here to the story of Kant's dove which, feeling the resistance of the wind, imagines it would fly much faster in a vacuum. So we imagine we'll arrive at absolute Good if we eliminate Evil, at the All if we eliminate the Nothing, at the Eternal if we eliminate Time. We conceive the Nothing as a diabolic resistance and as an emanation of Evil. A total misconception - the Nothing is as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove.”
B: “Yes, and why not also of negationism?Whereas it's the system that's truly negationist, since it's the denial of the nothing, the denial of any illusion. It's the whole system that's become nihilistic. Extending its moral nihilism, it’s become technically nihilistic. And, as a result, the term no longer means much. Nihilism (which is the forgetting of the nothing) is technically realized. Having said that, we always hear the same test-of-confidence question: where does all that get you? The old ultimatum, the old ideology of a reconciliation of theory and practice, the old dialectical nostalgia - of the kind we've absorbed throughout our philosophical and moral education! ”
B:”fulfilled prophecy robs the event of its singularity. What you have there is merely the image-feedback of thought on the event. The problem is, rather, that of a precession of thought over the event - and yet, simultaneously, of the precession of the event over thought.“
B: “Extricating itself, derealizing itself - this is a fatal hypothesis. The banal strategy being that which wishes simply to externalize itself, to expose itself so as to realize itself. Over against that, there's the strategy that puts itself dramatically in play, so as not to realize itself. At the cost of disappearing even, for there's a subtle difficulty in coming out of oneself while avoiding realizing oneself. It's a little bit like this with writing. Something finds its ultimate form, always slightly short of its realization. You have, in this way, to keep your balance in the paroxystic moment.”
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: If God doesn't believe in God, perhaps he's never existed. Like reality. It exists only if you believe in it. But perhaps reality doesn't believe in it itself. If put on a lie-detector, it would perhaps admit it doesn't exist.”
B:”The act of thought is, in fact, furtive. Like the photographic act, it's an act of disappearance. An act in which you eclipse yourself at the same time as you capture things.”
N: “It's the same with Zen, which says: 'Before studying Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. During the learning of Zen, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. Once you've learned Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers.' Between the first and the third instances, things are radically different, but you state them in the same way. When you say, "The mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers,' then perhaps, in Heideggerian terms, what you understand by 'being' isn't the same thing. 'Being' in the first instance is a kind of petrified identity”
N:”As in Fragment 12 of Heraclitus ('As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them'). There's a symbiosis between what he says and the way he says it; the river and the flow are in the rhythm of the language”
B: “The deepest horror would be to allow the word 'be' to be complicit with a static meaning. The world would abominate any form that could arrest itself in itself.”
N:”hypothesis bentha
ever constituting itself. Pure appearance and illusion are there; they would never take a second step, they are in a kind of pure being-outside-of-them-selves (ekstatikon), never completing themselves. I think of Heraclitus and his famous 'Panta rhei' (Everything flows'). It isn't a process at all, a succession; it isn't temporality at all (Heidegger said that time doesn't appear at all in Heraclitus). It would, rather, be an openness of things, an emulsion of being, but one that never manages to materialize in terms of identity.
B:Yes, but I don't know whether we can imagine the world that radically, whether we can imagine a literal universe in its literalness. It can only be a great play of forms, the great play of becoming as Heraclitus saw it.
Illusion, in that sense, has no history. Illusion isn't the opposite of reality or the opposite of truth. It's a game that in no way asks itself the question of truth or reality - very Heraclitean in fact: it plays itself out, and that's all there is to it. Being initiated into that game is like being initiated into the cos-mogonic play of the natural elements - water, fire, air and light - and their metamorphosis into one another. I believe the field of illusion is that of meta-morphosis. We must distrust the trap of representation which makes us see illusion in a figure as static as the figure of truth. Illusion is a transfiguration.
N:Yes, we may tend at times to fall into the trap of stratifying illusion.
Nevertheless, once we reach the point of what you call integral reality, that virtual and absolutely overrealized form of the world, from which allillusion virtual and absolutely over-realized form of the world”
N: “The over-realization of the real is, ultimately, what completely interrupts the circulation of forms, and this coagulation of the world might perhaps be said to create at the same time an effect of coagulation of illusion, since illusion is such only if it sets itself in play in the world, as you were saying before. As for the term meta-morphosis', couldn't it wrongly give the idea of a 'meta-', of a beyond?
The 'meta' of metamorphosis isn't that of metaphysics. It's a dimension of transference, of transfusion of one form into the other, without any higher instance than the game itself.
At any rate, a thing that transforms itself into another and that doesn't have its otherness within itself, so to speak, is perhaps in itself a mirage. It's difficult to conceive how otherness could be 'outside of whatever it may be, since that whatever it may be' lacks identity; how could a thing have its otherness 'this side of it', since it has no limits, no inside and outside? I prefer the term 'transfiguration', because it gives the sense of a figure that never completes itself, a movement that's unceasing, yet never arrives at identity.”
N:”Would it be possible to think of a strange necessity for illusion to abandon its 'condition', even if we take the view that illusion is nothing outside the game itself? Might not the fact that it allows itself to be invested by the real be part of its very play? The real might thus be seen as a moment of the becoming of the world, as an immanent relinquishment of illusion?
Can one conceive a self-challenge as an implicit movement on the part of illusion?
B: Being outside itself I like, and that's doubtless the most immediate figure of alterity. But for illusion to wish to be outside itself would mean it is unbearable to itself. Now, it's already in itself a form of radical otherness. How would it want to become outside itself? If we take the singularity, it doesn't strive to be outside itself, it has its own set of rules. The game itself has its rules and doesn't try to externalize all the rest, nor annex it to itself.”
B:”if the 'unbearable' hasn't always been so for everyone, it becomes difficult to identify the moment at which - and the reason why - a species sees itself suddenly terrorized by its symbolic universe, the moment at which it feels compelled to replace vision by representation (can we conceive that it's the fatal attraction of illusion, the fear of collapsing into it once and for all, the terrifying homologation with it, that leads us constantly to murder it and develop a will for its opposite?)“
N:”Even if we can try to speak of the world as Apollinaire did in his Calligrammes: to speak of a horse he traced its outline with the poem; to speak of rain he had it fall in lines...
B: Discourse is, in fact, discursive by definition. In other words, it's linear and non-reversible. But without going so far as the poetic mode, you can subsume the philosophical paradox in a kind of spiral. Consciousness analyses the world, but itself forms part of the world, and hence its claim to analyse it is itself part of the very operation of the world. Thought is, therefore, by homology, part of the general illusion by virtue of this enfold-ing, this embedding, of the one in the other. However far you go in objective analysis, you still remain in an operation that's itself part of appearances: that is to say, an operation that has no basis of any kind in a consciousness external to the world. This is where the secret lies, in this involuntary complicity, of a true - and I would even say poetic - grasp of the phenomenon of the world.
B:”All irony, all distance has disappeared from the intellectual field. The cult of the real, of the lost object, dominates us with all its bad conscience.
N: Yes, in the eyes of realist thought, everything is functional: by the very fact of exploring the scene of the crime, radical thought lays itself open to being charged with the murder. The strategy consists in deflecting exploration from another hypothesis: that of an assisted suicide of the real, a suicide from an incapacity to tolerate the overload of meaning.“
B: “But, beyond the strategic and political conflict, all wars ultimately have this objective and this main effect: the destruction of singular cultures and of everything that resists the global order and generalized exchange. Anthropological genocide.”
B:”In the past, the virtual had the possibility of becoming actual [réel]. Actuality was even its destination. There was, then, possibility. Today, when the virtual is winning out over the real, there's no longer any possibility, since everything is immediately realized. We have, then, here again, if you like, an absolute coextensiveness, though not, as in Spinoza, by ideal adequation, but rather, by confusion and mutual cancelling. In the virtual, there's no longer any actual, since any other actual is simultaneously possible; there's no longer any possible, since all the possibilities are immediately realized. The result is acceleration into the void... the desert, as I put it. The Real is the desert, and the Real is growing like the desert. "Welcome to the desert of the real; as they say in Matrix, that perfect illustration of virtual reality. The metaphysical immanence of Spinoza has given way to the operational immanence of the virtual.
N: Once arrived at the point of a pure operational immanence, without dis tance, transcendence or signification, then we may wonder whether illusion might ultimately be destructible.”
B:”Everyone's agreed on rescuing the imaginary of politics, but, in the end, the political has fallen into the sphere of the floating signifier, as Lévi-Strauss would say: a changeable, random space, as witness the fluctuations of Right and Left or the American elections, for example. This is all reinforced by opinion polls that claim to report on a hazy reality and are themselves even hazier than the reality.”
B:”Even the bank refused to exchange them for cash. I had to pay them into my account and transform them into virtual money before they'd give them back to me as real money.
There's no faith in the money-sign any longer (though that itself is an abstrac-tion); only the digital counts. At bottom, value, like signs, can now realize itself successfully only within a very narrow window. For things to circulate as quickly as possible, value must no longer have the time to realize itself, signs must no longer have the time to signify.”
B: “If there are two different human species, there's no universality.
When one of the two is eliminated, the remaining one becomes universal.
That was how we became the sole and unique universal human being! - at the risk of becoming Neanderthals again, or seeing them re-emerge. For we still are secretly a little Neanderthal. The spectre of the Neanderthal is always there!
All that's been repressed, all that's been eradicated, carries on obscurely along its parallel path. We carry it within ourselves like the dead twins in mythologies. Of the two twins, there's always one who has to die. But he's still there, inside, and life is an immense labour of de-twinning. I have my own little theory, on the fringes of psychoanalysis, about the fundamental separation. It isn't the separation from parents, but the break with one's original twin. In the beginning, we're always two, and we have to get rid of our twin. And we only really exist from the moment we get rid of him. It's very difficult. Some never manage it. There's always this buried otherness or, rather, buried 'sameness', and all problems of identity, of neurosis, come much more profoundly from this breaking of twinness or the failure of that break, than from the parental drama.
N: I like this theory': perhaps the labour of a life consists in washing away the bloodstains of this sacrifice. It's the term of the duality that was eliminated that becomes your destiny.
It resurfaces involuntarily, one way or another. If you eliminate it, you find yourself with countless twins (clones are an illustration of this) - a reming twinness which is simply the endless metastasis of the being that was eliminated at the beginning. So, all the virtual egos eliminated at birth by the constrution. of a single ego - all these other egos - make up our profound otherness,
Either you respect duality, so to speak, even lost duality, or you create a unity that metastasizes.
B: Unless you manage to bring twinness back into play. But almost all the stories of mythological twins have a tragic ending. It's a destiny that leads, one way or another, to death. We choose to eliminate one of them from the outset, which brings us back to Neanderthal man, who seems like the monstrous twin we really had to get rid of. Today, when we can no longer pride ourselves so assuredly on the universality acquired at his expense, we're turning back to him with some nostalgia, as we are to all the cultures or species that have been sacrificed. Retrospectively, we're no longer very sure of the universality of the human race, but it's no use mourning, since we are, in any case, going to offload it on to an artificial species that won't even remember it.”
N:”Might language be a form of despair about what is disappearing, while at the same time being an agent of that disappearance? Does language, like the world, hover between the retrieval of what is disappearing and the annihilation of what sees itself as unilaterally real“
N: “Perhaps it's the emptiness of something that calls on language to name it; when it nears its end, it's the emptiness that proposes...
B:... and language that disposes. In other words, it's when things disappear that you seek to verify them, that the whole machinery of verification through language gets going. And the more you verify, the more reality fades. It's a paradoxical, perverse effect of which reason knows nothing.
It knows only how to prove and provide evidence. But that within truth which is only truth is of the order of illusion. Things present their credentials through language. But that merely holds up a mirror to their disappearance.”
N:”There are two wagers. The first, as we were saying before, is that all the big concepts - the unconscious, history, etc. - are invented; they aren't discovered. But your argument goes even further: by the time language arrives, what it names has already disappeared.
According to Heidegger, nihilism is the forgetting of the nothing: perhaps the essence of nihilism lies in not taking the question of nothingness seriously.. What are we to say, then, if the omission of this question regarding the essence of nothingness was the reason why Western metaphysics has fallen into nihilism?' he asks.
Nietzsche, it seems to me, is different because, in his view, nihilism is the devaling of all values and the triumph of the reactive forces. And Heidegger says further: "How does it come about that being has primacy everywhere and claims for itself all that "is", whereas what is not an essent, everywhere and claims for itself all that "is", whereas what is not an essent, the nothing understood as Being itself, is forgotten?" We might wonder. then, whether true nihilism wouldn't be to forset the nothing by material.- Nihilism might be said to be the systematic elimination of the nothing in the analysis of things.
BAUDRILLARD: But we should differentiate the nothing from that which is worthless (nul) - by maintaining the idea that what is worthless is precisely that which has forgotten the nothing. You see this in great systems like political economy, which is based ultimately on the exchange of the nothing, on the multiplication of zero-sum exchanges. Exchange is exchange for the nothing, and it's the nothing that's exchanged beneath the apparent exchange of value. We have here the twofold aspect of impossible exchange.
In the interstices of exchanges squints the nothing, and we squint at the nothing (convergent strabismus). Most of the time, it's worthlessness that rules, the equivalence of the nothing. But, from time to time, the nothing draws attention to itself as what it is'; the absent term of every exchange resurfaces in the breakdown, the accident, the crisis of generalized exchange.
We may note two things, then. Everything is exchanged for nothing - this is 'traditional' nihilism. By contrast, nothing is exchanged, the nothing is inexchangeable - this is impossible exchange, though here we have the superlative dimension, the poetic dimension of impossible exchange. This is the opposite of nihilism. It's the resurgence of the nothing at the heart of the essent, at the heart of the something. Warhol talked, for example, of bringing out the nothingness at the heart of the image. And Barthes's punctum in photography is this too; the blind spot, the non-place at the heart of the image. What, then, would the opposite of nihilism be?
N: “Duality perhaps. That which leaves the dual principle of things intact, and isn't intent on exterminating the nothing.”
B: “I entirely agree. It's the dual form that creates the void and preserves the void, whereas oneness, being always the oneness of the whole, of the something, no longer leaves space for the nothing. Antonio Machado says that we always credit God with having created the world ex nihilo, with having created something out of nothing, but we ought to acknowledge in him a much higher power, that of having created nothingness out of something.”
N: Yes, and we could perhaps draw here on the story of the worm that ate its parasite, even though it was vital to it. At some point, we really did eat the nothing; we made it disappear and realized the world completely.”
B: “We could go back here to the story of Kant's dove which, feeling the resistance of the wind, imagines it would fly much faster in a vacuum. So we imagine we'll arrive at absolute Good if we eliminate Evil, at the All if we eliminate the Nothing, at the Eternal if we eliminate Time. We conceive the Nothing as a diabolic resistance and as an emanation of Evil. A total misconception - the Nothing is as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove.”
B: “Yes, and why not also of negationism?Whereas it's the system that's truly negationist, since it's the denial of the nothing, the denial of any illusion. It's the whole system that's become nihilistic. Extending its moral nihilism, it’s become technically nihilistic. And, as a result, the term no longer means much. Nihilism (which is the forgetting of the nothing) is technically realized. Having said that, we always hear the same test-of-confidence question: where does all that get you? The old ultimatum, the old ideology of a reconciliation of theory and practice, the old dialectical nostalgia - of the kind we've absorbed throughout our philosophical and moral education! ”
B:”fulfilled prophecy robs the event of its singularity. What you have there is merely the image-feedback of thought on the event. The problem is, rather, that of a precession of thought over the event - and yet, simultaneously, of the precession of the event over thought.“
B: “Extricating itself, derealizing itself - this is a fatal hypothesis. The banal strategy being that which wishes simply to externalize itself, to expose itself so as to realize itself. Over against that, there's the strategy that puts itself dramatically in play, so as not to realize itself. At the cost of disappearing even, for there's a subtle difficulty in coming out of oneself while avoiding realizing oneself. It's a little bit like this with writing. Something finds its ultimate form, always slightly short of its realization. You have, in this way, to keep your balance in the paroxystic moment.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review