Abstract
Baudrillard is introduced as a theorist whose work has frequently been misread. It is suggested that when sufficient attention is paid to his oblique and literary style we can find his work to have parallels with thinkers in the radical Durkheimian tradition, such as Mauss and Bataille, as well as to an almost poetic transformation of the situation diagnosed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Although such work differs considerably from that of Derrida, both are found to share a commitment to the championing of a certain singularity. This is seen to give rise to Derrida’s ‘a politics’ which challenges the reductions of political theory in the name of that which resists it and to which it cannot but must do justice. Baudrillard’s transpolitics is similarly a reaction to the failures of politics and the political in relation to singularity.
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Notes
Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Massachusetts UP, 1992).
This background is concisely summarized in Jon Baldwin, ‘Lessons from Witchetty Grubs and Eskimos: The French Anthropological Context of Jean Baudrillard’ French Cultural Studies 19 (2008), 333–46.
See also the work of William Merrin: ‘Uncritical Criticism? Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War’, Economy and Society 23 (1994), 433–58; ‘Television Is Killing the Art of Symbolic Exchange: Baudrillard’s Theory of Communication’ Theory Culture Society 16 (1999), 119–40; ‘To Play With Phantoms: Jean Baudrillard and the Evil Demon of the Simulacrum’, Economy and Society, 30 (2001), 85–111. I disagree with Merrin’s argument that the ‘symbolic’ remains an unspeakable beyond throughout Baudrillard’s work. On this see below what I have to say about the impossible. In addition to linking Baudrillard to a radical Durkheimian tradition, we might see him as extending the work of Barthes.
Mick Gane suggests that Baudrillard’s ‘search for singularity seems close to Barthes’ idea of a “science for each object”‘ Mick Gane, ‘Cool Memories: Baudrillard and the Crisis of Reading’ French Cultural Studies 19:3 (2008), 310.
Even as late as Impossible Exchange he can say ‘closer to us — as the material substance of the sociological masses’. Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (Verso, 2001), 12.
Ross Abbinnett’s ‘The Spectre and the Simulacrum: History after Baudrillard’ Theory, Culture and Society 25: 6 (2008), 69–87 offers an ingenious reading of the relationship of the two but remains extremely schematic and at some distance from the texts of both Derrida and Baudrillard. There is no remarking of their shared vocabulary.
Mick Gane (ed.), Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (Routledge, 1993), 21. He even went so far as to say that ‘my particular critical impulse comes from a radical temperament which has more in common with poetry than philosophy’. Baudrillard Live, 131. Also that: ‘if I started anywhere it was with poetical things, Rimbaud, Artaud, etc., Nietzsche, Bataille’ Baudrillard Live, 21. For more on Baudrillard as poet see the Conclusion.
Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact (Bloomsbury, 2013), 23.
Lasse Thomassen, ‘Radical Politics’, A History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 7 (Acumen, 2010), 169–86.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth’ in Derek Attridge (ed.) Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992), 11.
Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference (Harvard UP, 1994), 16.
Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 34.
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 1994), xv.
Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Stanford University Press, 1995), 89.
For a concise statement see Jon Baldwin, ‘Singularity’, in Richard G. Smith (ed.) Baudrillard Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 201–4.
Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Radical Alterity (Semiotext(e), 2008), 70.
At the same time he quite frequently associates the universal with ‘the West’: ‘the concept of the universal is the specific product, within the human race, of a certain civilization called Western, and within that culture, of a privileged minority, a modern intelligentsia that has dedicated itself to the philosophical and technical edification of humanity’ Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power (Semiotext(e), 2008), 51. Here we can see Baudrillard’s tendency to exemplify. The question is begged how Islam, which he opposes to ‘the West’, can escape making the sort of universalist claims that must accompany a form of monotheism and a ‘religion of the book’.
Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonism (Seagull Books, 2010), 21. Again in The Intelligence of Evil ‘modern western Reason’ is associated with ‘the turn to the Universal’ without any supporting argument given for a claim that dramatically diverges from the established philosophical understanding that universal claims arise first with the Greeks or with monotheism. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 29.
On occasion this can degenerate with the terms ‘universal’ and ‘singular’ being employed in an extremely loose way as when in Carnival and Cannibal he identifies what he calls ‘the paradox of universal values’: ‘ultimately, modern Western culture should never have stepped outside its own order where it constituted a kind of singularity’. Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal (Seagull Books, 2010), 12.
Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 70. In The Spirit of Terrorism he speaks of ‘all the singularities’, specified in brackets as ‘species, individuals and cultures’. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (Verso, 2002), 9.
Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford University Press, 2005), 148. Elsewhere he says that ‘singularity is never present. It presents itself only in loosing or undoubling itself in iterability’.
Derrida Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford University Press, 2002), 180.
Baudrillard, The Agony of Power (Semiotext(e), 2008), 77.
In making this nomination I apply to Derrida a term of my own coining although I would argue that it comes very close to what he himself identified as occurring in his work under other names. Nearly 25 years ago Derrida expressed the concern that ‘the absence of an adequate political code to translate or incorporate the radical implications of deconstruction has given many the impression that deconstruction is opposed to politics, or is at best apolitical’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’ in Richard Kearney (ed.) Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), 119–20).
In The Other Heading Derrida countered these accusations by arguing that deconstruction brings us to a position that is ‘neither political nor apolitical but to make cautious use of an old word for new concepts “quasi-political”‘ (Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indiana University Press, 1992), 40). It is a suggestion he makes again in Rogues: ‘it is perhaps possible, possibly possible, to displace the concept and continue to mobilize the name’ (R, 44). This ‘quasi-political’ interruption of the political is to be most emphatically distinguished from the apolitical ordinarily understood. ‘A politics’ is a resistance to politics in the name of a secret it contains and that it cannot account for. It is what is referred to when Derrida speaks in Spectres of Marx of ‘another concept of the political’ and the spectralization of politics (Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 75). Or what he means when he speaks in Rogues of ‘a hyperethics or hyperpolitics’, in Negotiations of the ‘beyond politics’ and in Adieu of ‘the beyond the political’ that he insists is most definitively not a ‘gesture toward the non-political’.
Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford University Press, 2005), 152; Derrida, Negotiations, 180;
Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford University Press, 1999), 79.
Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge UP, 1992), 10.
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 104. For a discussion of this term, see Alex Thomson, Deconstruction and Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2007), especially the last four chapters.
Francois Cusset et al., ‘Pour Baudrillard’ Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 March 2007 cited by Madalena Gonzalez, ‘Pourquoi y a-t-il Baudrillard Plutôt Que Rien?: The Reception and Perception of Jean Baudrillard in France’ French Cultural Studies 19 (2008), 287–303.
Jean Baudrillard, ‘Transpolitics, Transsexuality, Transaesthetics’, in William Stearns and William Chaloupka (eds) Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics (Macmillan, 1992), 21.
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© 2014 Mihail Evans
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Evans, M. (2014). Introduction. In: The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488565_1
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