Baudrillard's unsettling coda: previously unpublished texts written
just before the visionary theorist's death in 2007.
History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats
itself ends up making a history.--from The Agony of Power
In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his
death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering
situation currently facing us as we exit the system of "domination"
(based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of
generalized "hegemony" in which everyone becomes both hostage and
accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of
political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and
our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic
process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within
ourselves as an antagonistic force--most vividly in the phenomenon of
terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of
all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an
unbridled circulation--of capital, goods, information, or manufactured
history--that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and
pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the
conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the
alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side
of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in
which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have
been a lesser evil.This book gathers together three essays--"From
Domination to Hegemony," The White Terror of World Order, and Where Good
Grows--and a 2005 interview with Baudrillard by Sylvère Lotringer.
Semiotext(e) launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s;
now, as our media and information infested "ultra-reality" finally
catches up with his theory, Semiotext(e) offers The Agony of Power,
Baudrillard's unsettling coda.
