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DEATH

William Pawlett

Death is a vital term in Baudrillards theoretical vocabulary, used in a number of different but

interrelated senses. According to Baudrillard the system of power and control is founded on a particular

construction of the relationship between life and death, one which separates and opposes them, making

death the absolute termination of life. Baudrillard explores an alternative understanding of death in

symbolic or primitive cultures: death as a social, cyclical and reversible position in symbolic exchange

ritual. Death, understood as a stake in an ongoing cycle of symbolic exchanges, is never fully eliminated

by rationality, Baudrillard asserts. Indeed, he contends that the symbolic exchange of death, in sacrifi

cial or suicidal form, constitutes the ultimate weapon against the capital- ist system because it strikes

at the very foundation of its organisation. His work on the 9/11 suicide attacks explores this diffi cult

idea (ST).

Baudrillard also discusses the (attempted) elimination of death as symbolic form through the technology

of cloning, and his fi nal works suggest ways of thinking about life and death as parallel, inseparable

and complicit symbolic forms. For Baudrillard death is the most vital stake in social organisation for

both modern and symbolic societies. He claims that a fundamental reversal in the nature of social

organisation has taken place: a shift from the symbolic order where what cannot be symbolically

exchanged consti- tutes a mortal danger for the group (SED, 131), to capitalist modernity whereeverything which is symbolically exchanged constitutes a mortal danger for the dominant order (SED,

188). Modern society functions only by dismantling and preventing the cycles of symbolic exchange,

specifi cally by disallowing the moment of response or counter-g ift. The system creates a fundamental

symbolic debt, showering consumers with (simulatory) gifts of culture, education, medical technology,

communica- tion and liberation. This unexchangeable debt constitutes the social relations of symbolic

domination; capital is a form of domination over life and death (SED, 31). We are constructed as

wage- consumers who must work for a wage and must spend that wage on dead signs supporting the

system of consumption, a man must die to become labour power . . . *he dies+ by his defi nition as a

productive force (SED, 39). Baudrillard refash- ions Hegels master/slave dialectic arguing, The master

confi scates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own (SED, 40); the power

structure is thus a structure of death (SED, 40). For Baudrillard immediate death is the ultimateweapon against this system: you will never abolish this power by staying alive . . . only the surrender of

this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death . . . the only possibility of

abolishing power (SED, 40). Baudrillard insists the revolu- tion can only consist in the abolition of the

separation of death, and not in equality of survival (SED, 129). For Baudrillard, death is ultimately

nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the dead from the living (SED, 127). In

symbolic cultures death is affi rmed and marked by elaborate ceremony. Through ceremonial forms of

symbolic exchange death is understood as part of a symbolic and reversible cycle, not merely as the

biological end- p oint of the individuals life. For example, initiation rites are a kind of social death

followed by a rebirth with transformed statusindeed all death is social because it is part of a process

of the transformation of social status. *T+he initiation consists in an exchange being established . . . the

opposi- tion between birth and death disappears (SED, 132), Symbolic exchange is halted neither by

the living nor by the dead (SED, 134). Bycontrast in modernity the dead are thrown out of the groups

symbolic circulation . . . no longer beings with a full role to play (SED, 126). Increasingly, death is

separated from life; it is medicalised and confi ned. The sym- bolic exchange of death is ruptured as the

dead are removed further and further away from the living, no longer buried in village churchyards but

banished to out- of- town cemeteries or ghettos, increasingly inaccessible to their kin. Death becomes

anormal, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly: nothing

else is as offensive as this (SED, 126). Separated out from symbolic ritual death is devoid of meaning, an

unprogrammable horror, an unthinkable anomaly. Yet life too, separated from death, loses its

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meaningfulness, reduced to the indif- ferent fatality of survival (SED, 127). With the technology of

cloning the separation, confi nement and control of death reaches a new level: death can fi nally be

eliminated. For Baudrillard cloning would eliminate radical otherness, death, sex and the Other (the

singularity of other people). In cloning the individual is reduced to his abstract and genetic formula to

be nothing more than a message (TE, 118). For Baudrillard death is inseparable from, and runs parallel

to, life: death does not . . . await us at the end of life, but accompa- nies us faithfully and implacably in it

. . . one is dead in ones lifetime itself; multiple deaths accompany us (LP, 199). Liberation from death is

a far more terrifying prospect than is death, and, Baudrillard asserts, death as symbolic form will always

haunt us leading to the possibility of new ritual forms of death. He conjectures clones of the future may

well pay for the luxury of dying and become mortal once again in simulation: cyberdeath (VI, 12). A

further possibility is that original humans may desire to Kill your clone, destroy yourself with no risk of

actually dying: vicarious suicide (VI, 27). Where previous generations have suffered alienation, future

generations face an infi nitely worse prospect: the horror of never knowing death (CM5, 55).

Baudrillard often wrote of cancer as a condition caused by cells that forget how to die (VI) and

proliferate wildly, killing the host. With cancer, as with civilisation, the loss of death prefi gures the loss

of life. Developing the theme of double lives and parallel universes in The Intelligence of Evil or The

Lucidity Pact (2005a [2004]), Baudrillard suggests that we have a life of biological existence and a second

life of destiny; the two rarely intersect: Double life entails the notion of double death so that in one ofthese two lives you may already be dead, doubtless without knowing it (LP, 198). Cloning technology

represents a terrible violence because it threatens to eliminate both forms in an absolute death, yet

this perfect crime can never take place because life and death, are symbolic forms, complicit . . .

parallel and indissociable (LP, 200). People original and cloned will fi ght, to the death, for their

death.