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Stefano Borselli
Concerning a delnocian prophecy
THE DIVERGENCE OF '77
Baudrillard-Camatte-Collu Versus Negri-Mieli-Foucault
From Il Covile N°397, Dec 2016.
What is commonly referred to as Del Noce's ‘prophecy’1 concerning the inevitable transformation of Marxism into a radical bourgeois movement is often understood as being attributed to all Marxism. For example, here is how Vittorio Messori summarises an interview with the philosopher, the italics are ours:
“It was very prediable", replied Del Noce to those who asked him about these “prophetic"
virtues of his. “There was really no need to be a soothsayer: having lost the revolutionary
utopia, the essence of religious substitution, along the road, only the fundamental
aspe of Marxism remained: its existence as a produ of the scientific Enlightenment, of a rationalism
that replaces divine intervention with material inevitability. Even ‘European’ communism, therefore, has reversed into its opposite: it wanted to bury
the bourgeoisie but has become one of its most steadfast and essential components.”2
However, the reading of Del Nocian texts demonstrates that the philosopher, well aware of the multitude of Marxist interpretations, did not speak of Marxism in its entirety, but only referred to some of its modifiers and in particular to the so-called Gramscian one, essentially that of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI):
The outcome of Gramscianism and Euro-communism can only be that of transforming communism into a completely deconsecrated component
of bourgeois society, or to ena its definitive desecration in alignment with the profound
intention of the bourgeois spirit. It is not surprising, therefore, that Italian communism today appears to be the most appropriate force to maintain order in a world where
any religion has disappeared; not only the Catholic religion, but all its forms, including
immanent and secular ones; even faith in communism. The sincere dissatisfaion of authentic revolutionaries is justified. Certainly, Gramscian communism can succeed, but it can only achieve the exa opposite of what was proposed.3
We also note how in the passage Del Noce hints at a remnant of “authentic revolutionaries" dissatisfied with a drift that leads to the abandonment of class struggle in the name of the realization of the ancient proje of the Surrealists: the alchemical wedding (via Nietzsche, and contra-nature) between Marx and Sade.
The avant-garde [the surrealists] became aware of what its true position should be...
and did not even consider the communist proposal wrong, but only inadequate; Marxism
had to be completed morally with Sade4 and Freud... 5
And these “dissatisfied” “authentic revolutionaries” were not an abstra possibility, they aually existed. Del Noce knew them and listened to them carefully:
We can translate these theses [by the Marxist, Christian Riechers ]6 in different but equivalent terms: in reality, Gramscian communism effeively carries
out the intentions of the bourgeoisie; It, therefore, has the historical funion of
facilitating the transition from one bourgeois stage to another, one that is marked
by a more oppressive domination.7
Let us first listen to his opponent, Bordiga, who has repeatedly drawn attention to
the fundamental error of having substituted fascism-antifascism for the opposition
capitalism-proletariat. This error has created the myth of fascism as an evil in itself
by raising it, as others have suggested, to a meta-historical category. In his last
interview he said that antifascism had given “historical life to the poisonous monster
of this huge edifice that includes all shades of capitalist exploitation and its beneficiaries,
from the great plutocrats down to the ridiculous ranks of the middle-class, intelleuals
and laity...”8
The Divergence of 1977.
Around 1977 both the tendencies identified by Del Noce, along with refleions on their relations to capital, came to maturity in Marxism. A real fault line was therefore created, a fraure that over time would divide the Marxist Pangaea into two increasingly distant continents.
· Going Full Foucauldian.
Let us take 1977 as the year of reference because it is the year in which Toni Negri was exiled to Paris - in a euphoria reminiscent of Madame Bovary's9 provincial exaltation - and forgetting his youthful operaism, installed himself in the bobo salons,10 which were Foucauldian at the time [, this is from his autobiography]:
I am increasingly moving the centre of my interests to Paris... I start to deepen
my work by studying, this time continuously, both Deleuze (whom I begin to meet) and
Foucault (I am in conta with many of his most dire students, from [François] Ewald
to [Alessandro] Fontana).11
It will be those encounters that will give rise to the “amalgam of ideas”12 that Barbara Carnevali has recently defined as “the Theory”:
A simulacrum of philosophy, the Theory, wanders around departments all over the world. We are not talking about the work
of a particular author since many acclaimed theorists are fully-fledged in this thinking,
nor of the authoritative philosophical school that has claimed the title of Critical
Theory; but of that sort of postmodern scholasticism known to anyone teaching a humanistic
subje at university: an amalgam of ideas and formulas of various disciplinary origins
(mainly philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology), extraed from a canon of disparate
authors but which can be combined in a generic radical posture (Marx, Nietzsche, Lacan,
Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Agamben, Said, Spivak, Butler, Žižek, the omnipresent
Benjamin, the outgoing Derrida, the new entry Latour...), merged into a single crucible
and reduced to a narrow thematic agenda: power, bios, gender, desire and enjoyment,
subje and multitudes, the dominant-dominated couple, capital and speacle, etc.13
The Three Musketeers: Jean Baudrillard, Gianni Collu, Jacques Camatte.
It seemed, then, a common destiny that all Marxism would take the direion prophesied by Del Noce, but the most acute and intuitive among the so-called “authentic revolutionaries” had already sufficiently and clearly understood the situation.
To our knowledge, the first to draw conclusions, as early as 1976, was Jean Baudrilllard, with the succin and dense pages of Forget Foucault:
Whether we discuss the liberation of produive forces, of energies, or of speaking
about sex, it is the same struggle and the same advancement toward an ever more powerful
and differentiated socialization...14
The produion channel leads from work to sex, but only by switching tracks: as we
move from political to ‘libidinal’ economy (the last acquisition of ’68) we change
from a violent and archaic model of socialisation (work) to a more subtle and fluid
model which is at once more ‘psychic’ and more in touch with the body (the sexual
and the libidinal). There is a metamorphosis and a veering away from labour power
to drive (pulsion)...15
Nowadays, one no longer says: “You have a soul and you must save it,” but: “You’ve
got a sexual nature and you must use it well.” ¶ “You’ve got an unconscious, and you
must learn how to liberate it.” ¶ “You’ve got a body, and you must know how to enjoy
it.” ¶ “You’ve got a libido, and you must know how to spend it.” Etc., etc.
This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is
psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exa replica of the force which
rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed points must disappear;
the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly
and in every direion. This is the form itself which the current realization of value
takes. It is the form of capital; and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the
way it appears at the level of bodies.16
Twenty years later, the French thinker scandalized the gauche caviar17 (which since then isolated him like a plague)18 with these intrepid words:
He who lives with the same will perish of the same. The impossibility of exchange,
of reciprocity, of otherness, secretes this other invisible, diabolical, elusive otherness,
this absolute Other that is the [AIDS] virus, itself made of simple elements and of
an infinite recurrence. We are in an incestuous society. And the fa that AIDS first
affeed homosexual or drug-addied environments relates to this incestuousness of
groups that funion in closed circuits.19
But to the left of the fault line there was not only Baudrillard. Toni Negri tells of a certain opposition on the part of [Massimo] Cacciari and the Trontian operaistas prior to his Parisian flirtations.
The translations of Foucault's great historical writings on prisons and madness were
already circulating in Italy: but the transition to a refleion on the method of those
researches and the ascension of Foucault as a political philosopher were still distant.
There was, in that period, a very heavy and bitter attack on the part of Cacciari,
[Alberto] Asor Rosa & Co., who rejeed any reference to Foucauldian thought.20
More than that is not known.21 Certainly, Negri’s resistance here is rather low-key, as if he was suffering a little bellyache [malpancismo] over political doubts.22
Much more explicit (and in strong harmony with Baudrillard) there is Gianni Collu, who after having distanced himself from Giorgio Cesarano23 and his Bataillan turn, in 1977 formulated the situationist offensive of the Letters to Heretics. The book is really hilarious. We quote a passage in which Collu imagines Enrico Berlinguer [General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, 1972-84], an agent of Capital, writing to “Angelo Pezzana, bookseller, radical, founding member of FUORI (Italian Homosexual United Revolutionary Front), specialist in self-consciousness, awareness and the transition from the individual to the colleive":
I allude to the so-called sexual liberation of which so much is blathered-on about
under the press of every flag, without there ever being taken into account that it
progresses not because of the noise and the problematization surrounding it, but because
it is an inevitable effe of the development of capital... All this being said, I
can only regard favourably your struggle for sexual difference, and this approval
is seconded by the orderly anthropomorphization of capitalism. As you well know, capitalism
demands commodities that are always different and always new. And its voracity continues,
today requiring up-to-date human merchandise, which means – in the domain that we
have explored here – the introduion of new models of sexual commodity in the market
of behaviour. ¶ Yes to the valorization of deviancy – any and all deviancy. ¶ Yes
to the unremitting creation of new deviancies. ¶ Continue, comrades, but vigorously.24
A few months later (February 1978) Jacques Camatte wrote Love or Sexual Combinatorics, breaking with Mario Mieli25 and what we today call gender theory:
In the same way, what makes me uncomfortable is not so much the going beyond the man-woman
dyad, and through this, its destruion. What I fear and what troubles me is the fa
that Mr. Mieli's theorization could be an element in founding at this moment the undifferentiation
that capital reserves for us and which leads to the negation of the human... The
genders are exterior to beings, so too are the modalities for uniting them... After
all, it is not only something unique to humans, it is the same for animals. Gender
and instruions for use with their multiple variations are available to women and
men in the hypermarket of love realised by capital. So the buyer only has to program
his or her combinatorics... However, the greatest producer of possibilities is capital
itself, whose motto could be: everything is possible! [...] But how can not procreating,
giving birth or breastfeeding be a positive manifestation? This liberation/emancipation
is a stripping away, a reduion of the human being to a support for various funions
that can be grafted on or manipulated externally...26
Time begins to do justice: the testimony of Bifo:
In those far off years when I lived in Paris we were separated by our belonging to
different cultural environments. Among the people I frequented at the time, for example
in the Centre Initiatives Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté, founded and animated by Felix
Guattari and Giselle Donnard, Baudrillard was the obje of a sort of prohibition of
a political and philosophical nature. ¶ “It is enough to leaf through his booklet
entitled Forget Foucault, published in the mid 70s, to understand the meaning of that separation. Foucauldian
research had revealed the emergence of the intimately disciplinary charaer of modern
social institutions. On the other hand, the philosophical gesture proposed by Deleuze
and Guattari in Anti-Œdipus affirmed that desire27 is the driving force of the real movement that runs through society no less than
the journey of singularity.28
With an equally radical gesture, but of the opposite sign, in his works of those years
(The System of Objes, The Consumer Society, Requiem for the Media, and, finally, Forget Foucault) Baudrillard had argued that desire is the driving force of the development of capital,
and had opened a discourse on the imaginary consistency of the real, on the relationship
between the real and its imagination.29
A Paradox Funeral: Jean Baudrillard's funeral did not take place.
by Aliette Guibert-Certhoux
From Il Covile N°380, March 2007. Excerpts from: La Revue des Ressources, March, 2007.
From now on, Mr Finkielkraut30 has my full respe. I have always wondered about the intelleual singularity of Alain Finkielkraut, a progressive philosopher who became a reaionary media personality in the expression of his tastes and the orderly solutions he proposes on the waves of Radio France or in the press. But at the same time, he invited Baudrillard onto his radio show to defend himself when the latter was wrongly accused of anti-Semitism, a malicious interpretation derived from his reversible theses on Islam. I thought to myself that he must have been particularly masochistic because anyone who knows Jean Baudrillard at all, or his works, knows that his thought cannot be tamed, but only defended or rejeed.
In short, I didn't really know what to think of Alain Finkielkraut, nor what the purpose of his public philosophising is... Now I do: Alain Finkielkraut is an indispensable man. Here are the circumstances and the fas.
The tomb of Jean Baudrillard is in the 8th division of the Montparnasse cemetery, the name of the distri of Paris where he lived. He was buried on Tuesday 13 March in a most stripped-down ceremony; which would have been no surprise to him and was not so for his wife who, at the end of her strength, made sure that no condolences would be offered - so “Baudrillard's funeral did not take place!" aptly remarked the philosopher René Schérer, turning to the filmmaker Vincent Dieutre, who was among the audience who had come to pay their last respes, and adding, “... And so much the better. Now he will live".
Of Jean Baudrillard, his mischievous and serious radiance illuminated the day through the numerous presence of his faithful friends, his respeful fans (in far greater numbers than one might have expeed), intelleuals with whom he had no special relations, old students of Nanterre with greyed hair, young men and young women, and also numerous personalities, all there to pay homage. Among them the Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, caught off guard by so much international attention for a delocalised French philosopher (who had not passed through the Collège de France), as suddenly revealed to the official eyes of the nation by the noise of tributes in the foreign press.
A sincere minister when he confessed his personal dismay at never having met him and even more... doubly lacking according to his own admission, in concluding his short speech (which had mainly consisted of a distraught incantation calling for the return of the avant-garde), with: “I would have liked to speak with Jean Baudrillard... Now I have to read him.”
Not only had he not met him, but he hadn't read anything. It was proof that the Minister of Culture felt he was in an understanding environment, being able to confide such a thing without being resented (because he was given no importance – which he sensed correly).
This is not the only paradox of the truths unveiled for the public by this ceremony, for suddenly we were listening to Alain Finkielkraut (we were surprised that he was there, but what he said allowed us to understand afterwards that it was the Gods who had sent him). He declared that not a day went by without reading a passage by Jean Baudrillard, of whom he always kept an open book on his desk... But on the other hand (suddenly adopting an impatient and then excited tone), frequenting Jean Baudrillard's thoughts posed a serious personal problem for him, because... “The system of objes, America, the suburban uprisings, September 11th, Islam ablaze, our cities infested with graffiti... NO!"
Which adds up to a lot and makes Finkielkraut’s attraion for Baudrillard all the more unfathomable.
Then spoke Jacques Donzelot who, together with Baudrillard, was an accomplice in aivism at the University of Nanterre during the March 22nd movement in 1968. He declared, in order to bring the devil out of the holy font (as they used to say in the French countryside), that during a recent conversation about democracy between himself, Jean and Jean’s wife [Marine], (herself a former student in Nanterre), Jean’s wife asked a question... as Donzelot was not speaking very loudly, I did not hear all the story clearly, but what I did hear (and there are several of us who heard it), was this: “Jean, are you a democrat?" To which the latter replied, “That's not a question you ask a man you love."
What was she thinking, Marine, on that dreamy day, to forget America 31, she who knows the work so well (and which never seemed to take her by surprise)? Or perhaps, in the mutual space their love occupied she rediscovered the world of her enigmatic companion anew each day, until the last breath.
Although Jacques Donzelot succeeded in drawing us out of the general sadness, the fa remains that it was Alain Finkielkraut who reminded us of Jean Baudrillard’s solidarity with those in revolt and the fa that, following the failure of the revolutionary proje, he never abandoned the sharing with us of his concept of critical reversibility.32 Well, that's it, it was the reaionary Alain Finkielkraut who said it. Thanks to him, the Baudrillard who takes a stand against oppression in all its forms emerges forever from the shadows, all ambiguity is removed. Thank you. (How true that it takes all sorts to make a world!)
A little further on, at the entrance to the cemetery, towards the Avenue Edgar Quinet, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir watch over from one side with Roland Topor33 on the other, among the tombs that are at the heart of our eleive modernity and post-modernity, including that of Charles Baudelaire.
Curiously, it was one of the most polluted days of the season in Paris, though it was mild and sunny, and there was a prohibition on using motor vehicles during working hours, but parking had been declared free throughout the city. So, after the ceremony no one could help but linger at the pavement cafes, evoking memories... There were those who anticipated their lunch with a glass of wine and those who completed their interrupted breakfasts with toast and a tea, since the burial had taken place at 10 a.m. sharp, which was early for those who had come a long way.
When I returned home after the friendly reunion around Jean's burial a malevolent feedback put a strain on my energy. Rather than dozing off in front of my computer screen, I lay on my bed, rattled, exhausted, unable to sleep at all, remaining under the effe of a waking dream, until night...
It's over - but it all begins.
Jean Baudrillard's funeral was a pataphysical event. He would have liked that.
At least he will live on with his work, so many important people have not yet read it, and the others, who reread without interruption, still have to be content to have their understanding postponed. Jean, our brilliant and strange friend. Harsh and gentle.
Aliette Guibert-Certhoux
1 [Translators Note: For a useful overview see an article from 2019, by Carlo Lancellotti. The article quotes Augusto Del Noce from 1968: “a society [is created] that accepts all of Marxism’s negations against contemplative thought, religion, and metaphysics; that accepts, therefore, the Marxist reduion of ideas to instruments of produion. But which, on the other hand, rejes the revolutionary-messianic aspes of Marxism, and thus all the religious elements that remain within the revolutionary idea. In this regard, it truly represents the bourgeois spirit in its pure state, the bourgeois spirit triumphant over its two traditional adversaries, transcendent religion and revolutionary thought.” Lancellotti concludes: “the Marxist dream of a revolutionary catharsis had transmogrified into a bourgeois utopia of liberation from sexual repression and the shackles of traditional morality.”]
2 Vittorio Messori, “Augusto Del Noce: la ‘catastrofe’ della modernità,” in Pensare la storia, San Paolo, Milano 1992, p. 667.
3 Augusto Del Noce, Il Suicidio della Rivoluzione, Rusconi, 1978, p. 321, pp. 333–334. Notes omitted. Our italics.
4 On this theme: Riccardo De Benedetti, La chiesa di Sade. Una devozione moderna, Medusa, Milano 2008.
5 Augusto Del Noce, ‘L’Erotismo alla Conquista della Società.’ in Rivoluzione, Risorgimento, tradizione, ed. Giuffrè, Milano 1993, p. 79.
6 [TN: The historian, Christian Riechers, in books such as Antonio Gramsci: Marxism in Italy (1970), investigated how Gramsci, who became a cult figure in Italy in the 1960s, turned Italian Marxism toward allegiance to the Comintern (i.e., The Third International, 1919-1943, controlled by the Soviet Union). Gramsci even initiated the Comintern’s policy of national Marxism, against the opposition of internationalist left Marxists such as Amadeo Bordiga who were eventually marginalised to the extent that they only continued to exist weakly as “the theoretical conscience of revolutionary Marxism.” In 1924, long before the Comintern sanioned the strategy of popular fronts against fascism (mid 1930’s), Gramsci attempted to organise a political/military block, including elements of the bourgeoisie, against Mussolini to restore parliamentary democracy, since he believed that a democratic situation was more favourable to proletarian revolution. This, according to Bordiga, was another of Gramsci’s errors. ¶ Reicher’s work appears unavailable in English, for part of his dissertation, from which I have quoted, see https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com 2020/05/23.]
7 Augusto Del Noce, Il Suicidio…, cit., p. 321.
8 Ibidem, p. 322.
9 This was discuseed in Covile № 886, February 2016.
10 [TN: ‘bobo’ is a disparaging term referring to someone who leads a bourgeois lifestyle while espousing bohemian values.]
11 Toni Negri, Storia di un comunista, edited by Girolamo De Michele, Ponte alle Grazie, Milano 2015, p. 587. [TN: for a fascinating history of Ewald and the trajeory of Foucauldian thought see: ‘Accidents Happen’ by Michael Behrent, 2010.]
12 But we would also say this for people, careers and interests.
13 Barbara Carnevali, “Contro la Theory. Una provocazione,” in Le parole e le cose, 19 settembre 2016. [TN: “Theory is swift, voracious and cutting-edge...” enabling users to “find a colleion of prêt-à-porter ideas with which to fill university papers quickly and superficially,” from the same article.]
14 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 1977 (2007), Nicole Dufresne (trans.), Semiotexte p36.
15 Ibidem, p37.
16 Ibidem, pp39-40. [TN: this formulation, as we will see below in the remarks by Bifo, is the same as the Deleuzian concept of ‘desire,’ but operates in the reverse direion: for Baudrillard ‘desire’ is a funion of the development of capital. Baudrillard continues: “This is the nature of desire and the unconscious: the trash heap of political economy and the psychic metaphor of capital. And sexual jurisdiion is the ideal means, in a fantastic extension of the jurisdiion governing private property, for assigning to each individual the management of a certain capital: psychic capital, libidinal capital, sexual capital, unconscious capital. And each individual will be accountable to himself [sic, et al] for his capital, under the sign of his own liberation.” Forget Foucault, p. 40.]
17 [TN: A derogatory French term roughly equivalent to ‘champagne socialist.’]
18 As we will see below, Franco Berardi (Bifo), who prudently waited for his death to reveal his hidden sympathies, laid a veil of modesty over the matter, talking about "a sort of prohibition," but it was a cowardly and violent lynching that accompanied Baudrillard to the end. In Italy, at that time, only Il Covile reported the funeral and the fa that the oration was given by Alain Finkielkraut. [TN: In the obituary from Le Monde Baudrillard was described as “an unclassifiable thinker, who has become suspe on the left.” An intelligent overview of responses to Baudrillard can be found in Madelena Gonzalez’s article, ‘The Reception and Perception of Jean Baudrillard in France,’ French Cultural Studies, 19(3): 287–303, Sage, 2008.]
19 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Le Sida: virulence ou prophylaxie?’ in Écran total, 1997, Galilee, our translation. [TN: In the same article from 1987 Baudrillard writes: “If AIDS, terrorism, economic collapse and eleronic viruses are concerns not just for the police, medecin, science and the experst, but for the entire colleive imagination, this is because there is more to them than being mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effe, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one.” J. Baudrillard, Screened Out, Chris Turner (trans.), Verso, 2002. p6 (first published as Ecran total, Editions Galillee, 2000.) This was written 33 years before the 2020 pandemic.]
20 Toni Negri, Storia…, cit. p. 522.
21 Massimo Cacciari, whom we asked for an interview for his version of that clash, kindly replied: “I do not understand the topic you wish to confront here.” The path, during this era, of the Althusserians Costanzo Preve and Gianfranco La Grassa might also be worth investigating.
22 It will be necessary to arrive at 2015 to read more explicit words by Mario Tronti: "The workers' movement took the wrong road when it followed the Marx who was the apologist of the bourgeoisie, and guessed the corre road when it followed the Marx who was the critic of political economy. [...] Marx, who saw the terrible power of capital like no other, did not see that the destiny of the Modern had now become indissolubly identified with the history of capital.” Mario Tronti, Of the free spirit. Fragments of life and thought, Il Saggiatore, 2015, pp. 18-20.
23 [TN: Collu, Cesarano, and, of course, Jacques Camatte, were associated with the journal Invariance in the 1960s and ‘70s.]
24 (Fake author) Enrico Berlinguer, Letters to Heretics, Correspondence with the leaders of the new Italian left, (fake publisher) Einaudi, 1977. The text [TN: a satirical work first attributed to the head of the PCI, Berlinguer] was then attributed to Pier Franco Ghisleni. The thesis, which convinces us, of Collu's decisive involvement, was put forward by his closest friends and collaborators. [TN: Letters to Heretics can be found on the NOT BORED! website. The translation here of the quotes is modified with use of the NOT BORED! translation.]
25 [TN: Mieli and Pezzana were both involved in the founding of FUORI.]
26 Jacques Camatte, ‘Amour ou combinatoire sexuelle,’ on the site Revue Invariance.
27 [TN: “‘Desire’ is one of the central terms in Deleuze’s philosophical lexicon. In his work with Guattari, Deleuze develops a definition of desire as positive and produive that supports the conception of life as material flows.” Alison Ross, ‘Desire,’ in The Deleuze Diionary, Revised Edition, Adrian Parr (ed.), Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p 66. Bifo elborates: “Desire is not a force but a field. It is the force where an intense struggle takes place or, better, an entangled network of different and confliing forces. Desire is not a good boy, nor the positive force of history. Desire is the psychological field where imaginary flows, ideologies and economic interests are clashing. To give an example, there is a Nazi form of desire. ¶ “The field of desire is central in history, since within such a field forces that are crucial for the formation of the colleive mind, and therefore for the main axes of social progress, meet through juxtaposition and confli.” Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Soul at Work, 2009, F. Cadel and G. Mecchia (trans.), Semiotext(e), p. 118. ¶ Compare with this from Baudrillard: “Only the subje desires; only the obje seduces… Everything comes from the obje and everything returns to it, just as everything started with seduion, not with desire. The immemorial privilege of the subje is overthrown. For the subje is fragile and can only desire, whereas the obje gets on very well even when desire is absent; the obje seduces through the absence of desire; it plays on the other with the effe of desire, provoking or annulling it, exalting and deceiving it – precisely the power that we’ve wanted or preferred to forget.” Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, (1983) 2008, P. Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (tans.), Semiotext(e), pp. 141-2.]
28 [TN: Singularity, in Deleuze’s terms, is difficult to define absolutely: it is an event; a rupture; a concept; an fluid insularity; a moment when the infinite and infinitesimal is mirrored in, for example perhaps, a grain of sand. It is also always a starting point, from the Diionary again: “singularity shifts and bears different infleions in different contexts but is always related to perception, subjeivity, affeivity and creation,” Tom Conley, p. 256.]
29 Bifo (Franco Berardi), In memoria di Jean Baudrillard, 19 marzo 2007.
30 A reaionary bête noire for the bobos.
31 [TN: From America: “This is the surprise democracy had in store for us: equality is at the beginning, not at the end. That is the difference between egalitarianism and democracy: democracy presupposes equality at the outset, egalitarianism presupposes it at the end. [Quoting the American humourist, Roger Price:] ‘Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.’” Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner [trans.], Verso, 1988, p. 91.]
32 [TN: For an exploration of Baudrillard’s concept of reversibility see Jerry Coulter’s article in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.]
33 [TN: Roland Topor was a French humourist known for works in different media of a macabre and post-surrealist nature.]
Wehrlos, doch in nichts vernichtet
Inerme, ma in niente annientato
(Der christliche Epimetheus
Konrad Weiß)
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