The image of dark academe is that of a rotting cadaver. It is depicted in the epigraph to this book, which comes from the chapter of Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation) entitled “The Spiraling Cadaver.” Here Baudrillard briefly directs his theses on life, death, and the death drive toward the university. As we shall see, according to him, not only do life and death undermine capitalism, but once the symbolic enters the systems of capital, catastrophe is unavoidable. In terms of higher education, this catastrophe entails the death of the university, which will be the topic of this chapter.

“The university is in ruins,” writes Baudrillard, “nonfunctional in the social areas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge.”Footnote 1 “Power,” he continues,

(or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select—it will find its elite elsewhere, or by another means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order to crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on an already dead and rotting referential?Footnote 2

For him, the rotting of the cadaver of the university must be regarded as a model of decomposition of the whole of society. Thus, rather than trying to raise the university from the dead by trying to give diplomas value or ending its surveillance, we need to look to the death of the university to better understand “the death of capital,” which he says “has made us.”Footnote 3

In order to explain what Baudrillard means by the death of the university and the death of capital, it is necessary to examine his theses on death and the death drive. As we shall see, these theses are in large measure derived from his critique of Freud’s pioneering work on the death drive, which Baudrillard regards as constituting a decisive break from Western thought. By turning Freud against himself and “radicalizing” him, Baudrillard produces a form of anti-economics that undermines the foundations of capitalism—and with it, neoliberalism and the university. Thus, as we shall see, dark academe for Baudrillard is a fatal consequence of the turning loose of the death drive on the system of capital.

Death and Symbolic Exchange

A few years before his comments on the death of the university, Baudrillard published Symbolic Exchange and Death (L’échange symbolique et la mort), where he challenged Marxist theoretical tradition by favoring symbolic exchange over economic exchange. For Baudrillard, the symbolic exchange of pre-capitalist societies is much less limited than the economic exchange of capitalist and socialist societies. Rather than emphasizing the values of utility, production, and instrumental rationality, Baudrillard instead argues that we should look to the values of giving, expenditure, and sacrifice. In part, these latter values are derived from the anthropology of George Bataille, which Baudrillard argues posits an alternative form of economy that replaces the capitalist imperatives of labor, savings, and utility with ones derived from the pleasure humans find in things such as waste, sacrifices, expenditure, and festivities. Through Bataille, Baudrillard comes to view humans as characterized by an excess of drives, needs, fantasies, energies, and desires, which is a way very different from the one envisioned by Freud and psychoanalysis.

Nevertheless, if Bataille can be described as a direct route to Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange, then Freud along with Ferdinand de Saussure and Marcel Mauss are each indirect—albeit equally important—routes. I say this because whereas the symbolic exchange aspects of Bataille’s thought are directly cited and utilized by Baudrillard, those of Freud, Saussure, and Mauss only bolster his theory of symbolic exchange when the respective theories from these thinkers are deconstructed and, thereby, “radicalized.” In the case of Freud, it is his theory of the death drive; in the case of Saussure, it is his theory of the anagram; and in the case of Mauss, it is his theory of the gift. “Indeed,” writes Baudrillard, “we must switch the targets of each of these three theories, and turn Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against Saussure and Freud against Freud.”Footnote 4 Specifically, in the case of Mauss, his notion of the “gift” must be subjected to “the principle of reversibility.” Then, the resultant “counter-gift,” writes Baudrillard, “must be imposed against all of the economistic, psychologistic and structuralist interpretations for which Mauss paved the way.”Footnote 5 For Saussure, his linguistics must be set against his work on anagrams including his “restricted hypotheses concerning the anagram.”Footnote 6 Finally, in the case of Freud, his “death drive must be pitched against every previous psychoanalytic edifice, and even against Freud’s version of the death drive.”Footnote 7

Baudrillard contends that by subjecting key hypotheses in the work of Mauss, Saussure, and Freud to “paradox and theoretical violence,” we find that these “hypotheses describe, in their own respective fields … a functional principle sovereignly outside and antagonistic to our economic ‘reality principle.’”Footnote 8 Thus, not only are the economic foundations of traditional Marxism including capitalism and socialism dismantled through the “reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram,”Footnote 9 but so too are the respective theoretical foundations of the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. In the wake of the dismantlement, radicalization, and deconstruction of these domains, the form of the symbolic is “inevitably” revealed. It is a form that is “[n]either mystical nor structural,” but rather “assumes the form of extermination and death.”Footnote 10

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard pushes things such as death to the limit. By doing so, he contends, they “quite naturally … collapse and are inverted.”Footnote 11 In the case of death, its form is inevitably revealed in economics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology. However, it soon becomes apparent in Symbolic Exchange and Death that Baudrillard’s conception of death is very different than that of not only Freud in particular but also Western thought in general. “Death,” writes Baudrillard, “ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body.”Footnote 12 Rather, death ought to be understood “as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost.”Footnote 13 The reversibility that is inevitably revealed by playing death against death ends both death’s determinacy and indeterminacy. It also ends, he contends, “bound energies in stable oppositions, and is therefore in substantial agreement with theories of flows and intensities, whether libidinal or schizo.”Footnote 14

For Baudrillard, the unbinding of “energies,” which is the inevitable consequence of practicing reversibility, results in “the impossibility of distinguishing libidinal economy from the political economy of the system of value; and the impossibility of distinguishing capitalist schizzes from revolutionary schizzes.”Footnote 15 In this regard, the former impossibility has parallels to the work of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (Economie Libidinale), published two years before Symbolic Exchange and Death, and the latter impossibility has parallels to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (L’Anti-Oedipe), published four years earlier. But here’s the rub for Baudrillard: while “the system is master [and] like God it can bind or unbind energies,” it is still not capable of reversibility—and “can no longer avoid” it.Footnote 16 “Reversibility alone therefore, rather than unbinding or drifting,” concludes Baudrillard, “is fatal to it.”Footnote 17 For him, the fatality of reversibility is “exactly what the term symbolic ‘exchange’ means.”Footnote 18

In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to focus on the reversibility of Freud, which for Baudrillard means that the “Freud of the death drive must be pitched against every previous psychoanalytic edifice, and even against Freud’s version of the death drive.”Footnote 19 While the reversibility of Freud is significant as one of several fatal reversibilities that work in tandem in Symbolic Exchange and Death to undermine the notion of economic exchange, this is not the only reason it is worth a closer look. It is also significant because it presents a hypothesis regarding death after the death drive, which, in turn, can provide a portrait of the death of the university after the death drive. And while this hypothesis contains aspects of subsequent biopolitical and thanatopolitical speculation, it also points to a very different possible approach to work in these areas—one that I believe has been largely ignored because Baudrillard’s theses on death after the death drive in Symbolic Exchange and Death have not been seriously and extensively engaged or discussed.

Part of the reason for this is simple: a biopolitical or thanatopolitical Baudrillard does not fit the image of him in the English-speaking world, where he is heralded and read as one of the major theorists of postmodernity.Footnote 20 Moreover, as Baudrillard himself says, the arguments made in Symbolic Exchange and Death have never really been taken seriously, including the ones regarding death.Footnote 21 As evidence for this in the English-speaking world, where his work is generally engaged much more seriously than in the French-speaking world, consider that Symbolic Exchange and Death would not be available in English in its entirety until 1993, which is nearly two decades after its original publication in 1976. By this time, Baudrillard’s image as a postmodern provocateur was firmly in place, and being further solidified by the publication of controversial books at the time such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas en lieu), which was published in 1991.

Moreover, the little that was published in English prior to 1993 omitted his extensive arguments about death and focused instead on his statements regarding the end of production and the order of simulacra. The first selection from Symbolic Exchange and Death in English was published in 1983 in the Semiotext(e) volume, Simulations, and included the majority of Chapter 2, “The Order of Simulacra,”Footnote 22 along with the entirety of the first chapter of his 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation), which is entitled “The Precession of Simulacra.”Footnote 23 The second selection from Symbolic Exchange and Death was published in 1984 in the edited volume, The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought, edited by John Fekete, under the title “The Structural Law of Value and the Order of Simulacra.” It included the book’s “Preface,” and brief selections from Chapter 1, “The End of Production,” and Chapter 2, “The Order of Simulacra.”Footnote 24 This, in turn, was reprinted verbatim in 1988 in another volume, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, albeit with a new title, “Symbolic Exchange and Death.” Then, a few years later, in 1990, a new selection from and translation of Chapter 1, “The End of Production,”Footnote 25 was published in Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968–1983, edited by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis.

In short, these were the only selections from Symbolic Exchange and Death available to English readers from 1976 to 1993. For the most part, they conform to the image of Baudrillard as a postmodern theorist who is especially adept at articulating two of the features attributed to postmodernism by Fredric Jameson: flatness and depthlessness. For Jameson, the postmodernism effects a kind of superficiality or flatness that resists interpretation, that is, is an anti-hermeneutic. Moreover, it effects a kind of addiction to the image or reproduction without a model or referent in the real, which is, in short, the logic of Baudrillard’s simulacra.Footnote 26 What is missing though from these selections from Symbolic Exchange and Death is Baudrillard’s extensive commentary on death, the dead, and the death drive, which arguably is his most lasting philosophical contribution. Nevertheless, it is a vision that not only goes against the grain of most Western thought in this area but also contra to the position that the future of the university is located in one form or another of economic exchange.

Birth of the Death Drive

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was first published in 1920, Freud introduces the death instinct. “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the goal of all life is death,” writes Freud, “and, looking backwards, that ‘what was inanimate existed before what is living.’”Footnote 27 He would later formally link the “life instinct” (Eros) to the “death instinct” (Thanatos). Together, they are the only basic instincts. “The aim of the first of these basic instincts,” he writes twenty years later in An Outline of Psychoanalysis [1940], “is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus—in short, to bind together; the aim of the second, on the contrary, is to undo connections and so to destroy things.”Footnote 28

For Freud, “the final aim of the destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state.”Footnote 29 Along with these two primal forces is the “pleasure principle,” which Freud describes as “a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible.”Footnote 30 As to whether the pleasure principle “requires a reduction, or perhaps ultimately the extinction, of the tension of the instinctual needs (i.e., a state of Nirvana) leads to problems that are still [as of 1940] unexamined in the relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct.”Footnote 31

In 1933, he published his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which were meant to supplement his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis that were delivered in successive Winter Terms in 1915–1916 and 1916–1917. These later dates are important as they indicate a time period prior to the establishment of his theory of the death instinct. Therefore, one of the functions of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is to “introduce entirely new material and theories,” which in the case of his new introductory lecture on his theory of instincts requires him to, as James Strachey says, “plunge into theoretical and metapsychological discussions of a difficulty which had been studiously avoided fifteen years earlier.”Footnote 32

In the new introductory lecture entitled “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” Freud associates instincts such as the death drive with mythology:

The theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.Footnote 33

He also says that in both the realm of mental life and the realm of vegetative life, the instincts reveal a compulsion to repeat:

The instincts rule not only mental but also vegetative life, and these organic instincts exhibit a characteristic which deserves our deepest interest. … For they reveal an effort to restore an earlier state of things. We may suppose that from the moment at which a state of things that has once been attained is upset, an instinct arises to create it afresh and brings about phenomena which we can describe as a “compulsion to repeat.”Footnote 34

Thus, for Freud, examples of the instinctual compulsion to repeat include “the whole of embryology,” “[t]he spawning migrations of fishes, [and] the migratory flights of birds.”Footnote 35 Moreover, for him, it is possible that “all that we describe as manifestations of instinct in animals, take place under the orders of the compulsion to repeat, which expresses the conservative nature of the instincts.”Footnote 36

The latter point, that is, the conservative nature of the instincts, coupled with the compulsion to repeat is important to Freud because he believes that it helps us to understand the death drive. Specifically, it helps us to understand what it is that the death instinct wants to restore. In “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” he writes,

If it is true that—at some immeasurably remote time and in a manner we cannot conceive—life once proceeded out of inorganic matter, then, according to our presumption, an instinct must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to reestablish the inorganic state. If we recognize in this instinct the self-destructiveness of our hypothesis, we may regard the self-destructiveness as an expression of a “death instinct” which cannot fail to be present in every vital process. And now the instincts that we believe in divide themselves into two groups—the erotic instincts, which seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities, and the death instincts, which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state. From the concurrent and opposing action of these two proceed the phenomena of life which are brought to an end by death.Footnote 37

While one might be led to believe that Freud is arguing like Arthur Schopenhauer that the only aim of life is death, he does not believe this to be the case. Rather, in his defense, he says “there is life as well as death.”Footnote 38 For Freud, both instincts have their own aim. Nevertheless, at this relatively late point in his work (1933), Freud concedes that he is not sure how the life instinct and the death instinct are “mingled in the process of living.”Footnote 39 In other words, for Freud it is still to be determined “how the death instinct is made to serve the purposes of Eros, especially by being turned outwards as aggressiveness.”Footnote 40 At this point, Freud seems content with the conclusion that his work on the death drive has “confirmed by sober and detailed research”Footnote 41 not natural science, but rather the philosophy of Schopenhauer. He also appears content to leave it to others to sort out how the process of living mingles with our two basic instincts: the death drive and the life drive. It is here, over forty years later, that Baudrillard seeks to complete Freud’s research agenda for the death drive by thinking through some of the implications and paradoxes of Freud’s work on life and death.

The Dialectics of Death

For Baudrillard, Freud’s death drive is a decisive break from Western thought from “Christianity to Marxism and existentialism,” wherein death is either “openly denied and sublimated, or it is dialectized.”Footnote 42 Briefly, then, a note or two on each of these areas of Western thought as viewed by Baudrillard:

Christianity—in the case of Christianity, it was from the start, according to Baudrillard, “established on the bipartition of survival, or the afterlife, from life, the earthly world and the Kingdom of Heaven,” and the power of the Church was “based on the management of the imaginary sphere of death.”Footnote 43

Marxism—in the case of Marxism, death was either “integrated as historical negativity or conquered in the being of class.”Footnote 44 More generally speaking, writes Baudrillard, “the whole Western practice of the domination of nature and the sublimation of aggression in production and accumulation is characterized as constructive Eros: Eros makes use of sublimated aggression for its own ends and, in the movement of becoming … death is distilled as negativity into homeopathic doses.”Footnote 45

Existentialism—in the case of existentialism, Martin Heidegger, for example, speaks of “Authentic being-towards-death—which is to say, the finitude of temporality—is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.”Footnote 46 According to Baudrillard, the notion of death as authenticity brings with it “a relation to a system that is itself mortifying, a vertiginous escalation, a challenge which is in fact a profound obedience.”Footnote 47 Nevertheless, for Baudrillard, the “terrorism of authenticity through death remains a secondary process in that, by means of dialectical acrobatics, consciousness recuperates its ‘finitude’ as destiny.”Footnote 48 Thus, in the existentialist notions of the “anguish of death as a test of truth” and “human life as being-towards-death,” Baudrillard locates a complicated dialectics of death, which he finds “extremely Christian” and “constantly mixed up with “existential Christianity.”Footnote 49

Additionally, even revolutionary Western thought is characterized by a dialectics of death and the abolition of death. Revolutionary Western thought, writes Baudrillard, “oscillates between the dialecticisation of death and the rationalist objective of the abolition of death: to put an end to it as a ‘reactionary’ obstacle in solidarity with capital, with the help of science and technics, en route to the immortality of generic man, beyond history, in communism.”Footnote 50 “Death,” he continues, “like so many other things, is only a superstructure, whose exit will be governed by the revolution of the infrastructure.”Footnote 51

In contrast, however, Freud’s death drive for Baudrillard presents a notion of death radically different from its Christian, Marxist, existentialist, and revolutionary forms. Specifically, it is a notion of death with neither a dialectic, sublimation, nor denial. These three points are important to Baudrillard as they are used to differentiate Freud’s notion of death as a principle that is indestructible and is in opposition to Eros from the notions of death in previous Western thought. Moreover, Freud’s indestructible death principle is one wherein the notions of class, subject, and history are not relevant. Nevertheless, for Baudrillard, Freud’s death drive still has a well-known precursor in ancient thought that begs to be explained away in view of the thesis that the death drive marks a profound break from Christianity and Western metaphysics.

This ancient precursor is Manichaeism, a religion that originated in the Babylonia in the third century of the common era. Manichaeism generally contends that the framework of world conflict and redemption hinges on the opposition of good and evil, which are identified as light and darkness. Manichaeism spread from the Middle East to both Britain and China, and was once one of most popular religions in the world. Nevertheless, all of the major religions at the time, including Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, regarded Manichaeism a heresy.

For Baudrillard, the duality of the Eros and Thanatos drives in Freud “reawakens the ancient Manichean version of the world, the endless antagonism of the twin principles of good and evil.”Footnote 52 But as Baudrillard points out, Manichaeism “was unbearable to the Church, who will take centuries to exterminate it and impose the pre-eminent principle of the Good (God), reducing evil and death to a negative principle, dialectically subordinate to the other (the Devil).”Footnote 53 By reawakening this ancient dualism in the death drive, Freud is also reawakening “the nightmare of Lucifer’s autonomy, the Archangel of Evil,”Footnote 54 which includes forms such as black magic, Jansenist theory, and the Cathars. In short, for Baudrillard, associating the death drive with the dualisms of Manichaeism is tantamount to disassociating it from the Church, Christianity, Western metaphysics, and the dialectic, which here includes dialectical materialism.

This reawaking of the Manichaean dualities is most evident for Baudrillard in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where neither the drives of Thanatos nor Eros dominates each other. It is in this early work by Freud on the death drive where its Manichaeism is in most direct evidence. In later work, such as Civilization and Its Discontents from 1929, Baudrillard argues that the death drive comes to subordinate the life drive. In this work, the duality of Eros and Thanatos “completes itself in a cycle dominated solely by the death drive.”Footnote 55 “Eros,” argues Baudrillard, “is nothing but an immense detour taken by culture towards death, which subordinates everything to its own ends.”Footnote 56 Still, this later version of the duality of life and death is not one that reverts to an inverted dialectic between life and death. Why? Because the aim of Eros, as stated earlier in the passage from An Outline of Psychoanalysis, “is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus—in short, to bind together,” which is directly opposed to the aim of the death drive, which “is to undo connections and so to destroy things.”Footnote 57 Thus, for Baudrillard, the death drive through a repetitive cycle dismantles “the constructive, linear or dialectical finalities of Eros,” which is ultimately a victory for “the viscosity of the death drive and the elasticity of the inorganic” over the resistance against it asserted by the “structuration of life.”Footnote 58

On the one hand, for Baudrillard, disassociating the death drive with the Church, Christianity, Western metaphysics, and dialectics is just to assert one sense of its radicality. And, to be sure, Symbolic Exchange and Death articulates this sense of Freud’s radicality very well. On the other hand, this particular sense of radicality is not the one that Baudrillard utilizes in his own notion of death. Rather, it is another one, namely, the sense of radicality that comes by way of application of the principle of reversibility, which as noted earlier involves not turning Freud against Western thought, but rather pitting Freud against Freud. Thus, for Baudrillard, “the death drive must be interpreted against Freud and psychoanalysis if we wish to retain its radicality.”Footnote 59 Let’s now turn to some of the ways in which Baudrillard turns Freud against Freud in order to retain the radicality of the death drive—a radicality that Baudrillard seems to believe has been diminished or lost over the course of the half century between the publication of Symbolic Exchange and Death in 1976 and Freud’s introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920.

Radicalizing Death

For Baudrillard, both the duality of the drives associated with Eros and Thanatos, and the counter-finality repetition of the death drive in dismantling the finalities of Eros, are indicative of an aspect of Freud’s thought that cannot be reduced to any of the “intellectual apparatuses” found in Western thought. In a way, if Baudrillard concluded his commentary on Freud’s death drive here, it would be sufficient to demonstrate the radicality of his work with respect to his intellectual predecessors. But this is not enough for Baudrillard as he insists that based on its dissociation and irreducibility to any of the intellectual apparatuses of Western thought, it is “absurd to give [Freud’s death drive] the constructive status of ‘truth’: the ‘reality’ of the death instinct is indefensible.”Footnote 60 Given then that the status of “truth” cannot be conferred on the death drive, and that the death drive does not allow for any type of dialectical recovery, Baudrillard wonders if in the final analysis the death drive in Freud is only a rationalization of death.

Nevertheless, for Baudrillard, there still must be some way “to remain faithful to the intuition of the death drive.”Footnote 61 He contends that the only way to do this is by allowing the death drive “to remain a deconstructive hypothesis, that is, it must be adopted solely within the limits of the deconstruction that it carries out on all prior thought.”Footnote 62 Moreover, according to Baudrillard, the concept death drive holds no special status that makes it immune to deconstruction, that is, no special status “other than as the ultimate subterfuge of reason.”Footnote 63 Therefore, the principle of deconstruction must also be applied to the very concept of the death drive. So, in short, the further radicality of Freud’s work can only be ascertained by deconstructing the very concept of the death drive, which is exactly what Baudrillard does in Symbolic Exchange and Death.

Baudrillard proceeds with this “deconstruction” by pointing to the tension in Freud between speaking of the death drive as both a speculative hypothesis and a positivist fact. Freud’s positivism is on view for Baudrillard in statements from Beyond the Pleasure Principle such as one that was cited earlier, where he says, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the goal of all life is death,’ and, looking backwards, that ‘what was inanimate existed before what is living.’”Footnote 64 Elsewhere, however, in the same work, the notion of the death drive as a speculative hypotheses or rationalization regarding death is also offered by Freud:

The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the “Nirvana principle,” to borrow a term from Barbara Low [Psycho-Analysis, 1920])—a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of the fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.Footnote 65

These two passages from Freud are indicative for Baudrillard of the difficulty of eliminating positivism from the death drive “in order to turn it into a ‘speculative hypothesis’ or ‘purely and simply a principle of psychical functioning.’”Footnote 66 Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, in both of these passages, that is, the more positivistic one and the more speculative one, “death alone is finality.”Footnote 67

It is here, at the point where the duality of Eros and Thanatos is overcome by the finality of death, that Baudrillard adds another layer to Freud against Freud: if the first layer involves pitting the positivist Freud against the speculative Freud, then the second layer pits the scientific Freud against the mythologizing Freud. Regarding this second layer, Baudrillard contends that if only death is finality, then this also brings with it “death as anterior, as psychical and organic destiny, almost like programming or genetic code, in short, as a positivity that, unless we believe in the scientific reality of this pulsion [or drive], we can only take it as a myth.”Footnote 68 Regarding the latter, recall that it was noted earlier that in “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” Freud associates instincts such as the death drive with mythology. “The theory of instincts,” he says, “is so to say our mythology.”Footnote 69 “Instincts,” he continues, “are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness.”Footnote 70

Now that the organic destiny of death and scientific reality of the death drive in Freud have been put to the side for a moment, Baudrillard speculates on what it means to regard the death drive as a myth:

If the death drive is a myth, then this is how we will interpret it. We will interpret the death drive, and the concept of the unconscious itself, as myths, and no longer take account of their effects or their efforts at “truth.” A myth recounts something: not so much in the content as in the form of its discourse. Let’s make a bet that, under the metaphoric species of sexuality and death, psychoanalysis tells us something concerning the fundamental organization of our culture, that when the myth is no longer told, when it establishes its fables as axioms, it loses the “magnificent indefiniteness” that Freud spoke of. “The concept is only the residue of a metaphor,” as Nietzsche said. Let’s bet then on the metaphor of the unconscious, on the metaphor of the death drive.Footnote 71

In addition, if the death drive is a metaphor, then for Baudrillard it is a metaphor for both the political-economic system and this system’s double, that is, the doubling of the political-economic system into a “radical counter-finality.”Footnote 72 It is at this point that Baudrillard contends that the radicality of Freud’s death drive has been restored simply by regarding it as a deconstructive process.

For Baudrillard, as metaphor, the death drive must be regarded as “nourishing repressive violence and presiding over culture like a ferocious super-ego, the forces of life inscribed in the compulsion to repeat.”Footnote 73 Moreover, all cultural sublimation must be viewed as “a long detour to death.”Footnote 74 And for Baudrillard, all of this is true of our culture. “Death undertakes to abolish death,” he says, “and, for this very purpose, erects death above death and is haunted by it as its own end.”Footnote 75 As a metaphor, the term “drive” refers to “the contemporary phase of the political-economic system … where the law of value, in its most terroristic structural form, reaches completion in the pure and simple compulsive reproduction of the code, where the law of value appears to be a finality as irreversible as a pulsion [or drive], so that it takes on the figure of a destiny for our culture.”Footnote 76

But if all of this (and more) is what the myth of the death drive reveals, what happens when it is viewed as based in biology, science, and objectivity? While the implications are different than the implications of the death drive as myth, they are nevertheless just as radical. For Baudrillard, to regard the death drive objectively is to regard it as a species of Western thought and reason. As such, viewed from the perspective of science, death becomes both just another of the conceptual objects it produces and one of the axioms (namely, the separation of the dead) upon which science can be legitimated. Here Baudrillard claims that in science, dead or inorganic objects are good scientific objects, whereas living or organic objects are bad ones. This claim, however, is an arbitrary one, produced “through its own phantasm of repression and death.”Footnote 77 But even if it is an arbitrary one, it is still the one wherein the death drive can be associated with good scientific objects and the legitimation of science. Thus, concludes Baudrillard, “being nothing but the cyclical repetition of the non-living, the death drive contributes to biology’s arbitrariness, doubling it through a psychoanalytic route.”Footnote 78

Thus, if following the path of the death drive as myth elevates its radicality for Baudrillard, then so too does following the path of the death drive as objectivity—albeit in a different way. Namely, by letting the air out of the tires of science and biology through the assertion of their relative arbitrariness. The force of Baudrillard’s arguments here is bolstered more than anything else by the findings of anthropology, wherein it has been established that “not every culture produces a separate concept of the non-living; only our culture produces it, under the sign of biology.”Footnote 79 This, in turn, provides a fitting segue-way to the final section of this chapter, where we take up Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange and death, which arguably is one that is beyond both the death drive and biopolitics. But, to close out and affirm the anthropological basis of Baudrillard’s arguments regarding the arbitrariness of biology (and science), consider that he argues that if we stop discriminating against cultures that do not produce a separate concept of the non-living, then this “would be enough to invalidate the concept of the death drive, which is ultimately only a theoretical agreement between the living and the dead, with the sole result that science loses its footing amongst all the attempts at articulation.”Footnote 80 So what are these cultures that do not produce a separate concept of the non-living, and why does Baudrillard believe that accounting for them produces a notion of death beyond the death drive?

Death After Capitalism

According to Baudrillard, at the “core of the ‘rationality’ of our culture” there is an “exclusion that precedes every other.”Footnote 81 It is an “exclusion more radical,” he says, “than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all of these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and death.”Footnote 82 With this comment from Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard is well aware that he is evoking Michel Foucault’s genealogies of discrimination, and in fact describes them as “among the masterpieces of … cultural history.”Footnote 83 But by arguing that death is an exclusion that precedes and serves as the model for all of the ones Foucault discusses, Baudrillard is indirectly challenging him.

Nevertheless, in same year that he publishes Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard directly challenges the foundations of Foucault’s work by attempting to publish a long review-essay of his recently published book, The Will to Knowledge (La Volenté de savoir, 1976), which appeared in English a few years later as The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (1978). Baudrillard sent his review-essay, entitled “Forget Foucault” (“Oublier Foucault”), which among other things questioned the place of the dead and death in Foucault’s oeuvre, to the French journal Critique, which was founded by George Bataille—and at the time had Foucault on its editorial board. Not only was the essay never published in Critique, Foucault was invited to reply to it but remained silent. Baudrillard’s essay, however, would come out a few months later as a book under the same title.Footnote 84

The point here is that while Baudrillard is mostly quiet in Symbolic Exchange and Death about his disagreements with Foucault, only briefly mentioning his work three times in the book, Forget Foucault reveals that his disagreements are significant and extensive. It begins with Baudrillard’s counter-genealogy of discrimination, which claims:

There is an irreversible evolution from savage societies to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange, and we make this obvious by exiling them further and further away from the group of the living.Footnote 85

Baudrillard argues that we must juxtapose the evolving location of cemeteries from the heart of the village or town to locations further and further from the living against the fact that “[e]ven madmen, delinquents and misfits can find a welcome in … new towns.”Footnote 86 This leads him to assert that in the rationality of modern society “it is not normal to be dead.”Footnote 87

These observations regarding the abnormality of death echo Baudrillard’s non-biological and non-scientific conception of death. “Death,” he argues, “is ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the ‘living’: therefore it affects both equally.”Footnote 88 He supports his argument for death as a social relation by pointing out the following:

Savages have no biological concept of death. Or rather, the biological fact, that is, death, birth or disease, everything that comes from nature and that we accord the privilege of necessity and objectivity, quite simply has no meaning for them. … They have never “naturalized” death, they know death (like the body, like the natural event) is a social relation, that its definition is social. In this they are much more “materialist” than we are, since for them the real materiality of death, like that of the commodity for Marx, lies in its form, which is always the form of a social relation.Footnote 89

Moreover, as a form of social relation, there is no concept of the irreversibility of death. Rather, death is regarded as something “that is given and received, and that is therefore reversible in the social exchange.”Footnote 90 Additionally, there is also no opposition between birth and death, and no opposition between life and death. Ultimately, what separates the savagesFootnote 91 who do not oppose life against death from those like us who separate life from death is that symbolic “exchange does not come to an end when life comes to an end.”Footnote 92 “Symbolic exchange,” says Baudrillard, “is halted neither by the living nor by the dead (nor by stones or beasts).”Footnote 93

Regarded as an absolute law, the notion that symbolic exchange cannot be halted by either the living or the dead is a direct attack by Baudrillard on structures or apparatuses, such as psychoanalysis, that locate “their archetype in the fundamental distinction between life and death.”Footnote 94 It is also an attack on structures or apparatuses that are fascinated with the real and the imaginary. According to Baudrillard,

[T]he price we pay for the ‘reality’ of this life, to live it as a positive value, is the ever-present phantasm of death. For us, defined as living beings, death is our imaginary.Footnote 95

But for those who believe that symbolic exchange cannot be halted by either the living or the dead, the real and the imaginary are of no theoretical import.Footnote 96 For Baudrillard,

the symbolic everywhere put an end to the fascination with the real and the imaginary, to the closure of the phantasm drawn up by psychoanalysis, but where, at the same time, psychoanalysis locks itself up by establishing, through a considerable quantity of disjunctions (primary and secondary processes, unconscious and conscious, etc.), a psychical reality principle of the unconscious inseparable from psychoanalysis’s own reality principle (the unconscious as psychoanalysis’s reality principle!) and thus in which the symbolic cannot but put an end to psychoanalysis too.Footnote 97

In short, not only is Baudrillard asking us to abandon distinctions between life and death, conscious and unconscious, and real and imaginary, he is also asking that we abandon their associated political economy in favor of the type of economy found in Bataille mentioned earlier.

Whereas the psychoanalytic vision of death is one where drives are constrained by repetition and where the final equilibrium is set by the inorganic continuum, Bataille’s vision of death is one of a “paroxysm of exchanges, superabundance and excess.”Footnote 98 “Death as excess” is for Bataille “always already there,” says Baudrillard. It “proves,” continues Baudrillard, “that life is only defective when death has taken it hostage, that life only exists in bursts and in exchanges with death, if it is not condemned to the discontinuity of value and therefore to absolute deficit.”Footnote 99 “To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death,” says Bataille.Footnote 100 For Baudrillard, this means “death is not the breakdown of life, that it is willed by life itself, and that the delirial (economic) phantasm of eliminating [death] is equivalent to implanting [death] in the heart of life itself—this time as an endless mournful nothingness.”Footnote 101

In sum, for Baudrillard, Bataille’s notion of death as excess amounts to a kind of anti-economy, wherein

[o]nly sumptuous and useless expenditure has meaning; the economy has no meaning, it is only a residue that has been made in the law of life, whereas wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death: sacrifice, the “accursed share,” escaping investment and equivalence, can only be annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost, then annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.Footnote 102

Unlike Freud who missed “the curvature of life in death,” Bataille recognizes the excess, vertigo, and paroxysm of death. For Freud, the final economy of life is viewed under the sign of repetition, whereas for Bataille and Baudrillard, “[d]eath is neither resolution nor involution, but a reversal and symbolic challenge.”Footnote 103 For them, “life and death are exchanged at the highest price with death.”Footnote 104 And again, this is a “vision of death that removes it from psychoanalysis and its individual and psychical domain.”Footnote 105

It is also one that removes it from biopolitics, in particular the kind discussed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, which involves “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”Footnote 106 “Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding,” comments Foucault, “that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”Footnote 107 To be sure, from Baudrillard’s perspective, the notions of life and death utilized by Foucault in his biopolitics are predicated on the determinacy and autonomy of life and death—notions which he rejects in favor of “the radical indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility of their autonomy in the symbolic order.”Footnote 108 Thus, even though symbolic exchange as developed by Baudrillard involves extensive considerations of life and death, it is very much unlike what we have come to recognize or acknowledge as biopolitics. If anything, if we describe Bataille’s, and therefore Baudrillard’s, form of economics as anti-economics because of their relationship to capitalist economics, then it might be fitting to describe their biopolitics too as anti-biopolitics, namely, one wherein life and death are marked by radical indeterminacy.

Conclusion

“The great trick of capitalism,” writes Gilles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, “is to channel, to divert, the forces of annihilation, the death drive, towards growth.”Footnote 109 In their book, Capitalism and the Death Drive: Freud and Keynes (Capitalisme et pulsion de mort, 2009), Dostaler and Maris argue that capitalism is grounded on the negation of death and is accumulated as a defense against death. But in hands of Baudrillard, the death drive is turned loose on capitalism. Not only does the death drive as a deconstructive process offer an alternative account of value to capitalist notions, it also serves as a radical way of understanding culture and its processes.

Nevertheless, the price of producing an alternative to capitalism is a steep one: it asks us to turn psychoanalysis against itself. The radicality that is required to undermine the negation of death that grounds capitalism requires that the death drive be viewed “as acting against the scientific positivity of the psychoanalytic apparatus as developed by Freud.”Footnote 110 According to Baudrillard, by interpreting the death drive against Freud and psychoanalysis, it becomes a notion that “goes far beyond all previous points of view and renders all previous apparatuses, whether economic, energetic, topological or even the psychical apparatus itself, useless.”Footnote 111 In Baudrillard’s hands, the imaginary and the real, whether in Lacanian terms or others, play no theoretical role and are useless in understanding the way in which life and death undermine capitalism. The symbolic for Baudrillard is the sphere where life and death are radically indeterminate and where their autonomy is not possible. Once the symbolic enters the system of capital—one that “adds up living and capitalizes life” and one wherein “the death drive is the only alternative”Footnote 112—catastrophe becomes unavoidable. “Nothing,” writes Baudrillard, “not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains.”Footnote 113 For Baudrillard, this catastrophe is one that involves systemic suicide:

The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide.Footnote 114

It is perhaps here—in the image of the system of capital like a scorpion taking its own life rather than accepting the revolt of symbolic death—that Baudrillard the philosopher comes to also be like the scorpion.

If indeed the death drive marks the limit of psychoanalysis and is something that “must be wrested from psychoanalysis and turned against it,” and if the death drive has become a “meta-economic, metapsychical, meta-energetic, [and] metapsychoanalytic” notion where the dead and death are beyond determinate life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, the real and the imaginary, and biopolitics and thanatopolitics, then what remains of philosophy that is grounded on these concepts after Baudrillard?Footnote 115 As perhaps the ultimate antiphilosophical meta-philosopher of the late twentieth century, Baudrillard picks the Western philosophical cabinet clean in his analysis of death. But his analyses in Symbolic Exchange and Death marked the apex of his philosophical speculation on death—after which, he largely abandons this line of speculation on death and the dead for other provocations.Footnote 116

Moreover, and arguably, he also abandons symbolic exchange as a revolutionary and radical alternative to capitalism. I’ll leave it to others to decide if based on the lack of interest in his work in this area by Foucault and others he killed it off like the scorpion encircled by challengers—or whether his work on the dead and death succumbed to some other form of fatality. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most devastating, radical, and revolutionary readings of the death drive to date—one that incredibly asks us to go beyond biopolitics almost before there was anything like biopolitics. Additionally, if Foucault is correct in his call for us to think historically about neoliberalism in his 1978–1979 lectures on the birth of biopolitics,Footnote 117 then Baudrillard’s critique of Western notions of economic exchange, utility, production, and instrumental rationality in Symbolic Exchange and Death offers an alternative historical account of the birth of both biopolitics and neoliberalism, namely one where the death drive can and should play a prominent role.

In sum, the death of university for Baudrillard must be viewed as the consequence of the symbolic entering the system of capital. It is a catastrophe wherein the educational system itself is committing suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death. Dark academe is the rotting corpse of the university under these conditions. For Baudrillard, there is no way to bring academe back from the dead short of a revolutionary and radical alternative to capitalism. Whereas symbolic exchange was his proposal as an alternative to economic exchange, it is today but an unkept revolutionary and radical promise. Thus, without an alternative to capitalism, there is nothing after the death of the university. Perhaps Sedgwick was right, and the best we can hope for is to establish an epistemology that is set beside dark academe, rather than beyond it. Moving beyond dark academe is only possible through the production of an alternative to capitalism—without it, the rotting corpse of dark academe is lot of higher education in the twenty-first century.