On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

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According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.