Philematology: On Kissing and Cannibalism

Daniel Silver: Kissing (2024) [1]

Statuario Altissimo marble and bronze,

with a stainless steel baseplate

 

I. 

 

It wasn't until I saw Daniel Silver's sculpture of bronze lovers "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [2] that I realised the full horror of an oft-quoted remark made by Georges Bataille: 

 

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism ...

 

 

II. 

 

What this means is that there's an accursed link between eating and eroticism. 

 

For consumption, like sex, is a way in which separate beings not only communicate, but fatally come into touch, enabling the self and non-self to bridge their discontinuous existence as individuals [3].  

 

Or, to put it another way, sexual desire that drives us to press lips together and insert tongues in mouths (and other bodily orifices) and the voracious desire to devour the other, are as closely connected as Eros and Thanatos in a general economy in which non-productive expenditure (via acts that often violently transgress social norms) is key.    

Herman Hupfeld may insist that "a kiss is just a kiss" [4], but, as a matter of fact, nothing is ever so innocent or free from context (i.e., a whole network of meaning and significance). 

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, anthropologists disagree on whether kissing is instinctual or an example of learned behaviour. 

 

Those who favour the former point to the fact that other animals appear to kiss (whilst ignoring that not all humans engage in the activity) [5]. 

 

Those who favour the latter, argue that kissing in its modern (romantic) form has evolved from activities such as suckling or premastication in early human cultures [6] and there is certainly evidence to support the claim that cataglottism [7] has developed from mouth-to-mouth regurgitation of food - or kiss-feeding - either from parent to offspring, or between lovers.

 

 

IV.

 

It might be noted in closing, that man's will to merger or primal unity - be it via the sexual penetration of a lover's body or the consumption of their flesh - is what some describe as a death instinct, seeing as it conflicts with the "central law of all organic life"; namely, that each organism is "intrinsically isolate and single" [8].  

 

The problem, of course, is that another vital law is that we need and desire one another; that each organism only thrives via intimate contact with others.  

 

Fortunately, coition is only ever a coming-close-to-death; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the sovereign individuality of each party remains intact. 

 

However, that's not the case in cannibalism, or what might be called a hard-vore scenario, wherein at least one party is going to be semi-digested and certainly won't be able to enjoy a cigarette afterwards as a singular being.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Daniel Silver's Kissing (2024) - in part inspired by Constantin Brâncuși's famous sculpture, The Kiss (1907-08) - features in his Uncanny Valley exhibition currently showing at the Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square, London), until 18 January 2025. The photo is by Ben Westoby, courtesy of the artist and gallery. For more details visit: frithstreetgallery.com

 

[2] This humorous remark is made by Rawdon Lilly in D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91.

 

[3] See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. I, trans Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1988). Readers interested in Bataille's interesting (somewhat idiosyncratic) take on death and sensuality might also like to see his work entitled Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (City Light Books, 1986). It is also available as a Penguin edition entitled Eroticism (2001).

[4] Herman Hupfeld (1894-1951) was an American songwriter, whose most notable composition was 'As Time Goes By' (1931), which featured in the 1942 film Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz), performed by Dooley Wilson as Sam. The line quoted here is taken from the song. 

 

[5] I'm pretty sure that Heideggerians would protest that although many other animals exchange what appear to be kisses of affection, they are not kisses in the full sense (that kissing is something that only human beings can fully experience due to our ontologically unique status). 

[6] Another theory suggests that kissing originated during the paleolithic era, when cavemen would taste the saliva of females in order to determine whether they would make a healthy mate (or perhaps a hearty meal).

 

[7] Cataglottism - more commonly known as French kissing - involves extensive tongue activity in order to induce sexual arousal and not merely the pressing together of lips. 

      As Freud rightly says, it is strictly speaking a type of kinky deviation from normal sexual activity, even if no one acknowledges or rejects it as such. See his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1920), in which he writes: "Even a kiss can claim to be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of two oral erotogenic zones instead of the two genitals."

      Later, Freud comments on how strange it is that the lips have such erotic value amongst lovers - including the most sophisticated ones - in spite of the fact that (technically) they are not sexual organs, but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, Final Version (1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 67.

        

 

Further reading: those who are interested in this topic might like to see Ursula de Leeuw's essay 'A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism: Julia Ducournau's Raw and Bataillean Horror', in Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2, (2020), pp. 215-228. Click here for an online pdf. 

 

 

Thy Teeth Shall Not Do Him Violence, Nor Thy Bowels Contain His Glorious Body!

 

Juan de Juanes:  

Christ the Saviour with the Eucharist (1545-1550)

 

And after he had given thanks, Jesus broke the bread, and said: 

'Take, eat! This is my body, which is broken for you ...' [1]

I. 

 

Just for the record, I am not now and nor have I ever been a member of the Christian Church and so Holy Communion (or Mass) is not something I have personal experience or knowledge of. Thus, the question surrounding what happens to the sacremental bread (or host) once it has been consecrated and consumed as the body of Christ, is not really a great concern to me. 

 

However, for those who take these matters very seriously indeed and believe the miraculous teaching of transubstantiation - which is central to the Eucharist - to be literally true and not merely a symbolic act, the suggestion that Christ's holy flesh might have an excremental fate is problematic to say the least and has been the topic of fierce theological and philosophical debate going back many centuries.

 

 

II. 

 

Following the widespread religious, cultural, and social upeaval triggered by the Reformation, this really rather odd debate became heated once more and 17th-century English poet John Milton was particulary horrified by the thought that Christ could be eaten and subject to the natural processes of digestion:

 

"The Mass brings down Christ's holy body from its supreme exaltation at the right hand of God. It drags it back to the earth, though it has suffered every pain and hardship already, to a state of humiliation even more wretched and degrading than before: to be broken once more and crushed to the ground, even by the fangs of brutes. Then, when it has been driven through all the stomach's filthy channels, it shoots it out - one shudders even to mention it - into the latrine." [2]  

This passage not only exposes Milton's coprophobia, but makes his opposition to what is known as stercoranism equally clear.

 

For outraged Puritans like Milton, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation simply could not be true as this would not only mean that Mass is a form of cannibalism and utterly alien to reason - which is bad enough - but that it results in something so repulsive as to be blasphemous: Christ's flesh turned to shit.  

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst early Church theologians were prepared to accept that the sacramental elements of Christ's body were digested and excreted, later Catholic thinkers did what they could to repudiate this idea; declaring, for example, that whilst Christ is indeed present in the consecrated bread and wine, that is only before they are consumed and lose their appearance.   

 

In other words, when  the sacramental forms of bread and wine are changed, the substantial presence of Christ ceases to be. 

Despite this attempt to reassure, however, still the fear of stercoranism persisted, although, for me, it's a positively healthy thing to recognise that the holy spirit returns at last to that from which it arises; i.e., base matter. 

 

For whilst the marrying of shit and divinity may cause horror in the minds of some, there are compelling philosophical reasons eschatology should always include a scatological component and that's why what might otherwise seem to be an arcane (and insane) discussion over the status of the bread and wine used in the mass is still vital.    

 

Ultimately, we all unite in shit even if we do not all cleave together in the body of Christ. And that's what Holy Communion teaches us: paradise is regained in death; a festive return to the actual, as Nietzsche describes it [3].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] First Epistle to the Corinthians 11: 24.

 

[2] John Milton, Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. William Kerrigan, John Peter Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (Modern Library, 2007), p. 1290. 

      Despite what Milton warns here and elsewhere in his prose writings about worshipping a wafer and cannibalising the body of Christ, communion is given prominence in Paradise Lost (1667) and an astonishing vision of transubstantiation on a cosmic scale is imagined. Push comes to shove, I prefer the playful poet over the angry puritan reformer.

      Readers interested in this topic might like to see the excellent essay by Regina M. Schwartz, 'Real Hunger: Milton's Vision of the Eucharist', in Religion & Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 1-17. The essay is conveniently availble on JSTOR: click here. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Volume 9, 11 [70], where, in a note written in 1881, he says that we shouldn't think of our return to the realm of inanimate matter (the 'dead world') as a regression, but, rather, as a joyous form of reconciliation with what is actual. 

 

Last Rat Standing (Darwin and Bond in the Age of Coronavirus)

New York City rat (photo by Christopher Sadowski) 
and Javier Badem as Raoul Silva in Skyfall (2012)

There's a lovely scene in the Bond film Skyfall in which the villain, Raoul Silva, played by brilliant Spanish actor Javier Badem, tells the story of his grandmother's solution to the problem of rats when they infest the tiny island on which she lives:

"They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island, hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait. The rats would come for the coconut and they would fall into the drum. And after a month, you've trapped all the rats. But what did you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry. Then one by one, they start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what - do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees. Only now, they don't eat coconut anymore. Now they only eat rat. You have changed their nature."

I thought of this when I read about the plight of rats in NYC (and elsewhere) during the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to the so-called lockdown, many of their favourite feeding places - such as the bins at the back of restaurants - are no longer viable options, forcing these resilient rodents to resort to desperate measures. Not only are they fighting one another for food, but some have turned cannibalistic and are devouring their own kind.

The fact is, the threat of starvation makes rats - like people - behave in extremely different ways; they effectively change their nature, as Sr. Silva would say.

I suppose, in the end, this will give them an evolutionary kick up the arse and result in a future breed of stronger, more aggressive, more resourceful rats (survival of the fittest being the popular name for the mechanism of natural selection we can witness at work here).    

Notes

Skyfall (2012), dir. Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig (as James Bond) and Javier Bardem (as Raoul Silva): click here to watch the scene I mention above.

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 3: Chapters 4-6

Patricia MacCormack: Professor of Continental Philosophy
Anglia Ruskin University: click here for profile

It's always a bit worrying when an author says that the work that follows is experimental, because - sometimes, not always - that means badly thought through and lazy writing. Still, I doubt that's the case here, so let's investigate MacCormack's occultural and thanatological escape routes from anthropocentrism ...

VI.

Occulture, for those who don't know, is "the contemporary world of occult practice which embraces a bricolage of historical, fictional, religious and spiritual trajectories [...] an unlimited world of imagination and creative disrespect for [...] hierarchies of truth based on myth or materiality, law or science" [95-6] and a ritualistic method of catalysing ahuman becomings.

In other words, its a demonic mix of chaos magick, witchcraft, Lovecraft, and Continental philosophy that aligns itself with feminists, minorities, and nonhuman animals and which leads onto a paradoxically vital form of death activism, which we shall discuss below.

Occulture is also, according to MacCormack, a material and secular practice; a kind of atheism that opposes religious fundamentalism (or moral power and authority) in all forms that perpetuate anthropocentrism. It's compassionate too - for even the demons and monsters invoked by MacCormack conveniently share her ethical concerns.*

All that one needs to do to become a practitioner is read and think a little differently from the mainstream. No other experience is necessary and no teachers are required. It's self-inspirational. However, it's not about self-help, so much as loss of identity and refining the ego towards nothingness (what Deleuze and Guattari term becoming-imperceptible).     

That said, the key idea seems to be "remake the self and remake the world" [106] - though I hope that MacCormack is not suggesting that these projects are linked or one and the same, for that would be to fall into the purest idealism, or what Meillassoux terms correlationism. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure MacCormack is not suggesting that - even if she often writes of neural networks, modes of perception, and environmental systems in the same sentence.)  

Despite once spending a good deal of time at Treadwell's, the truth of the matter is I don't really know enough about chaos magick, or Elder Gods, etc. in order to comment on MacCormack's work in this area. Having said that, I have written fairly extensively on the cunt as a site of loss (where flies and philosophers lose their way), so was very interested to see what she had to say on why the cunt has been deemed "antithetical toward anthropocentrism, particularly phallocentrism" [116]. 

First thing's first, it's important to note that the cunt is not merely a biological organ; the cunt, in other words, is so much more than an obedient vagina. MacCormack likes to think of it as a kind of demon that incarnates as a viscous, fleshly, mucosal entity; "all the features of femininity despised by patriarchy [...] as abject and horrific" [119]. 

Alternatively, we might think of the cunt as a monstrous nonhuman animal; a "threshold of internal and external" [122] that is crucially composed of folds; a conceptual gate that grants access to unnatural worlds even while belonging itself to the natural order.

Ultimately, however, the cunt can never be fully known or described; can never have its form and function fixed like the rigid phallus. And it "will not come unless it is desired" [125], says MacCormack - and I don't quite know if she's only making a point about demonic evocation or if this is what passes for a saucy double entendre in the world of occulture.    


VII.

And so we come to death. But this is not just death; this is a life-affirming, ecosophical model of death that is about "the death of the human body in its actual existence more than just a pattern of subjective agency" [141]. This is the death of man (as species) understood as "a necessity for all life to flourish and relations to become ethical" [140].

Which, as I indicated in the first part of this post, is certainly not an idea I'm unfamiliar with or unsympathetic towards. As a thanatologist, I'm perfectly happy to curdle the distinction between life and death, or collapse the binary as MacCormack would say, and I'm pleased to see her discuss her project in relation to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia - something I did in my own work several years ago.

And if I'm not fully persuaded by the arguments in favour of cannibalism, necrophilia and utilising human corpses as a source of fuel, I'm kind of on board with sodomy, antinatalism, and suicide (as a practice of joy before death). Where Patricia and I part company is on the topic of abolitionism, which seeks to "abolish all interactions with animals based on human superiority presumption" [145], thereby ending vivisection and closing circuses, sea parks and zoos.

For although I don't subscribe to human exceptionalism, as a Nietzschean I do accept that life is founded upon a general economy of the whole in which the terrible aspects of reality - cruelty, violence, suffering, hatred, and exploitation, for example - are indispensable. MacCormack may address this elsewhere in her work, but, as far as I can see, she entirely fails to do so in The Ahuman Manifesto.

Instead, she adopts a fixed, unexamined and, ironically, all too human moral standpoint throughout the book from which to pass judgement (on men, on meat-eaters, on breeders et al). She may push her work in a queer ahuman direction beyond the "constraining systems of capital, signification and normativity" [155], but it's certainly not, alas, beyond good and evil.

Even when she does get a bit Nietzschean, celebrating death as an absolute Dionysian frenzy, for example, she quickly adds a proviso: "the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual" [158]. Ultimately, as she later admits: "I want to create an ahuman thanaterotics based on love, not aggression" [158].

And by that she means free of misogyny, racism, and the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male who can only imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in savage, sensational, and pornographic terms - and we don't want that, for this form of "serial-killer necro-cannibalism is a microcosm of normative anthropocentric practice" [160] of the kind that objectifies the world.

In the thanaterotics of love, the corpse can be fucked or served with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti, but only if the corpse has not been produced against its own agency via anthropocentric violence. Necro-cannibalism can thus be made perfectly natural and politically correct - and if it is still against the law, that doesn't matter because the law is a white, male Western phallocentric ass that seeks to deny the liberating potential and beauty of death for a variety of reasons (none of them good).

So Patricia says it loud and says it proud: "Go forth and love the dead!" [164]

And if you must eat meat - eat human corpses: "Our world is groaning under the weight of the parasitic pestilence of human life and yet our excessive resource is the human dead [...] a phenomenally cheap, if not free, resource." [162] 

Is this nihilism? No - this is the "only available creative outlet in an impossible situation" [165] and a form of ethical affirmation; it's fun too - and a form of freedom (the freedom to be eaten or become a necrophile's object of desire). After all, even Jesus - whom MacCormack regards as an activist - offered up his flesh for human consumption.   


VIII.

The closing chapter of The Ahuman Manifesto is a kind of apocalyptic conclusion that reminds readers that whilst they are right to have fears about the future, they can still act in the present with "tears of love and joy" [191] streaming down their faces - which is a bit too ecstatic for my tastes; I would rather people showed a little self-discipline and curbed their enthusiasm.    

For MacCormack, there are multiple apocalypses, large and small; the sexist apocalypse that women are born into and where "assault from a young age is expected" [172]; the speciesist apocalypse in which nonhuman animals - especially those that are farmed or enslaved for entertainment - are condemned to lives of abject misery; and even the Brexit apocalypse that shows "fascism can and does win" [174]. (I wish I were making that last example up, but unfortunately I'm not.)

None of these minor apocalypses really interest MacCormack though; she longs for something a bit bigger and regrets that plagues and wars in the past didn't do a better job of finishing off humanity: "For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species ..." [176]. A sentence that seems a long way removed from her preface promise that this is not a misanthropic manifesto. 

Ultimately, there's not much left for us to do now, she says, but manage our extinction and act as kindly caretakers for the planet. Which is all a bit Letzter Mensch sounding, is it not? The last man being the one who is tired of life and seeks only a slow and gentle way out ...

Oddly enough, MacCormack quotes from Zarathustra towards the end of the chapter and suggests that her compassionate model of apocalypse is in tune with his message of creating beyond the self. But, for me, it's hard to see anything very Nietzschean about her ahumanism. Indeed, it's arguably no more than another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; one that speaks of love and joy, but is shot through with ressentiment and a refusal to accept that nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.


* Note: Zarathustra says that if you take the hump from the hunchback, you take away his soul. I do feel MacCormack does something similar to the demons and monsters she invokes; robbing the former of their horns and the latter of their very monstrousness. I simply can't see why she is so sure that creatures of the underworld and hidden realms also read The Guardian - especially as she is keen to point out that "this cosmos is not [a] happy hippy cosmos but a terrifying one" [122].

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work.

To read part 1 of this post - notes on the preface and introduction - click here.

To read part 2 of this post - notes on chapters 1 and 2 - click here.

In Memory of The Woman Who Rode Away

Kate Millett famously condemns 'The Woman Who Rode Away' as an insane pornographic fantasy - which, in some ways, it is.

But even if there's something a little lurid and misogynistic about it at times, we can do without the kind of psycho-sexual analysis which suggests that all Lawrence's writing is animated by an unconscious element of voyeurism and sado-masochistic relish.

Charges such as this ignore the fact that, in Mexico, Lawrence discovered a religious sensibility which threatened to extinguish all that he was too. And so the tale is not merely about the drugging and murder of a desperate housewife in search of adventure. Rather, it makes a sacrifice of white-faced modernity itself, even as it mocks the romantic idealism of those renegades who turn against their own race, culture, and historical experience and seek out an impossible return to the primitive.

Of course, as one critic points out, it's never easy to "disentangle the patterns of primitive religious ritual ... from those of the kind of sexual titillation which depends on the dehumanization of its object".* But we're obliged as readers of Lawrence to at least try ...

At the heart of all religious practice and belief - I'd suggest - lies an almost fetishistic obsession with death. This becomes most apparent in sacrificial rites which are not only often elaborate, but extraordinarily cruel in character and designed to reveal the flesh, to mark the flesh, and, ultimately, to consume the flesh. 

And, let’s be clear, when I speak of the consumption of the flesh, I mean this literally; human sacrifice very often involves cannibalism. If the victim isn't quite viewed as butchers' meat, nevertheless he or she is frequently feasted upon. 

Now, whilst we may find the desire to cannibalise one another completely alien, it's worth remembering that even the Christian communion involves the eating of flesh and drinking of blood: Christ is sacrificed and ritually consumed by his followers. Indeed, the conquistadors, who provided many of the accounts we have of Aztec practices, were both thrilled and horrified to note how such a savage and cruel religion presented many points of analogy to the doctrine and ritual of their own faith.

The key, however, to all acts of sacrifice, is that they allow us as mortal or discontinuous beings to experience a sense of life's inhuman never-endingness; that is to say, via the death of an individual, the continuity of existence is confirmed. Christianity is fundamentally mistaken not in sacrificing its central protagonist, but in denying us the pleasure of this death.

One of the things Lawrence does in 'The Woman Who Rode Away', is give readers license to imaginatively exercise in good conscience those drives which direct us towards carnal pleasure, including the forbidden pleasure of anthropophagy. 

So, yes, it’s true that the woman who rode away is abused and victimized - and yes it's disingenuous to speak of her having submitted voluntarily to the above - but any sensational aspects should not obscure the story's religious dimension; in fact, they fully belong to it. Further, it should be remembered that within pagan religious culture the fatal element within eroticism was acutely felt and fully justified linking sex with sacrifice.
 
Thus, rather than try to disguise our discomfort as readers or mistakenly call for censorship, we should accept it. Anguish is one of the great religious feelings and has always accompanied human sacrifice. Bataille reminds us that within Aztec society anyone who couldn't bear to see victims being led to their deaths and allowed their anguish to collapse into pity, would be subject to punishments. Young and old alike were expected to stare death in the face and to share in the tragedy and horror of life.

In sum: I understand (and share) feminist concerns with works that portray women being raped, tortured, murdered or, in this case, ritually sacrificed - but isn’t it refreshing to think that female blood can also have redemptive power?

Besides, whilst the woman who rode away is passive in comparison to the priest who actively wields the knife, the latter too ultimately loses himself in the ritual (just as in the act of love). The ritual of sacrifice destroys the self-contained character of all participants (just as coition leaves both parties fucked). In a crucial passage, Bataille writes:

"In sacrifice, the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life … the victim dies and the spectators share in what [her] death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.”

The woman who rode away seeks this oneness; she is tired of living out of touch. In death, she achieves her freedom and fulfilment and she shares this with those who witness her death. Only a violent death which is carried out as a solemn and collective religious act has the power to allow men and women to experience immortality and live the life of the stars and the gods.

Or, as Bataille puts it, "divine continuity is linked with the transgression of the law on which the order of discontinuous beings is built" - namely, the commandment not to kill. Human sacrifice brings life and death into harmony, opening the former onto the latter whilst simultaneously transforming the latter into something paradoxically vital.

But this is not, of course, an argument for dusting off the obsidian knife and even Lawrence, thankfully, rejects violent, authoritarian theocratic culture at last and questions those writers who remain obsessed with the transgression of limits and only palpitate to thoughts of murder, suicide and rape ...  


See:

Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, (Penguin Books, 2001).

D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). *Note: The Penguin edition of this text (1996) has an introduction by Neil Reeve and he's the critic I'm quoting here.

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

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

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.