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21 " It is hard for us, with our reductive (economic and rational) anthropology, to imagine that being can shrink or revolt because it has been given too much. If lack and servitude characterized earlier societies, opulence and free markets characterize our society, which has entered its terminal phase and is ready for intensive care.We are not succumbing to oppression or exploitation, but to profusion and unconditional care - to the power of those who make sovereign decisions about our well-being. From there, revolt has a different meaning: it no longer targets the forbidden, but permissiveness, tolerance, excessive transparency - the Empire of Good. For better or worse.Now you must fight against everything that wants to help you. "
― Jean Baudrillard , The Agony of Power
22 " In fact, to describe this anthropological break, where all old values are obsolete and where all events take on another meaning, we would have to introduce the idea of a non-Euclidean space - the space of hegemonic world power, with its unprecedented machinery, but also the space of another type of events-events of another order than historical events - unpredictable events, without continuity or reference-and which are the radical sign of a counter-power at work.The obsolescence of History opens a space where everything that was historical or political - including revolutions - has become ''fake." All current political events, including the most violent ones, are made up of these fake-events, these ghost-events, which bear witness to a bygone history that is only the shadow of itself. In France, we see it today in melodramatic fashion. But the obsolescence of history and the political stage brings emerging events at the same time, events that I would call, by analogy with rogue states, rogue events - witnesses to the impossible revolution. "
23 " BUT: if this non-Euclidean universe is now the universe of power, it has also become the universe of counter-power. This reversion is much more radical than a negation; the antagonism is capableof turning the weapons of this new power against it, and especially of turning the weapons of power against themselves.The rules of hegemony are turned against it, through a force that contests it radically, in accordance with its own principles (and not only, like Marx in his time, according to historical contradictions while implicitly remaining faithful to the principle of reality and economic principles - to which his theory ends up succumbing).That is why this is not a historical revolution but a kind of anthropological mutation, and while there is no revolution thinkable in the context of the current hegemonic power, there is nothing beyond this "non-Euclidean" counter-power. "
24 " Opposition to global hegemony cannot be the same as opposition to traditional oppression. It can only be something unpredictable, irreducible to the preventive terror of programming, forced circulation, irreducible to the White terror of the world order. Something antagonistic, in the literal sense, that opens a hole in this Western agony. Something that leaves a trace in the monotony of the global order of terror. Something that reintroduces a form of impossible exchange in this generalized exchange. Hegemony is only broken by this type of event, by anything that irrupts as an unexchangeable singularity. A revolt, therefore, that targets systematic deregulation under the cover of forced conviviality, that targets the total organization of reality. "
25 " A prime example of these rogue-events, which are both farcical and terrifying, is the recent bird flu scare (where the terrorists were wild ducks!).There is no greater masquerade than this global panic, than the sacred union in panic. The international community becomes hectic and epileptic from the virus of terror and the terror of viruses. Terror is multiplied by the grotesque profusion of security measures that end up causing perverse autoimmune effects: the antibodies turn against the body and cause more damage than the virus. Without real solidarity between nations, the specter of Absolute Evil must be raised up as an ersatz Universal, an emergency solution to symbolic misery. When traditional contracts and symbolic pacts, the universal and the particular no longer function, a form like a conspiracy takes brutal shape, a plot in which everyone is involuntarily involved. Partaking in the conspiracy is not based on anything, on any value, other than delirious self-defense, in response to the total loss of the imaginary's immunity... In fact, the virus is a "cosa mentale" and contamination happens so quickly because the mental immunity, the symbolic defenses are long lost. A panic space can take hold in this liquidation, one to which the entire global information system also belongs for another reason, the system of networks and instant diffusion - a non-Euclidean space where all rational, preventive, prophylactic countermeasures are almost automatically turned against themselves through their own excesses. Security is the best medium for terror. "
26 " The depths of terror are inseparable from the extension of farce. The terror of the Good much more than of Evil, which only follows like a shadow. The parody of the sacred union is taking hold everywhere, under the sign of a full preventive war against the slightest infectious molecule - but also against the least anomaly, the least exception, the least singularity.The biting irony of this counter-terror, of white terror, is that it establishes a vast autoimmune syndrome, self-destruction through excess protection, which leads to crimes against humanity under the sign of the expulsion of Evil, crimes committed by humanity to get rid of itself completely, to cast itself out of an unlivable setting. "