To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces “true” symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness’s henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be “produced,” and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat “real” illnesses according to their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the principle of illness. As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for “real” more real than the other—but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious? Why couldn’t the “work” of the unconscious be “produced” in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine? Dreams already are.
+To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces “true” symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness’s henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be “produced,” and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat “real” illnesses according to their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the principle of illness. As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for “real” more real than the other—but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious? Why couldn’t the “work” of the unconscious be “produced” in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine? Dreams already are.
Certainly, the psychiatrist purports that “for every form of mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms of which the simulator is ignorant and in the absence of which the psychiatrist would not be deceived.” This (which dates from 1865) in order to safeguard the principle of a truth at all costs and to escape the interrogation posed by simulation—the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist. Now, what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the duplication of the discourse of the unconscious in the discourse of simulation that can never again be unmasked, since it is not false either?2
What can the army do about simulators? Traditionally it unmasks them and punishes them, according to a clear principle of identification. Today it can discharge a very good simulator as exactly equivalent to a “real” homosexual, a heart patient, or a madman. Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false, between the “produced” and the authentic symptom. “If he is this good at acting crazy, it’s because he is.” Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion.
@@ -709,37 +709,37 @@Cf. J. Baudrillard, “L’ordre des simulacres” (The order of simulacra), in L’echange symbolique et la mort (Symbolic exchange and death) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).↩
A discourse that is itself not susceptible to being resolved in transference. It is the entanglement of these two discourses that renders psychoanalysis interminable.↩
Cf. M. Perniola, Icônes, visions, simulacres (Icons, visions, simulacra), 39.↩
This does not necessarily result in despairing of meaning, but just as much in the improvisation of meaning, of nonmeaning, of many simultaneous meanings that destroy each other.↩
Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an “objective” social crisis or even to an “objective” phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script. (Cf. M. Makarius, La stratégie de la catastrophe [The strategy of disaster], 115.)↩
To this flagging investment in work corresponds a parallel decline in the investment in consumption. Goodbye to use value or to the prestige of the automobile, goodbye amorous discourses that neatly opposed the object of enjoyment to the object of work. Another discourse takes hold that is a discourse of work on the object of consumption aiming for an active, constraining, puritan reinvestment (use less gas, watch out for your safety, you’ve gone over the speed limit, etc.) to which the characteristics of automobiles pretend to adapt. Rediscovering a stake through the transposition of these two poles. Work becomes the object of a need, the car becomes the object of work. There is no better proof of the lack of differentiation among all the stakes. It is through the same slippage between the “right” to vote and electoral “duty” that the divestment of the political sphere is signaled.↩
The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning reflecting Jakobson’s famous grid of functions. That discourse “circulates” is to be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from one point to another, but it traverses a cycle that without distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such. Thus there is no instance of power, no instance of transmission—power is something that circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a cycle in which the positions of the dominator and the dominated are exchanged in an endless reversion that is also the end of power in its classical definition. The circularization of power, of knowledge, of discourse puts an end to any localization of instances and poles. In the psychoanalytic interpretation itself, the “power” of the interpreter does not come from any outside instance but from the interpreter himself. This changes everything, because one can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You. Thus is expressed, by an inverse simulation, the passage from the “analyzed” to the “analysand,” from passive to active, which simply describes the spiraling effect of the shifting of poles, the effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is resolved in perfect manipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze, but of the order of tactility and commutation). See also the state/family circularity assured by the fluctuation and metastatic regulation of the images of the social and the private (J. Donzelot, La police des familles [The policing of families]).
+1. Cf. J. Baudrillard, “L’ordre des simulacres” (The order of simulacra), in L’echange symbolique et la mort (Symbolic exchange and death) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
2. A discourse that is itself not susceptible to being resolved in transference. It is the entanglement of these two discourses that renders psychoanalysis interminable.
3. Cf. M. Perniola, Icônes, visions, simulacres (Icons, visions, simulacra), 39.
4. This does not necessarily result in despairing of meaning, but just as much in the improvisation of meaning, of nonmeaning, of many simultaneous meanings that destroy each other.
5. Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an “objective” social crisis or even to an “objective” phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script. (Cf. M. Makarius, La stratégie de la catastrophe [The strategy of disaster], 115.)
6. To this flagging investment in work corresponds a parallel decline in the investment in consumption. Goodbye to use value or to the prestige of the automobile, goodbye amorous discourses that neatly opposed the object of enjoyment to the object of work. Another discourse takes hold that is a discourse of work on the object of consumption aiming for an active, constraining, puritan reinvestment (use less gas, watch out for your safety, you’ve gone over the speed limit, etc.) to which the characteristics of automobiles pretend to adapt. Rediscovering a stake through the transposition of these two poles. Work becomes the object of a need, the car becomes the object of work. There is no better proof of the lack of differentiation among all the stakes. It is through the same slippage between the “right” to vote and electoral “duty” that the divestment of the political sphere is signaled.
7. The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning reflecting Jakobson’s famous grid of functions. That discourse “circulates” is to be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from one point to another, but it traverses a cycle that without distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such. Thus there is no instance of power, no instance of transmission—power is something that circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a cycle in which the positions of the dominator and the dominated are exchanged in an endless reversion that is also the end of power in its classical definition. The circularization of power, of knowledge, of discourse puts an end to any localization of instances and poles. In the psychoanalytic interpretation itself, the “power” of the interpreter does not come from any outside instance but from the interpreter himself. This changes everything, because one can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You. Thus is expressed, by an inverse simulation, the passage from the “analyzed” to the “analysand,” from passive to active, which simply describes the spiraling effect of the shifting of poles, the effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is resolved in perfect manipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze, but of the order of tactility and commutation). See also the state/family circularity assured by the fluctuation and metastatic regulation of the images of the social and the private (J. Donzelot, La police des familles [The policing of families]).
Impossible now to pose the famous question: “From what position do you speak?”—“How do you know?” “From where do you get your power?” without hearing the immediate response: “But it is of you (from you) that I speak”—meaning, it is you who are speaking, you who know, you who are the power. Gigantic circumvolution, circumlocution of the spoken word, which is equal to a blackmail with no end, to a deterrence that cannot be appealed of the subject presumed to speak, leaving him without a reply, because to the question that he poses one ineluctably replies: but you are the answer, or: your question is already an answer, etc.—the whole strangulatory sophistication of intercepting speech, of the forced confession in the guise of freedom of expression, of trapping the subject in his own interrogation, of the precession of the reply to the question (all the violence of interpretation lies there, as well as that of the conscious or unconscious management of the “spoken word” [parole]).
-This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time—all of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democractic simulacrum, which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous sources of power and knowledge—everything comes from the people and everything returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion polls, begins to be put in place.↩
PPEP is an acronym for smallest possible gap, or “plus petit écart possible.”—Trans.↩
Paradox: all bombs are clean: their only pollution is the system of security and of control they radiate as long as they don’t explode.↩
Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the “irrational” excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a “political aesthetic of death” at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn’t been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism’s cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.↩
The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, which will shortly follow the release of the film.↩
Still something else annihilates the cultural project of Beaubourg: the masses themselves also flood in to take pleasure in it (we will return to this later).↩
In relation to this critical mass, and to its radical understanding of Beaubourg, how derisory seems the demonstration of the students from Vincennes the evening of its inauguration!↩
Here we have not spoken of information except in the social register of communication. But it would be enthralling to consider this hypothesis even within the parameters of cybernetic information theory. There also, the fundamental thesis calls for this information to be synonymous with negentropy with the resistance to entropy, with an excess of meaning and organization. But it would be useful to posit the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION = ENTROPY. For example: the information or knowledge that can be obtained about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and entropy of this system (to be extended to science in general, and to the social sciences and humanities in particular). Information in which an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degradedform of this event. Do not hesitate to analyze the media’s intervention in May 1968 in these terms. The extension of the student action permitted the general strike, but the latter was precisely a black box that neutralized the original virulence of the movement. Amplification was itself a mortal trap and not a positive extension. One should be wary of the universalization of struggles through information. One should be wary of solidarity campaigns at every level, of this simultaneously electronic and worldly solidarity. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system.↩
Parly 2 is a mall that was built in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris.—Trans.↩
The RER is a high-speed, underground commuter train.—Trans.↩
Cf. D. Rorvik, A son image: La copie d’un homme (In his image: The copy of a man) (Paris: Grasset, 1978).↩
J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).↩
This introduction first appeared in the French edition published in Paris by Clamann-Lévy in 1974.—Trans.↩
1. Thus, in Texas, four hundred men and one hundred women experiment with the sweetest penitentiary in the world. A child was born there last June and there were only three escapes in two years. The men and women take their meals together and get together outside of group therapy sessions. Each prisoner possesses the only key to his individual room. Couples are able to be alone in the empty rooms. To this day, thirty-five prisoners have escaped, but for the most part they have returned of their own accord.↩
In French, bêtes de somme means beasts of burden. Baudrillard plays with the word somme in the phrase that follows: “Bêtes de sommation, elles sont sommées de répondre a l’interrogatoire de la science,” and in the use of the word consommation in the following phrase.—Trans.↩
That animals wander is a myth, and the current representation of the unconscious and of desire as erratic and nomadic belongs to the same “order. Animals have never wandered, were never deterritorialized. A whole liberatory phantasmagoria is drawn in opposition to the constraints of modern society, a representation of nature and of beasts as savagery, as the freedom to”fulfill all needs," today “of realizing all his desires” because modern Rousseauism has taken the form of the indeterminacy of drive, of the wandering of desire and of the nomadism of infinitude—but it is the same mystique of unleashed, noncoded forces with no finality other than their own eruption.
+This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time—all of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democractic simulacrum, which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous sources of power and knowledge—everything comes from the people and everything returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion polls, begins to be put in place.
8. PPEP is an acronym for smallest possible gap, or “plus petit écart possible.”—Trans.
9. Paradox: all bombs are clean: their only pollution is the system of security and of control they radiate as long as they don’t explode.
10. Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the “irrational” excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a “political aesthetic of death” at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn’t been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism’s cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.
11. The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, which will shortly follow the release of the film.
12. Still something else annihilates the cultural project of Beaubourg: the masses themselves also flood in to take pleasure in it (we will return to this later).
13. In relation to this critical mass, and to its radical understanding of Beaubourg, how derisory seems the demonstration of the students from Vincennes the evening of its inauguration!
14. Here we have not spoken of information except in the social register of communication. But it would be enthralling to consider this hypothesis even within the parameters of cybernetic information theory. There also, the fundamental thesis calls for this information to be synonymous with negentropy with the resistance to entropy, with an excess of meaning and organization. But it would be useful to posit the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION = ENTROPY. For example: the information or knowledge that can be obtained about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and entropy of this system (to be extended to science in general, and to the social sciences and humanities in particular). Information in which an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degradedform of this event. Do not hesitate to analyze the media’s intervention in May 1968 in these terms. The extension of the student action permitted the general strike, but the latter was precisely a black box that neutralized the original virulence of the movement. Amplification was itself a mortal trap and not a positive extension. One should be wary of the universalization of struggles through information. One should be wary of solidarity campaigns at every level, of this simultaneously electronic and worldly solidarity. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system.
15. Parly 2 is a mall that was built in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris.—Trans.
16. The RER is a high-speed, underground commuter train.—Trans.
17. Cf. D. Rorvik, A son image: La copie d’un homme (In his image: The copy of a man) (Paris: Grasset, 1978).
18. J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).
19. This introduction first appeared in the French edition published in Paris by Clamann-Lévy in 1974.—Trans.
20. 1. Thus, in Texas, four hundred men and one hundred women experiment with the sweetest penitentiary in the world. A child was born there last June and there were only three escapes in two years. The men and women take their meals together and get together outside of group therapy sessions. Each prisoner possesses the only key to his individual room. Couples are able to be alone in the empty rooms. To this day, thirty-five prisoners have escaped, but for the most part they have returned of their own accord.
21. In French, bêtes de somme means beasts of burden. Baudrillard plays with the word somme in the phrase that follows: “Bêtes de sommation, elles sont sommées de répondre a l’interrogatoire de la science,” and in the use of the word consommation in the following phrase.—Trans.
22. That animals wander is a myth, and the current representation of the unconscious and of desire as erratic and nomadic belongs to the same “order. Animals have never wandered, were never deterritorialized. A whole liberatory phantasmagoria is drawn in opposition to the constraints of modern society, a representation of nature and of beasts as savagery, as the freedom to”fulfill all needs," today “of realizing all his desires” because modern Rousseauism has taken the form of the indeterminacy of drive, of the wandering of desire and of the nomadism of infinitude—but it is the same mystique of unleashed, noncoded forces with no finality other than their own eruption.
Now, free, virgin nature, without limits or territories, where each wanders at will, never existed, except in the imaginary of the dominant order, of which this nature is the equivalent mirror. We project (nature, desire, animality, rhizome … ) the very schema of deterritorialization that is that of the economic system and of capital as ideal savagery. Liberty is nowhere but in capital, it is what produced it, it is what deepens it. There is thus an exact correlation between the social legislation of value (urban, industrial, repressive, etc.) and the imaginary savagery one places in opposition to it: they are both “deterritorialized” and in each other’s image. Moreover, the radicality of “desire,” one sees this in current theories, increases at the same rate as civilized abstraction, not at all antagonistically, but absolutely according to the same movement, that of the same form always more decoded, more decentered, “freer,” which simultaneously envelops our real and our imaginary. Nature, liberty, desire, etc., do not even express a dream the opposite of capital, they directly translate the progress or the ravages of this culture, they even anticipate it, because they dream of total deterritorialization where the system never imposes anything but what is relative: the demand of “liberty” is never anything but going further than the system, but in the same direction.
-Neither the beasts nor the savages know “nature” in our way: they only know territories, limited, marked, which are spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.↩
Thus, Henri Laborit refuses the interpretation of territory in terms of instinct or private property: “One has never brought forth as evidence, either in the hypothalamus or elsewhere, either a cellular group or neural pathways that are differentiated in relation to the notion of territory… No territorial center seems to exist… It is not useful to appeal to a particular instinct”—but it is useful to do so in order to better return it to a functionality of needs extended to include cultural behaviors, which today is the vulgate common to economics, psychology, sociology, etc.: “The territory thus becomes the space necessary to the realization of the act of bestowing, the vital space… The bubble, the territory thus represent the morsel of space in immediate contact with the organism, the one in which it ‘opens’ its thermodynamic exchanges in order to maintain its own structure… With the growing interdependence of human individuals, with the promiscuity that characterizes the great modern cities, the individual bubble has shrunk considerably…” Spatial, functional, homeostatic conception. As if the stake of a group or of a man, even of an animal, were the equilibrium of his bubble and the homeostasis of his exchanges, internal and external!↩
The allusion to Peter Schlemihl, the Man Who Lost His Shadow, is not accidental. Since the shadow, like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague), is a remainder par excellence, something that can “fall” from the body, just like hair, excrement, or nail clippings to which it “is” compared in all archaic magic. But they are also, one knows, “metaphors” of the soul, of breath, of Being, of essence, of what profoundly gives meaning to the subject. Without an image or without a shadow, the body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder. It is the diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. There is no more reality: it is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague, the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero—classic sequence of fantastic tales—see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). Thus the body can be nothing but the waste product of its own residue, the fallout of its own fallout. Only the order said to be real permits privileging the body as reference. But nothing in the symbolic order permits betting on the primacy of one or the other (of the body or the shadow). And it is this reversion of the shadow onto the body, this fallout of the essential, by the terms of the essential, under the rubric of the insignificant, this incessant defeat of meaning before what remains of it, be they nail clippings or the “objet petit a,” that creates the charm, the beauty, and the disquieting strangeness of these stories.↩
Moreover, contemporary strikes naturally take on the same qualities as work: the same suspension, the same weight, the same absence of objectives, the same allergy to decisions, the same turning round of power, the same mourning of energy, the same undefined circularity in todays strike as in yesterday’s work, the same situation in the counterinstitution as in the institution: the contagion grows, the circle is closed—after that it will be necessary to emerge elsewhere. Or, rather, the opposite: take this impasse itself as the basic situation, turn the indecision and the absence of an objective into an offensive situation, a strategy. In searching at any price to wrench oneself from this mortal situation, from this mental anorexia of the university, the students do nothing but breathe energy again into an institution long since in a coma; it is forced survival, it is the medicine of desperation that is practiced today on both institutions and individuals, and that everywhere is the sign of the same incapacity to confront death. “One must push what is collapsing,” said Nietzsche.↩
There are cultures that have no imaginary except of their origin and have no imaginary of their end. There are those that are obsessed by both… Two other types of figures are possible… Having no imaginary except of the end (our culture, nihilistic). No longer having any imaginary, neither of the origin nor of the end (that which is coming, aleatory).↩
Cf. Nietzsche’s use of the word “ressentiment” throughout Thus Spoke Zaralhustra.—Trans.↩
Neither the beasts nor the savages know “nature” in our way: they only know territories, limited, marked, which are spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.
+23. Thus, Henri Laborit refuses the interpretation of territory in terms of instinct or private property: “One has never brought forth as evidence, either in the hypothalamus or elsewhere, either a cellular group or neural pathways that are differentiated in relation to the notion of territory… No territorial center seems to exist… It is not useful to appeal to a particular instinct”—but it is useful to do so in order to better return it to a functionality of needs extended to include cultural behaviors, which today is the vulgate common to economics, psychology, sociology, etc.: “The territory thus becomes the space necessary to the realization of the act of bestowing, the vital space… The bubble, the territory thus represent the morsel of space in immediate contact with the organism, the one in which it ‘opens’ its thermodynamic exchanges in order to maintain its own structure… With the growing interdependence of human individuals, with the promiscuity that characterizes the great modern cities, the individual bubble has shrunk considerably…” Spatial, functional, homeostatic conception. As if the stake of a group or of a man, even of an animal, were the equilibrium of his bubble and the homeostasis of his exchanges, internal and external!
24. The allusion to Peter Schlemihl, the Man Who Lost His Shadow, is not accidental. Since the shadow, like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague), is a remainder par excellence, something that can “fall” from the body, just like hair, excrement, or nail clippings to which it “is” compared in all archaic magic. But they are also, one knows, “metaphors” of the soul, of breath, of Being, of essence, of what profoundly gives meaning to the subject. Without an image or without a shadow, the body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder. It is the diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. There is no more reality: it is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague, the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero—classic sequence of fantastic tales—see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). Thus the body can be nothing but the waste product of its own residue, the fallout of its own fallout. Only the order said to be real permits privileging the body as reference. But nothing in the symbolic order permits betting on the primacy of one or the other (of the body or the shadow). And it is this reversion of the shadow onto the body, this fallout of the essential, by the terms of the essential, under the rubric of the insignificant, this incessant defeat of meaning before what remains of it, be they nail clippings or the “objet petit a,” that creates the charm, the beauty, and the disquieting strangeness of these stories.
25. Moreover, contemporary strikes naturally take on the same qualities as work: the same suspension, the same weight, the same absence of objectives, the same allergy to decisions, the same turning round of power, the same mourning of energy, the same undefined circularity in todays strike as in yesterday’s work, the same situation in the counterinstitution as in the institution: the contagion grows, the circle is closed—after that it will be necessary to emerge elsewhere. Or, rather, the opposite: take this impasse itself as the basic situation, turn the indecision and the absence of an objective into an offensive situation, a strategy. In searching at any price to wrench oneself from this mortal situation, from this mental anorexia of the university, the students do nothing but breathe energy again into an institution long since in a coma; it is forced survival, it is the medicine of desperation that is practiced today on both institutions and individuals, and that everywhere is the sign of the same incapacity to confront death. “One must push what is collapsing,” said Nietzsche.
26. There are cultures that have no imaginary except of their origin and have no imaginary of their end. There are those that are obsessed by both… Two other types of figures are possible… Having no imaginary except of the end (our culture, nihilistic). No longer having any imaginary, neither of the origin nor of the end (that which is coming, aleatory).
27. Cf. Nietzsche’s use of the word “ressentiment” throughout Thus Spoke Zaralhustra.—Trans.