Symbolic Exchange and Death Jean Baudrillard, 1976. The book where the three orders of simulacra, the political economy of death, and symbolic exchange as the form capital cannot answer are first set out together.

This is the book where Baudrillard sets the three orders of simulacra, the long argument about the political economy of death, and the wager on symbolic exchange into a single structure. The pieces that later circulate separately, the precession of the model over the real, the code, hyperreality, are assembled here around one claim: that the law of value has passed from its commodity form into a structural form, and that what this structural order excludes, and cannot answer, is symbolic exchange.

The argument runs on a single operation repeated across every domain. Production, the body, fashion, sexuality, death, and poetic language are each shown to be organised by a law of equivalence, and each is set against a form that the law of equivalence cannot absorb. That form is reversibility: the gift answered by the counter-gift, exchange reversed in sacrifice, the term of the langue reversed in the anagram, life reversed in death. Where there is equivalence there is accumulation, linearity, and value. Where there is reversibility there is the symbolic, and the symbolic is what every system organised by value must keep at bay.

The brief preserves the book's own order. A preface lays the thesis and the method. The first chapter takes the case of production and labour. The second sets out the three orders of simulacra and the passage into the code. The third and fourth carry the same operation into fashion and the body. The fifth, by far the longest and the book's centre of gravity, is the treatise on political economy and death. The sixth turns to Saussure's anagrams and the extermination of value in poetic language. The apparatus at the end gathers the source's anomalies preserved as printed, the places where Baudrillard states a position he will not take, and the formulations that recur across the corpus.

Front Matter · page 22Preface

The Preface states the thesis in its first sentence and then states the method. The thesis is not that some societies run on symbolic exchange and others do not, but that symbolic exchange has ceased to organise the society we live in and now returns to it only as a haunting.

Page 22

Symbolic exchange is no longer the organising principle of modern society. Of course, the symbolic haunts modern social institutions in the form of their own death. Indeed, since the symbolic no longer rules these social forms, they experience it only as this haunting, and as a demand forever blocked by the law of value. Even though a certain idea of revolution has, since Marx, attempted to find a way past the law of value, it long since became a revolution in accordance with the Law. Even psychoanalysis gravitates around this haunting, which it fends off while at the same time circumscribing it within an individualised unconscious, thus reducing it, under the Law of the Father, to the obsessional fear of castration and the Signifier. Always the Law.

The opening move: symbolic exchange survives only as the repressed of the institutions that have displaced it, with both Marxist revolution and psychoanalysis named as forms that domesticate it rather than recover it.

From this the method follows. The three thinkers Baudrillard means to use are to be used against themselves, each turned past the point at which his own system stopped.

Pages 22 to 23

Indeed we must switch the targets of each of these three theories, and turn Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against Saussure and Freud against Freud. The principle of reversibility (the counter-gift) must be imposed against all the economistic, psychologistic and structuralist interpretations for which Mauss paved the way. The Saussure of the Anagrams must be set against Saussurian linguistics, against even his own restricted hypotheses concerning the anagram. The Freud of the death drive must be pitched against every previous psychoanalytic edifice, and even against Freud's version of the death drive.

The program in one passage. Mauss's gift, Saussure's anagrams, and Freud's death drive are recruited as the three figures of reversibility, each radicalised against the author who first stated it.

Reversibility is then named as the single form running under every domain, and the catalogue is given in full, since the list is the argument in miniature.

Page 23

Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, 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. In every domain it assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself.

The master list of reversibilities. Each later chapter works one entry: production in chapter one, the langue in chapter six, life in death across chapter five.

The strategic claim is that a system run by the code cannot be opposed by the old revolutionary dialectic, which belonged to the commodity stage of value. What answers the code is disorder of a different order.

Page 25

Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibility of death, belongs to a higher order than the code. Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption in the code. Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall.

The strategic thesis: against a system organised by the code, only the reversibility of death interrupts, and the system's own drive to perfection is what carries it toward collapse.