PH You wrote something recently about the [second Gulf] war in Libération (10 March 2003).2
Well, a month ago now – before it broke out, before it really started. Just before it started. Derrida and I did a session on the war together, so I said to myself I might as well go back to all that.3 Other than that, I didn’t really want to talk about the war, once I had talked about 9/11, the singular event. The war was a non-event, but everyone – TV, radio – was asking me to talk about it. I said, listen, you haven’t read my article where I say it’s a non-event, and there is nothing to say about a non-event. So since then, apart from the article, I haven’t got involved.
PH I know it’s a non-event, but it’s impossible not to mention.
Obliquely, mediatically, ‘why not’. The problem is what’s behind the request – they don’t like what I have to say, but they come to me anyway, because they need someone to say something different, the opposite of everyone else. Even Libération will publish an article, and then print the opposite view on the page next to it. An article appears, like a bubble – it’s nice to do, but I’m under no illusions about the reception. You need to be in the right frame of mind, there has to be something going on – that’s the difference between an article and a book. Or you need to be angry – not that I’m angry, I’m ‘cool’, but if there is something unacceptable going on, you need to demystify it, whilst keeping in some theory, if possible.
PH Are you really trying to demystify something, or is it more of an exercise in writing for you?
I think it’s firstly an exercise for me, and that’s how to do it. You shouldn’t think too much about what’s going to happen to it, as you can’t do anything about it. There’s not much response in any case. I know there is a reaction, but I only know about it indirectly. There are some who understand, and then some who pretend to understand, who’ll say that it’s great and then tell you the opposite of what you said. That’s how things are.
PH I’ve noticed that, especially among artists.
Artists have always seriously misunderstood what I’m saying. That all started in the 1980s, with the American artists of the time.
PH Do they have the right to do that?
Yes. You let it happen. If you put something out you are in the hands of others – that’s perfectly normal. It’s also normal that there is a certain type of aggression against someone who writes. So you send it out, and something has to come back. It could be agreement, but it could also be an attack, like you see in some conferences. A sort of challenge. It’s not a malicious attack, it’s a bit symbolic.
PH Challenge is still important for you?
Yes, I think it needs to be played like that, played out as challenge, with the challenge itself as symbolic exchange, and not necessarily in terms of ideas, content, significations. You can oppose anything with ideas, they can stand in for one another, but there is a relation which is not personal, in psychological terms, and this is a form of ‘challenge’. This relation has to be there – play, challenge, reversion. I believe it’s an essential relation, and it’s exactly what is missing in the current climate. Nobody thinks of responding in the strong sense of the word, as a challenge. People might try to refute, disqualify or oppose their ideas to your ideas to other ideas . . . but there’s nothing really at stake. I hold on to it, but all of a sudden you’re by yourself. Then the challenge is you against yourself, and you still have to play . . .
PH And then there’s indifference . . .
Definitely – or the kind of tolerance that says, ‘I don’t agree, but . . .,’ ‘I’ve nothing against . . .,’ ‘That’s what we need – someone with totally the opposite view.’ No – I don’t want to be there as an extra. They say, ‘we need someone to speak against,’ and immediately you can tell . . .
PH . . . it’s about legitimation . . .
Exactly.
PH What exactly is being legitimated on those occasions?
It’s about intellectual liberalism and difference. But then, you’re being integrated, integrated as difference. If I want to set myself up as an antagonist, I don’t want to be there as a difference, but the system swallows you up as one of all the possible differences: ‘he says this sort of thing, we know him, he always says the same thing, he’s an impostor’ – it’s often something like that.
PH You’re being allowed to do something, but you don’t want permission.
It’s not acceptable when someone ‘gives’ you something in that way. One thing I won’t be doing again is television – those programmes where there’s a whole group of people invited. What happens there is everything gets swamped. At a push I’d still do radio, one to one.
PH Do you watch much television?
Not much, occasionally. I watch the news, but as I don’t have cable, I don’t get any of the interesting film channels. But I don’t really care, I don’t have much time to watch it. I’ve watched it a lot recently, even if what we see is intolerably trivial, banal, and the commentaries unbelievably bad. That’s exactly what was interesting: that kind of banalisation, in a continual loop. There’s nothing to say about this event [the second Gulf War], because everything was played out in advance. It was still interesting. Other than that, I don’t really watch it, except for a film now and then.
PH But you still manage to watch some of the rubbish?
I don’t have any illusions about TV. I know what I’m going to get if I switch it on . . . I do like watching streams of images – and it’s nearly always rubbish, and maybe that’s what’s most interesting on TV – things like Loft Story [French reality TV show]. I think that’s the real TV. It’s not really Arté [a European, state-funded ‘cultural’ channel], cultural TV. There’s the odd interesting thing there, but that’s the world of the text really. Meaning is something else, and TV is just a conduit like any other. TV itself is destined for a sort of infinite proliferation – as banality, as a vague sort of interactivity, as vaguely hot reality.
PH So is Arté a mistake? Should it exist?
It’s not a mistake. It’s an indulgence. It’s culture looking over what’s left of itself. I don’t see why not – I’m part of that world, I’m in all of that, so I wouldn’t say don’t watch it, neither would I say that it is quality whilst everything else is shit. Just take the shit for what it is. If I want to find culture, I’ll make it myself, I won’t look for it on television. But there are interesting things on Arté – interesting in the way a book can be.
PH Isn’t Arté a bit ‘old Europe’?
Totally. It’s an extravagance, a museum. The cultural milieu has to have signs of recognition for itself. It already finds it hard to survive. I don’t know what it’s like in Ireland.
PH Well, we’re very ‘cultural’. Just like everywhere else, with a recently invented traditional culture . . .
Reterritorialisation. But something is happening, there is some receptivity? There is a heritage, but is there a singularity? An Irish singularity, with regard to this global exchange of culture? I suppose that everywhere is a bit standardised these days.
PH There might be. There is a claim of specificity, even though American culture dominates totally. That combination could be a sort of singularity.
You see that everywhere. I was in South Korea not long ago. It was the same thing: they’re ultramodern, there’s been a huge boom, a flash, and it’s fully mediatised, but what they’re after is ‘Koreanness’ [coréanité]. So that’s what they’re looking for – in resolution, reconciliation with this global culture they fully participate in, which they’re born with. It used to be a backward, poor country, and now it’s taking off. But, what they’re missing is ‘Koreanness’. They go and ask Westerners to tell them what ‘Koreanness’ is, because it’s not clear to them, not immediately. Saying what it is is our business, it’s up to us to invent it, so they come and ask someone like me what their cultural salvation might be. It’s very nice, and they do it with a lot of courtesy. They are caught in the same problem, the same chiasmus, between the two.
PH I get the impression from what you have written that Japan and Brazil are places where something can still happen.
Yes, of course. Japan goes without saying; it has always been a highly singular country. Brazil, as well, but in a different way, is highly resistant, very strong. I liked the US a lot, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, and still do, but back then I liked it for its singularity – its anticulture, there’s something about it, a form rather than a space. It is both the site of the global – deterritorialisation – and original in its way. I liked that a lot, as something very specific. Now that’s largely been wiped out – America itself has become global. It is both the epicentre and the victim of this globalisation. Well – it depends which America we’re talking about, as there are so many. Let’s just say that it is less original, less interesting. I go there less, and more often to South America.
PH Are you still going over to Brazil?
I’m going again this May. It’s not exactly for amusement, but it is a bit of an escape. I always go there for something specific, but it really isn’t like work.
PH Europe is very keen on South America at the moment.
Argentinean cinema is breaking through. It’s being heavily promoted, but down there, the Brazilians and Argentineans, are all looking to Europe. They still find it interesting, even though you say, hang on, it’s much more interesting here. It’s not just France they’re interested in, it’s also England, but French thought is still a kind of global heritage. It’s listed as part of global heritage. I can’t say anything against that, seeing that I profit from it.
PH Will that last?
I don’t know. The audience for it is getting smaller. On the one hand, over the last ten years you have the invasion by American culture, Northern American culture, even in terms of the language. The French language is diminishing. There is still an element of privilege given to French thought, but less and less. Even in the US, there is major reduction in the potential audience, especially in the universities. There was never a real exchange, just, at one point, the mass importing of French thought. I went over to New York after 9/11. There we were, two French, two American intellectuals (although Americans are more academics than intellectuals), and they were there to settle scores with the French intellectuals. We were there to talk about 9/11, and I did, but I could see that everything had been done to avoid talking about the event. What they were after was a settling of scores. It was totally pathetic.
PH There seems to be a lot of that – and in French thought, we seem to be going back to pre-1968 thinking.
That’s true. It started in the 1980s, with so many dying. It’s not really a regression, it’s a sort of reintegration, as we head off again towards earlier phases. As if to wipe something out . . . So we’ve seen the ‘renewal’, the ‘revival’ of the Subject, values, moral values, the reinvention of politics – everything that got more or less swept away in 1968. That’s happening everywhere, including the US. A new fundamentalism [intégrisme] is emerging.
PH It’s surprising because in the English-speaking world, the 1980s and 1990s were all about ‘theory’, mostly French, and so we’re all waiting for new ideas, and instead we get ‘what is justice?’ It’s not even critique.
I don’t know what they’re trying to get back. In reality it’s not even modernity – well, maybe it’s a form of modernity – humanist, humanitarian, but no longer in its ascendant phase. It’s in its ‘recycling’ phase. Before, at least there was a straight line, always progressing, but now it’s all over the place, like a spiral. All of which means that the current climate is stagnant, and largely disappointing.
PH Which contemporary writers do you read?
I read things that come out, but in a very unorganised way – I don’t have any set reading. I stopped reading Bourdieu, I admire Derrida but it’s not my thing, and the same goes for the ‘sub-Derrideans’. There are some interesting writers – I like what Agamben writes, and also Žižek, who’s not at all known in France.
PH Who is obligatory reading in the English-speaking world . . .
Obviously, yes.
PH He’s a bit too psychoanalytical for me.
It is a bit too Lacanian – but still very interesting, and the text ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ is very good. It’s something I’d like to translate, I see where he’s coming from, his vision of things, a particular kind of perception. I share the ‘feeling’ of what he writes, whilst not agreeing with him at all. You can question it all: he wants to keep a sort of dialectic, there’s still Marxism in there somewhere. He works with Jameson and people like him, with American neo-Marxists. Not forgetting the form of Lacanian real he uses. All of that is mixed in together, and there are all sorts of strange complexities. I don’t know whether you can separate it all out, but it’s very interesting – being very much in phase and also totally out of phase. There are exceptions . . . Sloterdijk has come through. Vattimo, but he’s been around a while. English-speaking writers aren’t well known. Some writers have an ‘economy of reading’, but I haven’t had it for a while now – it’s very much a secondary activity for me.
PH Have you ever had any discussions with Chomsky?
No. I haven’t really had much discussion recently. Someone I know of, but hadn’t met, was George Steiner, who was very friendly, very likeable. He has a certain type of cultured nobility, and very individual, insightful. We are hardly on the same wavelength, but that’s not important.
PH What about Michel Houellebecq, and his Atomised?
It’s the same sort of thing – fascinating, but a nasty sort of object. I find it suspect, but it’s not him as a person I’m doubtful about. There’s something about it I don’t like. I don’t know how to analyse it, although what I don’t like is the complacency of it. Other than that, it’s fine.
PH Most of the best literature seems to be coming from America.
It’s nearly always better, and the same goes for the films – most of what I see is American. I’m not interested in amazing production or aliens. But there are films I like, like The Truman Show, Minority Report – not great films, but interesting. Existenz is good, even The Matrix. They asked me to do something on the new one, actually. They got in touch when they started filming it. There had been something on the simulacrum in the first one. This time they wanted to set up a private showing for me, and for me to write something on it. That kind of thing professionalises you though – I’m supposed to be in the virtual so it’s me you need to go and see. Always the same misunderstanding – starting with the artists: ‘What we’re doing must be really interesting to you. You said the same thing.’ The last ones were those ‘biosymbiotic’ artists [SymbioticA]. They kept pestering me, saying, ‘but you must love what we’re doing’. I said, ‘Hang on, this is not acceptable.’ They have to get some sort of support, no matter how.
PH That moment in The Matrix, where we see the cover of Simulacra and Simulation – it’s a bit obvious, isn’t it? Did you know beforehand it was going to appear? What was your reaction?
No, I didn’t know. I don’t really care. Also, there were two versions – and in the other that moment has disappeared. I don’t feel in any way connected, or responsible for what might come about, as a result of my work. It’s always been in the same in the US – there’s an audience, and a sort of veneration, but negative – ever since the ‘high priest [gourou] of postmodernism’ and all that. They’re fascinated by it, without doubt, as they write so many things about what I write, but it’s always like the book reviews, or reviews of translations, in the newspapers, and always negative. It’s either ‘he’s mad’, ‘insane’, or ‘he’s a trickster’, a ‘maverick’. That’s never changed since America, which they gave 5–6 pages to in the New York Review of Books, a major piece, but it was just to say, ‘he didn’t understand anything about the reality of America’. Well, I reply that reality is not my thing. The book was very successful, and even burned once on a campus, which is the Holy Grail.
PH Are you still doing photography?
I had sort of stopped the last few years, but I’ve started again, as there’s a show in Italy – fifty new, large format photographs, in Sienna. So I’ve been busy with that, and also another exhibition in Germany – Kassel – in December next, and one in Vienna. So I have taken up photography again. It’s different from how it was at the beginning – it doesn’t have the same character or inspiration. As well as that, it’s known now, and people ask for it. I can show whatever I like, and it was never that that interested me, and all of a sudden you wonder what you are doing. When I take photos, I make images, and that’s all. I’m not a photographer, nor a professional. Once they get circulated, go on show, obviously they take on a different meaning, and that’s more or less inevitable, it’s the same thing for books, but with images, I would say it’s more outrageous. For me, images are more singular, more exceptional, more instantaneous, but that’s over once you install them in a space for a period of time. Basically, I never quite stop doing it because I still like it, so I carry on. I haven’t written anything new on photography, but I’m still attached to it, as a sort of counterpoint to writing, and even as something which has nothing to do with writing.
PH Can you really separate them like that though?
I have written on the image – the media image, the virtual image, and so on. For me, photography is the total opposite of all that – it’s truly a sort of singular event, outside the system of representation and signification. That’s what it was for me, but clearly, photography is there in art, in realism and in journalism. That is precisely what I have no interest in. It’s more the object, imposing itself, rather than me. From that point on, there is no doctrine, because the object is without doctrine. It’s there or not there, so it’s more a suborning of an appearance, of light. I am after something similar in writing, but it’s always a singularity, it doesn’t mix. They are two specific, singular areas, which could have the same ultimate destination, but there isn’t one, or if there is, it’s always in opposition to the integrated circuit, the total circulation, of images, or ideologies, or texts. So, the attitude is the same, and there is a pattern, but I really don’t think you can put the two together, at least not mechanically, just like that. A lot of people have wanted to see it like that, and immediately compared the two, and ‘recognised’ the link. I reply that they don’t know anything because it’s not at all the same thing. Then in the end I was forced to write about it anyway. I decided there was some sort of link – anamorphosis – between text and image, but not the sort of interactivity that’s being used so much today.
PH No praxis, either, I imagine.
Absolutely not.
PH When you say the object imposes itself in photography, that could be said to be a pretty traditional view, even if to say it in theory is radical.
Maybe, but I’m not entirely sure. I go to a lot of art events and festivals, and although I see plenty of original or amazing pieces, I don’t see much that hasn’t gone via a subject, a gaze. Everyone talks about ‘my gaze, my work, my thing’. There are very few photos or images where the photographer is just the means of staging a form of reality (which some of the time is totally unreal), or letting it happen, giving you something aleatory, that doesn’t cohere. I have done some series now, but other than that, there’s no theme or problematic being followed. Festivals and exhibitions have themes, ideas, and that all gets fixed at the outset, but my view is totally different. If you go back as far as icons, and the Byzantines, then you get the major distinction between cheiropoiesis – made by the hand of man, and acheiropoiesis – where something emerges from a contingency, or from the world, as it is – there’s no human intervention, no human subject or voice. I think that’s a good distinction, and the latter is what you get with early photography, when the machine lets the world break through. Now, though, that’s less and less the case. And if you look at pictures of the violence in Rwanda or Baghdad, that’s something else again. Is it photography? I don’t know. It all depends on the definitions, the point of view you hold. Are they images? They might be photographs, but in terms of images, it’s less clear. Barthes had some amazing things to say on this.
PH Which still hold true.
Completely, and not just in terms of the image – the event, for example. How does an event, even 9/11, keep its singularity? Thought has to try to sweep away all that came to cover it up, bury it, hide it away – including the [Gulf] war, obviously. It needs to dig things out, create a void around them, so that they can actually appear. So, it’s true for the image, but valid for everything, I think. It’s the same problem.
PH Is it possible to be aware of what’s going on, even if we can’t fully capture the singularity of it?
Yes, at a certain point, not in terms of reflexive thought or analysis, but more like a reflex. Even in photography, there is still someone there, certain things catch my attention, and there is an eye, some understanding. It’s not a gaze in the accepted use of the term, but there is still clearly some sort of eye, and some sort of determining process. What you are exactly isn’t clear – are you a vector, an operator? You are a kind of medium, but instead of the subject’s will, you disappear as a subject, or as medium. There must always be disappearance of the subject and appearance [apparition] of the object. That’s easy to say, and sometimes the subject only partly disappears, and in fact never fully does. There’s an art of disappearance, and then, it’s the object that helps you, and, in a way, does the work – so there’s a handover of power, a sort of overturning. That is not so the object can become a new pole of gravity, nor is it a metaphysics of the object in itself. There’s a game, and this game, at least, must be recovered, and the hold we have on things let go, but in the meantime, with technology – including the camera – the hold is getting ever firmer. Maybe there is a point where technology could go the other way. We can relinquish this hold, and at that moment, technology goes over to the object’s side. That’s what I’m after in photography – a kind of charm, in something that arrives from elsewhere, and free of any sort of personal story. All the literature coming out now is full of it – subjective, expressionist flights of fancy – we really are in Foucault’s self-avowal. It’s a culture of confession, where everything has to be brought out, avowed, confessed. All of that stuff . . . well, it’s the dominant culture.
PH Is this technological relation with the object the returning of the object’s challenge, or is the subject in a position of loss in an exchange of objects?
I don’t really know. I see it as challenge, and I’m annoyed that so much philosophical thought – for example, the recent interest in Blanchot, and his death – is full of absence, discretion, the end of the subject – all of that is just platitudes now, and a given, and I don’t think it can be – it should have to be played for. That thought was radical, was the best part of the nihilistic side of modernity. It comes in then, and that point – the nothing, nothingness, the void – can always make its irruption, and that is the interesting moment, but after that, it’s all over. Now what you get is books that are extraordinarily intelligent, of very high quality, but of no interest whatsoever, because it’s done, we know it. It’s gone totally away from how things are going. You have the nihilist continuum of philosophy, from Heidegger on, centred on the problem of ‘nothing’, but all the while, things carry on, heading quite visibly and directly toward nothing, nothingness. What is the connection between the two? That is still interesting – you have the ultimate [philosophical] nothing, and you have ‘nihil’, nothing at all – a residue rather than nothing, and the residual world is heading for disappearance, disappearing in the virtual. Are these two the same thing? It’s not the same type of disappearance, but once you’ve got a monopoly on the noble form, like philosophy has today, then the work is presumed to be done. I did that kind of thing before, but other things hold my attention, and philosophy, the way it’s written today, really doesn’t interest me. Philosophy has professionalised the void and absence, whilst others have done the same for the full and the operational, so there is a sort of schizophrenia there. I don’t want to dismiss all of that – it’s a good way, but somewhere along the line you have to find the other way. There has to be some sort of shock to the system, a clash, because, as we know, philosophy is supposed to always question itself, question its own absence, but that kind of thinking has become a complete positivity, a philosophical inheritance.
PH The problem is with the followers – it’s always the same stuff, even if the object changes.
Absolutely. Yes – there’s a recipe, an application, which isn’t exactly a doctrine, but which does imply a certain strategy, and I saw that in the session I did with Derrida [on the second Gulf War] – he wasn’t even really doing deconstruction. We ended up talking politics, which I’ve had enough of, but he had already gone on to that terrain. He has an oblique way of addressing things, which is full of insight, but with 9/11, for example, it didn’t really happen – it’s not an object for deconstruction.
PH Although you could imagine something on the void, ground zero, what it means to reconstruct.
It could be done – for example, on the theme of zero – ‘zero death’, ground zero – that whole global doctrine. I don’t have any view about the architecture of Libeskind’s project. It’s fine, what he does isn’t bad, but as for replacing it, if it was up to me, there is nothing any more that is worth destroying, so it’s not worth building anything. It’s an occultation – what are you filling up? – an empty space – it’s the exorcists’ way, a way of exorcising things, and once that’s the case, it could be good or bad architecture. The towers were not architecturally beautiful, but the destruction was, nonetheless, a beautiful event – war is always the opposition of event and non-event, and not at all some sort of political continuity, as if history still carried on – no, there is an event, and the rest is just an additional non-event, something to overcome the irradiation, the virus of the major event, of 9/11. After that, I don’t see how political negotiations can work, and the idea it’s all about oil . . . no, the fundamental humiliation has not been erased, and will not be.
So, we are in an endless non-event. The event has a limit, it happens and that’s it, it’s over.
PH Is it impossible to respond?
Yes, impossible and unexchangeable. It’s the impossible exchange – you can’t get away from it. The curse of omnipotence is that it cannot be exchanged. Omnipotence is unexchangeable, because there is no more equivalent, and with no possibility of exchange, it starts secreting . . . in a way, it starts to destroy itself. That which you cannot exchange is unacceptable. You need to provoke an opposing, destructive force – which happens to be terrorism, and failing that, you have to fill the void with non-events, through force if necessary, but that can never erase the initial event. I believe this is a problem at a more general level – the unexchangeable, impossible exchange. We’re all faced with this problem, in the most general way: what can or cannot be exchanged. We’re faced with a world that is given, in the first place that’s the natural world we find ourselves in. Previously, we could respond with sacrifice. In exchange, we had sacrifice. Today we don’t have this possibility, instead we have this ‘zero death’. We can’t respond with that, and the Americans can’t offer death for death, because for them what counts is ‘zero death’. Whichever way you look, they’re stuck. From there, either you have to destroy the world, as the world that is purely a given one, and to which you cannot respond, is unacceptable, or you invent a purely artificial one, and that’s what I think the virtual is. Invent one that’s not given, and that we have completely made ourselves. That would be cheiropoiesis. Then you do not have to account for anything to anyone, or to God. But that’s not the end of it, because the world we create for ourselves still has the symbolic principle [règle symbolique]. The rule of exchange: once something is made, it must be exchangeable, that is, ultimately, it must be sacrificeable, a form of possible counter-gift. But with the virtual, the counter-gift is no longer possible. The virtual homogenises, makes everything positive, so we find ourselves faced with the same, basically disastrous, catastrophic situation, which is ‘what can we do with that?’ How can we absolve ourselves of this virtual world we’ve created? It’s still the same problem – there’s no one there to absolve us, and there is no more enemy facing us to justify our power [puissance]. The major task today is to invent one enemy after another – as in the ‘Axis of Evil’ – but it isn’t working, it’s more like the parallax of Evil – in other words, the ‘Axis of Evil’ comes back to the inside of the Good, comes through the Good, and they haven’t understood that at all. We can’t even ask them to understand. We’re involved in a constant clamour that isn’t even war – it’s some sort of conjuration. We’re getting to a point of total security, total prevention, like Minority Report, where all possible crimes are prevented. Anything that could happen, anything that might take place is regarded as terrorism. The rule, or the order, is that nothing take place, nothing is to occur any more. So anything that can occur must be predicted in advance, exterminated in advance. Suddenly, we have to redefine terrorism, because it’s no longer just Muslims or fundamentalists – it’s everywhere – it could be a natural catastrophe, or a virus like SARS – what we’re talking about is objective terrorism. It’s no longer at all religious or ideological . . . it’s all forms. So, in practice, it’s total war, maybe the fourth world war, or, like Virilio said, a sort of planetary civil war, as it’s a coalition of all the powers on the side of order against all those who are now potential terrorists. All populations are virtually terrorist insofar as they have not yet been exterminated. That’s what we saw in the Moscow theatre.4 So what can we do – the objection to all that is to say we need to reconstruct. Because of the shock to the system, everyone’s trying to find the universal, some universal values which can mop up everything and mediatise it. Our Chirac is trying, against all the others . . . he brings up universal values and international institutions, but that’s precisely the proof that you can’t count on them any more. What we have is two extremes, extremists in opposition, and the universal got swept away by the world power which isn’t at all concerned about it – we’re in the global, not the universal, as I’ve said before.
PH The universal still works in France . . .
For us . . . it’s our heritage. The only thing is, it doesn’t have any value any more – it is not rated at the global level. It’s not worth anything on the Stock Exchange, values are down.
PH Even in the Eurozone?
There’s always little islands of value, where it still goes on. That’s the last resort, but at that point, it is no longer a transcendental universal, but a particular one that a culture cultivates for itself. We’re using the universal as a strategy of returns [rechange], but it no longer has currency as universality – as a value it has disappeared. That’s the situation as I see it, and for the moment, there’s no solution, either. You can look for an answer if you adopt an intermediate level – a so-called political solution, but once you look at the symbolic level, there is no solution, because by definition there is no solution at symbolic level. There’s a rule, a game, and you are caught within duality, alterity, without any possible reconciliation. What is interesting in the current situation is that we have got, violently, to duality. In other words, we are no longer in a dialectic, with its third term, but we are in a dual confrontation, and, that, I would say, is ultimately something good. It’s progress, it’s a radicalisation. So we’re a lot further from the solution, but a lot nearer the problem.
PH And if you’re too close?
It burns.
PH One last question: I’m very interested in the role of Bataille in your work – would you say he’s important for your books since The Perfect Crime?
Bataille, yes, Nietzsche above all – but they’re not really reference points as such. I read Nietzsche in German when I was young – all of it, and since then I haven’t opened a book of his. The same goes for Bataille – and in fact, it’s better than a reference, as it’s hidden away, part of the fabric, in the threads. I am Bataillean, even if I’ve written a critique of him5 . . . sovereignty, excess, the accursed share – these are still beyond domestication, unsurpassable.
PH It’s no longer possible to be Bataille, but if he were writing, he would be close to ideas like symbolic exchange, impossible exchange.
Yes. Maybe there’s some sort of mimetism, an analogism that plays unconsciously. That’s at play, but I had the same effect on Barthes, some time ago. There was a sort of parallelism of subjects, themes . . . never looked for, but a certain type of complicity. I don’t like the insistence on references – people are too fond of it. It answers the question too readily, and I’ve always tried to wipe out the traces . . . it’s part of the work . . . so I don’t really want someone to come and find them where maybe they don’t exist, but with regard to Bataille, it’s true.
PH Is it better to live in a Bataillean world or a Baudrillardian one?
I don’t know. In Bataille’s world, at that time, there was a form of excess, still something erotic, historical, in reserve – that we don’t have now. I don’t know what we live on. Unfortunately, it’s precisely that world, made in the 1920s and 1930s, that we live on in. So in a way we are their successors. I still consider that something has changed, so the situation is nonetheless original. Original in its banality as well. There’s a constant play between banality and fatality, but the circumstances are different now. There was a breath of air, an inspiration then that we have difficulty finding today. There was also a complicity – there was a big group of them, and they talked to each other. The group had a sort of ‘mini-sovereignty’. That period is truly over. There’s a fracture which meant there was something there, something of a golden age within modernity, even as it began to fall. You always have to be there, at the moment of fragility, the crucial moments of rupture, and they had the historic opportunity of an extraordinary moment of rupture. And we had 9/11.
NOTES
1. The interview was conducted in Jean Baudrillard’s apartment, on 17 April 2003. Words in italics and inside quotation marks were originally in English.
2. Baudrillard, J. (2005), ‘The mask of war’, c-theory.net, <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=494#_ednref1> (last accessed 18 August 2016). [Editors]
3. See Baudrillard, J. (2015), Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui? (avec Jacques Derrida), Paris: Éditions Lignes. Note that a DVD accompanies this book and includes a question from the audience, to which Baudrillard replies, which the book omits (Mike Gane, personal communication). [Editors]
4. The seizing of hostages by Chechen rebels at the Dubrovka Theatre on 23 October 2002. [Editors]
5. See Baudrillard, J. (1987), ‘When Bataille attacked the metaphysical principle of economy’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11: 3, pp. 59–62. [Editors]
© Continuum. Original publication: ‘Interview with Jean Baudrillard’, in P. Hegarty (2004), Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory, London: Continuum, pp. 134–49.