Irreconcilability
By Jean Baudrillard / Translated by James Benedict
This essay was originally published as part of Jean Baudrillard's "La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrèmes" (1990), translated into English in 1993 as "The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena".
To the principle of conjunction and reconciliation stands opposed the principle of disjunction and irreconcilability. From this confrontation the
principle of irreconcilability always emerges triumphant, because by definition it can never give way to the principle of reconciliation.
The same sort of thing happens in the case of Good and Evil. The Good consists in a dialectic of Good and Evil. Evil consists in the
negation of this dialectic, in a radical dissociation of Good and Evil, and by extension in the autonomy of the principle of Evil. Whereas the Good
presupposes a dialectical involvement of Evil, Evil is founded on itself alone, in pure incompatibility. Evil is thus master of the game, and it is the
principle of Evil, the reign of eternal antagonism, that must eventually carry off the victory.
When it comes to radical otherness between beings, sexes or cultures, we find the same kind of antagonism as in the case of Evil,
the same logic of definitive incomprehensibility, the same bias in favour of foreignness. Is it possible, then, to join forces with this foreignness? The
answer is no, because of the theorem which may be advanced, by analogy with the behaviour of heavenly bodies, according to which bodies and minds are
forever drawing farther and farther away from each other. This hypothesis of an endless process of excommunication, which subsumes the notion of an
indissoluble curse, is also, precisely, the hypothesis of the transparency of evil -- as opposed to the universal utopia of communication. A hypothesis,
therefore, that is everywhere contradicted by the facts. But only apparently so, for in reality the more things seem to become orientated towards
universal comprehension and universal homogenization, the more unavoidable becomes the idea of an eternal irreducibility whose ineradicable presence is
easier to sense than to analyze.
This presence imposes itself as the brute fact, as the irresistible, suprasensory, supranatural reality which is thrown up as
a figure of fatality by the impossibility of a dialectical theory of difference. A kind of universal force of repulsion confronting the official
universal force of attraction.
In its irreconcilability, this force is present in every culture. It is still at work today in the relationships between the
Third World and the West, between Japan and the West, or between Europe and America, and also within each culture, in the shape of those deviant forms
which eventually come to predominate. Morocco, Japan or Islam will never become Western. Europe will never bridge the gulf of modernity that
separates it from America. Cosmopolitan evolutionism is an illusion, and it is everywhere being exposed as such.
There is no solution to Foreignness. It is eternal -- and radical. It is not a matter of wanting it to be that way. It simply
is so.
This is Radical Exoticism: the rule governing the world. It is not a law, for the law is the universal principle of understanding, the regulated
interplay of differences, moral, political and economic rationality. It is a rule -- and, like all rules, implies an arbitrary predestination.
Consider languages, none of which is reducible to any other. Languages are predestined, each according to its own rules, its own arbitrary determinants,
its own implacable logic. Each obeys the laws of communication and exchange, certainly, but at the same time it answers to an indestructible internal
coherence; a language as such is, and must forever remain, fundamentally untranslatable into any other language. This explains why all languages are so
"beautiful" -- precisely because they are foreign to one another.
A law is never ineluctable: it is a concept, founded upon a consensus. A rule, by contrast, is indeed ineluctable, because it is
not a concept but a form that orders a game. Seduction illustrates this well. Eros is love -- the force of attraction, of fusion, of conjunction. Seduction
is the far more radical figure of disjunction, distraction, illusion and diversion, a figure that alters essence and meaning, alters identity and the
subject. And, contrary to common belief, entropy is on the side not of universal disjunction but of conjunction and fusion, love and understanding --
on the side of the proper use of differences. Seduction -- exoticism -- is an excess of the other, of otherness, the vertiginous appeal of what is
"more different than different": this is what is irreducible -- and this is the true source of energy.
In this predestined world of the Other, everything comes from elsewhere -- happy or unhappy events, illnesses, even thoughts themselves. All
imperatives flow from the non-human -- from gods, beasts, spirits, magic. This is a universe of fatality, not of psychology. According to Julia
Kristeva we become estranged from ourselves by internalizing the other, and this estrangement from ourselves takes the form -- among others -- of the
unconscious. But in the world of fatality the unconscious does not exist. There is no universal form of the unconscious, as psychoanalysis claims,
and the only alternative to unconscious repression is fatality -- the imputation of everything to a completely non-human agency, an agency which is
external to the human and delivers us from it.
The question of the Other in this fatal universe is the question of hospitality.
Hospitality represents a reciprocal, ritualized and theatrical dimension. Whom are we to receive, and how are we to receive them?
What rules should we follow here? For we exist solely to be received, and to receive (not to be known and recognized). This symbolic dimension is precisely
what is missing from communication, in which the message is merely decoded, never given or received. The message is passed -- but there is no exchange
between people. The abstract dimension of meaning is transmitted, while the aspect of reciprocity is short-circuited.
The Other is my guest. Not someone who is legally equal, though different; but a foreigner, a stranger, extraneus. And for
this very reason, his strangeness has to be exorcized. But once he has been initiated in due form, my guest's life becomes even more precious to me than
my own. In this symbolic universe there is no place for the otherness of difference. Neither animals, nor gods, nor the dead, are other. All are
caught up in the same cycle. If you are outside the cycle, however, you do not even exist.
All other cultures are extraordinarily hospitable: their ability to absorb is phenomenal. Whereas we waver between the other
as prey and the other as shadow, between predation pure and simple and an idealizing recognition, other cultures still retain the capacity to incorporate
what comes to them from without, including what comes from our Western universe, into their own rules of the game. They may perform this recycling
operation instantaneously or over the long term, but in no case are their code and basic arrangements threatened thereby. Precisely because they do not
live by the illusion of a universal law, they are not rendered oversensitive as we are, who are constantly being commanded to internalize the law and
to make ourselves the origin of our own selves, acts, tastes and pleasures. Primitive cultures do not burden themselves with pretensions of this order.
Being oneself means nothing to them: everything comes from the Other. There is no such thing as oneself, nor is there any call for such a thing.
From this point of view there is not much difference between Japan and Brazil, or between either of them and Jean Rouch's
"manic priests": all are cannibals in the sense that they offer a lethal hospitality to values that are not and never will be theirs.
The strength of the Japanese lies in the kind of hospitality they accord to technology and to all forms of modernity (just as, in the past, they
opened their doors to religion and writing). Their hospitality involves no psychological internalization or commitment on their part, however, and things
are kept strictly at the level of codes. It is more a form of challenge than an offer of reconciliation or recognition: their own impenetrability
remains total. This is, literally, a sort of seduction whereby something -- a sign, a technique or an object -- is diverted from its own essence and
made to function in another code; or -- to put it another way -- made to pass from the realm of laws (capital, value, economy, meaning) into the
realm of rules (play, rituals, ceremonies, cycles, repetition).
Japanese dynamism corresponds to neither the value system nor the goals of the Western project. Its practical applications
manifest a distantiation and operational purity unencumbered by the idologies and beliefs that have shaped the history of capital and technology in the
West. The Japanese are the great play-actors of technology, unknowningly upholding in the sphere of technology the paradox of the actor in the theatre:
the most effective actor must have detachment, he must have rules to go by, and his own inspiration must come from outside -- from the role, or from the
technical object, as the case may be. (Japanese industrialists believe that there is a god concealed within each product of technology, making it
autonomous and infusing it with its own inner spirit.) Technology is to be played with as signs are played with: the subject should efface himself
completely, meaning should be at its most elliptical -- in short, pretence should be the order of the day.
Symbolic rituals can absorb anything, including the organless body of capitalism. They obviate any need to leave one's own
ground, and involve neither Heideggerian speculation on technology's relationship to the origins and to being, nor psychological internalization. The
Japanese challenge the West on its own terms, but their strategy is infinitely more effective: the strategy of a value system than can afford the
luxury of technology, of a technological practice founded on pure artifice and having absolutely nothing to do with progress or similar rational
forms. For us this pure strategy, this cold and painstaking efficiency, so different from the trivial modernity of the West, is an enigmatic and indeed
unintelligible form. In this sense it is one of those forms that Segalen describes as radical exoticism, and one which is all the more startling in that
it "affects" the ways of an overdeveloped society while at the same time retaining all primitive society's power of ritual.
Japanese culture is thus a cannibalistic form -- assimilating, absorbing, aping, devouring. Afro-Brazilian culture is also a rather
good example of cannibalism in this sense: it too devours white modern culture, and it too is seductive in character. Cannibalism must indeed always
be merely an extreme form of relationship to the other, and this includes cannibalism in the relationship of love. Cannibalism is a radical form of
hospitality.
That is not to say that the race question is any nearer resolution in Brazil than anywhere else -- simply that racist ideology
faces a more difficult task in Brazil on account of the racial confusion and the range of race mixtures that exist there. Discrimination confronts a web
of racial lines as unpredictable as the lines of the human palm. This invalidation of racism by virtue of the scattering of its object is far more
subtle and effective than ideological struggle, whose ambiguity invariably revives the very problem it seeks to resolve. Racism will never end so long
as it is combated frontally in terms of rational rebuttal. It can be defeated only through an ironic give-and-take founded precisely on racial
differences: not at all through the legitimation of differences by legal means, but through an ultimately violent interaction grounded in seduction and
voracity. One thinks of the Bishop of Pernambuco; one thinks of the words "How good he was, my little Frenchman!" He is very good-looking, so he is
sanctified -- and eaten. He is granted something greater than the right to exist: the prestige of dying. If racism is a violent abreaction in response to
the Other's seductive power (rather than to the Other's difference), it can surely be defused only by an increase in seductiveness itself.
So many other cultures enjoy a more original situation than ours. For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary
analytical means but no situation to analyze. We live theoretically well beyond our own events: hence our deep melancholy. For others destiny still
flickers: they live it, but it remains for them, in life as in death, something forever indecipherable. As for us, we have abolished "elsewhere". Cultures
stranger than ours live in prostration (before the heavens, before destiny); we live in consternation (at the absence of destiny). Nothing can come from
anywhere except from us. This is, in a way, the most absolute misfortune.