Fictionalizing Marx, or Towards Non-Dialectics: Baudrillard and Laruelle

Jonathan Fardy (bio)

Abstract

This essay offers a comparative reading of the post-Marxian work of Jean Baudrillard and François Laruelle, arguing that both thinkers seek to establish a way forward for theory that remains faithful to the spirit of Marxism without reaffirming dialectics. In order to do so, both turn to the concept and strategy of “fiction.” Their fictionalized Marxian theory intervenes in reality in the form of writing without reaffirming the dialectical presumption that the Real and concept can be exchanged. To fictionalize Marxism in non-dialectical terms repudiates the logic of exchange, enabling us to think against capital in non-capitalist terms.

This essay offers a comparative reading of the post-Marxian work of Jean Baudrillard and François Laruelle to argue that these thinkers are linked by two elective affinities. First, both seek to establish a way forward for theory that remains faithful to the spirit of Marxism without reaffirming dialectics. Second, both turn to the concept and strategy of “fiction” in order to accomplish this task; Baudrillard names his work “theory-fiction,” and Laruelle names his “non-philosophical” approach to theory “philo-fiction” (short for “philosophical fiction”). I argue that their turn to fiction grows out of a shared conviction that theory must forge ahead without reference to the Real. I capitalize the Real, as does Laruelle, because it names what both thinkers conceive (in different ways) as the transcendental horizon that can never be encompassed by the signs and simulacra of theoretical concepts. This axiomatic starting point organizes Baudrillard’s and Laruelle’s approach to non-dialectical theory. For them, no dialectical exchange between concept and the Real ought to be assumed and enacted in the space of theoretical writing. The model of “fiction” does not make claims on the Real or the essence of reality, but takes place as an event in reality itself. The aim of their fictionalized Marxian theory is to intervene in reality without reaffirming the dialectical presumption that the Real and concept can be exchanged. Rather than leading either thinker to despair or to turn away from Marxism, fictionalization enables both to rethink the practice of Marxian theory in non-exchange-based terms or the terms of capitalist logic. To assume that the Real can be exchanged for concepts—which, for Laruelle, is the fundamental presupposition of all philosophies—affirms the primacy of the principle of exchange that underwrites capitalist abstraction. To fictionalize Marxism in non-dialectical terms repudiates the logic of exchange in order to think against capital in non-capitalist terms.

I want to first begin by very briefly opening up the concept of dialectics as it has been historically understood. Fredric Jameson argues in Valences of the Dialectic that the term “dialectics” historically has had two distinct but interrelated meanings. “Traditional presentations have tended to stage the dialectic,” writes Jameson, “either as a system on the one hand, or as a method on the other—a division that faintly recalls the shift from Hegel to Marx” (3). He suggests that both presentations are increasingly untenable today because the idea (or ideal) of philosophical systematicity has been dethroned. Marxist dialectics—dialectic as method—is beset by debate and division over the philosophical question of Marxism’s applicability, which inevitably leads back to affirmations or repudiations of the idea that Marxism is a system. Whether taken as method or as system, dialectical philosophy attempts to temporalize philosophical concepts: to think in time. A properly dialectical concept is self-reflexively defined by the contradictory conditions that establish the possibility of its own conceptualization. Dialectics repudiates the idea that timeless concepts make reality thinkable. For the dialectician, reality itself is an historically contingent (if not determined) concept. However, as Jameson shows, the argument over whether dialectics is a method or a philosophy presupposes a thoroughly “undialectical” conception of method and philosophy (49). At the same time, if one does not in some way lend the concept of dialectics “structure,” it cannot be conceptualized apart from the visisitudes of its history. One is then faced with the problem or the tension – perhaps a dialectical tension – between structure and event.

Dialectically speaking, there cannot in principle be something called “the dialectic,” which assumes a singular mode of thought that isn’t subject to history. But if there is no such thing as “the dialectic,” then there are only competing dialectical methods. While one could compile a list of examples of dialectical methods, the list would itself imply some structural invariance that binds the examples to one another: a law that would be the dialectical other of contingency. “Examples are the arbitrary cases that rattle around inside the impossible abstraction called a law,” writes Jameson, and this “law” of the same that identifies examples of thought as truly dialectical would be but the displaced name for “the concrete universal” (50). For Jameson, pluralizing and temporalizing the concept of the dialectic will not enable us to escape the binding claim of universality that conditions the possibility of the concept of “the dialectic” as the foundation of dialectics. Dialectics is either the method for gaining access to the Real movement of history or the unsurpassable philosophy of history itself. Either way, it appears to many contemporary thinkers as a dangerously totalizing mode of thinking.

Defenders of the dialectic maintain that it offers a means (if not a system) for reconciling thought and history – idea and time – and that this reconciliation to reality tempers theory by subordinating it to the historical conditions of its own possibility. The ideal dialectical reconciliation for Marxism is the ultimate unity of theory and practice, whereby the Real of history will at last be changed forever through a theory that correctly captures the Real and by a practice that transforms the Real by dissolving the necessity for theory itself though its very realization. As Lenin once put it: “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized” (Korsch 97). This drive to go beyond theory and transform reality marks the Marxian dialectical tendency to “distinguish itself from purely philosophical systems … by positing itself as a ‘unity of theory and practice'” (Jameson 321). But in order to realize itself in practice, Marxism (as philosophy or method) must first capture the Real of history in dialectical concepts using the dialectic itself. Baudrillard and Laruelle intervene on this question of the capture of the Real. Hence, their non-dialectical modes of fictionalized theory turn on the problem of the Real itself to which we now turn.

In Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle spells out his axiom of the Real. The Real is nothing less than the radicality of immanence prior to any concept of the Real, or what Laruelle calls “Philosophical Decision” on the Real. The Real is always already the prior condition for the possibility of philosophy and all its decisions. Laruelle writes:

Immanence of the Real, … without a single morsel of transcendence (of the World, language, movement, topology, set theory, etc.)—of philosophy. It is what it names, … an autonomy through radicality in relation to every form of transcendence. Phenomenally, it is a “Given-without givenness.”(18)

Laruelle’s point here is relatively simple. The Real is not a philosophical concept. The Real transcends philosophical reason only by reason of its immanence. As Ian James notes in The New French Philosophy:

[T]he real is transcendental … insofar as it is its own condition. The real does not need anything other than itself and its own indivisibility in order to be what it is: this is its absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency. Yet since the real is real (a lived, “unreflective” experience), it is also the condition of all being, existence, thought, consciousness, transcendence, and so on since all these are (in) the real, or put differently, the real is always immanent to them. (169)

Laruelle criticizes “standard philosophy” for presuming itself sufficient to determine or decide the Real. In Laruelle’s view, the Real is decisive and determinant for all thought in the last instance. Non-philosophy opts inventively to resign the authority of “standard philosophy” to decide the Real. It reworks philosophical concepts via aesthetic strategies of fictionalization in order to think through philosophy without presuming to know or decide what is decisive (the Real). Laruelle writes, again, in Principles of Non-Philosophy:

non-philosophy holds to: 1) the destitution of [philosophy’s] sufficiency and its authority (of the “Principle of Sufficient Philosophy”); b) the affirmation of the equivalence of every philosophical position before the Real; c) a reevaluation of the identity (if not the “whole”) of philosophy as simple … “field of phenomena” or objects for the new discipline [of non-philosophy]. (19)

The objects of non-philosophy consist of what Laruelle calls “clones,” which look like standard concepts but are used in non-decisionist ways. Laruelle assembles these clones into fictional texts or “philo-fictions.” Fiction should be understood here in Laruelle’s special sense. As he explains in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, philo-fictions have two “surfaces.” “On one of their surfaces,” writes Laruelle, “they [philo-fictions] will be scientific representations … that utilize philosophical elements,” which is to say philo-fictions represent a certain open-minded, experimental approach to the raw materials of philosophy; but, “on the other surface, they will be philosophical fictions, fictions ‘for’ philosophy” (239). Philo-fiction uses the raw materials of philosophy experimentally precisely by taking them as raw materials rather than as elements of a systematic set of coordinated decisions on the Real. This experimental or “scientific” approach yields a fictionalization of philosophical systems.

Philo-fiction thus occupies a parallel space to that of standard philosophy. As Anthony Paul Smith observes in Laruelle: A Stranger Thought, “the purpose of [Laruelle’s] fiction is a kind of counter-creation to that of the world” (119). By refusing to legitimize the gesture of philosophical decisionism, philo-fiction effects an auto-critique of philosophy’s a priori assumption that it is sufficient to know the Real and decide the question of its essence. “The act of creating fiction or ‘fabulating’ is the goal of a non-philosophy,” writes Smith, “in order to relativize and disempower what presents itself as sufficient and absolute,” namely philosophy itself (119–120). Philosophy valorizes itself by establishing a sovereign discourse over the Real. This presumption to mastery over the Real takes the form of a discourse on the world in most materialist philosophies, where the aim is not to seek a metaphysical truth, but to lay claim to the truth of the world as it is. But this too Laruelle rejects. This is why he always capitalizes “world,” because, like the Real, world is a transcendental signified invented and operationalized by philosophical reason.

In his critique of the concept of “world” Laruelle aligns himself with others of his generation, especially Alain Badiou. Familiar concepts of world tend to function as alibis for pragmatism and reformism. “Be practical!” “Get real!” “This is the real world.” For Badiou, these are colloquial versions of a philosophy of subjugation that prizes reconciliation with a hollow and hopeless concept of the world. But the world operative in such instances is not the Real. The Real is what can always be punctured and broken in two by the “event.” Badiou polemically and critically refuses what Peter Hallward calls “the worldly condition” (25). Badiou will not accommodate his thought to a concept of world that refuses to recognize its potential for eventual ruptures. “Badiou’s philosophy,” writes Hallward, “is infused with that same contempt for worldliness characteristic of the great antiphilosophers, most obviously Saint Paul and Pascal. The world, as such, is defined for Badiou by imperatives of communication and interest” (25). The concept of the world (or World, in Laruelle’s language) is an alibi for conformist thought that disavows eventual possibility. However, despite a degree of convergence between Laruelle’s and Badiou’s critiques of the commonsense concept of world, their projects are in detail entirely opposed. Badiou remains committed to concepts like Being and Truth, whereas Laruelle suspends these concepts—in a kind of radicalization of the Husserlian epoché—in order to treat philosophical texts as raw material for thinking otherwise than that demanded by the decisionist imperative. Laruelle’s inventive skill at disempowering and defetishizing philosophy comes to the fore in his book-length critique of Badiou. In Anti-Badiou, Laruelle clones Badiou’s concepts in order to produce a parodic representation of Badiou’s political philosophy that challenges what Laruelle sees as the authoritarian dimension of his thought. Laruelle zeroes in on Badiou’s axiom that mathematics equals ontology: Badiou “manages to divest us of all our predicates and reduce us,” writes Laruelle, “to the state of a proletariat at the service of a mathematico-philosophical dictatorship” (xxxvi). Laruelle resits, however, any overt “philosophical” challenge to Badiou’s philosophy on the grounds that this would merely aggrandize philosophy itself. Laruelle writes that his aim is

not a dialogue, it is … an ultimatum, but emitted this time from an acknowledged position of weakness, in an encounter with a position of acknowledged force. … An ultimatum signifies that we are not the mirror of the other. Very precisely, Badiou is a means for non-philosophy … [thus] this book is, above all, finally … a book in which non-philosophy explains itself to itself, but with the aid of a counter-model that it falls to us to transform. (xxxix)

Laruelle’s text on Badiou is a model of fictionalized Marxian theory. Laruelle voids Badiou’s “system” of its imperatives and decisionist valences. He reweaves, reworks, and re-produces Badiou’s terms into a “clone” of Badiou’s system. He treats Badiou’s concepts as “raw materials” to critique his mathematico-political “dictatorship.” Laruelle’s critique of his system via fictional strategies of parody, exaggeration, and juxtaposition constructs a counter-theory that implicitly calls for the “liberation” of theory from philosophical claims on the Real. He thereby indicates a path forward for theory that neither reifies nor aggrandizes philosophy’s stature. Laruelle’s fictionalization rebels against the authority (and authoritarianism) of philosophy. The fiction that interests Laruelle cannot be constrained by any theory or philosophy of fiction or tied to any conceptual apparatus that would decide its epistemic status in advance. As John O’ Maoilearca astutely observes in All Thoughts Are Equal:

If the Real is experienced as “nothing-but-real,” then fiction, commensurately, must no longer belong to the “order of the false”. … such a reconfiguration of fiction requires a rebellion against “philosophy’s authority” over it: fiction must no longer be subordinated to the judgments of philosophy. Instead, philosophy will be made to “reenter” through fiction and be conceived as a mode of fabulation. … an avowedly utopian form of thought. (99)

One does not “apply” non-philosophy any more than one would “apply” fiction. Rather, one non-philosophizes philosophy in the name of liberating thought from its addiction to dominate and decide the Real. Such liberation aims to repurpose philosophemes (voided of their decisionist character) within a fictional ensemble that maps out a theoretically utopic position free from the closed dialectic of the Real.

Here Laruelle’s position intersects with Baudrillard’s. Although their concepts of the Real are by no means identical, Baudrillard’s axiomatic starting point yields a similar mode of utopic theorizing that he calls “theory-fiction.” The central axiom of Baudrillard’s best-known work is the disappearance of the Real. “On the horizon of simulation,” writes Baudrillard, “not only has the world [or the Real] disappeared but the very question of its existence can no longer be posed” (Crime 5). For Baudrillard, this disappearance “defines the irresolvable relationship between thought and reality,” inasmuch as “a certain form of thought is bound to the real” (96). That “certain form of thought” is none other than dialectics, which “starts out from the hypothesis that ideas have referents and that there is a possible ideation of reality. A comforting polarity, which is that of tailor-made dialectical and philosophical solutions” (96). Opposing dialectical thought, which presumes a critical interface with a preexistent concept of the Real, Baudrillard advocates for the writing of “theory-fiction.” As he notes in an interview with Salvatore Mele and Mark Titmarsh:

My way of reflecting on things is not dialectic. Rather it’s provocative, reversible, it’s a way of raising things up to their ‘N’th power, rather than a way of dialectizing them. It’s a way of following through the extremes to see what happens. It’s a bit like a theory-fiction.(82)

For good reason, Baudrillard never spells out exactly the form that fictionalized theory is supposed to take; theory-fiction is not a systematic theory, but a process of invention that “challenges” the Real as well as the style and substance of dialectical theory. One may say that theory-fiction represents what Laruelle would call a mode of “non-analysis,” which parodically deflates and defetishizes the typical subjects of critical theory: power, domination, political economy. His search for a theoretical topos unencumbered by a concern for the Real marks the late Baudrillard as a thinker of utopia in theory, which also links his project with Laruelle’s non-philosophy. As Mike Gane notes in Baudrillard’s Bestiary, Baudrillard’s later work evinces an “undeniable vitality and creativity coupled with an undying fidelity not to a utopian vison in a passive sense, but to a passionate utopian practice in theory” (157). In Baudrillard’s earlier Marxian phase and in his later writings, theory-fiction is a means of theorizing that maintains an analytic indifference from the Real.

With the publication of For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in 1972, Baudrillard seeks to augment and critique bourgeois and Marxian political economy alike. He argues that both traditions err by theorizing a restricted conceptual economy or closed conceptual system in which production, exploitation, and consumption cycle predictably through the matrix of “use value” and “exchange value.” He shows that under late capital, exchange value is complexified by the exchange and circulation of signs and offers the art auction as an example; wealthy people buy blue-chip art at the auction not merely to purchase art, but also to show that they have the financial power to do so. Baudrillard acknowledges that his reading builds on the work of the late nineteenth-century economist Thorstein Veblen. In Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the principal labor of the wealthy or “leisure” class consists of social acts of “conspicuous consumption.” The “process of consumption considered as a system of sign exchange value,” writes Baudrillard, is “not consumption as traditional political economy defines it … but consumption considered as the conversion of economic exchange value into sign exchange value” (For 107). Bidding at the art auction is not simply an economic transaction; it is a system through which the bidders exchange social signs of wealth and leisure. Baudrillard contextualizes his project in For a Critique as part of an “exiled” and marginalized tradition of political economy:

Critical theorists of the political economy of the sign are rare. They are exiled, buried under Marxist (or neo-Marxist) terrorist analysis. Veblen and Goblot are the great precursors of a cultural analysis of class which, beyond the “dialectical materialism” of productive forces, examines the logic of sumptuary values which assures and perpetuates through its code the hegemony of the dominant class.(109)

Baudrillard argues for the analysis of, and critical resistance to, not only the cycle of economic production and exploitation, but the social “code” that valorizes and thereby perpetuates the perceived power of the dominant class. Traditional political economy does not account for the process of sign production and thus cannot resist it. A critical theory of consumer society must then begin by integrating the analysis of sign exchange “into the very structures of political economy” (108). But as he notes, this is strongly resisted by bourgeois and Marxian theorists alike:

[T]he traditional boundaries of political economy, canonized by bourgeois economic science as well as by Marxist analysis, should be disregarded. And the resistances to this are strong, for they are of all orders theoretical, political, phantasmagorical. Yet today only a generalized political economy can define a revolutionary theory and practice.(108)

Part of the resistance to integrating sign analysis into theories of political economy is that sign systems produce open and contingent meanings (or values) rather than fixed and predictable ones. Bourgeois and Marxian political economy alike traditionally relied on models of economic production that cycle through logically fixed circuits. But the meaning or value of a sign is contingent and mutable. Baudrillard thus challenges traditional semiotic theory (Saussure) because he rejects the anchoring force of the “signified” as a metaphysical mechanism designed to restrict the contingent economy of meaning. He also rejects Marx’s anchoring concept of “use-value,” which he sees as incompatible with the social labor of conspicuous consumption. For a Critique articulates a “general” conceptual economy in Georges Bataille’s sense. In The Accursed Share, Bataille famously distinguished between “general” and “restricted” economies. The former names economies in which some expenditure remains expended and does not return in another form; the latter names economic systems, like capitalism, premised on the belief that everything can be exchanged for its equivalent in another form. Baudrillard’s “critique” is in this sense a general economy in theory inasmuch as it is organized around “general principles” of sign exchange anchored neither in the Real of classical exchange, nor in the transcendental signified of classical semiotics. The theoretical economy of For a Critique is open and general in Bataille’s sense because it turns on the contingency of economic and sign-exchange.

Baudrillard’s insistence on the difference and distance between theory and its supposed referent—the Real in the last instance—also links him to Althusserian Marxism. Althusser’s work of the 1960s stresses the non-equivalence between theoretical concepts and the Real via the Spinozist distinction between the “real object” and the “object of knowledge”: “Spinoza warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was absolutely distinct and different from the real object” (Reading 40). Althusser claims that objects of knowledge (like the concepts that comprise Marx’s Capital) must be distinguished from “real objects” (like actually existing capitalism). He sharpens his point in “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation” (1974):

[T]heoretical work is not an abstraction in the sense of empiricist ideology. To know is not to extract from the impurities and diversity of the real the pure essence contained in the real, as gold is extracted from the dross of sand and dirt in which it is contained. To know is to produce the adequate concept of the [real] object by putting to work means of theoretical production.(15)

“Theory” for Althusser is a relatively autonomous practice that does not “reflect” the Real, but is rather a concept production process through which economy, society, politics and so on are made conceptualizable. On this account, one does not think the “real object.” Instead, one is tasked with producing concepts that make the Real thinkable as a model. Baudrillard further radicalizes the Althusserian split between concept and Real by theoretically letting go of the entire concept of the Real (and with it the reality-principle).

Here too Laruelle’s perspective is clearly aligned with Baudrillard’s inasmuch as both thinkers reject any prior decision on the relation between Real and concept. Both refuse to enact what Laruelle has named the Philosophical Decision, which he defines concisely (if elliptically) thus:

Philosophical Decision is an operation of transcendence that believes (in a naïve and hallucinatory way) in the possibility of a unitary discourse on the Real. … To philosophize is to decide on the Real and on thought, which ensues from it, i.e. to believe to be able to align them with the universal order of the Principle of Reason (the Logos), but also more generally in accordance with the “total” or unitary order of the Principle of sufficient philosophy. (Dictionary 117)

Philosophical Decision encloses the Real within a restricted theoretical economy dialectically hinged on a hallucinatory concept of the Real. Dialectics then presupposes a principle of exchangeability of concept and Real, which formally aligns dialectical philosophy with the logic of capitalist abstraction. As Katerina Kolozova notes in her study of Laruelle’s “non-Marxism,” philosophy “is constituted in a fashion perfectly analogous to the one which grounds capitalism” because it “establishes an amphibology with the real (acts in its stead, posturing as ‘more real than the real’)” (2). Kolozova does not cite the phrase “more real than the real,” but this is, of course, Baudrillard’s master formula for “hyperreality.” Kolozova (perhaps unwittingly) suggests a common conceptual space between Laruelle and Baudrillard. For Laruelle, philosophy proposes to be “more real than the real” inasmuch as it claims to have the key to the Real, but Kolozova (via Laruelle) sees this as a simulation of the Real. To put the matter in Baudrillard’s terms, philosophies of the Real are conceptual and analytical instances of the hyperreal. Just as capitalism is grounded on the fetish character of value abstracted from the social sphere, so too is philosophy constituted through a fetishization and reification of thought itself empowered by the hallucinatory force of Philosophical Decision. The image of the Real captured in philosophical “reflection” is never the Real for Baudrillard or Laruelle. Rather, what appears in the mirror of philosophy is a hyperreal phantasm of philosophy itself.

By the late 1970s, Baudrillard and Laruelle come to see that the problem is how to escape the auto-valorizing force of dialectical philosophy and to open anew the problematic of the politics of theoretical critique itself. Neither thinker seeks to overthrow or overcome dialectics, which would only reaffirm it. Instead, each seeks to invent strategies and aesthetics of theoretical writing that intensify the potential for emancipatory thought immanent to the ethics of Marxism without getting ensnared in the dialectic of exchange (or the rhetoric of production, as we will see). This project shares some affinity with Lyotard’s post-Marxist work of the same decade; Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy of 1974 taps into and exploits what he calls the “intensities lodged in theoretical signs” (102). However, in the same text he rebukes Baudrillard for his conceptual privileging of symbolic exchange. A brief detour though Lyotard’s critique of Baudrillard will spell out the difference between the fictionalized Marxism of Baudrillard and Laruelle and the libidinalized writing of Lyotard’s post-Marxism: a theoretical indifference to the Real (Baudrillard and Laruelle) versus the continuation of dialectics in a new way (Lyotard).

Lyotard’s major statement of post-Marxism is Libidinal Economy. The text stems from the tradition of Freudo-Marxism, albeit in a form that challenges that tradition. Lyotard argues that Marxian political economy is torn between two warring poles, which he names (somewhat regrettably) the “prosecutor Marx” and the “little girl Marx.” The “prosecutor Marx” names the Marx who sat in the British Museum day after day toiling away at Capital but never completed it; the “little girl Marx” names the one who did not complete his master text because he was too attracted to, and fascinated by, the polymorphous perversities of capital. Lyotard sees Marx as trying to engineer a theory to close and contain industrial society’s “erotic” fascination with the object (capital) he was trying to prosecute theoretically. Lyotard’s corrective is to explode political economy via a libidinalized textualism:

we are not going to do a critique of Marx, we are not, that is to say, going to produce the theory of his theory: which is just to remain within the theoretical. No, one must show what intensities are lodged in theoretical signs, what affects within serious discourse; we must steal his affects from him. Its force is not at all in the power of its discourse, not even in inverse proportion to it, this would still be a little too dialectical an arrangement.(102)

Lyotard explicitly targets Baudrillard’s work for continuing the tradition of prosecuting a critical theory of political economy and for its apparent valorization of what Lyotard sees as a thinly disguised figure of pre-lapsarian time: the time of “symbolic exchange,” before contact with the Real disappeared into the play of signs. Moreover, he points out what he sees as the racist and imperialistic legacies lurking in Baudrillard’s conceptual privileging of “primitive societies”:

When Baudrillard says: “There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies,” we say: there are no primitive societies. First of all, methodologically… this society of the gift and counter-gift plays, in Baudrillard’s thought, the role of a reference (lost, of course), of an alibi (which cannot be found), in his critique of capital. … How is that he does not see that the whole problematic of the gift, of symbolic exchange … belongs in its entirety to Western racism and imperialism—that it is still ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized, which he inherits with the concept? (106)

Lyotard believes his approach evades the traps of dialectical Marxism and the imperialistic fantasies of Baudrillard’s theoretical alternative by exiting the discourse of standard political economy via a libidinalized mode of writing that aims not to diagnose, but to actualize “intensities lodged in theory” or what Geoff Bennington interestingly calls “writing the event.” Lyotard’s writing aims not to theorize capital, but to write the dissolution of political economy (and of theory more broadly) and to actualize this event of dissolution through what might be called the jouissance of the signifiers of theory. Lyotard seeks to “demonstrate that the cold serious discourse of political theory is also a set-up of libidinal economy” (Bennington 34–35). He damns Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” qua a lost form of “primitive” exchange as the symptomatic sign that Baudrillard cannot relinquish his own desire for the Real, if only as a lost sign or lost time. Baudrillard remains committed to political theory dialectically hinged on the (lost) Real prior to capital. In short, he is still much more concerned with the Real and with the critique of capital than his prose suggests. But one could say nearly the same of Lyotard’s post-Marxist work. Lyotard’s desire to escape theory via a libidinalized textual free-play is itself a highly speculative if not “theoretical” project. In working through the tensions between theoretical analysis and an inscriptive desire to exceed analytic limits, Lyotard reproduces dialectics as he shuttles between what one is tempted to call a prosecutorial Freudo-Marxism and a polymorphous and perversely polysemic excess of writing. Without this background tension, the book would hardly have the charge it does. Lyotard can make the apparent dissolution of these theories an exciting literary event precisely because he is working against the backdrop of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Libidinal Economy is squarely situated within the dialectics of theory and practice: the practice of theorizing the end of theory.

Contra Lyotard, I want to suggest that the escape from dialectics lies not in the direction of a libidinalized writing, but in a form of thought structured by a radical indifference to the Real. Baudrillard’s indifference to the Real—although far more pronounced in his later “theory-fictions”—is already forming in For a Critique, which is organized around the thesis that a culture of sign-exchange is symptomatic of the loss of contact with the Real. Baudrillard further radicalizes his theoretical indifference to the Real in The Mirror of Production. In his landmark statement on Marxism, Baudrillard suggests that the concept of “production” has morphed into a “strange contagion” in post-1960s Left theorizing (17). Baudrillard detects symptoms of this “strange contagion” in everything from the “unlimited ‘textual productivity’ of Tel Quel to Deleuze’s factory-machine productivity of the unconscious” to Lyotard’s libidinalized writing; “no revolution,” he writes, “can place itself under any other sign” (17). He traces the problematical theoretical valorization of production back to Marx:

Marx did not subject the form of production to a radical analysis any more than he did the form of representation. These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance.(20)

Marx’s axiomatic decision on the nature of “man” as “productive animal” was never submitted to a radical analysis, according to Baudrillard. As Mike Gane notes in Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, Baudrillard argues that “Marx never gets to the position where he can challenge the thesis that the human is characterised by the capacity to produce” (98–99).

Marx adopts his concept of the human as productive animal from the classical texts of political economy as truth, which for Baudrillard determines and limits Marx’s thought. As Gane puts it, “What is necessary, Baudrillard reiterates, is to see that a generic definition of man as productive animal, homo faber, is actually caught within the effects of [the] rationality of capital itself” (Baudrillard: Critical 97). Production, and its human correlate of labor power, constitutes a closed circuit of philosophical decisionism that reproduces the image of the human qua producer in the mirror of bourgeois and Marxian political economy alike. Baudrillard sees Marx as having established a set of concepts—use-value, exchange-value, commodity-fetishism and so forth—whose analytic value is pegged to a concept of the Real given under the sign of “production.” Marxism never escaped this dialectical economy of knowledge qua production organized by the theses and assumptions of classical political economy. “Marxism was not the revolutionary breakthrough that had been hoped for,” writes Gane, “but catastrophically, it was a particular elaboration of capitalism’s own principles” (Baudrillard: Critical 94). As Baudrillard argues in Mirror, the system of political economy “rooted in the identification of the individual with his labor power” is naturalized in the theoretical mirror of classical political economy (31). “Between the theory [of capitalism] and the object [of capitalism],” writes Baudrillard, “there is in effect, a dialectical relation, in the bad sense: they are locked into a speculative dead end” (29). He thus concludes that Marx’s concepts of labor and production “must be submitted to a radical critique as an ideological concept” (Mirror 43). This is a clear shot across the bow of Althusserian theory. Althusser aims to save the “science of history” by distinguishing “science” from humanist (and Marxist) ideology. For Baudrillard to claim that the “science of history”—the science of the history of modes of production—is an ideological concept inherited from classical political economy is to say that Althusserian Marxism must be liberated from its symptomatically self-imposed ideological limits. In Gane’s description, “The analysis, in Althusser, of theory as a productive process … becomes modelled on capitalist processes, and, as a system of thought, only reduplicates its object as separated and alienated: theory and revolutionary practice are neutralized by this failure” (Baudrillard: Critical 98).

The Mirror of Production marks Baudrillard’s break with ideologically rigid Marxism (if not with Marx) and with critique and all critical theories of the Real. His break with Marxism specifically marks a turn from critical to fictive theory: a break not only with Marxist productivism, but with a theoretical mode of production that produces the Real in its “mirror” of critical reflection. This break links his dual “provocations” (as Kellner calls them) against Marx and Foucault. Two years after Mirror, in 1977, Baudrillard publishes his “broadside attack, Forget Foucault, at the time when Foucault was becoming a major figure in the pantheon of French theory” (Kellner 132):

In many ways Forget Foucault marks a turning point and point of no return in Baudrillard’s theoretical trajectory. In this text he turned away from his previous apotheosis of a politics of the symbolic, and moved into a more nihilistic, cynical and apolitical theoretical field.(132)

While Baudrillard’s later work does not often engage political questions directly, it does engage inventively and critically with the politics of theoretical critique itself. Forget Foucault is an indictment of the valorization of power by Foucault and of desire by Deleuze and Lyotard. For Baudrillard, “Foucault,” “Deleuze,” and “Lyotard” name patterns of theory that reify the desire of power and the power of desire. This he sees as theoretically complicit with the values of consumer capital:

This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. (Forget 25)

Baudrillard damns the libidinal turn in theory as simply the reflection and reification of what might be called (in Deleuzian terms) the desiring machine of capital itself.

The question for Baudrillard is: how to escape the “spiral” of critical theory whose models turn into alibis for the domination of bodies, desire, and libido by consumer society? What then is theory to do? In what form might anti-capitalist theory continue? Fiction is Baudrillard’s answer. In a brief essay titled “Why Theory?” he writes:

To be the reflection of the real, or to enter into a relation of critical negativity with the real, cannot be theory’s goal. … What good is theory? If the world is hardly compatible with the concept of the real which we impose upon it, the function of theory is certainly not to reconcile, but on the contrary, to seduce, to wrest things from their condition, to force them into an over-existence which is incompatible with the real.(129)

Strategies of fiction—such as exaggeration (forced over-existence), seduction, and wresting things from their conditions—are ultimately aesthetic solutions to the problem of theory’s relation to the Real in the age of its disappearance. Now it is no longer “enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes” (129). “Theory pays dearly” for this fictional transformation, because theory as fiction can no longer innocently critique its object as if that object exists in a certifiably distanced space designated as the Real (129). This is, however, not a mode of theory that merely ratifies defeatism, as Baudrillard’s critics often suggest; theory-fiction can still “challenge” the economic, the social, the political, the aesthetic.¹ But as Baudrillard notes:

Even if it speaks of surpassing the economic, theory itself cannot be an economy of discourse. To speak about excess and sacrifice, it must become excessive and sacrificial. It must become simulation if it speaks about simulation, and deploy the same strategy as its object. … If it no longer aspires to a discourse of truth, theory must assume the form of a world from which truth has withdrawn.(“Why” 129)

Just as literature creates a world, and that creation is an event in the world, so too does theory-fiction create a world of its own with the capacity to think in ways unconstrained by any pre-given concept of the Real. Baudrillard’s post-Marxist theory-fiction, styled in a self-consciously avant-gardist manner, strategically reanimates utopian thought. Theory “must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future” (“Why” 130). Baudrillard’s theoretical posture post-Mirror is to regard the Real with the same indifference with which the Real regards theory.

Here too Baudrillard’s project intersects theoretically with Laruelle’s non-philosophical project. Non-philosophy is founded on two axioms: 1) Standard philosophy is defined by the decisions it makes about the Real; 2) The Real is foreclosed to the philosophical grasp. Yet all thought (philosophical and non-philosophical) is immanent to the Real, which is determinant and decisive in the last instance. Laruelle identifies standard philosophy with what he terms the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy: to decide on the Real rests on the presupposition that philosophy has sufficient resources to decide it. Philosophical Decision creates a conceptual “world” in its own image. What philosophy “sees” as the world of the Real is a projection of what philosophy decides concerning the Real. And because this image is always partial, it is also always false, for the Real is not partial. Rather than produce a false image of the Real that denies its falsity, Laruelle turns philosophy into fiction because fiction knows itself to be other than true. The non-philosophical practice of Marxism (non-Marxism) is a form of philo-fiction composed of the “raw materials” of Marxism in a non-dialectical and non-exchange-based mode of theorization. The “non” of “non-Marxism” is thus not a negation of Marxism as a whole, but only a negation of its dialectical pretense to exchange the Real for concepts. As Laruelle notes in Introduction to Non-Marxism:

The non– cannot have any other “content” except that of the radical immanence of the Real or strictly following from it, without being a relation of negation to philosophy itself. … We will invert—at least—the usual approach of a philosophical appropriation of Marxism. Rather than completing Marxism through axioms drawn from the tradition … from thought-as- capital, we will instead disappropriate every constitutive relation to philosophy (but not its materials, symptoms, and models), i.e., every relation to it that is itself philosophical.(36)

Introduction to Non-Marxism is a fiction or a fictionalization of Marx and the Marxist heritage, less in the avant-gardist style of late Baudrillard and more the cold and anti-humanist rationality of the early Althusser. But whereas Althusser sought to save Marx’s science of history via philosophy, Laruelle seeks a “scientific” examination of standard philosophy.

Laruelle’s sense of “science” is as an attitude open to experimenting with the raw materials of a philosophical text or tradition. This experimental attitude is registered in syntactical and rhetorical constructions “cloned” from dominant philosophemes. Laruelle sees the fictionalization of Marxian theory as a means of rescuing or even redeeming it: “Rescuing Marxism from metaphysics is effectively an illusion as long as it is not rescued from philosophical sufficiency itself, belief in the Real and desire for the Real” (Non-Marxism 34). This is the first meaning of “fiction” for Laruelle: escape from belief in, and desire for, the Real. He defines his approach to writing (and reading) non-philosophical fiction thus:

To under-practice [sous-pratiquer] philosophical language, indeed to under-understand it … is to think in a more generic manner without exceptions. All this can appear too moral, but this would be forgetting that thought is not uniquely subtractive, it is insurrection. (Photo-Fiction 62)

This passage performs what it describes, rendering philosophical language in a style that subtracts the value of immediate understanding for an “under-understanding.” At issue (and in the “generic” practice of non-philosophy) is the disruption of the standard philosophical economy whose master formula is thought-for-the-Real. Non-philosophy aims to take philosophy out of circulation with any dialectically-conceived concept of the Real. This subtractive gesture ethically refuses to participate in the reification of the principles of exchange and equivalence that regulate standard philosophy or “thought-as-capital.” As Alexander Galloway notes, “exchange is not simply a philosophical paradigm for Laruelle, but the philosophical paradigm. There is no philosophy that is not too a philosophy of exchange” (117). Standard philosophy, insofar as it presupposes an operative principle of equivalence or exchange with the Real, is formally identical to the logic of capital according to Laruelle.

His work attempts to break this bond between theory and the Real through an insurrectionary use of language that scrambles the codes and coordinates of standard philosophy: “No synthetic portmanteau, but non-localizable indeterminations in the philosophical sense, a language brought to its simplest status and sufficiently disrupted in order for the superior form of expression certain of itself in the concept to be rendered impossible” (Photo-Fiction 62–63). Philo-fiction disrupts the syntax and operativity of standard philosophical prose to render the equivalence and exchange principle (or the capitalist principle) of standard philosophy inoperative. Laruelle continues:

Philo-fiction is a gushing [jaillissant] and subtractive usage of the means of thinking, of philosophemes-without-philosophy, of mathemes-without-mathematics, and from here, all of the dimensions of philosophy [are] rid of their proper all-encompassing finality, an insurrection against the all-too great superior finalities. (Photo-Fiction 63)

Laruelle’s fictional approach to Marxian theory uses insurrectionary language—an insurrection within and against philosophy—that operates on the immanent terrain of thought. “There is, for Laruelle, a way of valorizing fiction,” writes Anthony Paul Smith, “as a force of insurrection that disempowers the world and operates without concern for its parameters” (120). This disempowerment of the philosophy-Real dialectic radically defetishizes philosophy and devalues the whole schema by which the Real is reified and reproduced in the cultural capital of critique.

To conclude, in their fictionalizations of Marxian theory, Baudrillard and Laruelle attempt to “disempower” the concept of the Real. They answer the implacableness of the Real with a non-exchange-based form of thought, or what I would hazard to call “non-dialectics.” For theory to remain relevant, they posit that it has to become fiction (but not unreal). By an insurrectionary and non-dialectical mode of writing and thinking, they open places within the Real unbounded by standard philosophical thought monopolies. My task here has been merely to indicate the path they suggest for non-dialectical thought. In good non-philosophical fashion, I have attempted to avoid Laruelle’s and Baudrillard’s supposed “philosophical” differences and recast both thinkers as raw materials for a non-dialectical and non-capitalist mode of thought. By way of their fictionalized forms of theorizing, Baudrillard and Laruelle attempt to create the conditions of possibility for a non-Marxist mode of theorizing in a non-dialectical framework. This framework contains a meta-theoretical recitation of utopian thought. It creates a space—a no-place—outside the dialectical bounds of capitalist critique and the reproduction of capitalist logic as theory (or “thought-capital”). We need a non-dialectical theoretical countermeasure to the persistent illusion of the Real as a “world” where everything is subject to exchange under the rule of general equivalence and which justifies the continued destruction of all that is humane in human life.