Today especially,
the real is no more than a stockpile
of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language.

It still makes us feel secure today
to evaluate this stock of what is real
(let’s not talk about energy; the ecological complaint
that hides the fact that it is not material energy
which is disappearing on the species horizon
but the energy of the real, the reality of the real
and of every serious possibility,
capitalistic or revolutionary,
of managing the real).

If the horizon of production has vanished,
then the horizon of speech, sexuality, or desire can still carry on;
there will always be something to liberate, to enjoy,
and to exchange with others through words:

Now that’s real, that’s substantial, that’s prospective stock.
that’s power.

Not so, unfortunately. Not for long, that is.
This sort of thing consumes itself as it goes along.
We have made, and have wanted to make, an irreversible agency
out of both sex and power;
out of desire we have made a force or irreversible energy
(a stock of energy, needless to say, since desire is never far from capital).
for we give meaning, following our use of the imaginary,
only to what is irreversible;
accumulation,
progress,
growth,
production
value,
power,
and desire itself
are all irreversible processes

–inject the slightest dose of reversibility
into our economical, political, institutional, or sexual machinery
and everything collapses at once.

Seduction is stronger than production.
…It is a circular and reversible process of challenge,
one-upmanship,
and death.

Forget Foucault by Jean Baudrillard, trans by Nicole Dufresne, p. 64,65

The quotation is an extended meditation upon our human proclivity to designate some ideas to be indefatigable, armor-plated resistant to the erosion which all else suffers with the passage of time. Which is a roundabout way to say: death. We feel secure do we not, (not unlike an ancient ancestor bedding down at the back of a cave, fire burning brightly at the opening, full belly, a reserve of venison drying, etc.). We imagine our increasing pile of assets, blue chip stocks, the advance of technology, the growth in value of financial markets, our dollar as the reserve currency, and perhaps the most basic of all, our desire for “more” will continue infinitely, without end, that we will ride-this-wave forever… These are absolutely, uncontestably “real”.

Baudrillard suggests with irony, that the slightest dose, a mere hint of death, of limit – is enough to trigger a swift, catastrophic collapse of the entire structure. All of it is but a projection of our imagination. We imagined a bulwark against death, but it’s none other than death, the razor’s edge of seduction which keeps us alive, making life worth living, a conversation worth having. What we seek most is seduction.

What do you think? Does this meditation upon the crisis of meaning, upon the texture of our lives, of your life, of my life in this time resonate?