This is the Abstract of a lecture that I will give sometime in 2011, at a location to be disclosed later.
Two great yet underrated works of 20th century political and social theory, both focusing on the question of the institutional justification of murder in modern society, are Albert Camus’ The Rebel and Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime. Camus’ book, published in 1951, was critical of the prevailing idea on the Left that the end of “revolutionary justice” justifies the means of violence and murderous state power. The book’s publication led to the end of Albert Camus’ friendship with “fellow existentialist” Jean-Paul Sartre, who ambivalently supported the French Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and later Maoism. Against the dominant ideologies of corporate capitalism and self-righteous leftism, Camus the hybrid anarchist-liberal explicates the principles of how to fight and live, how to say both no and yes to the existing established order of society, of the authentic rebel. Baudrillard’s book, published in 1995, has been very little understood, since its central diagnostic theme of the “murder of reality” that is carried out by contemporary media-and-consumer-culture does not easily translate into the more familiar issues of social and political theory. Yet it is possible to elucidate Baudrillard’s argument in a highly logical way, unpacking it as a cogent explanation of legal, medical, and organizational principles that are at the heart of modern society, its human disaster, and its possible transformation. The concept of the “murder of reality” in The Perfect Crime is much more lucid and powerful than Jean Baudrillard’s more well-publicized and - at the end of the day - wobbly concepts-arguments about hyper-reality and simulation. Finally, my project is to unify the arguments of Camus and Baudrillard into an assessment of how the justification of murder in contemporary society operates, and the repercussions that it will have for action, organization, and justice if we remove this systemic thread: a refusal of it, a saying no to it, and instead a saying yes to life.
