Turbo-Capitalism and Power in Jean Baudrillard’s social and political ontotheology

Abstract

If postmodern Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) could be defined as a theorist of power - to the extent that for some this is a contradiction by definition, although something very similar takes place in the case of Michel Foucault, he could be defined as a theorist of meta-power in the globalized era of turbo-capitalism. In his late texts (2005), which were published in 2010, the eminent French philosopher builds a provocative theory about power by using the classic concepts of domination and hegemony within the contemporary social, economic, political and ideological context of neoliberal globalization. In these papers, he analyzes in-depth the metapower of hegemony in comparison with the power of domination. Actually, by signifying the critical passage of postwar capitalism from the phase of production to the phase of consumption, as Zygmunt Bauman does in his relevant work, Baudrillard formulates a meta-power theory as the equivalent of what he defines as turbo-capitalism. What is at stake is no longer the conventional issues of state sovereignty, Marx-inspired concept of alienation and Critical Theory-like negative dialectics but the crucial questions of hegemony, hostage and evilness. In short, Jean Baudrillard builds a new ontological and by extension disciplinary and theoretical field concerning global power, where the ‘Empire of Good’, or turbo-capitalism in his own terminology, is reborn in a totally catastrophic way (see simulation in the sense of a capitalist hypocrisy) either as an ‘Axis of Evil’ or as the ‘problem of terror’ (see simulacrum in the sense of a Lacanian stage of image within which turbo-capitalism represses, through a Freudian process of repelling, its unfamiliar self/i.e. uncanny, unheimlich). Despite the fact that Baudrillard has been sharply critisized for a kind of (apolitical) political pessimism, we strongly argue that, in a pure postmodern sense, Baudrillard illustrates power as a relational and absolutely dynamic, liquid and ambivalent space of antagonism, full of forces and counterforces. In the final analysis, he approaches power as an empty space, as in the similar case of Claude Lefort, open-ended, contingent, without certainties, within an ontological, anthropological and historical context which is characterized of high risk and an abyssal post-foundationalism. In this article, we thoroughly explore this novel and innovative Baudrillardian theoretical frame of power analysis and its potentialities for a New Critical Theory in the 21st century.