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In chapters 1, 2 and 3, I investigate to what extent Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals anticipates the general outline of Baudrillard’s critique of the morality of consumption, which Baudrillard develops in his first two published works, The System of Objects (1968; 2005) and Consumer Society (1970; 1998).

In chapters 4 and 5, I go through Baudrillard’s genealogy of the image and of simulation. In the final chapter 6, I deal with Baudrillard’s genealogy of death.

In chapter 1, I show that both Nietzsche and Baudrillard are interested in analyzing the power structures and differential relations upholding moral systems. Baudrillard applies the critical tools of genealogy to Saussurean linguistics and he analyzes concepts as symptoms of the dominant powers and forces. For Baudrillard, Saussurean linguistics presents us with a theory of language and it describes the consumer “morality” of late modernity (Baudrillard 1998, 79). Baudrillard thereby argues that neither structural linguistics nor our current morality of consumption is inevitable or universal.

Baudrillard seeks to show that structural linguistics ignores that it is a historically-based semiological structure, not a universal truth about language. The sign, separated from the referent and understandable only at the level of signifier relations, is a reduction of what Baudrillard calls the symbolic. Baudrillard argues that so-called “primitive societies” engage in symbolic communications: the signifier, signified and referent are all united in the act of communication. In symbolic communication, “signs include[…] words that [are] attached to referents and [are] uttered in a context that held open their possible reversal by others” (Poster 1988, 4).11

Unlike capitalist political economy, which isolates objects from their cultural meaning and subjects them to a specific (and therefore non-ambiguous) code of signs, symbolic exchange is ambivalent. Signs are detached from lived relations, and this makes possible their endless combination and recombination in a limitless process of integration. Signs even replace lived relation; they present a coded version of lived (symbolic) relation, one that is controlled and less threatening.

The consumption of sign-value is based on a meaningful “totality” which is unreachable (Baudrillard 2005, 224). Sign value always defers satisfaction by referring the process of consumption to another object/sign in the system. Like Christian morality, I claim that for Baudrillard, consumer society exposes man to a “piercing sensation of his nothingness” (Nietzsche 2007, 115).

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals ‘foretells’ the general outline of Baudrillard’s critique of the morality of consumption, but Baudrillard also transforms certain Nietzschean positions, processes, practices and figures. In chapter 2, I show how the Nietzschean figure of the ascetic priest becomes the modern advertiser in Baudrillard’s works on consumer society.

In chapter 3, one of the central questions I will tackle is whether the sign-object sold by the advertiser to the consumer is otherworldly and non-sensuous – or in some way close to or identical with the features that pertain to the world of being in Plato. The ascetic ideal propagated by the priest is something that does not bear the features of the sensuous world, like truth; as a result, it can only reject this world.

I discuss to what extent consumption as it is outlined by Baudrillard represents an “impoverishment of life” (Nietzsche 2007, 114; italics in the text). In the final section of chapter 3, I focus on how consumer society is run by pseudo-objects and pseudo-events. Consumer society is beyond the true and the false and this will allow me to introduce the concept of simulation to which I dedicate the next chapter 4.

It was already in his short text “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense” that Nietzsche (1999, 143) saw the “pure drive towards truth” as an effect of deception. I start chapter 4 (section 1) with a background discussion to Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism by scrutinizing Nietzsche’s early text “On Truth and Lie in the Non-Moral Sense” as well as his later text Twilight of the Idols.

Nietzsche calls into question (a) the moral interpretation of the difference between truth and error (that truth is something good and error something evil), (b) the metaphysical interpretation of the difference between truth and error (that truth represents a world of unchanging facts, and error, a world of becoming), (c) the logical interpretation of the bivalence between truth and error (truth is not opposed to error). In this scepticism, ‘error’ becomes the metaphor for a world without vertical antitheses and oppositions between good and evil, being and becoming, beauty and ugly.

According to Deleuze (2004, 300), living after Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism means living in a world where “simulacra” at last prevail over immutable Platonic Ideas. Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism thus sets the scene for my comparison between Deleuze’s view of the simulacrum and Baudrillard’s (chapter 4, sections 2 and 3). I regard Deleuze’s view as close to Baudrillard, as they both stress the undecidability between appearance and reality in simulacra. For Deleuze (2004, 295), the simulacrum produces an “effect of resemblance” that simulates the real. Resemblance for Deleuze here continues only as an external effect of the internal differential dynamic of the simulacrum. For Baudrillard, there now only exists an “empty space of representation”, which produces “effects of the real” (Baudrillard 1993, 70). Baudrillard calls this situation “the hyperreal”, to which I dedicate chapter 5 (Baudrillard 1993, 70). In chapter 5, I take a closer look at Baudrillard’s problematization of the true and false in hyperreal simulation.

In chapter 6, I tackle Baudrillard’s problematization of the separation between life and death and how this recalls Heidegger’s analysis of human existence as constituted by its relation to death. Nick Hanlon’s (2004: 518) article entitled “Death, Subjectivity, Temporality in Baudrillard and Heidegger”12 shows how Baudrillard’s analysis of Heidegger raises the problem of subjectivity, a problem crucially connected with death. Baudrillard critiques the economization and compartmentalization of death by investigating the social role and place of death away from a certain “tour subjectif”, which he identifies in Heidegger’s conception of death (Baudrillard 1976, 228-29). 13

In Hanlon’s view, Baudrillard’s analysis of Heidegger as subject-centred leads him away from the situatedness (Befindlichkeit) entailed in the Jemeinigkeit of death. For Hanlon (2004, 524), Baudrillard places all the emphasis on the contingent and the aleatory and regards “his theorising as somehow outside any structural conception of temporality and history – in a sense ahistorical”. Hanlon (2004, 513) claims that Baudrillard takes on an approach that revolves around “pure critique” rather than the proposition of “alternative structures” which can be critiqued. Hanlon uses Heidegger to claim that this leaves us with a conception of subjectivity that does not take account of our “situatedness” in a temporal framework. According to Hanlon,

“[t]he aporia concerning ‘situatedness’ in Baudrillard is clearly an aporia concerning Baudrillard’s approach to history, historicity and temporality. It may be understood as a weakness in Baudrillard’s theorizing in as much as if he is employing a Heraclitean ontology of flux, implying a conception of temporality along the lines of Nietzschean Werden and with his concept of reversibility being explicitly related to Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’, then there must be an acceptance that identity implies difference, that the eternal recurrence of the same also implies the absolute particularity of a moment and vice versa” (Hanlon 2004, 524).

In my view, and contra Hanlon, Baudrillard’s reversible temporality is not “ahistorical” and it does very well permit us to consider our immersion (“situatedness”) in a historical context. Genealogy as practiced by Baudrillard (in the footsteps of Nietzsche) challenges assumptions based upon linear and progressive orders of descent that would enable one to derive notions and practices from a natural single and stable origin. But I also think that Baudrillard (following Nietzsche) does want to show how the past inheres in the present.14

Nietzsche and Baudrillard’s genealogies are interested in constructing fictionalized hypothetical primal scenes through for instance so-called noble morality (in the case of Nietzsche) and primitive symbolic exchange (in the case of Baudrillard). These “alternative structures” are hypothetical and serve as a contrast to current self-understandings.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche uses the story of masters and slaves to narrate the origin of our most basic moral values and to suggest a difference between the values “good and bad” and “good and evil”. Nietzsche thereby claims that there cannot be an original or true designation of value since the master and the slave always evaluate the world in different ways.

Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard does not claim to discover an ideal society of symbolic exchange in ‘non-Western’ cultures. Symbolic exchange is presented as a form or principle, rather than as the specific ‘content’ of cultural practices. Baudrillard’s discourse on symbolic exchange (like Nietzsche’s noble morality) has no representational content or truth value. Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange is a figure of speech or metaphor15 that serves to enable us to make sense of what we do and what we believe. Baudrillard’s genealogical narrative seeks to integrate multiple genealogical perspectives into our conception of moral values.

In the words of Rafael Winkler, I intend to show that Baudrillard and Nietzsche are thinkers “of the limit of metaphysics” (Winkler 2018, 88). According to Winkler (2018, 87) Nietzsche does not aim to “neutralise metaphysical characterisations of the world whether as reality or appearance, being or becoming”. Winkler claims that Nietzsche proposes a “new practice of self-discipline”, whose aim is

“to incorporate the insight that the totality of propositions that has defined Western humanity’s self-understanding since Plato rests on simplifications, errors or fictions. The principal question here is not Is that insight true? but, rather, What would that insight do to me, how would it transform me, if it were true? and Am I able to overcome resistances to it? In Nietzsche’s eyes, what remains at the end of metaphysics, once the distinction between the super-sensuous and the sensuous worlds have collapsed in the general insight of our most cherished and prized truths rests on illusions, is a practice that uses the so-called truths as a means and tests of self-overcoming. Nietzsche is, like Heidegger, a thinker of the limit of metaphysics.” (Winkler 2018, 88)

In my study, I show that genealogy is mobilized by Baudrillard as such a practice at the limit of metaphysics. For Baudrillard (1993, 159) “[t]he subject needs a myth of its end, as of its origin, to form its identity”. Science demands an end to mythological thought. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Baudrillard criticize the attempt of science to regard subjects, objects and practices as examples of scientific laws; as unilateral irreversible facts; as universal and interchangeable.

This book shows that Baudrillard seeks to expose the myths surrounding consumer society (e.g., surrounding ‘needs’ and ‘personalisation’), hyperreality and biological, natural, impersonal death. In the process, Baudrillard proposes alternative myths (in the form of symbolic exchange). Baudrillard, in my view, like Nietzsche provides a theory of the historical variables that give rise to subjectivity. Genealogy, as practised by Nietzsche and Baudrillard, is a critically motivated art of drastic presentation, which should help us overcome our current perspectives of the world and ourselves. But before this transformation can take place their work seeks to enable us to make sense of what we do and what we believe in.

1 For a general overview of the influence of Nietzsche on Baudrillard see Lepers (2009); Pawlett (2007, 112-113) and interviews between François L’Yvonnet and Baudrillard (2001; 2004).

2 In the following excerpt from an interview collected as D’un fragment l’autre Baudrillard discusses his philosophical trajectory and he mentions Heidegger: “my philosophical background is shaky, particularly where the classical philosophers are concerned, such as Kant and Hegel or even Heidegger. I have read Heidegger of course, but not in German, and fragmentarily. Perhaps one only ever studies one philosopher seriously, just as one has only one godfather, as one has only one idea in one’s life. Nietzsche is, then, the author beneath whose broad shadow I moved, though involuntarily and without really knowing what I was doing” (Baudrillard 2004, 2).

3 In the collection of interviews D’un fragment l’autre, Baudrillard says: “Perhaps one only ever studies one philosopher seriously, just as one has only one godfather, as one has only one idea in one’s life. Nietzsche is, then, the author beneath whose broad shadow I moved, though involuntarily and without really knowing what I was doing” (Baudrillard 2004, 2).

4 As Nietzsche puts it in the Third Essay, paragraph 27 of On the Genealogy of Morals: “the law of necessary ‘self-overcoming’ is the essence of life” (Nietzsche 2007, 119).

5 In his entry “Nihilism” in The Baudrillard Dictionary, Rex Butler (2010, 139) says: “Nietzsche is one of Baudrillard defining influences. He is one of the few thinkers whose presumptions are not turned against them” as Baudrillard did with Marx in The Mirror of Production (1975) and Saussure as well as Freud in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993).

6 I follow R.L. Anderson (2005, 185) in this regard.

7 “It is this real, excluded by any attempt to speak of it, that is the limit to every system – it is the Platonic paradox that Baudrillard means by the real” (Butler 1999, 53). The paradox first raised by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus (1875, 257) has been treated by Derrida in his essay Plato’s Pharmacy.

8 Baudrillard’s chapter “The Extermination of the Name of God” in Symbolic Exchange and Death starts with a section on ‘The Anagram’. In his book on Baudrillard entitled Baudrillard’s Bestiary, Mike Gane (1991b, 118-121) discusses the intricacies of the anagram in his chapter “Anagrammatic Resolutions”.

9 Symbolic Exchange and Death, published in French in 1976, is the most all-encompassing exposition of Baudrillard’s ideas and it is the last of his works that proceeds in an overall systematic and scientific style. Here, Baudrillard provides a “genealogy” of death, but death is here already a figure of speech for the more general notion of symbolic exchange. After this book, Baudrillard steadily leaves the conventions of academic writing behind and he attempts to critique all systematic thought (by delving into the ‘simulations’ he describes).

10 For an analysis of Nietzschean symptomatology see for example van Tongeren (2000, 7,9,140-141).

11 With her emphasis on ‘forgiveness‘, Hannah Arendt holds out the possibility of constructing a symbolic world in which the consequences of our actions can be reversed. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Press 1958, 237-8). It would be important to pursue the connection between Arendt and Baudrillard on this point.

12 This is the only in-depth study that scrutinizes the relation between Heidegger and Baudrillard’s view on death.

13 In chapter 6, I focus on Heidegger’s early work Sein und Zeit published in 1927. During the 1920s, as Rafael Winkler (2018, xv) explains, Heidegger “leans towards transcendental idealism …, identifying the intelligibility of entities (their being) with Dasein's understanding of being. During the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger thinks of the relation of being and Dasein as a relation of reciprocal implication or mutual dependency (belonging and need are his two key terms, the first for Dasein's relation to being, the second for being's relation to Dasein), which means that he does not collapse one into the other. Being, the intelligibility of entities, unfolds as a play of differences and contrasts (Aus-einander-setzung), whereas Dasein shelters that play in beings (at least as long as it exists authentically)” (Winkler 2018, xv).

14 Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy places undue emphasis on the role Nietzsche accords to contingency and discontinuity within history. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” (1971), in The Essential Works of Foucault, Volume II: 1954–84, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 369–93.

15 It must be borne in mind that in the final chapter of Symbolic Exchange and Death, in the section ‘An Anti-Materialist Theory of Language’, Baudrillard (1993, 235) differentiates the “symbolic operation” from “a positive economy of metaphor: the idea of a reconciliation between the ‘thing’ and the word given back its materiality.”

For Baudrillard (1993, 236) “[t]here is no materialist reference in the symbolic operation, not even an ‘unconscious one; rather there is the operation of an ‘anti-matter.’”

Quoting Julia Kristeva (from Poésie et Négativité), Baudrillard (1993, 220) claims that metaphor is simply the transfer of value from one field to another to the point of the ‘absorption of a multiplicity of texts (meanings) in the message.’” Against this multiplicity of meaning and value, Baudrillard (1993, 220) advocates “radical ambivalence … non-valence”.

In the above, I use metaphor merely to emphasize that ‘symbolic exchange’ is not to be taken literally (i.e., it does not refer to specific practices in ‘primitive societies’). The symbolic does not refer to anything directly, nor does it seek to represent or express a repressed dimension (emanating for instance from an ‘unconscious’). I use ‘metaphor’ in the non-technical, non-psycho-analytic sense of the term.