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In this chapter, 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 he develops in his first two published works, The System of Objects (1968; 2005) and Consumer Society (1970; 1998). As already mentioned in my Introduction, not many scholars have paid sustained and in-depth attention to Baudrillard’s relation to Nietzsche and to my knowledge, no scholar has tried to reconstruct the links between Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and Baudrillard’s Consumer Society.

In my view, both Nietzsche and Baudrillard are interested in analyzing the power structures upholding moral systems. In Consumer Society, Baudrillard defines the role of consumption in Western society as an element structuring social relations and he claims that he is describing “a new form of hyper-civilisation” (Baudrillard 2005, 202). The world of consumption is treated like a discourse. Consumption is a way in which people communicate with each other. It is an order of significations, which requires knowledge of an organized system of established codes of signs. Consumers desire objects in a competitive relationship with other consumers, as mediated by the social signs of prestige and status. Baudrillard’s central point is that objects have become signs whose value is determined by a disciplinary cultural code. In this code, the idea of the relation (between signs) is consumed. The differential relationship between signs is what structures social meaning. It is what is ultimately desired and consumed.

Baudrillard’s Consumer Society is a culturally and institutionally critical text, just as Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is a radical critique of morality. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals looks at the power configurations that have driven the development of our moral valuations, and the language that underlies these valuations.

Nietzsche’s polemic disputes the assumption that there is a linear order of descent that can be traced to a common ancestor, and that would enable one to derive moral notions and legal practices from a natural, single and stable origin. Nietzsche does not simply reject the search for origins. 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”. The story shows that the master and the slave always perceive and judge the world in different ways. As a result, there cannot be an original or true designation of value. A search for origins must involve the discovery of a difference and a struggle at the origin, namely an origin that challenges us.

Nietzsche and Baudrillard do not attempt to offer a foundational account of morality, but, rather, they both aim to treat it as a contingent historical creation whose value can be taken as an object of critical reflection. Nietzsche and Baudrillard scrutinize the struggles and differential relations that are responsible for the creation of values. Genealogy, as practiced by Nietzsche and Baudrillard, reminds readers that their perspectives are contextual and proposes different perspectives. It motivates readers to compare the value of their perspectives in relation to other perspectives.

In section 1, I will provide a short review of the fragmented and scattered secondary literature available on the relation between Baudrillard and Nietzsche. I will then move on to show how Baudrillard’s views on consumer society revisit and update Nietzsche’s mode of genealogy.

In section 2, I provide an exposition of how Baudrillard is interested in understanding the structures of consumer society. Baudrillard applies the critical tools of genealogy to Saussurean linguistics and he analyzes concepts as signs of the powers and forces that have become dominant.

In section 3, I will move on to an account of perspectivism and how it underlies Baudrillard’s genealogy of consumption in Consumer Society and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. By presenting us with different perspectives, such as noble morality, Nietzsche motivates us to re-evaluate our values. I suggest that Nietzsche’s noble morality, and his views on excess may be at work in Baudrillard’s texts through his notion of symbolic exchange. I argue that Nietzsche and Baudrillard’s fictional accounts of noble and symbolic societies aim to problematize and undermine a morality that people share and find binding.