Attempting to escape the hyperreal is an imaginary that gives authority back to the symbolic order.

It is now the left (or the Third Way) that tries to re-inject moral order and justice into a failing system, thereby protecting it from its own collapse. Baudrillard implicitly criticises theories such as Laclau’s, which seek to re-inject meaning and intensity into politics. For Baudrillard, this task is both impossible and reactionary. Baudrillard sees the system as creating the illusion of its continued power by drawing on or simulating antagonisms and critique. There is thus a danger that critique actually sustains the system, by giving it a power it doesn’t have. Trying to confront and destroy the system thus inadvertently revives it, giving it back a little bit of symbolic power. He also sees conspiracy theories and current forms of Marxism as attempts to stave off awareness of the reality of a systematic code. In any case, the energy of the social is simply a distorted, impoverished version of the energy of “diabolical” forces (i.e. of symbolic exchange). Baudrillard thinks that societies actually come into being, not for the management of interests, but coalesce around rituals of expenditure, luxury and sacrifice. Politics itself was a pure game until the modern period, when it was called upon to represent the social. Now politics is dead, because it no longer has a referent in reality. This is because it lacks symbolic exchange. The absence of symbolic exchange leads also to an absence of possibility of redistribution, either North to South or elite to masses. Fascism also resists the death of the real, in a similar way. It tries to restore in an excessive way the phenomena of death, intensity and definite references, in order to ward off the collapse of the real. Fascist and authoritarian tendencies revive what Baudrillard terms ‘the violence necessary to life’ – they keep up some kind of symbolic power. (Baudrillard’s Lacanian heritage is clearly shown in this idea of a necessary violence). Baudrillard has a certain sympathy for the desire to escape hyperreality in this way, but also sees it as futile. People doing this – both left and right – are trying to resuscitate causes and consequences, realities and referents, and recreate an imaginary. But the system deters such efforts from succeeding. Le Pen for instance is ultimately absorbed, as the mainstream integrates and repeats his racist ideas. This analysis could also be applied to various “fundamentalisms” and ethno-nationalist movements today. This kind of resistance is ultimately reactionary, seeking to restore the declining regime of signs. But it can only be understood if its basis in energies of resistance to simulation is recognised. It is because it channels such resistance that it is able to mobilise affective forces. Baudrillard’s analysis is here similar to that the sovereign gesture is now exercised everywhere because of the rise of indistinction and indeterminacy. The paradox is that the performance of fundamentalism often leads back towards the world of simulation and deterrence. Such movements map symbolic exchange onto the state, restoring some of its reality, but ultimately contributing to the persistence of simulation. Resistance from inside the regime of power is impossible because of deterrence. Baudrillard suggests that it’s now impossible to imagine a power exercised inside the enclosure created by deterrence – except for an implosive power which abolishes the energies preventing other possibilities emerging. He also suggests that the loss of the real is irreversible. Only the total collapse of the terrain of simulation will end it, not a test of reality. A truly effective revolution would have to abolish all the separations – including the separation from death. It cannot involve equality in what is separated – in survival, in social status and so on. The strategy for change is now exacberation, towards a catastrophic end of the system. Baudrillard believes that the resultant death of the social will paradoxically bring about socialism.