Baudrillard - Death Power

The emergence of survival can therefore be analyzed as the fundamental operation in the birth of power.  Not only because this set-up will permit the necessity of the sacrifice of this life and the threat of recompense in the next (this is exactly the priest-caste's strategy), but more profoundly by instituting the prohibition of death and, at the same time, the agency that oversees this prohibition of death: power.  Shattering the union of the living and the dead, and slapping a prohibition on death and the dead: the primary source of social control.  Power is possible only if death is no longer free, only if the dead are put under surveillance, in anticipation of the future confinement of life in its entirety.  This is the fundamental Law, and power is the guardian at the gates of this Law.  It is not the repression of unconscious pulsions, libido, or whatever other energy that is fundamental, and it is not anthropological; it is the repression of death, the social repression of death in the sense that this is what facilitates the shift towards the repressive socialization of life.

-ch. 5, Symbolic Exchange and Death