The Sacred State - Baudrillard

Political Economy and Death


As a universal of the human condition, death exists only when society discriminates against the dead.  The institution of death, like that of the afterlife and immortality, is a recent victory for the political rationalism of castes, priests and the Church: their power is based on the management of the imaginary sphere of death.  As regards the disappearance of the religious afterlife, it is the even more recent victory for the State's political rationality.  When the afterlife fades in the face of advances made by 'materialist' reason, it is quite simply because it has crossed over into life itself.  The power of the State is based on the management of of life as objective afterlife.  In this, it is more powerful than the Church, since the abstract power of the State is increased not by an imaginary beyond, but by the imaginary of life itself.  It relies on secularized death, the transcendence of the social, and its force derives from the mortal abstraction it embodies.  Just as medicine is the management of the corpse, so the State is the management of the dead body of the socius...


Baudrillard