Baudrillard - Capital and Death

From this point on the obsession with death and the will to abolish death through accumulation become the fundamental motor of the rationality of political economy.  Value, in particular time as value, is accumulated in the phantasm of death deferred, pending the term of a linear infinity of value.  Even those who no longer believe in a personal eternity believe in the infinity of time as they do in a species-capital of double-compound interests.  The infinity of capital passes into the infinity of time, the eternity of a productive system no longer familiar with the reversibility of gift-exchange, but instead with the irreversibility of quantitative growth.  The accumulation of time imposes the idea of progress, as the accumulation of science imposes the idea of truth: in each case, what is accumulated is no longer symbolically exchanged, but becomes an objective dimension.  Ultimately, the total objectivity of time, like total accumulation, is the total impossibility of symbolic exchange, that is, death.  Hence the absolute impasse of political economy, which intends to eliminate death through accumulation...

Jean Baudrillard, 1976, L'echange symbolique e la mort; trns., Ian Hamilaton Grant, 1993, SAGE.



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