In the French philosopher, Alain Badiou’s book, The Century (2007), he proposes to conceptualize the 20th century, not simply as an historical time period, nor as an objective datum, but rather to ask how the century came to subjectivate itself. How did the century come to understand itself as a distinct epoch and what were the thoughts that became possible in this time? Badiou has a number of characteristics by which he designates the subjectivity of the 20th century. Primarily though, he argues that it is a century born under the paradigm of war. One furthermore caught between two distinct conceptions of war. On the one hand, the unjust and barbaric war and on the other, the final and definitive war; the war to bring perpetual peace. He sees the century as ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of high capitalism.

To try to apply this form of zeitgeist logic to our new century in its third decade might seem premature. To designate anything characteristic of our ‘age’ when we are only just beginning a new millennium is probably unwise. Arguably, however, this century, according to Badiou’s reasoning, probably started sometime in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s with the beginning of the internet and the rapid rise of Silicon Valley. Which, far from being an anachronism, is why I would venture to call this the “Baudrillardian” or, as I hope will become clear, the “Patipolitical century”. 

It would be no great insight to say that every notable and historically distinct societal phenomenon that we are currently living through, one way or another, has been shaped by that decisive moment at which civilization stepped into the digital realm and into the era of Artificial Intelligence. But this sudden accelerated velocity and the plethora of conceptual and technological issues it has given rise to has created a subjectivity so drastically different from that of the previous century that I think it already warrants description. The consequences of this galloping pace are not just in the empirically observable disasters occurring on the level of global politics and the distribution of resources, but, perhaps even more disastrously, on our very ability to philosophize. In fact, one could characterize Silicon Valley (the engine room of the century) as precisely the absence of thought in Badiou’s sense. Here thought is replaced by efficiency: to compute the century rather than to think it, that is what we are in danger of.

 As Badiou (2014) puts it:

‘Speed is the mask of inconsistency. Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speed, will constitute a time of its own. I consider this a singularity of philosophy: that its thinking is leisurely, because today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed.’ (p. 41) 

Badiou, here speaking in 1999 in a presentation entitled The Desire of Philosophy in the Contemporary World, goes on to argue that the desire of philosophy has four dimensions: revolt, logic, universality and risk. These four dimensions are in turn under threat in the contemporary world from these four corresponding principal obstacles: the reign of merchandise, the reign of communication, the need for technical specialization, and the necessity for realistic calculation of security. (We may of course add a fifth obstacle in our current century, which is climate catastrophe, bringing in the dimension of extinction as a philosophical category, which Ray Brassier has best tackled.) Given these dimensions, Badiou asks how philosophy can take on this challenge, and is it even capable? 

He characterizes the current state of philosophy (this being in the late ‘90s) as falling into three main tendencies arising from different traditions. Firstly, the Hermeneutic, deriving from German Romantism, being associated mainly with the names of Heidegger and Gadamer. The second is the Analytic tradition, originating in the Vienna circle and being synonymous with the names of Wittgenstein and Carnap, having migrated from Austria to where it now resides in Anglo American academia. The third being Postmodernism, which, although most pervasive in France, dominated in Spain, Italy, the US and Latin America. The panoply of names which represented it include most emblematically, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard. What these three philosophical orientations (Hermeneutic, Analytic and Postmodern) all have in common, according to Badiou, is two things. Firstly, a negative one: that they all designate an end of metaphysics in one way or another, or in other words a transition from truth-oriented philosophy to meaning-oriented philosophy. Secondly, the affirmative trait they share is the focus on language, such that the philosophy of the century has been nothing other than a meditation on language. The problem for Badiou is that these two axioms render philosophy incapable of sustaining the desire which is proper to it in the face of the pressure exerted by the contemporary world.

It is interesting that Badiou at this stage in his work does not count Historical and Dialectical Materialism as forming one of the main tendencies of philosophy at the time, corresponding to a lull in materialist philosophies that as we now know was followed by the explosion of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontologies onto the scene, none of which Badiou will be convinced by. Badiou’s own project places mathematics and dialectics centre-stage in a return of truth to philosophy.

So, let us return to the question of the century. If this is indeed a Baudrillardian century—referring to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard—then it is by virtue of the fact that we are some 40 years into a form of historical subjectivation in Badiou’s terms. This epoch has been characterized by the cleaving of ‘truth from knowledge’, or meaning from reality, in the strict sense that the “High Priest of Postmodernism”, as Baudrillard is known, meant it. Not the imprecise notion of “multiple realities”, as it is often stereotyped, but more specifically, a reality that has ceased to have meaningful effects, or 'truth effects’ to put it in the terms of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. If Badiou, as one of the defining philosophers of the (late) 20th century, the Century of War, implored us to go via Lacan in order to arrive at any form of truth as event, it is in the 21st century that we must make the same Badiouian gesture with an extra detour via Baudrillard. Since this, we could say, is the century of war by other means. What then is the war we are fighting in this century? I would propose it is a war of perpetual capture. 

Baudrillard is mostly associated with the concept of ‘hyperreality’, and his name is often used as shorthand for anything ‘postmodern’ or lacking in rigorous definability. But his work had more important conceptual elements to it that can help us to better understand the relationship between our current modes of near-total technological administration and subjectivity itself. What Baudrillard was concerned with in the paradigm of hyperreality was the question of obscenity. For Baudrillard, the concept of simulation led him ultimately to the idea that knowledge itself is obscene. Obscenity refers here not merely to the realm of the sexual, but to the whole of the visual field, the transparency of knowledge and the transmission of information.

Obscenity had replaced ‘seduction’, a concept that goes far beyond sex for Baudrillard (1991). Pornography is not merely a question of total access to the sexual body, but also the obscenity and transparency of knowledge and information. Seduction is not just a question of “femininity” traditionally understood but a game of ritual and simulation that governs politics, social life, culture, sex, and even death.  As he saw it, this obscenity must be tempered by the seduction of the world away from total capture in the episteme of the information age. Which, 30 years on from when Baudrillard was writing about it, has proven to be just as conceptually complex and metaphysically challenging as he proposed. But as with all speculations on the future, things never feel as “futuristic” as we imagined when they actually arrive. The point being that once the predicted conditions exist, we no longer have the tools conceptually to recognize them. It is the task of philosophy to make this predicament thinkable.

What Baudrillard sees as our immersion into hyperreality that was predicted with the merging of human intelligence and AI had already, in fact, begun as a constitutive part of the process of abstraction that begins with language itself. In a sense, Baudrillard was continuously making the claim that there is a direct and inverse relationship between the obscenity of everyday life and the disappearance of the world. This obscenity was ultimately brought about by the discourses of the Enlightenment, be they scientific, political, cultural, or aesthetic, and the surgical, microscopic, and anatomical precision with which everything is on display, categorized, and made operational. To put it in the crudest imagery: the Enlightenment search for complete knowledge is analogous with the pornographic drive towards extreme close-ups of bodily penetration.1

The anatomical perambulation of the female body is metonymic for the way that the idea of woman is constantly dissected and examined, as if one could get to the bottom of what she really is. This idea is as prevalent in discourses around the politics of female identity as it is as an object of fascination in horror movies and the psyches of serial killers: the attempt to find some obscure point within the body of the woman which would reveal 'her secret'. This impossibility is not in fact just one of female ‘perfection’, but the impossibility of feminine knowledge itself: the imaginary point ‘outside of science’. We could say that the fascination with finding the last remaining hidden spot on the human body, and the endless thirst for ever more graphic and explicit forms of sexual imagery, is a mirror of the scientific formalization of the universe. It is for this reason that Baudrillard takes the philosopher Michel Foucault to task for his part in making too explicit the sexual realm.

So, we should ask what thoughts are possible in the obscene 21st century that weren’t possible in the 20th? Or indeed vice versa. One of the elements that has concerned my research thus far and was the topic of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence (2021) was the relationship between thought and enjoyment. In other words, how can psychoanalysis be productively put into conversation with the questions arising from this century’s predominant preoccupation, artificial intelligence. And crucially how are we to position the subject within the epistemological, ethical and ontological series of problems that AI presents us with?

In the book, among other problematics, the concept of ‘Patipolitics’ emerged.2 Patior is the Latin ‘to suffer’, and suffering is the other side of jouissance, the Lacanian term for excessive (and largely unconscious) enjoyment. This concept therefore is one which is characteristic of our contemporary condition and markedly different to previous epochs. Drawing on the lineage of Foucault’s ‘Biopolitics’ and Achille Mbembe’s ‘Necropolitics’, the idea of patipolitics developed as a sort of aufhebung from the politics of life and death into the dominion of sex. If we are to follow the logic of the Freudo-Lacanian clinical observations that we are no longer a society of Freudian neurotics, but are now Lacanian ‘ordinary psychotics’, labouring under the incessant and traumatic injunction, incitation and provocation to enjoy, then patipolitics represents our current mode of subjectivation. 

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (2016), Adorno and Horkheimer were famously concerned with the historical process by which myth evolves into enlightenment and then enlightenment reverts to myth, ultimately resulting in the barbarism of Nazi Germany. How, they asked, is it possible that our civilization’s attempts to reach higher levels of intellectual sophistication inevitably lead to the dehumanization and degradation of our species? This onward march of instrumental rationality that they discerned, despite all the many ethics committees that have sprung up in their wake, has continued regardless. What makes it appear different today is its stealth tactics. We may be told by big corporations that technology is here to make our lives better, more efficient, to give us more pleasure, happiness and free time, but the question is, who or what has defined the criteria for this ‘better life’? And what exactly is our free time to be used for? Whereas the passive enjoying consumer was the focus of Adorno’s preoccupation, now the very architecture of our ability to enjoy is captured in advance.

From birth to death, virtually every piece of information about us may be harvested and used to profile, administer, market and ultimately make us into commodities ourselves. Deleuze (1992) coined the concept of the ‘dividual’ to express the way in which the various institutions of capitalism extract our data into systematic fragments making us into walking composites of various data banks, be they medical, financial, consumer or other institutions. Now this process operates on an even more granular scale, and at an ever more intimate level of dividualization. Take for example the data that is scraped from the usage of online pornography that forms the infrastructure of so many other consumer platforms. On a more ontological level this capture in the regime of predictability and computation means that even the romantic ideas of fate, destiny and contingency are owned by big tech.

In Agamben’s The Use of Bodies (2016) he returns to Aristotle’s Politics and his definitions of the working body and the relations of the household. Aristotle affirms that ‘the city is comprised of families or households oikai, and that the family in its perfect form is composed of slaves and free people’. He discerns three relations: the despotic despotike (master/slave), the matrimonial gamike (husband/wife) and the parental or technopoietike (specifically between the father/children). Of the three, the one which he determines as most fundamental is the despotic, since, according to Aristotle, the latter two terms are ‘nameless’ or lacking a proper name while ‘everyone knows what despotic is’. Aristotle defines the slave as a being that, ‘“while being human is by its nature of another and not of itself” asking himself immediately after “if a similar being exists by nature or if, by contrast, slavery is always contrary to nature.”’ (p. 3). 

What makes the master-slave relation significant here therefore is that it’s not a relation of two bodies, but rather the slave is an extension of the master’s body. To this degree it is impossible for the slave to ‘work’, in the sense that it cannot produce anything independently from the domain of the master’s purview. It is this relationship that characterizes our current emersion in the patipolitical century. As Agamben points out, Hannah Arendt recalls the difference between the ancient concept of slavery and that of the moderns: 

‘While for the later the slave is a means of procuring labor-power at a good price with the goal of profits, for the ancient it was a matter of eliminating labour from the properly human life, which was incompatible with it and which slaves by taking it upon themselves rendered possible.’ (p. 20) 

If today, we are all simply the extension of the master’s body how then is the properly human life possible at all? Patipolitics in this regard also attempts to return to some classical philosophical concerns with ‘the good life’ and accordingly Adorno’s suspicion that the wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Lacan (2004) famously said in Seminar XI:

‘[F]or the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what it means. In fact, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment. Between these two terms—drive and satisfaction—there is set up an extreme antinomy that reminds us that the use of the function of the drive has for me no other purpose than to put into question what is meant by satisfaction.’ (p. 165-66)

This direct parallel he draws between sex and speech expresses the discursive nature of the sexual and the sexual nature of discourse, but more fundamentally Lacan was trying to express the structural impossibility that gives rise to the speaking subject itself. That we speak is often hidden behind what is said (to paraphrase from his talk Radiophonie). Given that we are now fully subsumed into a discursive network which, in Baudrillard’s meaning of the term, puts us obscenely at the mercy of total administration under technocapitalism, and if we are to understand ‘sexual discourse’ as metonymic for our own unique form of enjoyment (as opposed to actual sexual activity), how do we even know the difference between when we are ‘fucking’ and when we are labouring? Which is a simulation of which? With the relentless uncovering of taboo and relinquishing of inhibition, where does this leave the negativity of the unconscious as a space of subjectivity? In this sense we may understand Foucault’s turn to care of the self via askesis as a method of escape from enforced enjoyment.

As Baudrillard (2008) provocatively puts it:

‘One may in fact argue that forcing the other to have pleasure, to feel rapture, is in fact the height of rape, and more serious than forcing the other to give you pleasure. At any rate this brings out the absurdity of this entire problematic. Sexual harassment marks the arrival on the scene of an impotent, victim’s sexuality. A sexuality impotent to constitute itself either as object or as subject of desire in its paranoid wish for identity and difference. It is no longer decency that is threatened with violation, but sex or rather sexist idiocy, which ‘takes the law into its own hands’. (p. 121–22)

What Baudrillard, perhaps jarringly, put his finger on here, is the paradoxical terrain of enjoyment. That far from being merely a source of pleasure it exists as a traumatic force which unsettles us and drives our behaviour despite our knowing better or wanting otherwise. And this is the crucial point underlying the horror of sexual abuse, and exploitation, that not only does it abuse the body and mind of the victim, but it preys upon their very capacity to enjoy, can form it, deform it or even destroy it completely. This is Baudrillard’s humane recognition, among all his paranoid theorizations, of the dangers of the age of obscenity, one that still remains elusive for a legal system and culture that continues to ask after a victim’s culpability in their own violation. 

This relationship of capture is, I believe, this century’s primary mode of administration, a situation in which one’s body and mind are subject to full transparency at all times. This is the terrain in which we must be most leisurely with our thinking in Badiou’s terms, seductive perhaps. We must reject the temptation to believe that faster or more efficient is better, and most of all be wary of anything that purports to presume how we must enjoy. In this precise sense the patipolitical tries to get to grips with the logical development of Lyotard’s (2015) concern with the worker and his beloved sausage meat; how have we become the impotent victims of our own treacherous enjoyment, and what is to be done?

***

References

Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2016) The Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Agamben, G. (2016) The Use of Bodies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Badiou, A. (2007) The Century. Cambridge: Polity.

Badiou, A. (2014) Infinite Thought. London: Bloomsbury.

Badiou, A. & Cassin, B. (2017) There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two 

lessons on Lacan: New York: Columbia University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1991) Seduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baudrillard, J. (1995) Simulacra & Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 

Baudrillard, J. (2007). Forget Foucault. Los Angeles: Semiotexte(e).

Baudrillard, J. (2008) The Perfect Crime. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, J. (2016). Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage Publications.

Brassier, R. (2007) Nihil Unbound. London: Palgrave.

Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on The Societies of Control. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: 

Penguin Books, 1978.

Lacan, J. (2004) Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 

London: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1999). Encore: On Feminine Sexuality the Limits of Love and Knowledge. 

London: W.W. Norton & Company. 

Lacan, J. (2001) Autre Ecrits. Paris: Seuil. 

Lyotard, J-F. (2015) Libidinal Economy. London: Bloomsbury.

Mbembe, A. (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): pp 11-40.

Millar, I. (2021) The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. London: Palgrave.

Millar. I. (2022) Can We Forget Foucault? Obscenity and the Politics of Seduction. In: 

A. Barria-Asenjo & S. Zizek – Revista Guillermo De Ockham. VOL. 20, NO. 2. Julio - Diciembre de 2022 227A proposito de si hay un inconsciente politico.