ABSTRACT
For Baudrillard, we must consider the real as historicised, a category. Instead of being an actual existing reality, beyond description, epistemology or conceptualisation, it comes from those things, and it does this differently in different periods, or, as he calls them, ‘eras of simulation’. And yet, the promise of something that many would call real, and Baudrillard thinks of as being against the real, is there. It can be thought of as symbolic exchange, impossible exchange, the event, seduction, or take other forms. Simulation can never be total, even when we have ‘integral reality’ (where the question of simulation as question no longer arises), as it carries within it the possibility of its nonexistence, or destruction, even if this moment would be brief (like the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001). Critics have pondered whether symbolic exchange lies outside simulation altogether, and if so, whether it represents a truer real than the one produced for and by us. For me, symbolic (or impossible) exchange is neither inside nor outside of simulacra, rather it is simulation’s Other, with which it is always intertwined, often as that which is lost, or fails to come to be. But the question of the position of the animal in Baudrillard’s thought (which is to be both domesticated and capable of symbolic revenge) seems to suggest a limit to symbolic exchange, which now seems to be predicated on the primacy of humanity over all existence. The animal becomes an other that is both carrier of symbolic exchange and that which lies at its border, the border of animal and human which Baudrillard barely touches on, as the key frontier for him is between simulated and unsimulated humanity.
