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In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault (1977) made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality —and of his entire oeuvre—and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext(e) edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim.
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SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Originally published in 1977 as Oublier Foucault, Edition Galilee, Paris. This translation first appeared as "Forgetting Foucault" in Humanities in Society, Volume 3, Number 1 and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2007 Semiotext(e) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext( e) 2007 W ilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semlotexte.com "Forget Baudrillard" is translated by Phil Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti. Special thanks to Andrew Berardini, Christoph Cox, Jared Elms, Ronald Gottesman, Rahul Govind, Lewanne Jones, Christopher Mays, Nicholas Zurko and Joe Weiss. Cover Art by: Josephine Meckseper Untitled (Vitrine), 2005, Mixed media in display window, 116.8 x 116.8 x 47 em Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York Back Cover Photography: Marine Baudrillard Design: Hedi El KhoIti ISBN-I0: 1-58435-041-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-041-5 Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America Jean Baudrillard Introduction and Interview by Sylvere Lotringer Translated by Nicole Dufresne Contents Introduction: Exterminating Angel 7 FORGET FOUCAULT 27 POSTFACE: FORGET BAUDRILLARD 71 An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer Sylvere Lotringer Exterminating Angel Introduction to Forget Foucault IN DECEMBER 1976 Jean Baudrillard sent a long review-essay of Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge, recently published in Paris, 1 to the prestigious French journal Critique founded by Georges Bataille. (Foucault was on the editorial board.) Its title, "Forget Foucault," left little doubt about the author's intentions. It wasn't just a critique of the book, but a pamphlet challenging his entire oeuvre. The essay was never published in Critique. It came out instead, separately, as a book a few months later. Forget Foucault,2 to my mind, is by far the best introduction to Baudrillard's work. I intended to publish it among the first three books of the new "Foreign Agents" series, which started in 1983, but the attack on Foucault made it a bit problematic. Taking on a fellow philosopher publicly, let alone a philosopher of Foucault's stature, was something rare,