Reversibility

Definition

Reversibility is Baudrillard's master-law in Fatal Strategies (1983) — the principle that things do not progress linearly or dialectically but push each other to the limit and turn into their opposites. "Reversibility… denotes the limit point in which all alternative values spasm into their opposite: such as life and death, good and evil, chance and fate, male and female, human and inhuman." It has two faces: an anthropological one (the symbolic law of the counter-gift and the accursed share, borrowed from Mauss and Bataille) and a physical/metaphysical one ("a kind of perfectly inverted and simultaneous determination, or perverse counter determination"). Reversibility is the fatal strategy's operative logic: "Reversibility kills any determinist (or indeterminist) principle of causality in ovum." It is the object's "absolute weapon" against analysis — "pushed into retreat by analysis, the objects become reversible, just like appearance." And it is the definition of destiny: things "don't progress in a linear fashion… Rather, they push each other to the outer limits." Baudrillard's closing figure is the reversible imminence of the magician and Paracelsus's rose — appearance and disappearance linked "according to the ineluctable rule (this is destiny)." The concept is the hinge between the book's metaphysics (destiny, the principle of Evil) and its physics (the reversibility of physical laws at the limits of science). See fatal-strategies, destiny, appearance-and-disappearance, symbolic-exchange, principle-of-evil.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the limit point in which all alternative values spasm into their opposite"; "the reversibility of destiny" (1983).
• Marcel Mauss (not yet paged) — the gift/counter-gift and the Kula circulation that supply the symbolic form of reversibility.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the symbolic order and "the excess of the signifier" as the régime of magical, reversible connection.
• Sigmund Freud — the death drive and the "compulsion to repeat" read as reversibility's psychic shadow.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the Eternal Return, which Baudrillard says has become the "Eternal Rerun" (Pettman).

Related Concepts

• Fatal Strategies — reversibility is their operative logic.
• Destiny — reversibility of causal order = the reversion of effect on cause.
• Appearance and Disappearance — the reversible cycle the magician's trick stages.
• Symbolic Exchange — the anthropological form of reversibility.
• Principle of Evil — "the world is not dialectical — it is sworn to extremes."
• Chance — the despised alternative (linear, statistical), against reversible fate.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: the reversibility of values, the reversibility of causal order, the reversible imminence of things, "Chance tires me.—God."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — "Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event"; the pataphysics of simulacra.
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the earlier symbolic/use-value analysis.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the reading that unifies the concept across Baudrillard's work: reversibility as "the fundamental rule of the world" (p. 97) — the system pushed too far in its resemblance "begins to produce the opposite effects from those intended"; death as its master figure — "It is life that reaches the end and death that is immortal, never-ending" (p. 98); Freud, Mauss and Saussure as the three thinkers who each intuit this reversibility and repress it (pp. 99–100); and the suggestion that reversibility "runs throughout Baudrillard's career" under the names of waste, the medium of exchange, the masses, seduction and the real (p. 167). See the-real, seduction, ceremonial-and-linear-time, doubling.

Open Questions

• Is reversibility a transcendental law or a rhetorical trope applied everywhere? Baudrillard offers no criterion to distinguish a genuine reversal from a merely asserted one.
• The book claims science itself is arriving at reversibility "at the physical and biological limits of its exercise." Is this an actual engagement with physics or an allegory?
• How does reversibility relate to the wiki's dialectical materials (Hegel, Marx, critical theory)? Baudrillard's whole polemic is that dialectics has been avoided, not fulfilled.