The Hostage

Definition

The hostage is Baudrillard's figure, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the condition of suspended, anonymous terror that replaces both alienation and violence in the transpolitical era. "Violence is anomic, but terror is anomalous. Like obesity, terror is a sort of convex and deforming mirror of order and the political scene: the mirror of its disappearance." The hostage is "neither dead nor alive… suspended by an incalculable outcome"; he "may no longer even run the risk of his own life: it too is stolen from him to serve as a cover." Baudrillard's claim is that hostage-taking is not marginal but the general form of our relation to power: "We are all hostages. We all now serve as dissuasive arguments. Objective hostages… But we are also subjective hostages… This is the law of the insured society, where all risks must be covered." "This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited… Gone is the constellation of alienation: from now on it is that of terror." The hostage's logic is that of the inexchangeable: "the hostage is secretly no longer negotiable, precisely because of his absolute convertibility." Terror, blackmail, and dissuasion ("if you don't do it…") are the era's "soft technologies" — and the hostage is "obscene because he no longer represents anything." The concept is the political-theoretical twin of the obese and the other transpolitical figures. See transpolitical, the-masses, symbolic-exchange, deterrence, obscenity.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "We are all hostages"; "Neither dead nor alive"; "the inexchangeable is the pure object" (1983).
• Michel de Certeau — a related theorist of strategy/tactics whose register Baudrillard's "manipulation on both sides" recalls.
• Paul Virilio — the orbital and the "pure war" as the hostage's spatial-technical conditions.
• Not yet paged: Aldo Moro, the Red Brigades, Judge D'Urso — the Italian cases Baudrillard reads in detail.

Related Concepts

• The Transpolitical — "the only transpolitical act is terrorism."
• The Masses — "the absolute prototype of the hostage… annulled in its sovereignty, abolished and nonexistent as subject."
• Symbolic Exchange — the hostage is "a sort of pure and impossible form of exchange"; the inexchangeable is the pure object.
• Deterrence — "we all live collectively under nuclear blackmail."
• Obscenity — the hostage is obscene: "in a state of pure and simple exhibition."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Hostage"; "We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists"; "Blackmail is worse than interdiction"; the Moro and D'Urso cases; "the inexchangeable is the pure object."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the deterrence/nuclear register.
• The Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1967) — the prior account of the mediated political spectacle the hostage radicalizes.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the fullest secondary analysis (ch. 2): the hostage "himself obscene because he no longer represents anything" (FS, 42–3); the paradox "that at the very moment the hostage is least free, most bound by exchange, held responsible for the rest of society, he or she is most free, not bound by anything at all, unable to be exchanged" (p. 92); terrorism's dream of "an impossible exchange" and its "denunciation of the impossibility of exchange" (FS, 50); and the hostage as the political figure of the failed medium of exchange. See medium-of-exchange, transpolitical, seduction.

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's hostage theory is keyed to 1970s–80s left-wing terrorism (the Red Brigades, Moro). Does the structural claim survive the shift to religious and state terror, or is it historically bound?
• Is "we are all hostages" a serious political ontology or a hyperbolic metaphor? The page should be tested against the wiki's power-and-space debate.