The Remainder

Definition

The remainder (le reste) is Baudrillard's concept for the residue that has no opposite (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994, "The Remainder"). The essay opens from an arithmetical paradox: "The equation of everything and nothing, the subtraction of the remainder, is totally false… It is not that there is no remainder. But this remainder never has an autonomous reality, nor its own place: it is what partition, circumscription, exclusion designate." The remainder is structurally odd because it has no opposing term: "one can say the right/the left, the same/the other… but the remainder/? Nothing on the other side of the slash." The "marked term" beyond the slash "has no name… it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder." This makes the remainder a figure of reversibility: "one never knows which is the remainder of the other," as in the mirror ("which, the real or the image, is the reflection of the other?"). The concept then becomes a diagnosis of the social: "Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste product… of what else?" When a system "has absorbed everything… the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder." The remainder "makes you laugh" because, like sex and death, it is reversible and "exchanged for itself"; and today "the remainder has become the weighty term" — the political economy of recycling, ecology, and the "return of the repressed." Now, in the phase of simulation, "there is no longer even a remainder, due to the fact that the remainder is everywhere." The concept is Baudrillard's theory of exclusion, waste, and the social residue — kin to the wiki's symbolic-ecology, the-social, and aestheticization-of-poverty. See simulation-hyperreality, the-social, symbolic-ecology.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the remainder without an opposing term; the reversibility of residue and system; the "political economy of the remainder" (1981/1994).
• Georges Bataille (not yet paged) — the adjacent theory of expenditure and the accursed share, which Baudrillard cites for the "squandering of excess."
• Jane Jacobs — the urban analogue: "unslumming," diversity and the self-destruction of diversity as the city's own remainder-dynamics.

Related Concepts

• Simulation / Hyperreality — the phase in which "there is no longer even a remainder."
• The Social — the system that becomes its own residue.
• Symbolic Ecology — the order of exchange and cycle against which residue is defined.
• Aestheticization of Poverty — the ideological conversion of the social remainder into image.
• Process of Elimination — the adjacent material-culture register of waste and residue.
• Nihilism of Transparency — the affect of a world in which the remainder is everywhere.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("The Remainder"): "the remainder/? Nothing on the other side of the slash"; "one never knows which is the remainder of the other"; "the entire sum turns to the remainder"; "the remainder is obscene, because it is reversible"; "there is no longer even a remainder… because the remainder is everywhere."
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the prehistory: the object's "cancerous metastasis" and the residual in the system of consumption.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies

Open Questions

• Is "the remainder" a formal concept (a structure with no opposing term) or a sociological one (the excluded)? Baudrillard uses it as both — do the two senses cohere?
• If in simulation "the remainder is everywhere," the concept self-destructs as a diagnostic category; is the essay therefore a farewell to the remainder, and what replaces it?
• The wiki's exclusion/otherness cluster (otherness, mutedness, aestheticization-of-poverty) could be re-read through the remainder. Does the concept add anything to those, or is it a more abstract redescription?