ARTICOLI / 10 / Guido Baggio /
Lyotard’s and Baudrillard’s intellectual path moves from the attempt to deconstruct the representational forms of structuralism and to criticize the various politically or culturally institutionalized versions of Marxism. This attempt implies re-exploring and rehabilitating the “symbolic” as a third realm between the domains of the real and the imaginary. The notion of symbolic refers to the concept of relational exchange which is a functional device of an “empty place”, a “margin”, a “manque”, and an “incommensurability”. Lyotard and Baudrillard both refer to the idea of “actualization” of the death pulsion meant as a radical ‘immanentization’ in which the subject loses its own subjectivity, either by being involved in the symbolic exchange or by being prevented from desiring. However, they still have to acknowledge the role of the social subject as deeply involved in the cyclical tension between life and death, gift and counter-gift.
