Return to Saussure

The Fork. AI image Thesis Jean Baudrillard argues that Marxism mistakenly treats concepts such as labour, production, and use-value as universal realities when they are, in fact, effects of a structural system of oppositions that produces the very reality it claims merely to describe. The distinction between concrete and abstract labour does not reveal an original essence subsequently distorted by capitalism; rather, the opposition itself generates the illusion of such an origin retrospectively. Introduction In The Mirror of Production , Jean Baudrillard returns to some of the foundational categories of Karl Marx’s critique of political economy in order to question their apparent universality. Rather than rejecting Marxism externally, Baudrillard interrogates the internal logic of its conceptual structure, focusing especially on the distinction between concrete and abstract labour. From this analysis emerges a radical claim: Marxism does not simply describe labour, production, an...

Introduction: When Critique Stops Working Twentieth-century critical thought was animated by a common ambition: to reveal what lies beneath appearances. Whether in political economy, psychoanalysis, or structuralism, theory sought to expose hidden mechanisms—exploitation, repression, underlying structures. Yet the persistence and adaptability of advanced capitalism raise a more troubling possibility: what if critique has lost its efficacy? More sharply, what if it now functions within the very processes it seeks to oppose? It is at this juncture that Jean Baudrillard proposes what he will later call fatal theory . Rather than refining inherited frameworks, he breaks with their underlying assumptions. The task is no longer to unmask a concealed reality, but to confront systems that absorb, circulate, and neutralize their own critique. The Limits of Classical Critique Baudrillard’s intervention targets a set of otherwise distinct traditions. In Karl Marx, critique proceeds by unc...

A Profound Reality. AI image Introduction Commentary on Jean Baudrillard often treats his theory of simulacra and his critique of political economy as distinct phases. A closer reading, however, reveals a structural continuity between these domains. This article argues that what Baudrillard calls “deeper reality” in the first order of simulacra can be understood as the semiotic analogue of use-value in classical political economy. Both operate as grounding principles that secure the legitimacy of a system—economic or representational—while concealing their own historical production. Tracing the erosion of these grounds makes visible a shared trajectory: the displacement of referential anchoring by autonomous relational structures. Use-Value and the Problem of Grounding In Capital Volume I , Karl Marx distinguishes between use-value and exchange-value . The former refers to the utility of an object, its capacity to satisfy a need; the latter expresses its equivalence within a net...