Baudrillard’s writing is “theory-fiction” (Baudrillard 1991c: 202) rather than theory, as he borrows a term from Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 92 f., cp. Blask, 2002: 133). Like all ’Pataphysics, this notion of “theory-fiction” may be traced back to the surrealists and their “poetic anthropology”, as Dietmar Kamper (1981, my translation) has called it. Such an anthropology is “poetic” because it refers to the art of writing, but also because it touches the original notion of “poiesis”, meaning to create something. ‘Poetic anthropology’ does not seek to describe a reality that lies out there, instead it aims to autopoietically produce the subject it writes about through its own act of description. Theory for Baudrillard is a “paradoxical political intervention” (Zapf 2010: 241, my translation). Thinking itself has to become the ambiguous kind of “singularity” (Baudrillard 1995: 96) and “event” (ibid.: 104) that is eliminated from almost any other sphere of the system: “Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real.” (Ibid.: 104). Maybe this is the most unique aspect of Baudrillard’s thinking altogether. He is a thinker who tries to think the world different from what it actually is. He sees himself as something like a smuggler or drug dealer, pushing forbidden items on a “black market in thought” (Baudrillard 1999: 104), promoting “a clandestine trade in ideas, of all inadmissible ideas, of unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s” (Baudrillard 1995: 104 f.).
