Enduring Right: Law, War and the Market

Among the more outrageous claims Baudrillard makes in “The Melodrama of Difference” there is one which aptly invokes extremities.2 To the geographical extremity of the Alakaluf people of Tierra del Fuego, Baudrillard would add an existential one. “They call themselves ‘Men’ – and there were [for them] no others;” and so, “[ i]n their singularity, which could not ever conceive of the Other, the Alakaluf were inevitably vanquished,” in effect exterminated, by “the Whites.”3 Yet, he goes on, “who can say that the elimination of this singularity will not turn out, in the long run, to be fatal for the Whites too? Who can say that radical foreignness will not have its revenge – that, though effectively conjured away by colonial humanism, it will not return…dooming them to disappear themselves one day in much the same way as the Alakaluf.