Territory is the site of total exchange without subject or death

Evidence

A territory is also not a space, with what this term implies for us about liberty and appropriation. Neither instinct, nor need, nor structure (be it “cultural” and “behavioral”), the notion of territory is also opposed in some way to that of the unconscious. The unconscious is a “buried,” repressed, and indefinitely subdivided structure. The territory is open and circumscribed. The unconscious is the site of the indefinite repetition of subjective repression and fantasies. The territory is the site of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges - without a subject, but without exception: animal and vegetal cycle, cycle of goods and wealth, cycle of parentage and the species, cycle of women and ritual - there is no subject and everything is exchanged. The obligations are absolute therein - total reversibility - but no one knows death there, since all is metamorphosed. Neither subject, nor death, nor unconscious, nor repression, since nothing stops the enchainment of forms. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 454

Categorization

• DEFINE: Baudrillard’s antipodal definition: unconscious (buried, repetitive, subjective) vs. territory (open, cyclical, subjectless, metamorphic).
• XREF: Connects to Lévi-Strauss’s exchange cycles and Mauss’s gift; the ‘total reversibility’ echoes the symbolic exchange theme across Baudrillard’s work.