Abstract: Both Michel Foucault’s serial lectures “Society Must Be Defended” (1976) in the Collège de France and Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) deal with disciplinary/regulatory power techniques and the macro-logic of symbolic exchange. Though discursively re-forming the boundary between life and death on the level of power and that of symbolic exchange, Foucault and Baudrillard’s investigate modernity in the throes of life and death, which illuminates the ambivalent relationship of appropriation and repulsion between Western discourse of philosophical modernity and the Other in its ethnical, cultural, social and historical sense. Revealing the double bind methodologically confining both Foucault and Baudrillard’s discursive formations of modernity in this way, one can not help reflecting on the necessity to reconstruct the boundary of culture concerning inter-cultural translation internal to theoretical formulations.

Key words: Foucault, Baudrillard, Bio-Power, Symbolic Exchange, Modernity