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Fatal Strategies: 1st (First) Edition
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October 17, 2024
A KEY BOOK BY A FRENCH “POSTMODERN” PHILOSOPHER
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer most associated with the “Postmodern” movement.
He says in the first essay in this 1983 book, “The world is not dialectical---it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of Evil, as expressed in the ‘evil genie’ of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object and in its strategy, victorious over that of the subject.” (Pg. 7)
Later, he adds, “Every event is today virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its message: the equiprobability of all causes and of all consequences---multiple and aleatory meanings.” (Pg. 16-17)
He suggests, “The entire sphere of manipulation is of the same order. Manipulation is a soft technology of violence by blackmail. And blackmail always functions by taking hostage a parcel of the other, a secret, an effect, a desire, a pleasure, his suffering, his death; this is what we play on in manipulation… It is our way of arousing, by forced solicitation, a demand equivalent to our own.” (Pg. 40)
He points out, “There are people today … who don’t even believe in the space shuttle. Here it is no longer a matter of philosophical doubt as to being and appearance, but a profound indifference to the reality principle as an effect of the loss of all illusion. All the old structures of knowledge, the concept, the scene, the mirror, attempt to create illusions, and thus they emphasize a truthful projection of the world. Electronic surfaces, on the other hand, are without illusion; they offer only the inconclusive.” (Pg. 87)
He observes, “We are no longer even alienated, for there is no more other; the scene of the other, like that of the social and political, has disappeared. Each individual is forced into the undivided coherence of statistics. Extraversion without appeal, like uncertainty.” (Pg. 90)
He argues, “in the end the greatest singularity is to be found… in this more extraordinary rapport of seduction. It alone leads to … making of the opposite sex a destiny, making of it not a final object … but a fatal object (of death and metamorphosis)… Because it pushes the game of difference to the point of challenge and absolute attraction… because it is a vertigo from raising the stakes and not from accounting…. Seduction alone can put an end to the domination of one sex over the other.” (Pg. 127) Later, he adds, “We were all once produced, we must all be seduced. That is the only true ‘liberation,’ that which opens beyond the Oedipus complex and the Law, and which delivers us from a stern psychological calvary as well as from the biological fatality of having been sexually engendered.” (Pg. 138)
He states, “Chance is attributable to a God even more extraordinary than the one who manages everything with his will, than the one of universal predestination or the providential and fateful linking of everything… It’s no surprise that God has died, leaving behind a perfectly free and random world, and leaving the task of organizing things to a blind divinity named Chance. God scarcely held up his side of the bargain. He… ended up arranging things so that what happens without reason, what arrives through an extremely rare and unlikely probability, is more meaningful than what happens as a result of a cause. What happens accidentally takes on a meaning and intensity that we no longer assign to rational occurrence. In an overdetermined world, chance is the creator of special effects.” (Pg. 148-149)
He begins the final chapter with the statement, “These fatal strategies, do they exist? I don’t even feel that I’ve described them, or even come close, nor that the hypothesis is anything but a dream---so great is the sway of the real over the imagination. Where do you get what you say about the object? Objectivity is the opposite of fatality. The object is real, and the real is subject to law, period. And so: faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism... Today, illusion no longer counts; in order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real.” (Pg. 181)
He continues, “This is why, chance having been abolished, the Last Judgment is useless. This is why the theory of predestination is infinitely superior to that of the freedom of the soul Predestination eliminates from life all that is only destined---all that, having happened only once, is only accidental, while what happens a second time becomes fatal; but it also gives to life the intensity of these secondary events, which have, as it were, the depth of a previous existence.” (Pg. 187)
This is one of Baudrillard’s more widely-read books, and will be of great interest to anyone studying his thought.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer most associated with the “Postmodern” movement.
He says in the first essay in this 1983 book, “The world is not dialectical---it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of Evil, as expressed in the ‘evil genie’ of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object and in its strategy, victorious over that of the subject.” (Pg. 7)
Later, he adds, “Every event is today virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its message: the equiprobability of all causes and of all consequences---multiple and aleatory meanings.” (Pg. 16-17)
He suggests, “The entire sphere of manipulation is of the same order. Manipulation is a soft technology of violence by blackmail. And blackmail always functions by taking hostage a parcel of the other, a secret, an effect, a desire, a pleasure, his suffering, his death; this is what we play on in manipulation… It is our way of arousing, by forced solicitation, a demand equivalent to our own.” (Pg. 40)
He points out, “There are people today … who don’t even believe in the space shuttle. Here it is no longer a matter of philosophical doubt as to being and appearance, but a profound indifference to the reality principle as an effect of the loss of all illusion. All the old structures of knowledge, the concept, the scene, the mirror, attempt to create illusions, and thus they emphasize a truthful projection of the world. Electronic surfaces, on the other hand, are without illusion; they offer only the inconclusive.” (Pg. 87)
He observes, “We are no longer even alienated, for there is no more other; the scene of the other, like that of the social and political, has disappeared. Each individual is forced into the undivided coherence of statistics. Extraversion without appeal, like uncertainty.” (Pg. 90)
He argues, “in the end the greatest singularity is to be found… in this more extraordinary rapport of seduction. It alone leads to … making of the opposite sex a destiny, making of it not a final object … but a fatal object (of death and metamorphosis)… Because it pushes the game of difference to the point of challenge and absolute attraction… because it is a vertigo from raising the stakes and not from accounting…. Seduction alone can put an end to the domination of one sex over the other.” (Pg. 127) Later, he adds, “We were all once produced, we must all be seduced. That is the only true ‘liberation,’ that which opens beyond the Oedipus complex and the Law, and which delivers us from a stern psychological calvary as well as from the biological fatality of having been sexually engendered.” (Pg. 138)
He states, “Chance is attributable to a God even more extraordinary than the one who manages everything with his will, than the one of universal predestination or the providential and fateful linking of everything… It’s no surprise that God has died, leaving behind a perfectly free and random world, and leaving the task of organizing things to a blind divinity named Chance. God scarcely held up his side of the bargain. He… ended up arranging things so that what happens without reason, what arrives through an extremely rare and unlikely probability, is more meaningful than what happens as a result of a cause. What happens accidentally takes on a meaning and intensity that we no longer assign to rational occurrence. In an overdetermined world, chance is the creator of special effects.” (Pg. 148-149)
He begins the final chapter with the statement, “These fatal strategies, do they exist? I don’t even feel that I’ve described them, or even come close, nor that the hypothesis is anything but a dream---so great is the sway of the real over the imagination. Where do you get what you say about the object? Objectivity is the opposite of fatality. The object is real, and the real is subject to law, period. And so: faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism... Today, illusion no longer counts; in order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real.” (Pg. 181)
He continues, “This is why, chance having been abolished, the Last Judgment is useless. This is why the theory of predestination is infinitely superior to that of the freedom of the soul Predestination eliminates from life all that is only destined---all that, having happened only once, is only accidental, while what happens a second time becomes fatal; but it also gives to life the intensity of these secondary events, which have, as it were, the depth of a previous existence.” (Pg. 187)
This is one of Baudrillard’s more widely-read books, and will be of great interest to anyone studying his thought.
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