Fatal Strategies

by Jean Baudrillard

In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the "false problem." One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Theory, France, 20th Century, Cultural

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Reviews

[Jan Peter Rebel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most French book i have ever read: 50% bullshit, 50% genius.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is insane. The idea that human beings have already passed the point of apocalypse, can never return, and are existing in a hyperreal world whhere ideas have no center makes me gloomy. I am putting this on hiatus at page 95 and reading a novel with a lot of characters.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fatal Strategies strikes a fine balance between the early Baudrillard (e.g. Symbolic Exchange & Death), who was more analytical and argumentative, and his later works that focus more on style and are largely aphoristic (e.g. the excellent Cool Memories series). The book is more of a transition to the latter, as B starts to use narratives and jokes as devices in his theory. While I'm not too interested in the themes surrounding seduction and disappearance, the work's form supports the content in a way that most writing only aspires to.
I bought this on a whim in a used bookstore but wow, I really don't need to read any more Baudrillard. Time to move onto something new and less cynical.

[Sencer Turunç · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Nereden bakarsanız bakın, savaşı mantıksızlık kazanmaktadır. Kötülük ilkesi işte budur. Evrenin diyalektik bir açıklamalası yapılamaz;" diye başlıyor kitap...

Şöyle bir tespiti var bir yerde, "Dünyanın gişatına bakıldığında insanlık sanki geriye dönmenin, yavaşlamanın ve hızını kesmenin imkansız göründüğü gizemli bir noktayı aşıp geçmiş gibidir... Ancak bu hızlanmanın gerisinde kesinlikle yavaş giden bir şey vardır. Kesinlikle yavaşlayan o şey de bizleriz."

"Dünya artık terörün egemenliği altında bulunan bir no man's land'den yönetilmektedir; başka bir ifadeyle dünyamız sözcüğün gerçek anlamında coğrafi sınırların ötesine ait, gezegen dışı bir yerlerin rehinesine dönüşmüş gibidir."

"Artık herşeyi gören, kaydeden ama hiçbirşeye inanmayan birer ekrana benziyoruz." Kitleler tarafından hayatımız söndürülmüş durumda; bu hem çaresizlik hem de kimseye fark ettirmeden ortadan yok olma fırsatı...

[akemi · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I like Baudrillard's musings on the death of the dialectic and the fatal strategies of the object, I can't help but feel he's a cryptic beta-male who's into conspiracy theories.

That the alt-right (read: Baudrillard) are a second-order slave morality, reacting to the socialist left's first-order slave morality--an ecstatic multiplication of self-repression, that imposes itself as a universal condition--and then sells it as a book by Semiotext(e).

Baudrillard seems to be exactly what Nagle calls transgression without content. Regardless of Nagle's own troublesome book on the alt-right, I feel Baudrillard, by elevating the radical alterity of the object into an ecstatic ontology, removes all accountability towards what is done to the object.

To put it in simpler terms, he's a rape apologist. He makes a universal fetish of subjugation and violation. He ignores all evidence contrary to his argument.

Regardless of all this, he does say some neat things. Let's remember that Nietzsche was also a raving (ironic?) sexist.

1) The dialectic has given way to ecstasy. It is not sublation that leads to disappearance, but rather, the multiplication of the singular unto obscenity. Signifiers without signifieds.
2) The object seduces the subject.
3) The effect precedes the cause. Things move so fast that all causes are retroactively imputed. Causation is a simulation.

etc etc etcccc>>>>>>>>>

[Ben Arzate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in PDF. I now need to get a physical copy and go through it with a highlighter.

[pistachiodots · Rating 3 out of 5]

He seguido atentamente el pensamiento de Baudrillard en recorrido cronológico, recorrido obsesivo, y que creo que ha culminado con este libro publicado en 1983. Bien, hasta el momento podría decirse que hay un salto extraño en su pensamiento, desde sus inicios como un sociólogo altamente mordaz influenciado por Althusser, Lacan, Freud, Marx, Barthes, et al. ['Sistema de los Objetos', 'Sociedad del Consumo', 'Por una critica de la economía politíca del signo'], a la puñalada confusa, casi sans-referentes del 'Intercambio Simbólico y la Muerte' que puedo ahora considerar con certitud es su obra maestra, lleno de conceptos futuristas, aún noveles y dignos de ser analizados.

Sin embargo, Baudrillard a partir de ese momento entra en una especie de agotamiento intelectual, aferrandose a una aliteración casi nauseabunda de motivos expuestos en sus obras anteriores. Claro está, 'De la Seducción' es una ligera excepción, en donde se plantea una primera solución a las problemáticas expuestas en 'Intercambio Simbólico...', por medio del exceso, la seducción, el juego y el disfraz. Del izquierdismo frío, analitico [Ladrillard] a la excentricidad festiva [Mauss]. De hecho, lo que muchos juran es su obra maestra que se compone de micro-tratados cyberpunk en 'Simulacres et Simulation', abunda en un reciclaje descarado de conceptos [nada de la radicalidad de 'Intercambio...' o de 'A la Sombra de las Mayorias Silenciosas'] y ridículas citas que auto-referencian sus propias obras [ia comicidad de la teoría, supongo].

Bien, el núcleo del pensamiento de Baudrillard para esta, su más extraña entrega, se ha fundido, se desploma como un liquido dorado, se hunde en lisergia neo-decadentista a pesar de que en las cuatro primeras secciones del libro siga comportandose como un uróboros maniatico ['El rehén', 'El genio maligno de la pasión']. B. de hecho me sorprende al atreverse a escribir una especie de manifiesto en las dos primeras páginas del libro: 'A lo más verdadero que lo verdadero opondremos lo más falso que lo falso. No enfrentaremos lo bello y lo feo, buscaremos lo más feo que lo feo: lo monstruoso. No enfrentaremos lo visible a lo oculto, buscaremos lo más oculto que lo
oculto: el secreto. No buscaremos el cambio ni enfrentaremos lo fijo y lo móvil, buscaremos lo más móvil que lo móvil: la metamorfosis...'.

La tésis central del libro yace en denunciar la fabulosa banalidad del fin de siécle primer mundista, la obscenidad y esnobismo de las masas [sin considerarlas claro está, estúpidas sino por lo contrario, 'ingeniosas'], el antropocentrismo cientifista [en donde lo inhumano se instrumentaliza], un doblez de la realidad que ha logrado la eliminación de previos parametros como eran la ilusión y la ceremonia, y que en este momento pueden derivar hacia una serie de estrategias irónicas contra la fachada trágica de nuestro sistema, entre una de estas, la de considerar al objeto [no banal, el que pone en ridículo a los investigadores] últimamente superior al sujeto [el cuál debe aceptar su eventual fin]. B. pretende armar un gran teatro de dimensiones patafisícas, crueles, ridículas, asemejandóse a las máquinas barrocas de Nicola Sabbatini y el teatro chino, cómicas, finalmente por fuera de la academia, el pariah francés B. desea construir un nuevo sistema de castas también por fuera del azar y la indeterminación modernas: todo está dado, todo está determinado, la entropía es una ilusión hiperracional, las reglas están puestas sobre la bandeja de plata al igual que en el Brahmanismo, mientras de su boca se escupen rubíes y plumas de pavo real bañadas en 30 kilates de oro.

De todos los libros de B., este me ha frustrado en su delirio redoblado e ininteligible, multiplicando y metamorfoseando la implosión de los medios en una alucinación aristocrática. Hay páginas al final del libro ['Lo fatal, o la inminencia reversible', 'La ceremonia del mundo', 'Por un principio del Mal'] en donde no sé a que territorio intenta llegar o si intenta llegar a uno. Tal vez es el punto del libro, en dónde la dimensión intelectualista cesa, y se transforma en algo justamente 'monstruoso'.

[v · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jean Baudrillard (borrowing from Elias Canetti) hypothesizes that at some point we can no longer even identify we passed beyond history. Ballpark figure, considering Canetti and Baudrillard's fascination with nuclear weapons (the possibility of our own impossibility): 1945. Reality could falsify this hypothesis, but it refuses to.
This is also the book in which Baudrillard passed beyond -- beyond what, and into what, it is similarly hard to say. For that reason, it is one of his most significant works from a formal perspective, and the one that sets the standard for his later work. It is beautiful and ugly, thoughtful and silly, and truly touching and superbly written in places.
Baudrillard ultimately doesn't say what fatal strategies are but by the end that doesn't matter; more worryingly, the relationship between the first half of the book on hyperreality and the transpolitical, and the second half on the object and seduction, is left awfully opaque. But inconsistent as the book is (and indifferent to many of its readers), it is the crucial experiment for that fictional science Baudrillard has christened "theory."

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is perhaps the fact of being engendered and engendering that is the crime above all others, and that which must be resolved, redeemed, expiated by the initiatory fact.”

“All the illogical charm of the story is in the movement where the two rush to raise their masks and there's nothing behind them. As if the two masks (Harlequin and Boatman) were acting on their own, looking to remarry each other, as a function of a pure inertia of language, of the tale, while they have no reason for doing so. (But by what miracle do they find themselves there, by what uncanny conjuncture, and where are the two others, the real ones, during this time?) The real is out, only the appearances function, and they combine according to their own logic…the word becomes a line—no longer a carrier sign but a pure vector of appearance. Fragments of language unknown to each other, without causal links, meet there as if by enchantment and discover with delight that they were "neither one nor the other." The terms tear off each other's masks, but do not recognize each other.”

“It is never causes but rather appearances that, when they link themselves up, lead to catastrophe. Unlike the crisis, which is only the disorder of causes, catastrophe is the delirium of forms and appearances. Just as delusion is the pure, nonreferential linkage of language, just as ceremony is the pure, nonreferential linkage of gestures, rites, and costumes, so catastrophe is the pure, nonreferential connection of things and events. There is no chance at work in all of this. It is rather a formal linkage of the highest necessity.”

“Speed itself is doubtless only this: throughout and beyond all technology, the temptation for things and people to go faster than their cause, to thereby catch up to their beginning and annul it. As such, it is a vertiginous mode of disappearance (Paul Virilio). But writing is another: going faster than the conceptual connections-this is the secret of writing. In comparison to this catastrophic occurrence-catastrophe is always ahead of the normal schedule; it's always a telescoping, a sudden instantaneity of time, a seism that pulls together the separated edges of time-meaning is always too late. It is like Kafkas Messiah, who will come only when he is no longer needed, not on the Day of Last Judgement, but the day after.”

“Things can be in crisis only in a "normal" order of succes-sion. Crisis is the management of causality: liberate the causes and find a rational connection of effects and causes; while in this sudden precession, in this reversibility of the event that devours its own cause, things no longer even have the time to see themselves contested in their principle and corrected as they proceed. Pure contingency, accidentality, the brutal upending of the real and its representation—as Clement Rosset would say-leaves a critical temporality of meaning no chance.”

“The ceremony contains the presentiment of its development and its end. It has no spectators. Wherever there is spectacle, ceremony ceases, for it is also violence against representation. The space where it moves is not a stage, a scene, a space of scenic illusion: it is a locus of immanence and of the unfolding of the rule. Let's consider again the way the game works (cards, chess, chance): there is nothing less theatrical than a passion for gambling-all intensity is withdrawn into the interior, towards the internal operation of the rule, toward the difference of stage and spectacle that is open to view. The slightest dramatic intrusion of the gaze plunges ceremony into aesthetics, which thereby becomes the source of a pleasure; but ceremony is not of the order of pleasure, it is of the order of power, which it possesses by virtue of the immanence, in each of its signs and actors, of its development, and not by virtue of some kind of transcendence of aesthetic judgement.”

“this unleashing of truth, this triumph of sincerity in all its forms, also consecrates the end of illusion, of the power of illusion. Illusion in the literal sense of an initiation to the rule, to a superior agreement and convention in which something other than the real is at stake. The game is based on this possibility for every system to overflow its own reality principle and to be refracted in another logic. This is the secret of illusion, and what is at stake is always to rescue this vital dimension. Just like the eigh-teenth-century magician who had invented an automaton that could imitate human actions so perfectly that he was obliged on stage to "automatize" himself, to imitate mechanical imperfection precisely in order to save the game, to preserve the infinitessimal difference that made the form of illusion possible: if the two of them had been equally perfect, all seduction would have vanished.”

“For something to really disappear, to resolve into its appearance, there must be a ceremony of metamorphosis.”

“It is objective irony that lies in wait for us, the irony of the fulfillment of the object without regard for the subject or its alienation. In the phase of alienation, it is subjective irony that triumphs; it is the subject that constitutes an insoluble challenge to the blind world that surrounds him. Subjective irony, ironic subjectivity, is the essence of a world of interdiction, Law and desire. The power of the subject lies in its promise of fulfillment, whereas the sphere of the object is the order of what has been fulfilled, and from which, for this very reason, it is impossible to escape.”

“hostage-taking never has negotiation as its goal: it produces the inexchangeable. The "How do we get rid of terrorism?" is a false problem. The situation is original in that it is inextricable. One must conceive of terrorism as a utopian act, proclaiming inexchangeability from the beginning, and violently so, experimentally staging an impossible exchange, and thereby verifying at its limit a banal situation, our own, that of the historical loss of the scene of exchange, the rules of exchange, and the social contract. For where is the other now? With whom do we negotiate what is left of our liberty and sovereignty, with whom do we play the game of subjectivity and alienation, with whom do we negotiate over my image in the mirror? What has disappeared is that good old alterity of relation, that good old investment of the subject in the contract and rational exchange, the site of both profitability and hope. It all yields to a state of exception, a mad speculation which is more like a duel or a provocation.”

“When everything becomes cultural, it is the end of culture as destiny; it is the beginning of culture as politics, and means the immediate impoverishment of this cultural politics.”

“This obscenity drags away with it whatever remained of an illusion of depth and the last question that could still be asked of a disenchanted world: is there a hidden meaning? When everything is oversignified, meaning itself becomes impossible to grasp. When all values are overexposed, in some kind of indifferent ecstasy… it is the very credibility of the value which is annihilated.”

“We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia-we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, it’s collapse into the real.”

“This is the end of an aesthetics, and the begining of an ethics of the political, just like some figurative space, from now on no longer assigned to scenic illusion, but to historical objectivity. This ethical crystallization of the political scene engenders a long process of repression (just as linguistic structuring engenders a repressed of the sign). The obscene has its birth here, in the off-stage, in the shadows of the system of representation. It is therefore first of all dark: this is what foils the transparence of the scene…He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity. What characterizes him is less his light-years distance from the real, a radical break, than absolute proximity, the total instantaneousness of things, defenseless, with no retreat; end of interiority and intimacy, overexposure and transparency of the world that traverses him without his being able to interpose any barrier: for he can no longer produce the limits of his own being, and reflect himself; he is only an absorbant screen, a spinning and insensible plate for all the networks of influence. If it was true, if it were possible, this obscene and generalized ecstasy of all functions could well be the state of desired transparency, of reconciliation of subject and world, that would be for us basically the Last Judgment; and it already would have taken place…Two alternatives, equally possible: nothing has yet happened, our unhappiness comes from nothing having really begun (libera-tion, revolution, progress) —finalist utopia. The other eventuality is that everything has already happened. We are already beyond the end. All that was metaphor has already materialized, collapsed into reality.”

“In "reality," behind this "objective" fortification of networks and models which think they capture them, and where a whole population of investigators, analysts, scientists, observers (as well as mediaticians and politicians) is in motion, there passes a whole wave of derision, reversion, and parody which is the active exploitation, the parodic set-up by the object itself of its own method of disappearance! The media make the event, the object, the referent, disappear. But perhaps they only serve as support for a strategy of disappearance which would be that of the object itself? The masses destroy and eclipse the individual.”

“—no longer the subversion of the masses by the media, but instead the subversion of the media by the masses, in their strategy of disappearance on the horizon of the media. Just as the observation of a particle under given conditions does not allow us to draw any conclusions as to the behavior of another particle under these same conditions, so everything happens as if individuals and masses only comply so well with analytical models and polls to make them more indeterminate…a verdict of incredulity and mistrust, which today extends to everything that is delivered to us via the media and information, and even science. We record everything, but we don't believe it, because we have become screens ourselves, and who can ask of a screen to believe what it records? To simulation we reply by simulation; we have ourselves become systems of simulation. There are people today (the polls tell us so!) 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.”

“The misunderstanding is enough to crystallize an entire moral philosophy of information. We live all of this, subjectively, in a paradoxical mode, since these masses coexist in us with the intelligent and voluntary being who condemns and scorns them. No one knows what the true opposite of consciousness is— unless it be this unconscious of repression that psychoanalysis has imposed upon us. But perhaps our true unconscious is in this ironic power of withdrawal, of nondesire, nonknowledge, silence, absorption then expulsion of all powers, wills, of all enlightenment and depths of meaning, because of an insistance which is thereby bathed in the light of a ridiculous looking halo. Our unconscious might not be composed of desires properly sworn to the sad destiny of repression. It might not even be repressed at all. It would instead be made up out of what's left after this joyous expulsion of all encumbering superstructures of being and will. We always had a sad vision of the masses (alienated), a sad vision of the unconscious (repressed). Upon our entire philosophy lies the heavy weight of these sad correlations. If only for the sake of change, it would be interesting to conceive of the masses, the object-masses, as possessing a delusive, illusive, allusive strategy, corresponding to an unconscious that is finally ironic”

“The crystal takes revenge. The object is what has disappeared on the horizon of the subject, and it is from the depths of this disappearance that it envelopes the subject in its fatal strategy. It is the subject that then disappears from the horizon of the object. other, to become for him the event that exceeds all subjectivity, that checks, in its fatal advent, all possible subjectivity, that absolves the subject of its ends, its presence, and of all responsibility to itself and to the world… like the locus of a violent hemorrhage of subjectivity. "Behind the subjectivity of appearances there is always an occulted objectivity." The entire destiny of the subject passes into the object.”

“What remains for the man but to seek through her this power of metamorphosis?”

[Catholicus Magus · Rating 5 out of 5]

It should be supremely ironic that the Eldest Daughter of the Church, for all the supposed blessings and refinements received by the hands of Carolus Magnus, has simultaneously been the brood mother of virtually all refined heresiarchs in the Western World for the last 8 centuries; beginning with the Cathars, we move into Calvin, d'Holbach, La Mettrie, Voltaire, Diderot, and all the Gymnosophists. Baudrillard continues this strong Frankish tradition by revisiting—in light of Christian eschatologies' metamorphosis into the Marxist project of liberation—the dualist system of Manichaeism. In returning to that Gnostic system long abused by St. Augustine and the whole of the Western world, Baudrillard asks the question, "Is the Principle of Evil the reversal of metaphysics to recognize that it is the object, rather than the subject, who performs the seduction of meaning?"

His answer, although greatly delayed by many forays into Freud, Canetti, Baudelaire, and the way in which humans interact through ceremonial versus "aesthetic fashion," is that it is the object which controls man. Only when we admit that fatality overtakes any hyper-rational system of meaning; the very same system which was supposed to banish arcane concepts such as "destiny, magic, or mysticism," will we ever possess any true orientation in a world which is bound by the instant. Baudrillard, towards the conclusion of his book, has this to say on the more "traditional" framing put forth by the illuminated Gnostics on the matter of material being:

> Metaphysics only allows good rays to filter in, and wants to make the world into the mirror of the subject (who has already passed through a mirror phase.) Metaphysics wants a world of forms distinct from their doubles, their shadows, their images: this is the principle of Good. But the object is always the fetish, the false, the feiticho, the factitious, the lure, everything that incarnates the abominable confusion of the thing with its magical and artificial double; and that no religion of transparency and the mirror will ever be able to resolve: that is the principle of Evil.

When the evil of material creation is framed not so much as an endemic feature of creation itself, which provoked such strong backlash from the likes of St. Ambrose, St. Irenaeus, and St. Clement, but is rather a feature from being seduced by the luxuries of pleasure into self-renunciation, then it is very hard to argue with a "crypto-Gnostic" view of the world. Especially considering, that with the likes of Msr. Guenon, Gurdjieff, and the other spiritual masters of the 20th century, psychoanalysis sought to open man to the creative possibilities of the sub-personal, only to be themselves governed by the sub-personal like steeds. Baudrillard would rightly be called a "pessimistic" or "dark Gnostic," since unlike the Valentinians or Marcions who sought to reach the ineffable Heaven by resisting every form of demiurgic concealment, Baudrillard gives nothing other than an outline of the fog with which modern man is surrounded. He does not pretend there is a Realm of Light for the soul to escape to, nor does he posit an unchanging Good hidden by Yaldabaoth's fog—there is nothing other than the intoxicating stupor of archonic matter, and your job is to recognize that prior to any "post-modern gnosis."

[Leon Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oscuro, esotérico, caótico, lacerante. Este libro es un escupitajo a los sistemas occidentales y a la hegemonía de los simulacros, al imperialismo y a la banalidad de la política en su deformación posmoderna. Paradójicamente este es un libro demasiado posmoderno. Pero es sirviendo a un propósito: la reversibilidad. Baudrillard parte el libro en dos vertientes; la crítica y la apuesta. La primera parece ser un resumen de su teoría de los intercambios, el sistema de signos y de la simulación; la segunda (la más interesante, la que pone sobre la mesa un manifiesto retorcido) es una apuesta, si la simulación engulle ya todas las posibilidades del pensamiento crítico, de la toma del pensamiento ilustrado e incluso los postulados dialécticos en la suma de lo exponencial, del crecimiento que ya no es crecimiento sino proliferación entonces quedan otras alternativas: la seducción, el objeto, la fatalidad y los atractores extraños partiendo de la teoría del caos. Esto es ya un postulado radical pues toma la posición del sujeto en el privilegio de las apariencias, en la multiplicación del efecto y lo impulsa a un horizonte radicalizado donde las posibilidades son irónicas y patafísicas. Lo segundo es un espejo a la civilización, a sus contradicciones, a su finalidad sin final aparente. Baudrillard superpone estos conceptos desde el perfil del mal y hace uso de ellos para que él mismo sea usado bajo la elocuencia de los acontecimientos. Porque son los mismos acontecimientos los que contornean una vida, son los signos los que rodean un intercambio más factible pero no verdadero, sino verosímil. Es el potencial de la ilusión y habitar en ella es habitar desde la sensibilidad poética, el asombro de la ciencia y la sutileza de los intercambios simbólicos.

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing book by Baudrillard. There are three things that are criticized here: dialectics, conservative or reactionary romanticism, and theory in general. The criticism of dialectics brings a sour taste at the very beginning and I don't agree with it because I think he misrepresents it, he sees it as striving for an equilibrium instead of understanding it as a dynamic force constantly moving history. In his dynamism I think he is far more dialectical than he realizes, the spectre of Marx and the ghost of Hegel constantly haunting him, but that's the thing with dialectics, you can never fully escape it. The criticism of conservative striving to what has passed is very good and with poetical talent to match it. But then Baudrillard goes a step further and extends nihilism present there to theory in general, expressing doubts that any kind of analysis can be useful and that the system will always either find a way to just accommodate it as another spectacle or that it will be left as something that can't catch the interest of the masses, something that may seem exaggerated, but which experience has validated and which can help us understand how we got here. When these basic themes are covered Baudrillard expands on some of his other ideas picking up threads from previous books, particularly Seduction. It is all well written and even if I have a problem with something said I feel there's something useful to be taken from it.

[Wan Feng An · Rating 3 out of 5]

"the object only pretends to obey the laws of physics because it gives so much pleasure to the observer."

What is there to say about this book? Baudrillard is the prophet of a totalising and nihilistic vision — that we have reached utopia, and in all the irony of the evil genie we have to be careful what we wish for. Against dialectics he opposes a duality, of opposites that do not reconcile into a greater whole nor resolve through an overcoming of itself. His duality is one of ecstacy, where one pole doubles in on itself and in doing so gains the power of the other (e.g. his example of the simulation, the Real with the power of the Lie, the realer than real of models and prefabricated reality). There are bits I don't quite understand (the points on seduction and fatality) but there are interesting ideas on the Object: how it can escape us and entrap us, how we see in it only a mirror for the Subject yet overlook its impact on our reflection. I do think Baudrillard falls into old fashioned essentialism and exoticism, and his philosophy does rely on a binary reading of the world. Baudrillard doesn't show us a way out of our world, but find the way to live within it in an ironic fashion. On the whole an interesting book but I have grown tired of his yapping.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely clear-sighted and ahead of its time.
In this book, Jean Baudrillard lays of the foundations of a metaphysical system useful to understand the "post-modern" world. This system is based around the individual acting as an object who is being seduced by other object instead of seeing humans as subjects who work through desire.
However, the book is almost impossible to read. It is straight up written in reverse. The introduction doesn't introduce anything that can be understood on the first reading. Baudrillard then throws out examples out of nowhere, he then defines his main concepts (they are necessary to understand the introduction by the way) and he then starts his argument and in the 20 final pages he finally reveals his main thesis.
On first read this book makes almost no sense but with careful examination and painstaking time spent into, it's probably one of the clearest and most prophetic book written in the 20th century.

I would only recommend this book if you have time and are fine spending like 30h on a 200 pages book. Otherwise, it's probably going to be somewhat disappointing.

(I read the book in French)

[Corwin Richter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wie bei den meisten Bücher Baudrillard hat man es hier mit einer Arbeit zu tun, die theoretisch aggiert - demnach sollte man hier den empirizistischen Standpunkt verlassen und Baudrillard auf seinem eigenen Feld begegnen, um daraus etwas ziehen zu können. Auf der einen Seite hat man es bei Die Fatalen Strategien mit einem großartigen Text zu tun bezüglich des Exzesses und dem Obszönen in einer postmodern gewordenen Gesellschaft. Auf der anderen Seite sollte man die Stellen nicht vergessen zu kritisieren, in denen Baudrillard hinter seine eigene Logik fällt (Sexismus und Transphobie sind beispielsweise keine notwendigen Schlüsse aus den Strategien und dennoch sind sie hier vorhanden). Besonders interessant sind verteilte Ansätze einer frühen Theorie der digitalen Memetik, die man aus diesem Text heraus entwickeln könnte, sowie die Ironie der Verführung als alternative Strategie um die post-narzisstischen Verhältnisse der Nachkriegszeit neu zu denken.

[Jaime Gomory]

de esos libros que me hace pensar que no vale la pena leer filósofos europeos porque tienen tendencias fatales a universalizar sus puntos de vista miopes. el estilo del baudrillard aquí es una tortura, muy difícil de leer por su poco rigor intelectual; casi todo son opiniones verbosas sin respaldo.

su argumento final no me pareció desagradable-- sobre cómo los objetos ya marcan la pauta de su lectura. a esta idea le veo un parecido a la antropología por demanda de segato. cute.

el pasaje más chistoso es el de la obesidad porque es un ejemplo de todo lo que está mal con los pensamientos de baudrillard y al mismo tiempo de lo que lo hace tan atractivo: su sentido del humor.

[Taras · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Фатальні стратегії» безперечно важкою для читання, а для аналізу й поготів, книгою. Але вона пропонує ширший розгляд філософії і вартує зусиль. 

Рекомендую цю книгу тим, хто зацікавлений у розумінні альтернативних світоглядів до сучасного філософського мислення від автора, який заперечує існування постмодернізму.

[Богдан Малиш · Rating 4 out of 5]

Важка книга, яка потребує знання континентальної філософії, що розуміти посилання філософа. Але про іронічні ігри об'єкта, про заміну гегелівської діалектики цією насмішкою, про фатальні стратегії, які заміняють собою детермінізм та телеологізм, а також про боротьбу з цінностями шляхом їх подвоєння надзвичайно потужні висновки. 8/10.

[Nik Robbins · Rating 1 out of 5]

I forced myself to finish this book only to remind myself why and how much I hate postmodernism/poststructuralism (anyone, like Baudrillard, who has to deny being a postmodernist/poststructuralist almost certainly is one).

[Noah Coates · Rating 2 out of 5]

indecipherable drivel

[Camila De La Fuente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro muy interesante, pesado de leer. Hace crítica a diferentes pensadores, analiza sobre muchos temas como la obesidad y el terrorismo.

[Bekan Romero · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.5 Siempre con el gran ironico de Baudrillard

[Filipe Siqueira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blasfêmia filosófica e enigmática, resolvê-la é agente um mundo sem volta

[Yama · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hits different after Trump's reelection.

[Mark Harvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an easy read. If and once you begin to accept what Baudrillard teaches us, you can begin living free, if you can apply it.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mijn hoofd is niet meer hetzelfde

[Aleksander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is straight up insane.
Baudrillard is usually hard to read by default but this book takes the cake in case of impenetrability.
Awesome ideas, mind bending shit

[Sam Farnsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hes just the goat- best book ive read so far

[Brandon Neth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt much better w this one than w symbolic exchange and death. I liked the stories, the one about the rat especially. and the sections about chance and the empirical subject. good xmas read.

[Monur B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

İŞTE YUKSELMEK İSTiyormusun,? Sevkiline hava atmakmı? İşyerindekileri çıldırtmak istermisin? Patronun gösüne girmek!.. o halde sende oku.... mühammel MUKTEŞEM bir kişişelgelişim KİPATI :::))