Fatal strategies
By: Originally published in 1983 as Les Stratégies fatales by Editions Grasset, Paris. Written by Jean Baudrillard. Introduction by Dominic Pettman. Translated by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. Distributed by the MIT Press. Cover Art by Matt Fishbeck. “We Never Close,” 2007. Back Cover Photography by Marine Baudrillard. Design by Hedi El Kholti.
Contributors: Fleming, Jim
Series: Foreign agents
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Los Angeles, USA; Cambridge, USA
Language: eng
Translated from: fre
Translation of: Les stratégies fatales
Number of pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9781584350613
Copyright date: 2008
Subjects: Modern Civilization; Social problems; Postmodernism
Work titles: Stratégies fatales
First sentence: THINGS HAVE FOUND A WAY of avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in an ascension to  the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent finality and senseless reason.
Description: When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned,wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the false problems posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosophy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard. In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic,and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations (1983) instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art.
Notes: New edition; new introduction; English translation.