An early work in which Baudrillard became Baudrillard.
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 philosphy 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.
