Fatal Strategies (Semiotext(e) / Double agents) - Softcover

Baudrillard, J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0936756500 ISBN 13: 9780936756509

Publisher: MIT Press, 1990

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'The world is not dialectical ... madness now rules everywhere.' Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is one of France's leading modern thinkers and a scholar whose work has necessitated major reassessments across several academic disciplines. Fatal Strategies, first published in France in 1983, comprises his key writings on postmodernism. In this fascinating collection, Baudrillard challenges many of our assumptions about the world in which we live. Claiming that the world is sworn to extremes, he turns received wisdom on its head, arguing for the triumph of unreason and of the victory of the pure object and its 'ironic strategy' over the subject. He looks at illusion, secrets, the visible and the hidden, and claims that the only possible response to the delirious world is the ultimatum of realism and the Principle of Evil.

This is Baudrillard's writing at its most aggressive, most extreme, and most exciting.

About the Author:

Jean Baudrillard was one of France's leading thinkers in the 20th and early 21st century. His work has been widely translated into English. He died in 2007.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0936756500
• ISBN 13: 9780936756509
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192