Dead Point

Definition

The dead point (or "dead center") is Baudrillard's image, in Fatal Strategies (1983, "Ecstasy and Inertia"), for the threshold at which a system tips from contradiction into ecstasy. "Dead point: the dead center where every system crosses this subtle limit of reversibility, contradiction and doubt and enters live into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy…" It is where "a pataphysics of systems" begins. It is distinct from Canetti's "blind point" past which history stops being real: "The point he refers to is by definition impossible to find, for if we could grasp it, time would be given back to us." The dead point is the system's own point of inertia and saturation — the moment it can no longer be contested in principle and begins to shine "in its pure and empty form." The concept is the threshold-figure of inertia and ecstasy and the temporal marker the book uses to date the catastrophe (as opposed to the crisis). See inertia, ecstasy, catastrophe, reversibility.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the dead center where every system crosses this subtle limit… into ecstasy"; "Here begins a pataphysics of systems" (1983).
• Elias Canetti (not yet paged) — the "blind point" past which history stops being real, the book's denied alternative.

Related Concepts

• Inertia — the dead point is inertia's threshold.
• Ecstasy — the state entered at the dead point.
• Catastrophe — catastrophe follows the passage of the dead point.
• Reversibility — the "subtle limit" the dead point crosses.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "Ecstasy and Inertia": "Dead point: the dead center where every system crosses this subtle limit of reversibility… into ecstasy."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• The dead point is a metaphor that carries a great deal of the book's argument; the wiki should decide whether it is analytically load-bearing.