Destiny

Definition

Destiny — or fate, fatality — is Baudrillard's name, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the precession of effects over their causes and the ineluctable return of the same sign at a life's beginning and end. "This is the definition of fate: the precession of the effects over their very causes. So all things happen before having happened. Reasons come after." "In fatality or destiny, the linkage, far from being causal, is rather this: the sign of the apparition of things is also the sign of their disappearance. The sign of their birth will be the sign of their death." Destiny is opposed both to reason and to accident: "The fatal is absolutely opposed to the accidental (as well as to the rational, of course)… Chance is improbable, and fatality quite frequent." Baudrillard gives it two further determinations. First, reversibility: "It is the reversibility of destiny… the reversion of cause on effect, the precession and triumph of effect over cause." Second, predestination and the second birth: "the theory of predestination is infinitely superior to that of freedom of the soul… what happens a second time becomes fatal." "Everyone has the right to a second birth: the true one." The book's closing figure is that "heaven itself" is meaningful only through "the recurrence of their trajectory" — "it's the recurrence of certain fatal peripeties that makes for the event of a life." The concept is the temporal-heroic core of the book, and the true content of its title. See chance, appearance-and-disappearance, reversibility, ceremony-of-the-world, fatal-strategies.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the precession of the effects over their very causes"; "the same sign presiding over the beginning and the end"; "Everyone has the right to a second birth" (1983).
• Friedrich Nietzsche — amor fati and the Eternal Return, revised by Baudrillard into the "Eternal Rerun" and the fatal sign.
• Elias Canetti — the aphoristic source of fate's "codes" and "the same sign."
• Sigmund Freud — psychoanalysis as the rival interpretation of the same material (the two disappearances resolved by a name, not by the unconscious).
• Not yet paged: Tiresias, Oedipus, the Duke of Palagonia — the mythic figures of fate and metamorphosis.

Related Concepts

• Chance — destiny's opposite: "no chance will ever abolish fate."
• Appearance and Disappearance — "the precession of the effects over their very causes" is the mode of appearance.
• Reversibility — "the reversibility of destiny."
• The Ceremony of the World — "ceremony was the image of destiny."
• Fatal Strategies — the fatal is destiny as strategy.
• Second Birth — predestination and the "second coming."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence": "the precession of the effects over their very causes"; the same sign at birth and death; "no chance will ever abolish fate"; the two disappearances and the name; predestination and the second birth.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — reversibility as "the only event"; "the remainder" as an unnameable fate.
• The Apartment (Perec 1978/2006) — the wiki's constraint/game register as a cousin of "the rule."
• 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

• Is Baudrillard's destiny a genuine ontology of the event or a literary-theological mode? His examples are largely autobiographical and anecdotal.
• The concept is anti-causal and anti-statistical. Can the wiki's historical-social materials (which rely on causes) accommodate it, or is it strictly a poetic counter-principle?
• "Predestination is infinitely superior to freedom of the soul" — a provocative anti-liberal claim. How does it sit with the wiki's freedom/agency/everyday materials?