Fatal Strategies

Definition

Fatal strategies are Jean Baudrillard's name (Fatal Strategies, 1983) for the strategies of the object rather than the subject. Where classical strategic thought — Machiavelli, Sun Tzu — aims at securing the sovereignty of a subject, fatal strategies "are not about securing the sovereignty or prosperity of the subject, but are deployed by forces enigmatic to us: evil genies, sly objects, ironic events, and spanners in the works which escape the centripetal will and best laid plans of the individual." The term contains a deliberate paradox and pun: fatal means both of fate/destiny and lethal (the death-drive détourned toward objects). "how could there be fatality if there is strategy? That's just the point: the enigma is that fatality is at the heart of every strategy." Fatal strategies are not a technique one can adopt; they are the mode in which the object doubles the subject's calculations, escalates the stakes, and installs a "playful" strategy with no ends of its own — "a fatal strategy in that the subject thereby succumbs to the surpassing of its own objectives." The book's wager is "to believe for a single instant the hypothesis that there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things." See supremacy-of-the-object, objective-irony, destiny, reversibility.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "The only strategy possible is that of the object"; "the object mocks the laws we attach to it; it would rather figure in our calculations as a sarcastic variable" (1983).
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the fatal as amor fati and the death of the "real world" ("with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world"); a long shadow over the book (Pettman).
• Elias Canetti — the aphoristic source of the "blind point" past which history stops being real, quoted throughout.
• Not yet paged: Sun Tzu, Machiavelli — the subject-centric strategists the fatal strategy displaces.

Related Concepts

• Supremacy of the Object — the metaphysical reversal on which fatal strategies depend ("only the object seduces").
• Objective Irony — the affect/mechanism of the fatal strategy: "the irony of the fulfillment of the object without regard for the subject."
• Reversibility — the master-law of the fatal: "a strategy emerging from within any given arrangement: the immanent potential for subversion or metamorphosis."
• Destiny — the fatal as the precession of effects over causes.
• Principle of Evil — the "evil genie" whose duplicity the fatal strategy expresses.
• Deterrence — the nuclear-era instance: "the system dissuades itself."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The only strategy possible is that of the object"; "how could there be fatality if there is strategy?"; "At the heart of banal strategies is the fiery desire of fatal strategies"; "let's believe for a single instant the hypothesis that there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the near-contemporary statement of the "superior ruse" and the pataphysics of simulacra.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book in context and 'The Hostage' in detail (ch. 2): Fatal Strategies as the culmination of the "frantic theoretical production" of 1976–83 (pp. 7, 16); the security system's three stages ending in "panic and terror" (FS, 37), terrorism as "the executioner for a system which seeks both total anonymity and… total responsibility" (FS, 36), and the paradox of the inexchangeable hostage; the fatal as what "explain[s]" rather than opposes the world — theory as "a kind of undemonstrable yet irrefutable doubling of the way things are" (p. 20); and the 'FS', 186 nuclear-spectacle passage ("The drive to spectacle is more powerful than the survival instinct") quoted in Butler's n. 8. See the-hostage, doubling, seduction.

Open Questions

• Is a "fatality at the heart of every strategy" a substantive claim or a rhetorical frame? The book's only positive programme is "to side with the object."
• Can fatal strategies be used (taught, designed, built), or only registered as the ironic surplus of all human projects?