Second Birth

Definition

The second birth is Baudrillard's figure, in Fatal Strategies (1983, "For a Principle of Evil"), for the initiatory event that redeems biological birth — the "event without precedent" of being seduced, which opens a destiny beyond the Oedipal history imposed by engendering. "Everyone has the right to a second birth: the true one. Everyone is predestined: not by astral decree, but by internal immanence in our own life, to the necessary return of such events." Where the first birth "imposes a history upon us, necessarily an Oedipal one," the second birth — "this event without precedent is seduction" — is "without origin, coming from somewhere else and arriving always unexpectedly — a pure event that erases in one fell swoop all conscious and unconscious determination." Its temporal logic is the "second coming": "what happens a second time becomes fatal"; "When a life knows no second coming of this kind, it ends before having begun." The concept is Baudrillard's counter to psychoanalysis's Oedipal subject and to any "liberation" by will: "We were all once produced, we must all be seduced. That is the only true 'liberation.'" See destiny, seduction, the-secret, symbolic-exchange.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Everyone has the right to a second birth: the true one"; "the only true 'liberation'" (1983).
• Sigmund Freud — the Oedipal history and psychoanalytic economy the second birth "redeems" (via Monique Schneider's Freud and Pleasure).
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the Eternal Return, transposed into the "second coming" and "the recurrence of certain fatal peripeties."

Related Concepts

• Destiny — "what happens a second time becomes fatal."
• Seduction — the event without precedent that constitutes the second birth.
• The Secret — the initiatory secret into which one is seduced.
• Symbolic Exchange — the initiatory, non-economic gift.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "For a Principle of Evil": "Everyone has the right to a second birth: the true one"; "the precession of the effects over their very causes."
• 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 concept is close to Nietzsche's Eternal Return and to initiation rites; the wiki should distinguish Baudrillard's version.
• Is the second birth a temporal event or a structural figure? Baudrillard's examples are anecdotal.