Materialism as a fatal strategy: Jean Baudrillard’s critical path of modernity

ABSTRACT

Jean Baudrillard took the ‘object’ of everyday experience and developed it into the ‘Object’ that escapes the subject-object relationship, and in this way formulated a unique version of the theory of materialism. Taken in its extreme form, the later Baudrillard termed it the ‘fatal strategy’, that is, the strategy for eliminating the subject-object relationship by means of the endless proliferation of objects. This demonstrates the particular ways in which Baudrillard tried to respond to, criticize, and even shatter the subject-object relationship by completely subverting the logic of subjectivism. In his theoretical situating, the ‘Object’ will chase off the subject through ‘seduction’, ‘disappearance’, and ‘catastrophe’, and this ‘revolt of the object’ is in his view the only remedy for the crisis of modernity. In the author’s view, however, such ‘terrorism of objects’ does not occur groundlessly, and Baudrillard’s extremization of the ‘logic of the object’ should be viewed as resulting from the Marxism that was constantly evolving and deepening and its inheritance in the West, that were combined with the contemporary realities of capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Materialism
• fatal strategy
• object: logic of the object
• Jean Baudrillard

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Xiang Liu

Xiang Liu received her Ph.D. degree from Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China in 2010. She is an editor of Frontiers of Philosophy in China at School of Philosophy at Beijing Normal University. Her research interests lie in Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society theory, French Philosophy and Postmodernism. Her major publications include Take the Position of Objects - A Study in Jean Baudrillard’s Radical Thoughts of Anti-Subjectivism, Fatal Strategies(translation), etc.