Shipley Gary J. - Stratagem of the Corpse : Dying With Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra

Stratagem of the Corpse

Stratagem of the Corpse

Dying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra

Gary J. Shipley

Anthem Press

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

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Copyright Gary J. Shipley 2020

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955658

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-275-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-275-6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

I would like to thank the indefatigable Edia Connole for her continued support and advice. It is no exaggeration to say that were it not for her this book might never have left my hard drive. I would also like to thank William Pawlett for his generous foreword, and for choosing this as the inaugural work in Anthems Radical Theory series. I must also express my sincerest gratitude to Nick Land, Dominic Pettman, Richard G. Smith and Jason Mohaghegh for their kind endorsements.

Earlier versions of parts of this book were published in the anthologies Dark Glamor: Accelerationism and the Occult (Punctum), Phono-Fictions and Other Felt Thoughts Catalyst: Eldritch Priest (Noxious Sector) and Mors Mystica (Schism); and in the following journals: Bright Lights Film Journal and Fanzine.

Did you ever get the feeling that critical and expositional works on Jean Baudrillard were missing something? Something important, but hard to pin down? That they were missing something of what might, loosely, be called the radicalism of Baudrillards ideas? Shipleys work is one of the rare exceptions. Some of Baudrillards best-known, but least understood, ideas are here unleashed, freed of the disciplinary apparatus of academic convention and rightly so. When higher education has abandoned all pretence that ideas matter, why should ideas be pressed into the service of this spiralling cadaver, this zone of surveillance?

Baudrillards notions of simulacra and simulation have indeed suffered a fate worse than death; they have been reduced to a pulp and then reconstituted as supplements to the inventory of banal notions globalization, mediation, performativity that constitute media, cultural and communications studies in the twenty-first century. Shipley, in contrast, finds in Baudrillard what was always there, and reanimates what was killed off: the corrosive, pataphysical effects, the diabolical ambivalence and the deathly irony. Shipley also reminds us of something we had almost forgotten: Baudrillard was serious, and he often takes us just a little further than we want to go.

The author examines the many guises of death in Baudrillards thought: the medical and technological processing of death; the production of cadaver as stuffed simulacra and the commodification of death; virtuality and the expulsion of death at the core of the social; the denigration of the dying and the dead, but also death in its symbolic and fatal forms: disappearance, suicide, the uncanny appearance of the double that foretells death as inescapable destiny, the radical otherness of our own death. Yet death is also examined here in ways that are far from familiar, that are not pursued by Baudrillard but are not absent from his work either: death without end, immunology and virology; death than resists both meaning and non-meaning; death which refutes the comforts of nihilism and atheism which are today the very strategies of the system of control.

Shipleys work is rare in reading Baudrillards postSymbolic Exchange and Death work against the earlier work; Seduction, Fatal Strategies and The Perfect Crime are central to this new reading. In the last 20 years or so Baudrillards notion of symbolic exchange has been the focal point for new interpretations, challenging the earlier and erroneous views of Baudrillard as disillusioned Marxist or irresponsible and detached postmodernist. Shipley sets out from Baudrillards position in The Ecstasy of Communication, later reinforced in Carnival and Cannibal, that symbolic exchange cannot be located in opposition to integral reality without itself falling into simulation, and that simulation is itself dual and reversive.

While this is certainly not Baudrillard for Beginners, paradoxically the student of Baudrillard will find much of value here. There are acute and incisive discussions of many of Baudrillards most suggestive themes and ideas: hyperreality, implosion, terrorism, seduction, suicide, fatal strategies and poetic reversal, doubling and duality, failing, desertification, integral reality, the perfect crime. This study takes us further into the simulacrum than we have been before. It is an uncomfortable journey, but one that should be made.

William Pawlett, 2017