Stratagem of the Corpse

Dying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra

By (author) Gary J Shipley Foreword by William Pawlett

Publication date:

30 January 2020

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781785272752

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Foreword; Introduction; Chapter 1 On Decay and Other Synthetics; Chapter 2 Stratagem of the Corpse; Chapter 3 A Bleak Non-History of History; Chapter 4 The Hyperactivity of Objects; Chapter 5 The Unnamable Catastrophe; Chapter 6 A Cure For Vertigo; Chapter 7 Chance and the Temporality of Death; Chapter 8 The Possibility of Nihilism; Chapter 9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show; Chapter 10 The Evil Death; Chapter 11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak; Chapter 12 The Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe; Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Index.

'Shipley’s work is one of the rare exceptions. Some of Baudrillard’s best-known, but least understood, ideas are here unleashed, freed of the disciplinary apparatus of academic convention – and rightly so.’ —William Pawlett, Senior Lecturer in Media, University of Wolverhampton, UK