STRATAGEM OF THE CORPSE

Abstract

Never before has a book been solely dedicated to tackling the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard, nor has any book made so patently clear the importance of his tendency to poeticize; his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry and others; or his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Gary J. Shipley's 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.