Radical Illusion (A Game Against)

There are two voices in the work of Jean Baudrillard, the early voice, which lasted less than 10 years, and the mature voice, which lasted about 30. The first voice is younger and more conventionally leftist. It was fully embedded in the intellectual debates of the late 1960s. A committed Marxist, the younger Baudrillard wrote on labor and needs, use-value and production. But after this period as a young man, Baudrillard transitioned into a very different thinker in the middle to late 1970s. He developed a whole new theoretical vocabulary that was completely in tune with that decade's historical transformation into digitization, postindustrial economies, immaterial labor, mediation, and simulation. His theories of play and games are at the very heart of this transformation. Through a close reading of several texts, this essay explores Baudrillard's interest in play and games through the concepts of seduction, the fatal strategy, illusion, and what he called the “principle of separation.”