Jean Baudrillard’s Schellingian Qualities

Abstract

This article argues that Jean Baudrillard’s theory of qualities in Les Stratégies fatales can be clarified through a Schellingian interpretative key. Reconsidering Graham Harman’s object-oriented reading of Baudrillard, the paper addresses three related problems: the meaning of seduction as a “passage to a higher level,” the status of absence in Baudrillard’s anti-dialectical logic, and the nature of his theory of qualities. These issues converge in a single theoretical problem structured by intensification, redoubling, and qualified identity. First, Baudrillard’s use of Steigerung is reconstructed as an anti-Hegelian logic of potentiation or elevation to a higher potency, paralleling Schelling’s account in the 1813 draft of Die Weltalter. Second, Baudrillard’s treatment of absence, hyper-determination, and antagonism is interpreted through reduplicative identity (reduplicatio), which in Schelling grounds Steigerung. Third, Baudrillard’s “fatal qualities” are shown to concern not intrinsic and relational properties, but a theory of qualified identity in which a term becomes absolute by absorbing the energy of its contrary. On this basis, the article suggests that Baudrillard’s own strategy for thinking the passage from identity to non-identity without sublation takes shape through a reading of Schelling.