Product Description
This is the first English-language translation of JeanBaudrillard's contemporary classic on the sociology of consumption. Originally published in 1970, the book was one of the first to focus on the processes and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. At a time when others were fixated with the production process, Baudrillard could be found making the case that consumption is now the axis of culture. He demonstrates how consumption is related to the goal of economic growth and he maps out a social theory of consumption. Many of the themes that would later make Baudrillard famous are sketched out here for the first time. In particular, concepts of simulation and the simulacrum receive their earliest systematic treatment.

Written at a time when Baudrillard was moving away from both Marxism and institutional sociology, the book is more systematic than his later works. He is still pursuing the task of locating consumption in culture and society. So the reader will find here his most organized discussion of mass media culture, themeaning of leisure and anomie in affluent society. There is also a fascinating chapter on the body which shows yet again Baudrillard's extraordinary prescience in flagging the importance of vital subjects in contemporary culture long before his colleagues.

Baudrillard is widely acclaimed as a key thinker in sociology, communication and cultural studies. This book makes available to English-speaking readers one of his most important works. It will be devoured by the steadily expanding circle of Baudrillard scholars, and it will also be required reading for students of the sociology of culture, communication and cultural studies.

This edition is published with a long, specially prepared introductory essay written by the noted cultural commentator and social theorist, George Ritzer, author of The McDonaldization of Society.

Customer Reviews (2)

A Great Introduction to a General Theory of Consumption
Of Baudrillard's many books, The Consumer Society is a ground breaking work and a clear advance from Liberal and Marxist interpretation of the capitalist economy.Baudrillard deploys structural analysis to decode what he later develops into theories of simulation, hyperealty, among others.In the consumer society his approach is still grounded in structuralist and Marxian approaches.

Despite its academic approach, this is one of Baudrillard's most accessible works and, truthfully, a better place to start that his later work - Simulacra and Simulations - popularized by the Matrix.

His work really extends arguments made by Veblen, Galbraith and Vance Packard, with regard to consumption operating as a system of communicating social status.However, he develops these themes more systematically, borrowing from Barthian semiology to begin his development of a enlarged theory of consumption as a communication system with the power of reordering society toward a system based no longer on needs but desires.The result is a more thorough analysis and broader critique:it is a cornerstone work in the development modern consumer theory and the beginning of a psychology of consumption.

For Baudrillard, this is the start point to a fatalistic system whose telos is not some Hegel cum McLuhan universal spirit but one of catastrophe and implosion.A world where realty has been exchanged for an image or sign that increasing has no reference to the real.

Since consumer has been reordered from a firm basis of need to a slippery one based on desire, the consumer society is insatiable and superficial creating an unstoppable advance that Baudrillard believes can only end in catastrophe.

Baudrillard is a prolific writer and perhaps the most important social thinker of the past 20 or 30 years.I recommend this book as one of his most relevant and accessible texts.

Symbolic exchange
This book is an earlier text of Baudrillard. Baudrillard is considered as a major theorist of postmodernism. But at the time he wrote this book, he was not postmodernist but Marxist. In 1973, Baudrillard divorced with Marxism. But before that year, he maintained the Marxist stance. His main subject was the political economy in Marxist style and the society of consumption in Frankfurt school¡¯s style. He was a pupil of Henry Lefevre who expanded the scope of Marxism into the study of everyday life. Baudrillard took the area his mentor opened up, but approached it somewhat differently: he borrowed frameworks of structuralism. He transformed Marx¡¯s distinction of use value/exchange value into the semiotics of consumption. Society is the field where symbolic exchange, in Marcel Mauss¡¯s term, takes place. What is exchanged in symbolic exchange is not use value but exchange (or symbolic) value. We consume the object not only of its use value but of its symbolic value. Object is exchanged as sign in symbolic exchange. Goods could signify the social status. Object could be desired not only in its use value but in its symbolic value that make difference to its owner from others: consumption could be interpreted as the logic of social distinction. In later texts, he asserted that capitalist society is centered not on production but on consumption. There could be not much objection upto this point. But, he argues, the logic of social distinction is not produced by consumer. It¡¯s the system of signification that is imposed on consumer. In this point, Baudrillard depicts such an unreal picture of iron cage as Frankfurt school did. The system of signification is illustrated as the something of a big brother we can¡¯t exercise any say. But that kind of image is not the one we experience in daily life. Marx said, ¡®Men make history, but not in their own choice.¡¯ Social fact like language transcend individual. We didn¡¯t choose our own mother tongue. We were born into it. But it doesn¡¯t deny the point that we make history. The system Baudrillard delineated is not unearthly fantasy. But where does it come from? It¡¯s the creature we make and change day by day. But in Baudrillard¡¯s world, such a point is lost. On Baudrillard¡¯s picture, the individual is lost. Baudrillard only takes a shot of horror film. In terms of methodology, Baudrillard makes non-sense. ... Read more

Product Description
History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making a history.
—from The Agony of Power

In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of "domination" (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of generalized "hegemony" in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force—most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation—of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history—that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.

This book gathers together two essays—"The Agony of Power" and "From Domination to Hegemony"—and a related interview with Baudrillard from 2005, "The Roots of Evil." Semiotext(e) launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s; now, as our media and information infested "ultra-reality" finally catches up with his theory, Semiotext(e) offers The Agony of Power, Baudrillard's unsettling coda.

Intervention Series
Distributed for Semiotext(e) ... Read more

Product Description
The thinker whose work constitutes some of the founding documents of postmodern theory turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.In his newbook, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, JeanBaudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which hehopes may yet be solved: the “murder” of reality. To solve the crimewould be to unravel the social and technological processes by whichreality has quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media “realtime.“

But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lamentthe disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as“the most important event of modern history,” nor even to meditate uponthe paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crimeis also the work of a great moraliste: a penetrating examination ofvital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the“advanced democracies” in the (very) late twentieth century. Wherecritics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of “themedium,” Baudrillard lays bare the depredatory effects of an oppressivetransparency on our social lives, of a relentless positivity on ourcritical faculties, and of a withering 'high definition' on our verysense of reality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

surprisingly lucid and poetic!
I'd never read a word of Baudrillard before reading this book. I had assumed that he was an apostle of the silly side of 'postmodern' writing - of a tedious celebration of indeterminacy, advertising and globalization, like Hardt and Negri. But no - this is a powerful, tragic lament that at times sounds like a romantic elegy for the human imagination, threatened by a hubristic 'virtuality'. His argument seems to be that the old (romantic) duality of 'the real' and 'the illusory' is being replaced by a new duality of 'the real' and 'the virtual'. Whereas in the former duality, we chased the seductive shadows of a Utopia forever out of reach, in the new duality we deny to ourselves the tragic truth that this seduction is never complete by creating a virtual replica world that requires no imagination at all - in other words which simply translates 'the real' into code of various kinds, in particular that which forms virtual worlds in the media and the internet, or which turns the fallible human body into a body of pure digital knowledge in the form of genetic code on disc. This is an old story - it's a story about denying desire because it cannot be fulfilled - about denying our mortal human condition out of a childish demand for perfection. In fact one might even find parallels to the argument in mainstream Anglo-american philosopher Thomas Nagel's book 'The View From Nowhere', though I'm sure both Nagel and Baudrillard would rather eat knives than acknowledge each other. One doesn't have to buy into Baudrillard's dubious metaphysics or odd misreadings of politics to find this book rather beautiful and deeply disturbing.

Baudrillard's Best Book
Though Simulacra has acquired Baudrillard his most cultural currency, this book in fact is the most eloquent (and witty) and well argued, filled with trenchant wit and sly insights. Baudrillard is the best cultural critic tocome out of France in the last century, and this book will prove to be thegreatest sample of his thought. Covering topics as disparate as Andy Warholand Yugoslavia, Baudrillard examines the implosion of reality in thecontemporary global world, exploring the moral implicatioins of the age ofinformation. Those who seek to discredit Baudrillard as a stylishpostmodernist will have difficulty dismissing this eloquent and disturbingtext. Very highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Having been sought in the sphere of economic production for too long, according to Jean Baudrillard, the mainspring of modern society must be located in the sphere of consumption and of the cultural system in general. As with artistic, intellectual, and scientific production, culture is immediately produced as sign and as exchange value. Hence, in modern society consumption defines the stages where the commodity is immediately produced as sign, and signs as commodities.

This collection of essays attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx's critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form: as the commodity is at the same time both exchange value and use value, the sign is both signifier and signified. Thus, it necessitates an analysis on two levels, with the author confronting all of the conceptual obstacles of semiology in order to provide the same radical critique that Marx developed of classical political economy. ... Read more

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Baudrillard's last book was about America. His new one is about cats, Foucault, Alfa-Romeos, leukemia, Catholicism, the Berlin Wall, mattresses, Laurent Fabius, John Paul II, roses, Antartica, Lech Walesa, mud wrestling, porn films, snow, feminism, Rio, Lacan, Stevie Wonder, DNA and Terrorism. ... Read more

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Product Description
This book offers a major reappraisal of Jean Baudrillard's thoughts on the image, radical illusion and media culture.

Here for the first time, through a number of highly accessible interviews and recent essays, Baudrillard introduces what he calls the `stunning clarity' of the photographic, and fascinatingly outlines his present thoughts on urban reality, aesthetics, virtual reality and new media technologies, in the light of his practice as a photographer.

The book is illustrated with eight colour plates of Baudrillard's photographs and includes a number of provocative and illuminating responses to his recent writings from noted Baudrillard scholars. It also incudes a definitive bibliography of critical responses to Baudrillard's writings on media culture, art and photography.

Product Description
This new edition further explores the connection between the cultural analysis provided by the contemporary philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the new 'star' of global culture - architecture.


In a world in which images have become a substitute for reality - i.e. simulacra capable of both stimulating and satisfying collective needs - the question arises as to whether architecture could be seen as a 'super-fetish', capable of both mirroring and shaping western society's culture and identity.

The aim of this book is thus to provide new methodologies and to suggest new meanings for the comprehension and development of contemporary architecture. In Baudrillard's terms, architecture could be seen as the supreme medium of contemporary visual culture, especially in its potential to influence the individual's perception of reality as a component of the mass-media system. This kind of cultural analysis of the built environment and its effect on everyday life is still a relatively new phenomenon - both in the fields of critical theory and even more so in mainstream architectural criticism.

This book, which forms a significant resource on the work of an immensely important writer, should appeal to a wide range of readers. Through highly evocative writing, it provides a theoretical, illuminating pathway for everyone who, either directly or indirectly, is involved or interested in architecture, urbanism and related subjects. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

architecture: the biggest "show" of power and consumism
This book is very interesting for phylosophers as well as architects/designers, but also for all the people who wants to be politically active.
It is s review of essays by Jean Baudriallard, a french phylosopher and a real genius of our times. As in most of his books, he explains perfectly how our society works, this time he uses architecture to tell us new things about our life.
We live in the "dream of democracy" because the real political power is an effect of the communicational power (that is to say: money to buy advertising). How architecture explains it?
Take the centre pompidou, for example. People think to go there to see the works of art, but most of them are just getting into a temple of culture to make their own show: the mass getting into aristicracy. It's all a big farce...
The transparency of the walls and the exibition of the structures is showing the box and revealing the inside. This is the obscene of our society, the pornography of reality, that is to say - in few words - an over-exibition of it.
We are all so used to be part of a show, to be "other from ourselves" that we are now missing reality.
Please, notice also the foreword by Francesco Proto, that suggests new idea about the "doubleness" of contemporary society.
Forgive my poor english and have a good reading! ... Read more

Product Description
First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. ... Read more

Product Description
This new edition further explores the connection between the cultural analysis provided by the contemporary philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the new 'star' of global culture - architecture.


In a world in which images have become a substitute for reality - i.e. simulacra capable of both stimulating and satisfying collective needs - the question arises as to whether architecture could be seen as a 'super-fetish', capable of both mirroring and shaping western society's culture and identity.

The aim of this book is thus to provide new methodologies and to suggest new meanings for the comprehension and development of contemporary architecture. In Baudrillard's terms, architecture could be seen as the supreme medium of contemporary visual culture, especially in its potential to influence the individual's perception of reality as a component of the mass-media system. This kind of cultural analysis of the built environment and its effect on everyday life is still a relatively new phenomenon - both in the fields of critical theory and even more so in mainstream architectural criticism.

This book, which forms a significant resource on the work of an immensely important writer, should appeal to a wide range of readers. Through highly evocative writing, it provides a theoretical, illuminating pathway for everyone who, either directly or indirectly, is involved or interested in architecture, urbanism and related subjects. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

architecture: the biggest "show" of power and consumism
This book is very interesting for phylosophers as well as architects/designers, but also for all the people who wants to be politically active.
It is s review of essays by Jean Baudriallard, a french phylosopher and a real genius of our times. As in most of his books, he explains perfectly how our society works, this time he uses architecture to tell us new things about our life.
We live in the "dream of democracy" because the real political power is an effect of the communicational power (that is to say: money to buy advertising). How architecture explains it?
Take the centre pompidou, for example. People think to go there to see the works of art, but most of them are just getting into a temple of culture to make their own show: the mass getting into aristicracy. It's all a big farce...
The transparency of the walls and the exibition of the structures is showing the box and revealing the inside. This is the obscene of our society, the pornography of reality, that is to say - in few words - an over-exibition of it.
We are all so used to be part of a show, to be "other from ourselves" that we are now missing reality.
Please, notice also the foreword by Francesco Proto, that suggests new idea about the "doubleness" of contemporary society.
Forgive my poor english and have a good reading! ... Read more

Product Description
Baudrillard's work of the last two decades has downplayed the position of the critical subject and gone over to the standpoint of the object. Nowhere is this objective (non-)critique which results so clearly played out as in the Cool Memories series. Here again, in this fourth collection of fragments and sketches, Baudrillard's stance is less that of the interventionist intellectual analysing the world as critical subject than of the barely participant observer—an object among objects, an "internal exile", watching the world "world itself" with such fierce insistence, yet registering with acuity our general deficit of reality and meaning. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Intellectual(?) Entertainment......
How would one even go about reviewing a book such as this. Or, for that matter; how could anything even be said of an academic work that has no central thesis. In fact, it is hard to even pin down any point in which there could be said to be an actual message. Then again, that seems to be the point of the work. In the Baudrillardian world, one that has become so submerged in the hyperreal, representations merely become the model by which which reality is generated. Thus, there is no longer a need for representation. Baudrillards attempt here is to present the fatal strategy of fractal information. Ideas, or words that have no referrent, but merely metamorphise into ideas created by the words themselves. What matters here is not the truth for which the words represent, but rather; the style and manner in which the words present themselves as objects. Perhaps, a possible critique would be to use Baudrillards concept of the System of Objects against these fragments. So, rather than judging the futile referent of said statements. Rather, contrast the fragments against each other in a system that would reveal the hyperreal contstruction they create. Regardless, taken this work too seriously is an insult both to the book and to the reader. The better approach would be to take the book as it appears; simply a collection of fragmented ideas for the mere purpose of entertainment.

Ramblings
A coffee-table collection of thoughts, aphorisms, pithy sayings.
Some of what Baudrillard says is seductive, some is humorous, much is cynical, some may even be true. A good portion of it appears as the pseudo-philosophically justified grumblings of a post-marxist, sometimes reactionist malcontent.
The great question that this book (and much of Baudrillard's writing raises) is that of irony--how ironic is Baudrillard being at any given time?
His diatribe against the female activist (for example) could easily be turned against himself, and there are many other occasions in this collection where this is the case.
The claim that Baudrillard has attined some sort of renunciation of critical subjectivity in favour of a non-critical object among objects is, to me, spurious and laughable.
Nonetheless, this book is enjoyable to pick up and read for a couple minutes now and then (a clearly intented reading strategy). But I would recommend something else by him if you want an intro to his thought. "Simulacra and Simulations," for example. ... Read more

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Jean Baudrillard is one of the most controversial theorists of our time, famous for his claim that the Gulf War never happened and for his provocative writing on terrorism, specifically 9/11. This new and fully updated second edition includes:

• an introduction to Baudrillard’s key works and theories such as simulation and hyperreality
• coverage of Baudrillard’s later work on the question of postmodernism
• a new chapter on Baudrillard and terrorism
• engagement with architecture and urbanism through the Utopie group
• a look at the most recent applications of Baudrillard’s ideas.

Richard J. Lane offers a comprehensive introduction to this complex and fascinating theorist, also examining the impact that Baudrillard has had on literary studies, media and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and postmodernism.

Customer Reviews (3)

excellent companion volume
This volume is a very good introduction to Baudrillard for those unacquainted with his writings, and a useful companion volume to a thorough study of his texts.Unlike the "[Philosopher] in 90 minutes" series, the "Introducing" series, etc., this book is intended as a supplement to the primary texts, not as a simplified condensation of the original texts for the casual inquirer who wishes to appear well-read.

Cultural influences on Baudrillard are discussed at length (the Monnet projects in post-WWII France; the student revolt in Paris in May '68); etc.Also, many of the key concepts that Baudrillard appropriated from other thinkers are situated in context by reference to their origins with Foucault (the panopticon as a model for contemporary culture), Bataille (excess, expenditure - the escape from Hegel), Mauss ("potlatch"), Debord (spectacle), and others.

Some of the scandals associated with Baudrillard's writings - the fights with various feminists over his notorious remarks about women, his misconstrued analysis of the United States in "America," and of course the bru-ha-ha over his wildly misunderstood claim that "the Gulf War did not happen" - are rather neatly side-stepped in this volume with a paradigm in which Baudrillard's later writing (after "Symbolic Exchange and Death") is understood as performative, with an emphasis on hyperbole, exaggeration, fictionalization and, above all, humor.

A few disadvantages of this volume are largely caused by the date of its publication: completed in 1999, it does not address Baudrillard's final works, particularly his analyses of 9-11; nor does it include any commentary on the most important pop-cultural manifestation of Baudrillard's work, namely the Matrix trilogy.

I would suggest this book before, after, or along with Mark Poster's excellent selection of Baudrillard's texts in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings: Second Edition and, of course, the now-classic text Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism).

Postmodern embodiment...
Richard J. Lane's text on Jean Baudrillard is part of a recent series put out by the Routledge Press, designed under the general editorial direction of Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), to explore the most recent and exciting ideas in intellectual development during the past century or so. To this end, figures such as Paul Ricouer, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other influential thinkers in critical thought are highlighted in the series, planned to include more than 21 volumes in all.

Lane's text, following the pattern of the others, includes background information on Baudrillard and its significance, the key ideas and sources, and Baudrillard's continuing impact on other thinkers. As the series preface indicates, no critical thinker arises in a vacuum, so the context, influences and broader cultural environment are all important as a part of the study, something with which Baudrillard might agree,

Why is Baudrillard included in this series? This series is primary for critical thinking in a literary sense, but also develops the cultural criticism aspect of which literary theory cannot help but be a part.Baudrillard, as Lane suggests, is not only one of the more famous names in postmodernism, but practically embodies postmodernism in his own work.Key ideas and catch-phrases of Baudrillard include 'simulation', 'hyperreal', and 'implosion of meaning'.Baudrillard is very much a product of the French literary/philosophical school of the 1960s, opting eventually toward a radical reworking of both primitive cultures and post-Marxist thought that some critics see as inconsistent and confused, but definitely not to be ignored.

One of the useful features of the text is the side-bar boxes inserted at various points. For example, during the discussion on Baudrillard's development of writing strategies for postmodernism, there is brief discussion, set apart from the primary strand of the text, on Nihilism, developing further these ideas should the reader not be familiar with them, or at least not in the way with which Baudrillard would be working with ideas derived from them. Each section on a key idea spans fifteen to twenty pages, with a one-page summary concluding each, which gives a recap of the ideas (and provides a handy reference).

One of the more useful pieces in this text is also the 'two worlds' listing, which develops some of contrasting ideas in the shift from modernity to postmodernity.These include hierarchy versus anarchy, selection versus participation, signified versus signifier, and more interesting, sometimes surprising pieces.In discussing the development of culture in all its various aspects in an American context, Baudrillard shows the difference in 'city' culture as one goes from East to West - one of the paradoxes of the postmodern situation in America is that there are two primary city paradigms, New York City and Los Angeles, each of which is a perfect example of the city structure, one built up and close-knit architecturally, and the other spread out and low-rising.The cultures of the two cities are quite different, yet both are quintessentially American and both undoubtedly urban.That two different cities occupy the centre at the same time is the paradox of postmodernity.

Baudrillard has a fascination with America, which can be seen in his development and application of ideas such as the hyperreal and of simulation.The levels of simulation and hyperreality in America extend from the 'real' town square to the simulation of the town square in the shopping mall, which becomes a hyper-reality with controlled climates and selected people both as workers and shoppers; another classic example is that of Disneyland, with its carefully constructed and controlled environments, which is 'real' because it stands in contrast to the 'really real'.Media portrayals of events is also highlightedas examples of this kind of shift in thinking - the media distorts both the rhythm and the nature of the event, through selectivity and varying emphasis on actors and actions involved, and the kinds of manipulation to which media is always subject.News of real events becomes entertainment; entertainment programming becomes more fully developed and thus more real.We have more information, without more understanding, and the experience becomes more complex and involved, yet empty at the same time.

Part of Baudrillard's fascination with America is an interest in the development of technology, and the growth of the production/consumer kind of culture, where everything becomes part of a system of commodities, including language and knowledge.Indeed, Western identity is constructed of these kinds of objects, which the system also requires to be destroyed (think of the built-in redundancy or ever-increasing development of 'new and improved' products) - a dialectical performance writ large over the culture.

The concluding chapter, After Baudrillard, highlights some key areas of development in relation to other thinkers, as well as points of possible exploration for the reader.Baudrillard's ideas impact the development of aesthetic theory (from art to mere performance and entertainment).History and geography are also at issue, for the landscape of the past and of the present shifts with emphasis in different categories.Perhaps the most important development of significance to a postmodern fragmentation of the sort Baudrillard writes about is the internet, and the growth of theory from his influence is only beginning here.

As do the other volumes in this series, Clark concludes with an annotated bibliography of works by Baudrillard in English (or English translation), works on Baudrillard, and a good index.

While this series focuses intentionally upon literary theory, in fact this is only the starting point. For Baudrillard (as for others in this series) the expanse is far too broad to be drawn into such narrow guidelines, and the important and impact of the ideas extends out into the whole range of intellectual development. As intellectual endeavours of every sort depend upon language, understanding, and cultural interpretation, the thorough comprehension of how and why we know what we know is crucial.

A Concise & Accessible Introduction
I'm trying to gain a perspective on key postmodern thinkers, so I can't really contextualize this work within others on or by Baudrillard.What I can say is that this book provides an excellent overview of Baudrillard's theories, his influences and his milieu.Lane also makes it a point to introduce important concepts (like structuralism, deconstruction, modernism) as though they are being encountered for the first time.This is really nice since most of texts on or by people like Baudrillard, Derrida, and their ilk can be difficult to penetrate because of the neologisms and assumptions about the foreknowledge of the reader.In addition to providing an accessible introduction to and broad overview of Baudrillard, the book also features recommendations for further reading which I think is an excellent aspect.It's obviously not the end-all-be-all on Baudrillard or postmodernism, but it's an excellent start in my opinion. ... Read more

Product Description
First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. ... Read more

Product Description
This book marks an important evolution in Jean Baudrillard's thought as he leaves behind his older and better-known concept of the "simulacrum" and tackles the new problem of digital technology acquiring organicity. The resulting world of cold communication and its indifferent alterity, seduction, metamorphoses, metastases, and transparency requires a new form of response. Writing in the shadow of Marshall McLuhan, Baudrillard insists that the content of communication is completely without meaning: the only thing that is communicated is communication itself. He sees the masses writhing in an orgiastic ecstasy of communications. Baudrillard navigates the Object's maelstrom with the euphoria of the astronaut reentering Earth's atmosphere with no possibility of assistance from Mission Control. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

painfully boring...
This is a rambling and painfully dull essay on the alienation induced bycommunications media and technology.It reads like he scribbled this one out over a couple of double lattes.

128 pages of endless pontificating. Luckily it is a mercifully short read, as he uses the usual sophomoric trick of large font and small pages to pad this thing into book length.

My advice is to save the $10 and go to one of those cafes that have the house journals that people write in, and read some of those instead...that will be much more interesting and you won't feel so disconnected from society like Baudrillard.

Modern Philo Par Excellence
This book is a riot and a total joy to read. Baudrillard skitters over all the modern fixtures (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Derrida) citing no one, instead whipping together confections that result in immediate addiction to his prosaic bakery. All his books glow like embers after being read, but this one in particular sews up a lot of his interests: modern existence enslaved by the eye, history as a mass recapitulation of fantasy put on by nostalgia, the secret as already always revealed.

A stimulating book
A major contribution to the theory of postmodernity written in a mentally stimulating way. ... Read more

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Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the postmodern. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as an outsider in the field of great French thinkers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

interesting
i saw this book on my teacher's desk, so i bought it. i must say, as much as i like to philosophize, a lot of this was way over my head. but, on some pages, i found certain paragraphs that hit the spot.

Baudrillard's Table Talk--Under the Salt
"The fragment has its ideal" -- R. Barthes.

It's a little expensive for such a slim book, but it's so dense you wouldn't really want it any longer.FRAGMENTS is a very overdetermined word, too, it makes you wonder why, after Kierkegaard and Barthes and all the other writers who used the word so precisely, if Baudrillard sanctions its use or is it a "clever" device of the translator?

He's constantly fascinating, and quite a conversationalist, not a dull sentence in the book.Did you know that in Japanese there is no word for "the subject," nor for 'the universal,' nor again for "communication" itself?It makes you realize with a start that if one's vocabulary is shaped with some words and not others, than one's conceptual limits will be quite different than someone else with a different language, where perhaps there are three hundred words for rice--or love.

Ha, it's funny how Jean and Francois put down America for producing novels that last for manybe a thousand pages.This is hypertrophy they say, linking it to America's search for empire and planet glory.Well I have read some baggy monsters originated in France too.Then he (Jean) will turn around and praise something like Abbott's wonderful FLATLAND, and we see that nothing artificially determined sways his likes and dislikes, and that for Baudrillard, cities and cultures alike are controlled by language, borders, and the shock troops that keep us all from understanding one another.He follows Abbott in seeing God as an intuition, a vanishing point, very much as Antonioni found God in the American desert in Zabriskie Point.These European intellectuals with their quite touching view of the American West.

liberating,violinin water,colour in a hot-dog sexectoplasm
If Jean Baudrillard wrote music it would indeed transcend the musical languages and styles of modernity to popular tex/mex forms,it would have the negativity of Schoenberg mixed with the traditional beauty of Mozart with the energy of Joanie Jett,the subversiveness of The Dead Kennedys and the directness of Sharon Crow;Baudrillard indeed has paid his dues writing from the late Sixties,he also became frustrated when the revolution didn't come as quickly as expected. His work today cuts across many genres. I know painters who don't paint until they read him first. Also philosophers wanting a good time,those who need to escape the stifling air of academia,and the interlocking complexity that can be a part of todays philosophic scene of intertextual interdiscipline without being committed in anyone direction. But to call Baudrillard ancompact anarchist would be too cruel his thought has too much discipline of it,although that's how his language comes across. Yet he has a deep-rooted feeling for humanity; he can't quite seem to find a place for its demise. He wants to see something happen,well people still make sex and art,and music. I think behind all the dark-edged pessimism that emanates from his sentence constructions there is a need to emote, Baudrillard is a new genre artist,there is no label yet for who he is like Hannible Lecter. For instance on politics,"There is no need to attack politicians. They are engaged in spontaneous self-destruction. You simply have to be firm about not going to their aid." Baudrillard has seen and will seen things going,jettisoning down the tubes for some time to come. And that's why we need him. He has a gift for picking the smallest nuance of reality, the tiniest particle of the life-world as a means toward whatever is larger. A political system and institution. We find value in the fragments,Wittgenstein said this of God: I always find other things in Baudrillard than what he means. Like danger zones, like tripping over a cliff,The beauty in a Chicago ho! t-dog,yet it can kill you. "In Amazonia,certain butterflies simulate the markings of their poisonous fellows to protect themselves. When you have the good fortune to be poisonous,you have to use deception." Since the world has long stood on its philosophic head(Hegel/Marx), we can find comfort in being "Other" or so it seems. To be outcast is cool soemtimes, it doesn't help pay any bills,you need to be a Derrideanfor that to find a normative world. To Baudrillard all culture is worth the trip to understand it. Although you feel his European roots all the time, with the heavies he introduces us to Canetti,Pessoa. He always speaks within eye-shot of a monument. Years of theory does that to you. And he searches the mysteries of expression,from one fountain head one manifold source,culture going over Niagara Falls,expression teeming with amoeba,paramecium. He also is/was the first to speak on postmodernity,another stick in the side of art. In fact we owe a debt to him for taking the rigours of the postmodernist credo to a new level of cognition. Composers would never have been able to distinguish five strains of tango without it. He finds meaning in anything today,antique sales in Pennsylvania Even pornography has a double meaning. The skinny porno-queen blond who ran for the Italian Pariliament, (La Cicciolina),she married Jeff Koons who also accelerated the postmodern language to its head,carnal ectoplasm. Baudrillard speaks of the ends of things. And since we are at the end of languages,styles,meanings,subjects and objects,we are at the beginning of them as well. Too bad Baudrillard can't give us any third base guidance. Well who can? I hear he lectures at UCLA today.But I love Baudrillard because he looks for meaning anywhere. In Egyptian pyramids(ultimate space) inside,in a hermit's life,in boredom, in Andy Warhohl,in the scar on a womens face,which lends her all her charm. I think Baudrillard's next zone should be on the mystery of women throughout the ages. "Not to think any! more. To be like a dog. To be in one's head like a dog in a kennel." After you read Baudrillard you can get high from the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. He can also look beyond his own coffe-table, The French conceit that Chernobyl didn't cross to Paris,1,000 French impervious to Russian fission. Of course the dark side to all this is that Baudrillard sees us as all in a zoo,that we all have basic fatal attraction instincts that can put the rabbit into boiling water faster than the anyone. ... Read more

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`The first and only book to explore, at once, the field of my work and its limits, with both the intimacy and distance required: doubling and shadowing. It gives me great pleasure to find something that, beyond commentary, sees what I see and at the same time what I am unable to see' - Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard is a controversial figure. His work tends to fascinate and infuriate readers in equal numbers. Yet there is no doubting his importance to the key debates in culture and theory of the last ten years.

A prolific author, readers sometimes find it difficult to tease out the consistencies in Baudrillard's arguments. This book seeks to redress the balance. It aims to go beyond his writings on consumer objects, the Gulf War and America, to identify the fundamental logic that underpins his writings. It does this through a series of close readings of his main texts, paying particular attention to the form and internal coherence of his arguments. The book contends that, just as Baudrillard himself grapples with the problems of how to criticize self-defining systems, so we cannot simply hold Baudrillard up against external standards but must seek to judge him on his own terms.

Jean Baudrillard: A Defence of the Real will be an indispensable text for all those interested in social theory who want a general introduction to Baudrillard's work.

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Alterity is in danger. It is a masterpiece in peril, an object lost or missing from our system, from the system of artificial intelligence and the system of communication in general.
—from Radical Alterity

Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard's work and his reading of the "radical exoticism" posited by Victor Segalen—ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign "primitive society of the future," America.

In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity.

This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, "Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Brilliant, Provocative, Disturbing . . .
Jean Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End is a fantastic read whether one chooses to take the author seriously or whether one simply wishes to loose himself in the author's creative metaphors which sum up the meaning of life and death in our modern (post-modern) society with a few hard-hitting words and phrases.Baudrillard's style is fairly simple, and I would say that his texts are easy to understand in French and in English although finding his texts in the original French can sometimes be problematic.Chris Turner's translation ... , does a great job of capturing Baudrillard's humorous and sometimes shocking ideas about the world and what he considers to be the illusion of time.

The central theme of this book is that time is becoming an illusion, and I would even say that Baudrillard already believes time has disappeared.Humankind, by falsely believing that time is linear and that "ends" exist, has created a reality out of illusions and is now gradually erasing history in an attempt to make itself "feel" better about living a life that is all but certain.

Baudrillard does not spend a great deal of time wading through previous critics' opinions about the nature of time or what physicists may say about the past, present, and future.He jumps right into his own theories which really ask the reader to rethink his notions about our world and where humankind is going, or as Baudrillard would say - re-visiting - in its attempt to revise all of those little unpalatable events from the past such as the Cold War, Persian Gulf War, and the Timisoara massacre.

Baudrillard is refreshing and shocking at the same time.Although his style is simple and stimulating, his ideas verge on the outrageous and the unpredictable.I recommend this book highly.

crunch your brain
Jean Baudrillard - I must say that albeit he is a self-proclaimed postmodernist theorist, it is not at all fair to lump together with others (specifically those influenced from poststructuralism).Baudrillard is amaterialist.In spite of that, he has other postmodern sensibilities(fragmentation, symbolic-surface function, etc.).

He talks about historyand the linear construction of time, and how this has framed our thoughtprocesses.Because of this artificial linearizing of time, he pokes fun at"ends."For Baudrillard, time has, more or less, stopped.It isno longer a question of forward or backward.

He argues that we arespeeding towards hyperreality, where everything is sterile and eternal. Using the example of the compact disc, he says (roughly) "If objectsno longer grow old when you touch them, you must be dead."We need tosee and experince death and decay to constitute life.My only concern isthis implicit statement that there is a kind of default nature positon whenthings were right (vinyl records, no email, news travelling via mouth,etc.).

Overall, brilliant and stimulating. ... Read more

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Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter—not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle between real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. This new edition is up-dated with the essays "Hypotheses on Terrorism" and "Violence of the Global". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

"There's an end to all your talk about the virtual-this is something real!" (p.28)
The violence of the real, or the reality of violence is the only thing power understands. Confronted with suicides, the system (indeed any system) begins to mimic suicide, ultimately committing itself to its own suicide.
I won't pretend to understand all of this great writer's words. Partly because my understanding of French is limited. Partly because I have only read a translation. And lastly because I have been fed oh so many Americanisms.
This is a good intro into exploring possible interpretations and misunderstandings embedded in our conceptions of the "World". Reading it has helped me to begin to demystify the political concept of Terrorism, especially its connotations within the virtual world of media discourse.
"To the point that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from minds and mores, and liberal globalization is coming about in precisely the opposite form-a police state globalization, a total control, a terror based on 'law and order' measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society." (p.32 from the unrevised edition)
I would also recommend "The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon" (1993) by Jean Baudrillard.

falsely profound and profoundly false
About 9/11, B writes, "At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. . . . We are far beyond ideology and politics now. . . .
As if the power bearing these towers suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power suddenly gave way under too intense an effort: the effort always to be the unique world model."

Despite the silliness of these ideas, here and there B does make an interesting point.But the book exists primarily to exhibit B's cleverness rather than to illuminate terrorism.

America
Well, this is a very short book. If you arte not familiar with Baudrillard's academic social theory and philosophical works, much of the commentary may come across as superficial, cynical or just plain odd. The unreferenced paraphrasal of Clauschwitz's formula (earlier inverted by Foucault), the references to 'symbols' and death as 'sacrifice'; none of this will make any sense unless you have read Symbolic Exchange and Death, or Signs and Simulations, and like those english journos who reviewed 'The Gulf War did not take place' with similar ignorance, if you take it only at that level you will miss the whole point, and look like a stupid arse.

Sacrifice referes to his thesis in symbolic exchange and death that the only resistance to the 'system' is suicide, building on the third volume of Marx's Capital; so that dead labour now outweighs living labour, we all live in a world of death, the only refusal is to stop the system killin us.

As the editor of the edition of 'The Gulf war did not take place' that I read showed; many people criticsed Baudrillard comparing him to a classical 'enlightenment' thinker like Noam Chomsky. But this edition then had a quote by Chomsky in the intro where he said it wasn't a 'war' because that conventionally meant two sides fighting against each other. Similarly, Baudrillard's point that we have all imagined the collapse of american empire; in a couple of different places in his work on US foreign policy Chomsky talks about the war mongers in Vietnam and what they said about the 'VC', hypothesising what they would have done if the VC had launched attacks in downtown New York.

Besides which, why should Baudrillard have to explain himself to you in any case? If we can't see through the oxymoronism of a 'War on Terrorism' we deserve to blown up in densly populated city centres like the sheep we are.

America
Well, this is a very short book. If you are not familiar with Baudrillard's academic social theory and philosophical works, much of the commentary may come across as superficial, cynical or just plain odd. The unreferenced paraphrasal of Clauschwitz's formula (earlier inverted by Foucault), the references to 'symbols' and death as 'sacrifice'; none of this will make any sense unless you have read Symbolic Exchange and Death, or Signs and Simulations, and like those english journos who reviewed 'The Gulf War did not take place' with similar ignorance, if you take it only at that level you will miss the whole point, and look like a stupid arse.

Sacrifice referes to his thesis in symbolic exchange and death that the only resistance to the 'system' is suicide, building on the third volume of Marx's Capital; so that dead labour now outweighs living labour, we all live in a world of death, the only refusal is to stop the system killin us.

As the editor of the edition of 'The Gulf war did not take place' that I read showed; many people criticsed Baudrillard comparing him to a classical 'enlightenment' thinker like Noam Chomsky. But this edition then had a quote by Chomsky in the intro where he said it wasn't a 'war' because that conventionally meant two sides fighting against each other. Similarly, Baudrillard's point that we have all imagined the collapse of american empire; in a couple of different places in his work on US foreign policy Chomsky talks about the war mongers in Vietnam and what they said about the 'VC', hypothesising what they would have done if the VC had launched attacks in downtown New York.

Besides which, why should Baudrillard have to explain himself to you in any case? If we can't see through the oxymoronism of a 'War on Terrorism' we deserve to blown up in densely populated city centres like the sheep we are. ... Read more