Book Description
Everything starts out from impossible exchange. The uncertainty of the world lies in the fact that it has no equivalent anywhere; it cannot be exchanged for anything. The uncertainty of thought lies in the fact that it cannot be exchanged either for truth or for reality. Jean Baudrillard's now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life—the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others—he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity. Literally, they have no meaning outside themselves and cannot be exchanged for anything. Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has no meaning. Schemes for genetic experimentation and investigation are becoming infinitely ramified, and the more ramified they become the more the crucial question is left unanswered: who rules over life, who rules over death? Baudrillard's conclusion is that the true formula of contemporary nihilism lies here: the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and the most baleful consequences. This book might be said to be the exploration, first, of the 'fateful' consequences, and subsequently—by a poetic transference of situation—of the fortunate, happy consequences of impossible exchange. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not for the unprepared
This is a dense book, not for casual reading. Presumably the readeralready knows something about Baudrillard or wants to learn about him andthe general point of view he represents, viz. post-structuralism. The bookdoesn't function well as an introduction to either Baudrillard orpost-structuralism.Considerable background in these subjects is assumedby the author who makes few concessions to the unintiated. To readers morefamiliar with French social theory, Kellner's commentary is rewarding,particularly the final summing-up chapter, which contextualizespersuasively the arc of Baudrillard's intellectual career. Marxism entersas the stubborn persistense of a socio- material realm increasingly ignoredin that arc and to its detriment. On balance, I believe Kellner treats thesometimes maddening hyperbole in a fair-minded manner, though a moreconcrete exposition of the promising ideas surrounding `sign exchange'would better illustrate Baudrillard's early appeal which does seem tosuffer at book's end. This is not a book for the unprepared. ... Read more

Book Description
There are few philosophers today cool enough to be referenced in the Matrix, interesting enough to be mentioned on Six Feet Under, and popular enough to get over 400,000 hits on Google. Jean Baudrillard has succeeded in all of this and more. Now, in his latest book, Baudrillard presents his most popular themes symbolic exchange, hyper-reality, technology and warand applies them to the current global conflict between the West and the Rest, including Islam. Ultimately, it is not simply about the war against terror but about the bigger picture of capitalism versus everything else. This book serves as the summation of Baudrillards work over the last 20 years and is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

One of Baudrillard's Best Books
For anyone casting about for a place to begin with Baudrillard, this might be a good place to start. It is a sort of summing up of his main themes, and the curious reader who has heard about such things as 'simulacra,' 'virtual reality,' 'integral reality,' and the like can rest assured that he will find Baudrillard discoursing here upon the themes which made him most famous.

Is there enough room, Baudrillard asks, for both the world and its (virtual) double? As we attempt to seal the world shut beneath a dome of virtuality that attempts to eliminate all forms of noise and chaos, the inherent evil in the world continually resists this Western sanitization in the form of accidents, crashes, terrorist violence and natural disasters. The attempt to virtualize the world is simultaneously an attempt to eliminate all forms of evil from it, but Baudrillard seems fairly confident that this will never happen. A complete sealing shut of the world behind a dome of virtuality can never be a success since evil is part of the very nature of the world that is in process of being cloned. To clone the world is also to clone its evil.

Baudrillard is at his best when discoursing upon the death of the spectator or the effects of electronic technology upon society, but he is less effective in his discussions of ethics and evil. The reader constantly finds himself fighting the urge to categorize Baudrillard as Manichean, but this is a myth that is too radically certain of itself to fit comfortably within Baudrillard's nihilism, with its decentered and ironic gaze. At times, though, one suspects Baudrillard of being a closet mystic. Wouldn't THAT be a wonderful irony! At the root of all his sceptical perspectives would lie an urge to be free of Western culture forms and to dissolve himself into the white radiance of a non-existent certainty.

--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

Read no Evil ...
Gotta give it for France for bringing so many heavyweights in the Postmodern ring of thoughts. Baudrillard is something of a post-Marxist academic gone wild, hitting you from every angle, slowly decentering the virtual world of the subject into the ritualistic world of objects. A must-read, Worth the time deciphering through the countless paradoxes and hints of esoterism.

Standard fare
This review is admittedly brief and frankly only directed at those familiar with Baudrillard's work, since it's not really possible to buy the argument of The Intelligence of Evil without having bought the notion of the Impossible Exchange. That being said, the editor's word "summation" to describe this work in relation to Baudrillard's career is a little flattering--nothing significantly new appears here, and the kinds of things Baudrillard tends to say are fairly derivative of standard polemics a la Nietzsche, Bataille, Marcuse, and so on. Baudrillard once complained that no one describes his work as being 'serious', even when he thinks there are philosophically serious things in his works. One wonders why he feels entitled to that description when nothing in his writing invites the kind of attitude he thinks should be taken to his work. It is one thing to be philosophical and quite another to do philosophy. At best Baudrillard qualifies for the former since nothing about the way he writes could pass for 'philosophy', even if one is not particularly wedded to an Anglo-American idea of what 'philosophy' should be (as I am not myself). His paragraphs are at times provocative, but rambling and more often than not vague. The translator calls Baudrillard's work "philosophical analyses of current events in the best Deleuzian fashion", which again is a little flattering--Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1 and 2 are incomparable with regard to the intellectual and philosophical challenge they present to the reader, regardless of whether or not one finds their arguments any more or less compelling than Baudrillard's. Baudrillard's jargon and terminology simply have nowhere near the rigor or historical depth of many of his compatriots.

The title 'The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact' relies on a Platonic reading of a line from Adorno (strange in itself!): "It is no longer a question of a thought critical of reality, but of a subversion of reality in its principle, in its very self-evidence. The greater the positivity, the more violent is the--possibly silent--denial. ... But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true. Hope, if we were still to have it, would be hope for intelligence--for insight into--good. Now, what we have left is intelligence of evil, that is to say, not intelligence of a critical reality, but of a reality that has become unreal by dint of positivity, that has become speculative by dint of simulation." (I read Baudrillard's reading of negation and transcendence as Platonic in this context.) In other words, Baudrillard is rehashing comments about hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation or the kinds of things said by any number of social critics since Simmel, Marx, and Nietzsche that talk about the outstripping of the subject by the objective world. (Incidentally, Baudrillard's conception of the dual illusion of subjectivity and objectivity is one that I find incoherent with other criticisms he gives about the failure of transcendence and the loss of reality.) As for the "pact" part of "the lucidity pact", this relies on a distinction between a "pact" and "contract" which is interesting, but undeveloped.

Regardless of Baudrillard's work as a whole, what I really wanted to say about this work in particular is simply that it's only really useful either for those who have already read others of Baudrillard's works or those who are tired of (in my opinion) better social critics saying much the same thing about the loss of reality (the other theorists with whom Baudrillard aligns himself, such as Zizek and Agamben, seem to have more understandable criteria for knowing when we are actually experiencing reality) and/or ungrounding the war on terror. The motive is admirable even if the execution is not. ... Read more

Book Description
World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those he has already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney World, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the 1995 French public sector workers' strike, the Rushdie fatwa, mad cow disease and genetic cloning. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is—pace his critics—still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal. ... 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

Book Description
In his analysis of the deep social trends rooted in production, consumption, and the symbolic, Jean Baudrillard touches the very heart of the concerns of the generation currently rebelling against the framework of the consumer society. With the ever-greater mediatization of society, Baudrillard argues that we are witnessing the virtualization of our world, a disappearance of reality itself, and perhaps the impossibility of any exchange at all. This disenchanted perspective has become the rallying point for all those who reject the traditional sociological and philosophical paradigms of our age.

Passwords, in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze's Abécédaire, offers us twelve accessible and enjoyable entry points into Baudrillard's thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his work: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality, and thought. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Step into a world
In his impressive body of work, Baudrillard seems to take an infinite amount of paths leading to a small set of concepts, or vectors upon which he observes society. One of those essential concepts dominating Baudrillard's work is that we can no longer make representations of the world we live in, because by now representation precedes reality, and as such is no longer a representation, but a model. Hence the end of the principle of reality, and the birth of the hyperreal, reality as nothing more than the simulation of a model.
With this book, Baudrillard allows those concepts to come forward, very much like nerve cells, connecting and connected to his previous works, clarifying many of his obscure observations.
Each word/theme works as a model throught which the world is, for lack of better word, simulated.
In many ways, those are the models upon which Baudrillard's work is generated, but I doubt it will be of much use to those who are not familiar with his work.

It's Vehicle and Destination
Baudrillard claims that words are at once the vehicles of ideas, and, in their own convoluted way, the very destination of that which they're driving towards. The same could be said of Passwords; each aphoristically short essay gestures toward a deciphering of Baudrillard's thought as a whole, but, simultaneously they stand as a signpost of that thought by which one could, after deciphering, re-cipher the thought into its totality.

Many of the essays in this volume are excellent entryways into Baudrillard's more discursive works i.e. Impossible Exchange, The Transparency of Evil, and Seduction. I think it's worthy of those already familiar with Baudrillard's work, but it functions best as it is titled, a password.

PASSWORDS
This book is a very short read, but perhaps that is part of its charm. It is a window into contemporary thought, concerned with ways of viewing a super-extended human existence. As you may have noticed, humans and their gadgets, gizmos, plumbing, and bridges have conquered the world. But the imposition of the human will upon the structures of nature has its limits. When the everyday objects we take for granted in their use are seen as forms that have been forced into function, we cannot but notice, notes Baudrillard, that the object may someday take its revenge. The oceans, for example, may flood the earth. The author lets the reader become aware of the meaning that humans write into existence, mapping their desires onto an outside world that is otherwise non-human. Thus he encourages a world of the mind, of pass-words, that is, a way of adventuring with the spiraling language that humans otherwise use for politics. Although at times Mr. Baudrillard writes expecting that his meaning is self-explanatory, causing an unsure conjecture on the part of the reader, his book is a fine example of an urge to lead philosophy, the arts, the sciences, and ethics towards an interpenetrating coded language of thought, one that would encourage our minds to observe the world more brightly and, depending on where you stand, to regard it with ir/reverential I/eyes.

One of Baudrillard's best.....
Baudrillard's main thesis here is that words, rather than just generating ideas, actually metamorphize and become these ideas, which in turn do the same. We end up, then, in a sprialing evolution. Baudrillard closes the book by offering that there cannot be an end as the final word will only metamorphize into yet another concept, or will become the object. While this thesis is great fun to play around with, the book's true merits come in the presentation of a collection of Baudrillard's most important topics that he has been working with over the decades. This book is far from an anthology, but reading this book along with other difficult titles will open new routes of interpretation, thus helping readers to better understand some of Baudrillard's extremely difficult concepts. ... Read more

Book Description

Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history? What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? InThe Vital Illusion -- as always -- Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions.

Baudrillard considers how human cloning -- as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities -- heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of self-replicating cells. By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it.

Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corps(e) of the Real -- if there is any -- has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found."

Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor,The Vital Illusion exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives.

Customer Reviews (2)

Use your Illusions (part one)
Although it is illuminating to peruse the range of philosophic thought throughout the ages, from pre-Socratic ponderings to Kant's analytical deconstructions, I cannot help but find many of these famed thinkers to be more interesting as _historical thought_ rather than paradigm-paths to set one's foot upon.Such is the price of time, of evolving cultural consciousness.Thinkers of the past are intimately tied to the world as it existed then; their procedures and puzzles grow and gel into the vast soup of the hyper-spun mind-verse, annexed and assimilated like so much else-; whereas, in this accelerated, pre-apocalyptic era, the crow caw of the post-postmodern ("meta" squared) philosopher addresses, to the forward-thinking inclination, the challenges party-crashing their way into the 21st century, the horrific changes already in embryonic phase...

French harbinger Jean Baudrillard is among my favorites of the current era's post-post prophets, the unflinching eye and unwavering cry to detail the vertigo of the so-called 'hyper-real.'Baudrillard isn't the easiest read: the good professor seems to prefer oblique allusion over clear-cut definition, in both idea and grammatical usage: an effective stratagem for expressing the nightmarish quagmire of the impending future, with all of its possible ramifications, but rarely something to breeze through at the bedside.In The Vital Illusion, however, Baudrillard (or, perhaps, his translator) has set his syntax to a more digestible format, and only occasionaly do these essays slip into metaspake-insinuation.Thankfully, the content of the book itself is not affected; indeed, this more straightforward approach lends a subtle dynamism to the ideas expressed.

The essays, in brief:

1.The Final Solution: Here Baudrillard casts to us, scions of the 21st century, the snake-eyes dice-roll of ultimate conformity: the chilling concept of living in "the Hell of the Same."As science strives toward the seductive apple of immortality, its juicy flesh of *primal desire* will be devoured and irrevocably transformed, via cloning and genetic refinement, into a frightening husk of its original promise, the metaphorical allure stripped clean, the remains w/out nourishment or natural constituent.With the eventual dominance of the 'artificial continuum,' the human element will be subsumed in turn, the core motivational urges of sex and death eradicated by their very obsoleteness, all original thought and spiritual cognizance reduced in turn to a cold white tunnel-vision, the zero-essence of widespread cultural monothought.

Worse, the blind arrow of this post-modern scientific drive exterminates the raw and the flaw of evolution for the controlled security of moderated, non-trauma sub-being: the clone: a fearsome involution.The key motivation here appears to be a surrealistic *suicide-drive* -- the collective unease at our historical prominence and ever-expanding ability: our subsequent subconscious _need_ to 'ready ourselves' for the impending, inevitable catastrophe resultant of this era's technological excesses. Thus, the Final Solution: sacrificing the whole diversity of specie, and indeed the fertile loam of the earth itself, for the Pandora's Box of limitless experimentation, a grand scale kamikaze wet-dream--; via commodity, cancerous replication, clone-reproduction and the causality therein, Nietzche's "human, all too human" factor erodes before the immortal-coil ambition, and Baudrillard warns that the consequential artificial hegemony will transform mankind into a mere genetic simulation of life -- "the Hell of the Same," ad infinitum... and ironically, our only remedy will be the survival-mechanistic *resistance* that both propels and retards human advancement.

2. The Millennium: Our philosopher endeavors, in a rather round about sort of way, to express how time has been mapped: our past by nostalgic reminisce and sentimental bias; our present in the glaring symbol-fractures of liquid quartz crystal; and our future...ah, the future...predicted and devoured accordingly, with all "current events" anticipated and presented with bare resemblance to the actual occurrence -- the event itself overhyped and saturated to the point of non-entity.Baudrillard also addresses the unfortunate mass confusion that even now pervades the knowledge-explosion of the mediaverse: how the loss of "utopia" and ideological theism has jeopardized the *vital illusion* of structure, shipwrecking the common man upon the unkind shores of nihilism.Alas, the cynical result (a mental entropy in and of itself) has already [irrevocably?] infected the mainstream herd mentality of both the "real" and its cyberspace equivalent.

In this new millennium, as the simulacra outstrips the original in replication/expansion, increasingly *clone-like* symbols -- of religion, commodity, etc. -- emerge to the forefront: and the original intent of these icons are diluted/raped and/or mutated into strange monstrosities of blind belief...A (very prominent) past example: the Nazis corrupting and in turn stigmatizing the hakenkreuz swastika of Hindu cosmology, transforming a powerful symbol of cyclical movement into a brand of hatred, genocide, and reactionary fear.

3. The Murder of the Real: Finally Baudrillard settles back into the comfort-zone of post-modernism, indulging in the safety net of metaspeak to detail a very un-safe concept: that the 'Real' is not only dead, it has vanished completely: the 'rules' terminated before the law of 'higher' realms (the virtual, for one, with all its criminal possibility & sterile generalization of humanistic motifs); all ideological structure hopelessly corrupted & replicated to the abstract point of having almost no resemblance with its original intent; language melted down to the base-communication of keyboard strokes and emoticon glyphs.The 'murder' is that of human *conception*, slain before eruptive expansion: there is simply too much -Real- to assimilate! It no longer can be catalogued and calculated; chaos has begun to rule.Shiva is on the dance-floor, folks, and Baudrillard suggests it might be better to slip on our suede shoes and boogie down to the beat, to celebrate disappearance and obsolescence as an artistic form, rather than succumb to the black-hearted ruin of spiritual capitulation.Shape chaos! We all do it anyway, to a greater or lesser extent...

...and so forth.Even if you don't agree with this bleak vision of the future, Baudrillard at least gives us entertaining concepts to introduce at the next dinner-party.Shake up the routine of endless pop-culture riffing, corrupt the small-talk routines! The crow's caw is never welcome, but neither can it be truly *ignored*.

A Vital Voice in an Illusive World
For those who are familiar with Baudrillard, being told that the Real is being murdered before our very eyes will come as no surprise. After all, let's be fair; Jean Baudrillard has been saying the same thing for quite some time now, and you shouldn't expect any surprises here. You've heard it before, in "The Transparency of Evil," "Simulacra and Simulation," "The Perfect Crime," et cetera.

Still, if before his position was characterized by what we might call a sort of nostalgia, now it would seem to be panic. You get the impression that Baudrillard suddenly realized that he may actually be right, and that this being the case, he may need to be understood by more than just his cult following and a few academics. The prose is uncharacteristically clear for Baudrillard, and although this may be in part because the selections are part of a series of lectures, one gets the impression that there is more to it. He wants to be understood.

At times, one cannot help but be reminded of Sci/Fi by the likes of Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard. It is hard not to think of the latter's novel "High Rise," for example, when Baudrillard asks apropos of cloning, "Have we come...to the same point at which animal species, when they reach a critical saturation point, automatically switch over to a kind of collective suicide?". That is, is cloning really, despite appearances, a symptom of what Freud called the Death Drive?

This is great cultural commentary. Thought-provoking and unsettling. For those of you who are new to Baudrillard, but were fascinated by "The Matrix," this book might be a great place to start investigating some of the possibilities that film suggests. As for those who, like me, know just enough Baudrillard to be dangerous (to themselves mostly), this might just be the most accessible thing by him in English that you've read so far.

4 Stars for content. 5 stars for presentation. ... Read more

Book Description
Jean Baudrillard's work on how contemporary society is dominated by the mass media has become extraordinarily influential. He is notorious for arguing that there is no real world, only simulations which have altered what events mean, and that only violent symbolic exchange can prevent the world becoming a total simulation.

An ideal introduction to this most singular cultural critic and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard: live theory offers a comprehensive, critical account of Baudrillard's unsettling, visionary and often prescient work. Baudrillard's relation to a range of theorists as diverse as Nietzsche, Marx, McLuhan, Foucault and Lyotard is explained, and the impact of his thought on contemporary politics, popular culture and art is analyzed. Finally, in the new interview included here, Baudrillard outlines his own position and responds to his critics. ... Read more

Book Description

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a controversial social and cultural theorist known for his trenchant analyses of media and technological communication. Belonging to the generation of French thinkers that included Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard has at times been vilified by his detractors, but the influence of his work on critical thought and pop culture is impossible to deny (many might recognize his name fromThe Matrix movies, which claimed to be based on the French theorist's ideas).

Steve Redhead takes a fresh look at Baudrillard in relation to the intellectual and political climates in which he wrote. Baudrillard sought to produce a theory of modernity, but the modern world of the 1950s was radically different from the reality of the early twenty-first century. Beginning with Baudrillard's initial publications in the 1960s and concluding with his writings on 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, Redhead guides the reader through Baudrillard's difficult texts and unorthodox views on current issues. He also proposes an original theory of Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism, presenting the theorist's work as "non-postmodernist," after Bruno Latour's concept of "non-modernity." Each section of the Reader includes an extract from one of Baudrillard's writings, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction that places the piece in context and puts the debate surrounding the theorist into sharp perspective. The conflict over Baudrillard's legacy stems largely from the fact that a comprehensive selection of his writings has yet to be translated and collected into one volume.The Jean Baudrillard Reader provides an expansive and much-needed portrait of the critic's resonant work.

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Extrapolation, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2005. The length of the article is 4781 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Between visibility and invisibility: Baudrillard, Jean-Luc Marion, and Lance Olsen's Girl Imagined by Chance.
Author: Paul Petrovic
Publication: Extrapolation (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 46Issue: 2Page: 249(10)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the "false problems" posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosophy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard.

In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil. ... Read more

Book Description
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed “France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism” and “a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left,” he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture. Following his acclaimed America and Cool Memories, this book is the third in a series of personal records in hyperreality. Idiosyncratic, outrageous, and brilliantly original, Baudrillard here casts his net widely and combines autobiographical memories with further reflections on America, the crisis of cultural production, new ideas in fiction/theory, and the “verbal fornication” of the postmodern.
In this wide-ranging discussion of events and ideas, Baudrillard moves between poetry and waterfalls, strikes and stealth bombers, Freud and La Cicciolina, shadows and simulacra, deconstruction and the zodiac, Reagan’s smile and Kennedy’s death, the “curse” on South America and the future of the West, the last tango of French intellectual life and the exemplary disappearing act of Italian politics. Writing at the site where the philosophic and the poetic merge, he once again offers us commentary in the form of the riveting insight, the short distillation of reality that establishes its truth with the force of recognition.
Cool Memories II, Baudrillard’s latest commentary on the technopresent and future, an installment of his reflections on the reality of contemporary western culture, will entice all readers concerned with postmodernism and the current state of theory.

... Read more

Book Description

This uniquely engaging introduction to Jean Baudrillards controversial writings covers his entire career focussing on Baudrillards central, but little understood, notion of symbolic exchange. Through the clarification of this key term a very different Baudrillard emerges: not the nihilistic postmodernist and enemy of Marxism and Feminism that his critics have constructed, but a thinker immersed in the social world and passionately committed to a radical theorisation of it.

Above all Baudrillard sought symbolic spaces, spaces where we might all, if only temporarily, shake off the system of social control.His writing sought to challenge and defy the system. By erasing our liberated identities and suspending the pressures to compete, perform, consume and hate, that the system induces, we might create spaces not of freedom, but of symbolic engagement and exchange.

Book Description
This book goes beyond Baudrillard's 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 is written for all those who want a general introduction to Baudrillard's work, and will also appeal to those readers who are interested in social theory, but who have not yet taken Baudrillard seriously. ... Read more

Book Description
The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie as well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka.

Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were seminal for some of his most shockingly original books: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, Simulations, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. But Utopie was also a topical journal and a political one; the topics of these essays are often torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following the uprisings of May 1968. ... Read more

Book Description
Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do--and all they will do--is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. ... Read more