Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.
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 from The 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.
The famous postmodernist thinker turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.
Here, in this fourth collection, Baudrillard's stance is less that of the interventionist intellectual analysing the world as critical subject, than of the barely participant observer, an "internal exile" watching the world with fierce insistence, yet registering our shortage of reality.
Includes most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure, and anomie in affluent society.
Examines humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. This book leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death.
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. This book is the third (after "America and Cool Memories") in a series of personal records in hyper-reality. It is suitable for those concerned with the debates about postmodernism and the state of theory on the social sciences and humanities.
Not long ago, two friends Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other from nowhere, met in Paris. They had a long discussion without any precise aim. It was, rather, a way of rubbing up against metaphysics without risk of contagion.
Prophet of the apocalypse, hysterical lyric poet, obsessive recounter of the desolation of the postmodern scene and currently the hottest property on the New York intellectual circuit. The Guardian A sharp-shooting lone-ranger from the post-Marxist left. New York Times The most important French thinker of the past twenty years. J.
This text offers readers 12 entry points into Baudrillard's thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his oeuvre: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality and thought.
';Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless that goes without saying but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly with its warm bitterness particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness the uselessness of the screen.'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 already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa, Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. 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.
Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughternot 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.'
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? In The Vital Illusion-as always-Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions.Baudrillard considers how human cloning-as well as the "e;cloning"e; 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 "e;nonevent"e; 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 "e;the murder of the real"e; 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: "e;The corps(e) of the Real-if there is any-has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found."e;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.
Jean Baudrillard’s last book was about America. His new one is about cats, Foucault, Alfa Romeas, leukemia, Catholicism, the Berlin Wall, mattresses, Laurent Fabius, Jean-Paul II, roses, Antarctica, Lech Walesa, mud wrestling, Zinoviev, porn films, snow, feminism, Rio, Jacques Lacan, Stevie Wonder, Palermo, DNA and terrorism.“Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense. I’m trying to grasp a world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you’re no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm, or by traditional passions? Can things “tell” themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.”
Offers transcripts of interviews with French intellectual Jean Baudrillard, covering topics such as: Fukuyama; 1989 and the collapse of Communism; Bosnia; the Gulf War; Rwanda; the New World Order; consumer society and social exclusion; liberation; and nihilism.
Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. A summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years, this is an analysis of the fundamental conflict.
An analysis of how Mitterand came to power in France and how political power seduced the French Left and became a simulacrum.First published in French in 1985, The Divine Left is Jean Baudrillard's chronicle of French political life from 1977 to 1984. It offers the closest thing to political analysis to be found from a thinker who has too often been regarded as apolitical. Gathering texts that originally appeared as newspaper commentary on François Mitterand's rise to power as France's first Socialist president and the Socialist Party's fraught alliance with the French Communist Party, The Divine Left in essence presents Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum as it operates in the political sphere.In France, the Left, and even the ultra-Left, had been seduced by power. This scenario—dissected by Baudrillard with deadpan humor and an almost chilling nonchalance—produced a Socialist Party that devoted itself to rallying the market economy and introducing neoliberalism, and replaced an intellectual class with the media stars and hyper-professionals of the spectacle. Starting from the elections of 1977, Baudrillard analyzes—in "real time,” as it were—how the Left's taking of power had in fact been an enaction of not just its own death throes, but those of power itself. The Divine Left outlines a simulation of politics that offers discomfiting parallels to our political world today, a trajectory that has only grown more apparent in recent years: the desire and intention to fail.
Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault.In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault (1977) made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality—and of his entire oeuvre—and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext(e) edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim.
Part of "Radical Thinkers" series, this work presents key texts by philosophers and thinkers. It offers a postmodernist philosopher's tour-de-force contemplation on sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture after the 'orgy' of the 1960s.
Features postmodernity's quintessential theorist with his meditations on the meanings of objects.
Seminal essays written by Baudrillard for a journal devoted to a radical leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life.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.
Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations.
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
