Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, is in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.
The hypothesis of this book is that the deterrence of war in the traditional sense has been internalized and turned back upon the Western powers, producing a form of self-deterrence which renders them incapable of realizing their own power in the form of relations of force.
In this, his most accessible and evocative book, France's leading philosopher of postmodernism takes to the freeways in a collection of traveler's tales from the land of hyperreality.
In this remarkable book, Jean Baudrillard - France's leading theorist of postmodernity - argues that the notion of the end is part of the fantasy of a linear history. Today we are not approaching the end of history but moving into reverse, into a process of systematic obliteration. We are wiping out the entire twentieth century, effacing all signs ...
Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge ...
Published for the first time in English, this is Jean Baudrillard's earliest book, written in 1968, at a time when (as the author would put it later), "The society of the spectacle and its denunciation were still the focal point of semiological, psychoanalytical and sociological arguments". Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the ...
We are at war. 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. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is ...
'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. G ...
Jean Baudrillard is arguably one of the most central figures in the current debate on postmodernism, and this book is a selection of previously untranslated writings spanning his earliest works of the 1960s, through to his most recent. The book covers the major developments in his analysis of culture and society, the dynamics of his encounters ...
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. This major work, appearing in English for the first time, occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of ...
'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 ...
Jean 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 ...
Closely interviewed by the French journalist Philippe Petit, Baudrillard covers a vast range of topics, including Fukuyama, 1989 and the collapse of Communism; Bosnia, the Gulf War, Rwanda and the New World Order; globalization and universalization; the return of ethnic nationalisms; the nature of war; revisionism and Holocaust denial; Deleuze, ...
"It is paradoxical to form a retrospective overview of an oeuvre that never sought to be prospective...Doubtless one should put oneself ion the position of an imaginary traveller who came upon these writings as if they were a lost manuscript and, for want of supporting documents, subsequently strove to reconstitute the society they describe." In ...
In this book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, Jean Baudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet be solved: the "murder" of reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the social and technological processes by which is becoming a thing of (empty) transparency and visibility, a ...
Now available in English for the first time, Jean Baudrillard's classic text was one of the first to focus on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. Originally published in 1970, the book still makes a vital contribution to current debates on consumption. Many of the themes which would make Baudrillard famous appear here ...
This anthology features a breadth of work from cultural commentator Baudrillard, with translations of his major writings from the 1960s through to his critiques of Marxism in the 1970s and sexuality in the 1980s. The book serves as an introduction to those unfamiliar with his writings, as it features a range of commentary and choice of texts, and ...
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 ...
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 ...
What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, ...
In this collection of his work, which represents a key text on postmodernism, Baudrillard challenges many of our assumptions about the world in which we live. Claiming that the world is sworn to extremes, he turns received wisdom on its head, arguing for the triumph of unreason and of the victory of the pure object and its "ironic strategy" over ...
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. They called it "Exiles from Dialogue" as a mirrored homage to ...
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