Jean Baudrillard

The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought

Simulacra and Simulation

Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, The System of Objects offersa cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillardclassifies the everyday objects of the "new technical order" asfunctional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts "modern" and"traditional" functional objects, subjecting home furnishing andinterior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment ofnonfunctional or "marginal" objects focuses on antiques and thepsychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends tothe useless, the aberrant and even the "schizofunctional." Finally,Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit andadvertising for the commodification of everyday life. The System of Objectsis a tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the earlyBaudrillard, who emerges in retrospect as something of a lightning rodfor all the live ideas of the day: Bataille's political economy of"expenditure" and Mauss's theory of the gift; Reisman's lonely crowdand the "technological society" of Jacques Ellul; the structuralism ofRoland Barthes in The System of Fashion; Henri Lefebvre's workon the social construction of space; and last, but not least, GuyDebord's situationist critique of the spectacle.

The System of Objects

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 for the first time. The book includes Baudrillard's most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure and anomie in affluent society. A chapter on the body demonstrates Baudrillard's extraordinary prescience for flagging vital subjects in contemporary culture long before others. This English translation begins with an introductory essay by Ge

Ses Mythes, Ses Structures

Société de Consommation

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.

America

'This is easily Baudrillard's most important work. It is a key intervention in the debates on modernity and postmodernity and the site of his postmodern turn. Anyone who wants to understand the complexity and provocativeness of Baudrillard's richest period must read this text' -Douglas Kellner

Symbolic Exchange and Death

Hazal Deliceçaylı

Ferda Keskin

Tüketim toplumu

The Ecstasy of Communication

Simülakrlar ve simülasyon

Until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself.

The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays

In a provocative analysis written during the unfolding drama of 1992, Baudrillard draws on his concepts of simulation and the hyperreal to argue that the Gulf War did not take place but was a carefully scripted media event -- a "virtual" war. Patton's introduction argues that Baudrillard, more than any other critic of the Gulf War, correctly identified the stakes involved in the gestation of the New World Order.

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

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.

Forget Foucault, new edition

Examines modern critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and discusses the modern concept of sex roles and the political aspect of human sexuality.

Seduction

Alain Willaume

A meditation on the question of disappearance explores variations on the theme ranging from the disappearance of humanity to the vanishing of reality.

Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

The Conspiracy of Art

The year 2000, the end of the millennium: is this anything other than a mirage, the illusion of an end, like so many other imaginary endpoints which have littered the path of history? In this remarkable book Jean Baurdrillard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 of the cold War one by one, perhaps even the signs of the First and Second World Wars and of the political and ideological revolutions of our time. In short, we are engaged in a gigantic process of historical revisionism, and we seem in a hurry to finish it before the end of the century, secretly hoping perhaps to be able to begin again from scratch. Baudrillard explores the "fatal strategies of time" which shape our ways of thinking about history and its imaginary end. Ranging from the revolutions in Eastern Europe to the Gulf War, from the transformation of nature to the hyper-reality of the media, this postmodern mediation on modernity and its aftermath will be widely read.

L'illusion de la Fin

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. Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1977). It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext(e)'s new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was 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.In effect Baudrillard's essay (it quickly became a must to read both in the art world and in academe) was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is.

Jean Baudrillard

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