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Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)

Author of Simulacra and Simulation

133+ Works 9,839 Members 59 Reviews 22 Favorited

About the Author

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first show more century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. show less
Image credit: Jean Baudrillard appears on the TV literary program "Vol de Nuit" to discuss his book "Cool Memories V" (Galilée) on the theme "Men of Conviction", 10 may 2005

Works by Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulation (1981) 2,104 copies
America (1986) 786 copies
The System of Objects (1968) 648 copies
Simulations (1983) 480 copies
Seduction (1979) 302 copies
Forget Foucault (1977) 258 copies
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987) 239 copies
The Perfect Crime (1995) 239 copies
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) 213 copies
The Conspiracy of Art (2000) 211 copies
Fatal Strategies (1983) 202 copies
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (1988) — Author — 199 copies
The Illusion of the End (1992) 196 copies
Cool Memories (1987) 147 copies
The Mirror of Production (1973) 147 copies
Impossible Exchange (1999) 133 copies
Passwords (2002) 131 copies
Screened Out (2002) 126 copies
The Agony of Power (1978) 106 copies
Cool Memories II, 1987-1990 (1987) 65 copies
The Vital Illusion (2000) 64 copies
Looking Back on the End of the World (1989) — Editor — 56 copies
Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000 (2000) 43 copies
Cultura y Simulacro (1978) 28 copies
Radical Alterity (1994) 26 copies
Cool Memories V: 2000-2004 (1987) 26 copies
Power inferno (2002) 23 copies
Evil Demon of Images (1987) 18 copies
Telemorphosis (2001) 18 copies
The Desert (2000) 17 copies
Exiles from Dialogue (1994) 17 copies
La violence du monde (2003) 14 copies
Pataphysics (2002) 14 copies
Il Dono: The Gift (2002) 12 copies
The Universitas Project (2006) 8 copies
Cyberfilosofia (1998) 7 copies
The Uncollected Baudrillard (2001) — Author — 6 copies
Xerox and infinity (1991) 5 copies
Il sogno della merce (1995) 4 copies
La pensee radicale (1994) 4 copies
Kusursuz Cinayet (2012) 4 copies
Short cuts (2003) 3 copies
EL TROMPE-L'OEIL (2014) 2 copies
Can Cekisen Küresel Güc (2017) 2 copies
Karnaval ve Yamyam (2012) 2 copies
Art and philosophy (1991) 2 copies
Bir Parcadan Ötekine (2015) 1 copy
ECRAN TOTAL (1997) 1 copy
"Lisons !" 1 copy
L'America 1 copy
Cool Anılar III-IV (2017) 1 copy
Silling 1 (1982) 1 copy

Associated Works

Our Tragic Universe (2010) — Contributor — 767 copies
The New Media Reader (2003) — Contributor — 297 copies
Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984) — Contributor — 223 copies
The Cultures of Collecting (Critical Views) (1993) — Contributor — 108 copies
Jean Baudrillard (2008) — Contributor — 3 copies
Fiction 2 : Del Soggetto (1977) — Contributor — 1 copy

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I am putting makeup on empty space
all patinas convening on empty space
rouge blushing on empty space
I am putting makeup on empty space
pasting eyelashes on empty space
painting the eyebrows of empty space
piling creams on empty space
painting the phenomenal world — Anne Waldman

"Mix and Match: A Furry Bicycle is an Example of a __________"
Of my scant memories from grade-school, I recall drafting a Goosebumps story about a summer camp run by skeletons (themes of stranger danger), and also a moment of perplexity at a bizarre grown-up phrase: "Conversation Piece." That an object (such as a "furry bicycle") might be an occasion to dispense a pithy anecdote prepared in advance struck that child as bizarre. What a way to constrain a conversation to a series of fixed remarks and set-pieces, however amusing. (This, unfortunately, remains the mainstay of so-called conversation-between-adults.) The Conversation Piece as a way of filling empty space — in a situation where the right words aren't at hand.

In more regimented form, this is also what is happening on the blank line of a not-insubstantial number of university papers. The intelligent student, when stumped, fills the page with much that can be said to be true, much that is neither-true-nor-untrue, and, perhaps, a little that is pertinent. (The Visuddhimaggha has a term for work such as this, "Bean-soupery is resemblance to bean soup; for just as when beans are being cooked only a few [stay hard] so too the person in whose speech only a little is true, the rest being false, is called a 'bean soup;' his state is bean-soupery." (The felicitous similarity between the syllables (B.S.) reminds us that The Ancients were already fed up with Bull Shit.).)

Baudrillard, titan that he is, has a nose that knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark Capital, but his smelling sense is not very precise. Fortunately, he has studied the 'Class Material', so that much of what we get is true-in-part. Some remarks on Digital Capital that are correct, albeit not groundbreaking:

• "From now on, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on condition that they are no longer exchanged against the real)." (48)
• "Today all labor falls under a single definition, [. . .] service-labor." (61)
• "[Wages] are no longer in any proportional or equivalence relation at all, they are a sacrament, like a baptism (or the Extreme Unction)," (64)
• "Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value." (87)
• "Marxism and psychoanalysis [. . .] may yet do each other great collateral damage. We must not be deprived of this spectacle: they are only critical fields." (366) (already passé, but credit where it's due. . .)

But beyond these phrases from the Good Book, we are in a very cold space. Death (violent type), is subsequently presented as the appropriate response to the incessant circulation of signs:
"There is no other alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying alive, since there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only the surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death, constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of abolishing power. No revolutionary strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at stake, since this is what the master puts off in the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be put to death, refuse to live in the mortal reprieve of power, refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to settle this long-term credit through the slow death of labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this abject dimension, in the fatality of power. Violent death changes everything," (91)

Certainly, violent revolution without-a-cause (empty teleology/eschatology) is destabilizing to any system, though, more than a focused critique-of-Capital, this section of the text has the character of a critique by smell. Not just the teleology of, "smells bad, throw the whole thing out of the refrigerator," but the imprecision of "I think it's coming from this container," and the instinctual revulsion of, "Stinky!" (A reminder for writers: the extended metaphor is only half as clever as you think it is.)

Violent death, as a gift that cannot be exchanged ("there is no counter-gift") constitutes an empty space (there is nothing after death), but this space is already being filled (in the same way an empty refrigerator continues to stink). Robbe-Grillet notes, "Metaphysics loves a vacuum, and rushes into it like smoke up a chimney; for, within immediate signification, we find the absurd, which is theoretically non-signification, but which as a matter of fact leads immediately, by a well-known metaphysical recuperation, to a new transcendence." Our bright-eyed revolutionary is giving himself over to the violent death act, perhaps for the sake of a 'better tomorrow.' To the extent that this act can be legibly inscribed with the signs of exchange, the violent death is already failing. We arrive at the position from which we hasten a violent death to the end that, "the system must itself itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide," (87) but one less legible than the "taking of hostages" (for exchange) Baudrillard prescribes. To go one level further than this would be to take those we had sought to protect as hostages. (This is already at the level of Kierkegaard's Demonic Dread which, in despair, renounces the ethical.) But just as in Baudrillard's analysis of "systems of totality" which collapse at the moment they triumph and become a total identity, the 'perfected' violent revolutionary act is no longer capable of being performed. The actor-beyond-exchange who is giving up everything --> for the future --> for nothing, is already the post-revolutionary who is cynically asking, "Why can't someone else do it?" — Excepting the (not infrequent) situation of the mental block. (Kierkegaard is also remarking on the man who is humorous because he has gone so far as to die for his cause, which upon further inspection, it appears he didn't believe).

This is perhaps why, in the most significant sentence in the text, Baudrillard pre-emptively walks back his later unequivocal exhortation to violence. In the second footnote to the preface: "Death ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body, but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost. " (45) Nowhere else in Baudrillard will we have such a frank admission to playing loose with life that is actually being lived as someone else (e.g. another meaning of Waldman's poem above.) We are already suspicious of the phrase, "Security as Blackmail," (279) which the Sloterdijks and Baudrillards of the world wield against seatbelts and social security. The argument that we are helping the System out of the brutality it deserves (i.e. "the automobile death") is obliterated the by (socialist) maxim that nobody deserves anything (bad), which is already the basis of a more robust response to Capital, and perhaps one better appreciated by those already dead.
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Joe.Olipo | Jan 1, 2024 |
If I were solely reviewing the eponymous essay then I’d give this book top marks, Baudrillard does an extraordinary job at imploding the micropolitics/physics of both Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari’s theories, making them careen out of their orbit like a spinning top (spatial metaphors abound in here relating to the kind of moves Baudrillard makes, but that labyrinthine ratcheting up of the stakes, fully affirming the premises and pushing them to their utmost limit, is basically the gist - creating a crisis within theory itself until it has no term or end to justify it and thus causing it to disappear). I really recommend that particular essay, and it stands as a great introduction to Baudrillard’s thought more generally - I hope Baudrillard’s truly evocative statement that power no longer exists, perhaps has never existed, unless it tries to cannibalise and disintegrate itself, has been taken up by others - there’s so much to be said on the matter, and it’s endlessly fascinating. Equally impressive is just how dense the collection of interviews at the end are in comparison to the main essay, I mean the exchanges are so pithy (read as curt), and the topics glossed over so numerous, that they alone took me absolutely ages to finish. They are likely worth stumbling through for the most ardent of Baudrillard afficionados, but I think I probably could have spent my time better elsewhere. Sparknotes version - read main essay, its a real goodun, and skim the interviews at the end (the topics discussed are outlined at the start of each interview so you can jump in at random points if you’re interested in such things as seduction, nuclear warfare, terrorism, dizziness/grace, Jesuits, the event, the media, “the game”, May ‘68 etc. etc.).… (more)
 
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theoaustin | 1 other review | Dec 26, 2023 |
Consider Zinedine Zidane’s head butt and dismissal in his final game and World Cup final 2006: “it was almost as if a great Shakespearean actor, playing King Lear at the National Theatre for the last time, interrupted his final soliloquy by punching the dead Cordelia and then announcing his life-long hatred for producers, directors and – especially – the paying public” (Smith, 2009:28) The butt was a “decisive, brutal, prosaic, novelistic act: a perfect moment of ambiguity under the Berlin sky, a few dizzying seconds of ambivalence, where beauty and blackness, violence and passion, come into contact and provoke the short-circuit of a wholly unscripted act…Zidane’s act knows not the aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime, it stands beyond the moral categories of good and evil, its value, its strength and its substance owing only to their irreducible congruence with the precise moment in time at which it occurred” (Toussaint, 2007: 12). For Baudrillard it was a singular exhibition of indifference to global power. It was “a stunning act of disqualification, of sabotage, of ‘terrorism’. By blighting this ritual of planetary identification, these nuptials between sport and planet, by refusing to be the idol and mirror of globalization in such an emblematic event, he is denying the universal pact that permits the transfiguration of our sad reality by Good and allows billions of unidentified human beings to find an identity in the void (the same sublimation operates in the sacred illusions of war)…And it was, indeed, stigmatized as an act of desertion, but, as such, it also became simultaneously a cult gesture: by passing from the peak of performance to the peak of dysfunction, to the thwarting of Good in all its splendour, it suddenly pointed up the Nothingness at the heart of globalization…And all this by a simple act that is not in any sense a gesture of revolt…Certainly the most glorious (and most elegant) ‘scandal’ we have been afforded for many years. It is a ‘blow’ by which everyone can be said to have lost the World Cup. But isn’t that better than having won a victory for globalization itself?” (Baudrillard, 2010b: 78).… (more)
 
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Maristot | 1 other review | Jun 5, 2023 |
Lexo Amerikën të zbulosh të nëndheshmen e një kontinenti përrallash. Të qasësh një tjetër univers, një tjetër kohë, një tjetër botë. Të rrokësh imazhet e një utopie të çuditshme që, pa reshtur, përkundet mes ëndrrës dhe realitetit.
 
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BibliotekaFeniks | 7 other reviews | Jan 20, 2023 |

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ISBNs
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