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Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important and provocative writers in the contemporary era. Widely acclaimed as the prophet of postmodernism, he has famously announced the disappearance of the subject, meaning, truth, class and the notion of reality itself. Although he worked as a sociologist, his writing has enjoyed a wide interdisciplinary popularity and influence. He is read by students of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, literature, French and geography.

Organized into eight sections, the volumes provide the most complete guide to Baudrillard currently available:

Section 1:Theoretical Issues

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'In January of 1972, The Museum of Modern Art hosted "The Universitas Project," a two-day conference sponsored by the Museum’s International Council and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. The distinguished participants, from a wide range of scholarly and artistic disciplines, including Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Gyorgy Kepes, Octavio Paz, Anatol Rapoport, Meyer Schapiro, Carl Schorske and Jivan Tabibian, among many others, engaged in a multidisciplinary debate on the future of design and design institutions in the postindustrial era. The project, conceived and directed by the noted architect and designer Emilio Ambasz, then Curator of Design at the Museum, was originally described as "a critical and prospective inquiry into the relation of man to the natural and the sociocultural environment...specifically planned to explore the possibility of establishing in the United States a new type of institution centered around the task of evaluating and designing the man-made milieu." This important volume publishes in their entirety the various components of the conference: the working papers that set the terms of the debate; the essays submitted by the invitees; the proceedings of the symposia responding to the papers; and the postscripts provided by the participants after the event. It makes this chapter in the intellectual history of the Museum, addressing issues and ideas still relevant today, available for the first time to scholars, the architecture and design community and the general public. ... Read more

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This uniquely engaging introduction to Jean Baudrillard’s controversial writings covers his entire career focusing on Baudrillard’s 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 theorizsation 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.

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Helping to Understand Warhol
Andy Warhol remains to be one of the most prominent figures of American art. His approach and philosophy crashed the traditional thinking of high art in America. Americans more so than other cultures have always regarded art as a definition of individuality. Particularly in comparison to what had been happening Europe already. Much of Warhol's career slams that idea. For him, art was first and foremost a tool a communication which also highlights the modern debate of whether or not graphic design is art.

In order to understand Warhol's ideology, you cannot simply know only a few pieces. It the collective body of his work that defines his philosophy. The individual can still be appreciated, but much like the writing of Vonnegut or the science of Hawking, it is much more comprehensive to know a number of works.

This book collects the work, but comes complete with essays that summarize and explain the work. The contributors are amazingly involved with Warhol. They have curated the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and known his work intimately. This perspective is a unique insight into an artist that is arguably one of the most misunderstood of our time. ... Read more

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This book relates Baudrillard's work to contemporary social r4248y.The author traces the connections between Baudrillard's work and Marx and Marxism; Lefebvre and structuralist method; the works of Saussure, Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, Mauss, Peirce, McLuhan and the Prague School.The result is an authoritative and stimulating account of Baudrillard and modern social theory. ... Read more

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"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 "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. ... Read more

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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

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‘In a sense, we do not believe in the Year 2000’, says French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Still more disturbing is his claim that the millennium might not take place. Baudrillard’s analysis of ‘Y2K’ reveals a repentant culture intent on storing, mourning and laundering its past, and a world from which even the possibility of the ‘end of history’ has vanished. Yet behind this bleak vision of integrated reality, Baudrillard identifies enigmatic possibilities and perhaps a final ironic twist.

‘Baudrillard and the Millennium’ confronts the strategies of this major cultural analyst’s encounter with the greatest non-event of the postmodern age, and accounts for the critical censure of Baudrillard’s enterprise. Key topics, such as natural catastrophes, the body, ‘victim culture’, identity and Internet viruses, are discussed in reference to the development of Jean Baudrillard’s millenarian thought from the 1980s to the threshold of the Year 2000 – from simulation to disappearance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Superb
Here is a book for Christmas and other sites of predatory concern, for synchronised office parties and galas galore, a redolent guide to all good stuff, plus a snip at the price - better than photocopying a fiver hoping that old dear in the sweetshop won't blink or bat at handing over the Woodbines... especially in academic circles where the spirit is barbed bashed and bitter and all flesh is weak - so to speak... and all bets are off on ecstasy until that coveted win. Meantime sidleup to the dean and wink in the fellow's tin underpants with a spot ofhis meretricious Spanish Chardonnay...then nestle up to the Standing Committee for Academic Merit[...] then dash off a piece on pumping pomo pumas scattering observations far and wide in a swathe of brillianceand then potter down the pub for ten or so pints a bottle or three of that vin rouge washed down with a plate of fat wet chips plus mine's a treble... only to stagger back and throw up a lecture to the bemused second years serve the lazy rascals right! and finally...Of course, and naturally - even though there is apparently no such thing as Nature, not really, so they all tell us, it's all in the mind that we are all going out of... I jest... even though there is no such thing a jest, not really, especially not after that miserable old fake Freudmurderedthe topic, and as for us what about human agency and where does that fit in? Nowhere it seems certainly not on the number 231 to... ... Read more

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Jean Baudrillard is a pivotal figure in contemporary cultural theory. Without doubt one of the foremost European thinkers of the last fifty years, his work has provoked debate and controversy across a number of disciplines, yet his significance has so far been largely ignored by feminist theorists. ... Read more

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Extremely Comprehensive
This book not only gives a comprehensive understanding of Baudrillard's concepts of reversion and simulation, but deals with practically every criticism of Baudrillard systematically and concretely. The explanation of the implications for feminism are clear and weaved skillfully throughout the book, though anyone interested in Baudrillard for non-feminist reasons should try this book. ... Read more

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· EDITORIAL · DISNEYWORLD COMPANY, CRIAR POLS Jean Baudrillard · MASSIMO VITALI · UNA FORÇA DE TREBALL JOVE Carles Guerra · BIEL CAPLLONCH - SERGIO CABALLERO Carles Guerra · SANTIAGO SIERRA, VERS UNA ESTÈTICA REMUNERADA, Taiyana Pimentel · 7 SEAS MARINER · STADIUM Antoni Muntadas ·· CADAQUÉS, Passanelles, Barana per una festa infantil, Toni Gironès · GIRONA, Temps de flors, 10x15 col·lectiu · BARCELONA, Any Gaudí, Instal·lació al Palau Robert - Centenari Sert, Caseta per a la ciutat del repòs i les vacances, f-451, Josep Llinàs · U2 "POPMART" - TINA TURNER "TWENTY FOUR SEVEN" - ROLLING STONES "LICKS" Mark Fisher · TOKYO, GOLF URBÀ, Kurt Handlbauer · CAFÉ MUSIQUES David Trottin, Emmanuelle Marin, Louis Paillard, Anne-Françoise Jumeau, Dominique Jakob, Brendan Macfarlane · Expo02 Arteplage, EL MONÒLIT, Architectures Jean Nouvel · Expo02 Arteplage, EDIFICI BLUR, Diller + Scofidio · VERS EL ZERO ABSOLUT Hans Ibelings · BRAMSCHE-KALKRIESE, Parc i Museu Arqueològic, Annette Gigon, Mike Guyer · ALCOBENDAS, Museu de la Ciència - KOYANG, Aquàrium i centre esportiu, Esteve Terradas, Robert Terradas · INNSBRUCK, Ajuntament, centre comercial, hotel i espai públic - BADALONA, Complex esportiu, Dominique Perrault · ST. JACOB PARK, Estadi de futbol, centre comercial, residència d'avis, Herzog & de Meuron · MONTE-CARLO, Dic semiflotant a la Condamine, Doris Engineering · BARCELONA, Moll de Barcelona, Jordi Henrich, Olga Tarrasó · YOKOHAMA, Terminal del port internacional, Foreign Office Architects · ... Read more

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En torno a los objetos singulares se urde la trama de esta conversacion entre un filosofo - Jean Baudrillard - y un arquitecto - Jean Nouvel -. Que es un objeto singular? Es lo opuesto a lo neutro, a lo global; es lo irrepetible, lo indestructible, lo que guarda un secreto, lo que seduce a pesar de ser feo. Estas cuestiones son tratadas en un encuentro singular entre dos pensadores. ... Read more

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Hovering between generosity and insult, seduction and trap, homage and defiance, the gift is a gesture with which relations are established and desires intertwined. In a world in which personal interactions are more and more sternly regulated, in which the symbolic value of things has been lost, to reflect upon the work of art as a gift means to emphasize its ability to establish new types of relationships and encounters. Fifty artists, including Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeoise, Clegg & Guttmann, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mona Hatoum, Alfredo Jaar, Joseph Kosuth, Piero Manzoni, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, and Gabriel Orozco, have fashioned gifts of object and self, gifts of one's own body and of symbols, discreet and intrusive gifts, free handouts and exaggerated donations. In the spirit of giving, a bountiful range of philosophers, anthropologists, art critics, and essayists offer their own complimentary musings on the idea of the gift. Featuring: Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeoise, Clegg & Guttmann, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mona Hatoum, Zhang Huan, Alfredo Jaar, Joseph Kosuth, Piero Manzoni, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, and others.
Edited by Gianfranco Maraniello, Sergio Risaliti, and Antonio Somaini. Essays by Jean Baudrillard, Dan Cameron, Jean-Luc Nancy, Harald Szeemann.

6.75 x 9.5 in.
120 color, 126 b/w illustrations
English/Italian ... Read more