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The famous postmodernist thinker turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.
"Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled."—Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman...
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Disturbing and vivid meditations on the meanings of objects and sensations, from postmodernity's quintessential theorist. This third book in the Cool Memories series is culled from Baudrillard's notebooks in the period when he was composing The Illusion of the End and The Perfect Crime. In it, he resumes his investigation of the meta-metaphysics of objects. Like its predecessors, the book is a work of brief meditations, of poetic musings: in a word, of fragments. ....
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The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought. ...
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A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day....
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The renowned postmodernist philosopher’s tour-de-force contemplation of sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture after the revolutionary ‘orgy’ of the 1960s. “The most important and original French thinker of the past twenty years.” --J.G. Ballard ...
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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 he has already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney World, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the 1995 French public sector workers' strike, the Rushdie fatwa, mad cow disease and genetic cloning. 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. ...
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Jean Baudrillard is one of the most controversial and stimulating figures in contemporary philosophy and cultural criticism. Whether embraced or reviled for his reflections on 'hyperreality', he never fails to evoke strong reactions. Yet, all too often, discussion of Baudrillard's ideas takes place at one remove, with much imputed to him. It is sometimes claimed that his writing is too abstract or obscure to analyse rigorously. The Indifferent Paroxyst offers the reader a new way to approach Baudrillard's ideas through the use of the interview format. Closely questioned by 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; globalisation and universalisation; the return of ethnic nationalisms; the nature of war; revisionism and Holocaust denial; Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille and Virilio; nihilism and the apocalyptic; the practice of writing; virtual reality; the West and the East; the culture of victimhood and repentance; human rights and citizenship; French intellectuals and engagement; the nature of capitalism today; consumer society and social exclusion; liberation; death, violence and necrophilia; reality, illusion and the media; and destabilisation of all aspects of life, including sexuality. Baudrillard's answers--which span politics, philosophy and culture--are concise, witty and trenchant, and they serve both as an accessible introduction to his ideas for the newcomer and as a fascinating clarification of recent positions for the connoisseur....
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“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,” writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in March 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical “subject,” whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a “pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.” Interspersed throughout the text are 15 photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard’s argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen—some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms—yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a “vital dimension” of the existence of things. ...
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