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Product Description: Jean Baudrillard’s now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life—the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others—he finds that they are all characterised by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity...read more

Product Description: In his analysis of the deep social trends rooted in production, consumption, and the symbolic, Jean Baudrillard touches the very heart of the concerns of the generation currently rebelling against the framework of the consumer society...read more

Product Description: Mas alla de lo economico y lo politico, el poder mundial se afirma hoy en la influencia de la simulacion, de una simulacion operativa de todos los valores, de todas las culturas. El poder ya no se afirma a traves de la exportacion de las tecnicas, de los valores, de las ideologias, sino mediante la extrapolacion universal de una parodia de tales valores; la democracia se universaliza de forma caricaturesca, despectiva: los paises subdesarrollados siguen el ejemplo de simulacro del desarrollo y del crecimiento, los pueblos en vias de desaparicion siguen el ejemplo de la restitucion fantoche, disneyficada, de su cultura y todos estan fascinados por un modelo universal del que Norteamerica, sin dejar de contar las ganancias, es la primera victima...read more

In this, his most important collection of essays since Le systeme des objets, Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western culture “after the orgy”—the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the 1960s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a reign of transvestism, to a confusion of the categories of man and woman—to the “androgenous and Frankenstein appeal of a Michael Jackson.” The revolution in art has led to a “transaesthetic realm of indifference.” The cybernetic revolution has blurred the distinction between man and machine, while the political revolution has led to a ‘transpolitics’ that merely simulates old political forms. Such are the points of Baudrillard’s compass as he steers his way through the mental landscape of this febrile fin de siecle.

“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.           

Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault. In a torrent of haikus, which can now be seen as classically Baudrillardian, he swirls Foucault's concepts of repression, sexuality, production, consumption, and history around in an intense, and often comical, reversal of forces. Exceeding the boundaries of literary or philosophical critique, Baudrillard writes from beyond the horizon of political thought and in a space of phantasmic speculation, finally "using" Foucault's terminologies and public significance to launch his own form of occult, philosophical clarity. In the second half of the book, Baurillard meets his match in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer, who teases Baudrillard with his own ideas, in turn making commentaries on subjects as diverse as panic, ecstasy, and May '68.

Product Description: Seminal essays written by Baudrillard for a journal devoted to a radical leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life.The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste...read more