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Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: '"Cool Memories" is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in a classical sense... I'm trying to grasp the world in all its silences and brutality. Jean Baudrillard

Product Description: Baudrillard’s work of the last two decades has downplayed the position of the critical subject and gone over to the standpoint of the object. Nowhere is this objective (non-)critique which results so clearly played out as in the Cool Memories series...read more

Product Description: Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed “France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism” and “a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left,” he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture...read more

Product Description: Baudrillard’s work of the last two decades has downplayed the position of the critical subject and gone over to the standpoint of the object. Nowhere is this objective (non-)critique which results so clearly played out as in the Cool Memories series...read more

Product Description: De la seducción es el último libro perverso de Jean Baudrillard, perverso en el sentido de aquél que pervierte el orden de los términos.

In this collection of his work, which represents a key text on postmodernism, Baudrillard challenges many of our assumptions about the world in which we live. Claiming that the world is sworn to extremes, he turns received wisdom on its head, arguing for the triumph of unreason and of the victory of the pure object and its "ironic strategy" over the subject. He looks at illusion, secrets, the visible and the hidden, and claims that the only possible response to the delirious world is the ultimatum of realism and the Principle of Evil.

Having been sought in the sphere of economic production for too long, according to Jean Baudrillard, the mainspring of modern society must be located in the sphere of consumption and of the cultural system in general. As with artistic, intellectual, and scientific production, culture is immediately produced as sign and as exchange value. Hence, in modern society consumption defines the stages where the commodity is immediately produced as sign, and signs as commodities. This collection of essays attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx's critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form: as the commodity is at the same time both exchange value and use value, the sign is both signifier and signified. Thus, it necessitates an analysis on two levels, with the author confronting all of the conceptual obstacles of semiology in order to provide the same radical critique that Marx developed of classical political economy.

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: Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the post-modern. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard is on sparkling form and explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as outsider in the field of great French thinkers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: “Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment enjoys an equal distinction. Even the most banal finds exceptional reader. Each, in turn, has its hour of glory. Of course, each fragment could become a book...read more

Product Description: More cool memories from the master of postmodernism. 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...read more

Product Description: 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 BaurdrillardFrance's leading theorist of postmodernityargues that the notion of the end is part of the fantasy of a linear history...read more