Pluto Classics
2 total works
In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the "false problem." One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists.
Jean Baudrillard is arguably one of the most central figures in the current debate on postmodernism, and this book is a selection of previously untranslated writings spanning his earliest works of the 1960s, through to his most recent. The book covers the major developments in his analysis of culture and society, the dynamics of his encounters with Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics and postmodernism.