Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality

Couverture
Routledge, 12 nov. 2007 - 222 pages

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.

 

Table des matières

Chapter The Break with Marxism 28
Chapter Symbolic Exchange and Death 47
Chapter Simulation and the End of the Social 70
Chapter The Body Sexuality and Seduction 91
Chapter Into the Fourth Order 107
Chapter War Terrorism and 911 133
Chapter Subjectivity Identity and Agency 150
Conclusion 168
Bibliography 186
Index 194

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À propos de l'auteur (2007)

William Pawlett is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He received his PhD in Sociology from Loughborough University and is on the editorial board of The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.

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