Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history? What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? In The Vital Illusion―as always―Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions. Baudrillard considers how human cloning―as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities―heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of self-replicating cells. By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it. Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corps(e) of the Real―if there is any―has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found." Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor, The Vital Illusion exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives.

The Vital Illusion

Literature & Fiction

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

Witwer, Julia

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

The Jean Baudrillard Reader (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a controversial social and cultural theorist known for his trenchant analyses of media and technological communication. Belonging to the generation of French thinkers that included Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard has at times been vilified by his detractors, but the influence of his work on critical thought and pop culture is impossible to deny (many might recognize his name from The Matrix movies, which claimed to be based on the French theorist's ideas).Steve Redhead takes a fresh look at Baudrillard in relation to the intellectual and political climates in which he wrote. Baudrillard sought to produce a theory of modernity, but the modern world of the 1950s was radically different from the reality of the early twenty-first century. Beginning with Baudrillard's initial publications in the 1960s and concluding with his writings on 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, Redhead guides the reader through Baudrillard's difficult texts and unorthodox views on current issues. He also proposes an original theory of Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism, presenting the theorist's work as "non-postmodernist," after Bruno Latour's concept of "non-modernity." Each section of the Reader includes an extract from one of Baudrillard's writings, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction that places the piece in context and puts the debate surrounding the theorist into sharp perspective. The conflict over Baudrillard's legacy stems largely from the fact that a comprehensive selection of his writings has yet to be translated and collected into one volume. The Jean Baudrillard Reader provides an expansive and much-needed portrait of the critic's resonant work.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a controversial social and cultural theorist known for his trenchant analyses of media and technological communication. Belonging to the generation of French thinkers that included Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard has at times been vilified by his detractors, but the influence of his work on critical thought and pop culture is impossible to deny (many might recognize his name from The Matrix movies, which claimed to be based on the French theorist's ideas). Steve Redhead takes a fresh look at Baudrillard in relation to the intellectual and political climates in which he wrote. Baudrillard sought to produce a theory of modernity, but the modern world of the 1950s was radically different from the reality of the early twenty-first century. Beginning with Baudrillard's initial publications in the 1960s and concluding with his writings on 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, Redhead guides the reader through Baudrillard's difficult texts and unorthodox views on current issues. He also proposes an original theory of Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism, presenting the theorist's work as "non-postmodernist," after Bruno Latour's concept of "non-modernity." Each section of the Reader includes an extract from one of Baudrillard's writings, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction that places the piece in context and puts the debate surrounding the theorist into sharp perspective. The conflict over Baudrillard's legacy stems largely from the fact that a comprehensive selection of his writings has yet to be translated and collected into one volume. The Jean Baudrillard Reader provides an expansive and much-needed portrait of the critic's resonant work.

In a provocative analysis written during the unfolding drama of 1992, Baudrillard draws on his concepts of simulation and the hyperreal to argue that the Gulf War did not take place but was a carefully scripted media event―a "virtual" war.
Patton’s introduction argues that Baudrillard, more than any other critic of the Gulf War, correctly identified the stakes involved in the gestation of the New World Order.

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

Indiana University Press

Arts & Photography

Examines modern critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and discusses the modern concept of sex roles and the political aspect of human sexuality.

Seduction

Self-Help

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

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. Perhaps most interestingly, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to his contemporaries: thinkers such as Bataille and the Situationists, Barthes, Lyotard, and Deleuze, amongst others. Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard will be essential reading for any scholar of Baudrillard, but will also prove an attractive and informative starting point for any student trying to get to grips with his work for the first time.

Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard

Routledge

The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

University of Michigan Press

The Revenge of the Crystal: A Baudrillard Reader

Social Sciences

Pluto Press

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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BAUDRILLARD, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BAUDRILLARD, Jean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BAUDRILLARD, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Vital Illusion

The Jean Baudrillard Reader (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

The Jean Baudrillard Reader (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

Seduction

Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

The Revenge of the Crystal: A Baudrillard Reader

The Revenge of the Crystal: A Baudrillard Reader