Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X in 1966. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007. His many works include Simulations and Simulacra, America, The Perfect Crime, The System of Objects, Passwords, The Transparency of Evil, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Fragments, among others.Blog
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Get your radical thinking caps on...To celebrate the publication of Set 5 of the Radical Thinkers series, Verso is offering 2 lucky winners the chance to win all available titles in the five sets published to date.
The highly popular series publishes new editions of important works of continental philosophy in beautifully-designed and affordable editions. Covering the full spectrum of critical thought, the series includes work from radical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno and many more.
First published in 2005, there are now 60 titles in the series. In 2009, set 4 was launched with a stunning and acclaimed new cover design from Rumors, which has become a hallmark of the series. They have been widely praised, including in the Guardian, Bookforum and the New Statesman.
Baudrillard's “stunning” America one of the Financial Times’ best non-fiction books of 2010
Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times' architecture critic, selects Jean Baudrillard's America as one of the best non-fiction books of 2010:
Baudrillard's stunning contemplation on the vastness of the US was first published in English in 1988 and is reissued here with an excellent introduction by Geoff Dyer.
Visit the Financial Times to read the full list.
Baudrillard's American road trip still resonates with P. D. Smith
Writing in the Guardian, PD Smith finds Jean Baudrillard's reflections on his travels through America in the early 1980s to be, "original, memorable and even funny".
Written while Reagan was president, Baudrillard's provocative account of this "obsessional society" remains relevant. From the "steepling gentleness" of New York's skyscrapers to the "limitless horizontality" of Los Angeles, he explores this New World, where the carpets have an "orgasmic elasticity" and the people are "like shadows that have escaped from Plato's cave.
Books
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Impossible Exchange
Jean Baudrillard's now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. -
Passwords
In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze’s Abécédaire, Passwords offers us twelve entry points into Baudrillard’s thought.
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America
“A sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left.”—New York Times
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The Transparency of Evil
Sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture, after the ‘orgy’ of the 1960s.
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The Perfect Crime
Baudrillard investigates the murder of reality—“the most important event of modern history.”
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Fragments
Disturbing and vivid meditations on the meanings of objects and sensations.
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The System of Objects
A tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard.
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The Spirit of Terrorism
Until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. -
Cool Memories IV
In this fourth collection of fragments and sketches, Baudrillard’s stance is that of a barely participant observer, rather than an interventionist intellectual.
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Cool Memories
Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense.