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Jean Baudrillard
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Jean Baudrillard

Four Volume Set
Edited by:

Other Titles in:
Social Theory

September 2000 | 1 664 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important and provocative writers in the contemporary era. Widely acclaimed as the prophet of postmodernism, he has famously announced the disappearance of the subject, meaning, truth, class and the notion of reality itself. Although he worked as a sociologist, his writing has enjoyed a wide interdisciplinary popularity and influence. He is read by students of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, literature, French and geography.

Organized into eight sections, the volumes provide the most complete guide to Baudrillard currently available:

Section 1: Theoretical Issues

In this section the central themes informing Baudrillard's work are defined and discussed. Baudrillard's place in contemporary social thought is examined through considerations of how his work has been received. The importance of signs and the sign economy in Baudrillard's analysis is highlighted. The case for treating Baudrillard as a seminal theorist in contemporary social thought is elucidated.

Section 2: Postmodernism

Baudrillard is reluctant to regard himself as a postmodernist. Nonetheless, it is as the leading theorist of postmodernism that he is widely celebrated and generally known. This section explores Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism and demonstrates his specific contribution. Questions of Baudrillards relation to capitalism, commodification, fatalism, Lyotard, Jameson and politics are explored.

Section 3: Culture

It is now commonplace to refer to the period since the late 1980s as `the cultural turn'. Baudrillard's work provided a leading exponent of the significance of culture in understanding contemporary life. Included here are reflections on Baudrillard and corporate culturalism, power, ideology, simulation, mass media, Disney, hyperreality and leisure.

Section 4: War

In the 1990s Baudrillard became famous for the thesis that `the gulf war did not happen'. For some critics, it revealed the poverty of Baudrillard's approach. For others it showed more profoundly why his thought is an indispensable tool in grappling with the complexities of contemporary society. At all events, Baudrillard's treatment of the war represented a climacteric in critical responses to Baudrillard. In this section the various range of responses to Baudrillard's intervention are precisely delineated, providing the reader with the essential data required to decide if Baudrillard's thesis is right or wrong.

Section 5: America

America dazzles and appalls Baudrillard. In America and of Cool Memories 1&2, he documents his violent responses to America as an idea; a physical space. Included here are reflections on Baudrillard, America and postmodernism; Baudrillard's significance as an ethnographer of US life; Baudrillard and American film; Baudrillard and Reagan's America; and Baudrillard, America and the politics of simulation.

Section 6: Seduction

Baudrillard's theory of seduction is, like much else in his work, controversial. This section examines how the theory has been interpreted and criticized. The relationship between Baudrillard and feminism is examined. Applications of his theory to art and work are explored.

Section 7: Fiction and Art

Baudrillard is an unusual contemporary thinker, in as much as his writing is taken seriously by artists. Baudrillard himself has responded to this, by becoming more interested in photography in the last ten years. This section aims to provide an essential guide to the relationship between Baudrillard and art. Included here are enquiries into Baudrillard and science fiction, the relationship between Baudrillard and J G Ballard's `Crash'; Baudrillard and abstract painting; Baudrillard and Francis Bacon; Baudrillard, Benjamin and Lichtenstein; Baudrillard, Barthes and photography; and Baudrillard's theory of communication.

Section 8: Baudrillard and Other Social Theorists

The concluding part of the collection aims to situate Baudrillard in the field of contemporary social theory. Interestingly, Baudrillard himself has never attempted to compare and contrast his theoretical ideas with those of others. The 14 contributions included in this section, seek to rectify this shortcoming. The contributions cover Baudrillard and Marx; Baudrillard, Durkheim and Rousseau; Baudrillard and psychoanalysis; Baudrillard and Bataille; existentialism, postmodernism and Baudrillard; Baudrillard and McLuhan; Baudrillard and Critical Theory; Baudrillard and Habermas; Baudrillard and Deleuze; Baudrillard and de Certeau; and the fictional Baudrillard, as dreamt up by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

The contributions are selected and introduced by Mike Gane, Reader in Sociology at the University of Loughborough. With publications like Baudrillard's Bestiary, Baudrillard: Critical & Fatal Theory and Baudrillard Live, Gane is widely recognized as the leading secondary commentator on the work of Baudrillard. No-one else matches him in the appreciation and critical understanding of Baudrillard. In a full length 'Introduction' to the volumes, written with verve and penetration, Gane shows exactly why Baudrillard is a key thinker of our times.

Mike Gane is Professor of Sociology at University of Loughborough

 
A Challenge To Theory
Introduction to Jean Baudrillard

 
 
PART ONE: THEORETICAL ISSUES
Jean-Claude Giradin
Toward a Politics of Signs
Reading Baudrillard

 
Robert Hefner
Baudrillard's Noble Anthropology
The Image of Symbolic Exchange in Political Economy

 
Charles Levin and Arthur Kroker
Baudrillard's Challenge
Bryan S Turner
A Note on Nostalgia
Douglas Kellner
Boundaries and Borderlines
Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory

 
David Revill
Report
Jean Baudrillard

 
Arthur Kroker
`Why Should We Talk When We Communicate So Well?'
Baudrillard's Enchanted Simulation

 
Barry Sandywell
Forget Baudrillard?
Paul Sutton
Jean Baudrillard
Transintellectual?

 
Anthony King
Baudrillard's Nihilism and the End of Theory
Andrew Wernick
Sign and Commodity
Aspects of the Cultural Dynamic of Advanced Capitalism

 
Richard G Smith
The End of Geography and Radical Politics in Baudrillard's Philosophy
 
PART TWO: POSTMODERNISM
Mike Featherstone
Cultural Change and Social Practice
Douglas Kellner
Baudrillard, Semiurgy and Death
Arthur Kroker
Panic Baudrillard
Steven Best
The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification
Baudrillard, Debord, and Postmodern Theory

 
Barry Smart
On the Disorder of Things
Sociology, Postmodernity and the 'End of the Social'

 
Mike Gane
Ironies of Postmodernism
Fate of Baudrillard's Fatalism

 
Norman Denzin
Takes on the Postmodern
Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Jameson

 
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Baudrillard, Modernism and Postmodernism
Zygmunt Bauman
The Sweet Scent of Decomposition
Christopher Norris
Lost in the Funhouse
Baudrillard and the Politics of Postmodernism

 
 
PART THREE: CULTURE
Philip Hancock
Baudrillard and the Metaphysics of Motivation
A Reappraisal of Corporate Culturalism in the Light of the Work and Ideas of Jean Baudrillard

 
Timothy W Luke
Power and Politics in Hyperreality
The Critical Project of Jean Baudrillard

 
Lothar Baier
Der Schwindel der Simulation
Michael Billig
Sod Baudrillard!
Or Ideology Critique in Disney World

 
Stuart Sim
'The Text Must Scoff at Meaning'
Baudrillard and the Politics of Simulation and Hyperreality

 
Briankle G Chang
Mass, Media, Mass Media-Tion
Jean Baudrillard's Implosive Critique of Modern Mass-Mediated Culture

 
Kuan-Hsing Chen
The Masses and the Media
Baudrillard's Implosive Postmodernism

 
Gary Genosko
The Paradoxical Effects of Macluhanisme
Cazeneuve, Baudrillard and Barthes

 
Jim Tarter
Baudrillard and the Problematics of Post-New Left Media Theory
Marcus A Doel and David B Clarke
Virtual Worlds
Simulation, Suppletion, S(ed)uction and Simulacra

 
Neville Wakefield
Space on Flat Earth
Disney

 
William Bogard
Sociology in the Absence of the Social
The Significance of Baudrillard for Contemporary Thought

 
Philip Hayward
Implosive Critiques
A Consideration of Jean Baudrillard's 'In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities'

 
Anthony King
A Critique of Baudrillard's Hyperreality
Towards a Sociology of Postmodernism

 
Chris Rojek
Baudrillard and Leisure
Douglas Kellner
Mapping the Present from the Future
From Baudrillard to Cyberpunk

 
Juliet Steyn
Jean Baudrillard
`Then We Too Shall See the Stars Fade Away'

 
 
PART FOUR: WAR
Deborah Cook
Ruses de Guerre
Baudrillard and Fiske on Media Reception

 
Kevin Robbins
The War, The Screen, The Crazy Dog and Poor Mankind
Christopher Norris
Consensus `Reality' and Manufactured Truth
Baudrillard and the War That Never Happened

 
William Merrin
Uncritical Criticism?
Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War

 
Paul Patton
Introduction to The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
 
PART FIVE: AMERICA
Paul Buhle
America
Post-Modernity?

 
Dima Cioran
The Ethnographer as Geologist
Tocqueville, L[ac]evi-Strauss, Baudrillard and the American Dilemma

 
Norman K Denzin
Paris, Texas and Baudrillard on America
Jacques Mourrain
The Homogenization of America
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Baudrillard's Amérique, and the `Abyss of Modernity'
Arthur J Vidich
Baudrillard's America
Lost in the Ultimate Simulacrum

 
Bryan S Turner
Cruising America
Diane Rubenstein
The Mirror of Reproduction
Baudrillard and Reagan's America

 
Stephen Watt
Baudrillard's America (and Ours?)
Image, Virus, Catastrophe

 
Andrew Wernick
Post-Marx
Theological Themes in Baudrillard's America

 
Ed Cohen
The 'Hyperreal' vs. the 'Really Real'
If European Intellectuals Stop Making Sense of American Culture Can We Still Dance?

 
Brian Jarvis
Everything Solid Melts into Signs
Jean Baudrillard

 
 
PART SIX: SEDUCTION
Louise Burchill
Either/Or
Peripeteia of an Alternative in Jean Baudrillard's De la S[ac]eduction

 
Meaghan Morris
Room 101, or A Few Worst Things in the World
Sadie Plant
Baudrillard's Woman
The Eve of Seduction

 
Mike Gane
The Object's Seduction
Efrat Tseelon
Postmodernism and the Clothed Meaning
A Keith Goshorn
Valorizing 'The Feminine' While Rejecting Feminism?
Baudrillard's Feminist Provocations

 
Andrew Wernick
Jean Baudrillard
Seducing God

 
Barry Smart
Art, Work and Analysis in an Age of Electronic Simulation
 
PART SEVEN: FICTION AND ART
Istvan Csiscery-Ronay Jr
The SF of Theory
Baudrillard and Haraway

 
Jonathan Benison
Jean Baudrillard on the Current State of SF
 
PART SEVEN: FICTION AND ART
N Katherine Hayles et al
In Response to Jean Baudrillard
Nicholas Ruddick
Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard
David Carrier
Baudrillard as Philosopher, or The End of Abstract Painting
Arthur Kroker
Panic Value
Bacon, Colville, Baudrillard and the Aesthetics of Deprivation

 
Carter Ratcliffe
The Work of Roy Lichtenstein in the Age of Walter Benjamin's and Jean Baudrillard's Popularity
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Baudrillard, Barthes, Burroughs, and 'Absolute' Photography
William Merrin
Television is Killing the Art of Symbolic Exchange
Baudrillard's Theory of Communication

 
 
PART EIGHT: BAUDRILLARD AND OTHER THEORISTS
Joseph Valente
Hall of Mirrors
Baudrillard on Marx

 
Arthur Kroker
Baudrillard's Marx
Raymond Lee
In the Shadow of Reason
From Weber's Elective Affinity to Baudrillard's Fatalism

 
Stjepan G Mestrovic
How to Comprehend Barbarism in the Midst of Enlightenment
Anthony Carty
Post-Modernism in the Theory and the Sociology of Law, or Rousseau and Durkheim as Read by Baudrillard
Charles Levin
Baudrillard, Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis
William Pawlett
Utility and Excess
The Radical Sociology of Bataille and Baudrillard

 
Bernhard H F Taurek
Ethik Jenseits von Moral
Sartre, L[ac]evinas, Baudrillard

 
Andreas Huyssen
In the Shadow of McLuhan
Jean Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation

 
St. Louis Telos Group
Notes and Commentary
The Totally Administered Society

 
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Jean Baudrillard
Mark Poster
Technology and Culture in Habermas and Baudrillard
Steven C Ward
In the Shadow of the Deconstructed Metanarratives
Baudrillard, Latour and the End of Realist Epistemology

 
Steven Maras
Baudrillard & Deleuze
Re-Viewing The Postmodern Scene

 
Gary Genosko
The Struggle for an Affirmative Weakness
de Certeau, Lyotard, and Baudrillard

 

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ISBN: 9780761968320
£675.00