Impossible Exchange

Impossible Exchange
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1789600391

Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life-the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others-he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity. Literally, they have no meaning outside themselves and cannot be exchanged for anything. Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has no meaning. Schemes for genetic experimentation and investigation are becoming infinitely ramified, and the more ramified they become the more the crucial question is left unanswered: who rules over life? Who rules over death? Baudrillard's conclusion is that the true formula of contemporary nihilism lies here: the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and the most baleful consequences. This book might be said to be the exploration, first, of the 'fateful' consequences, and subsequently-by a poetic transference of situation-of the fortunate, happy consequences of impossible exchange.

The Jean Baudrillard Reader

The Jean Baudrillard Reader
Author: Steve Redhead
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780231146135

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.

Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings

Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804742733

An expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of Baudrillard's work, this new edition adds examples from after 1985.

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought
Author: Lawrence D. Kritzman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 820
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231107907

This valuable reference is an authoritative guide to 20th century French thought. It considers the intellectual figures, movements and publications that helped define fields as diverse as history, psychoanalysis, film, philosophy, and economics.

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard
Author: David B. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1134040717

Containing two previously unpublished essays by Jean Baudrillard, this book provides a series of dazzling demonstrations of the power of Baudrillard’s thought from many of his most accomplished commentators.

Parallax of Growth

Parallax of Growth
Author: Ole Bjerg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150950625X

Parallax of Growth explores the ideas of economy and ecology and the factors that have put them on a collision course. Bjerg argues that our current mode of economic organization is characterized by an inherent debt drive, whereby the creation of money through the issuance of commercial bank credit has locked our economy into a vicious circle of forced growth and increasing debt. Parallax of Growth is not a catalogue of solutions to the ecological or the economic crisis. The book aims to shift the inquiry from what shall we do? to why have we not already done it? In order to address the challenges of our contemporary times of crisis, we need to understand how the idea of growth is deeply ingrained in the ideology as well as the organization of our society. The book aims to open the space for philosophical thinking about this important issue.

Passwords

Passwords
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789600111

In his analysis of the deep social trends rooted in production, consumption, and the symbolic, Jean Baudrillard touches the very heart of the concerns of the generation currently rebelling against the framework of the consumer society. With the ever-greater mediatization of society, Baudrillard argues that we are witnessing the virtualization of our world, a disappearance of reality itself, and perhaps the impossibility of any exchange at all. This disenchanted perspective has become the rallying point for all those who reject the traditional sociological and philosophical paradigms of our age. Passwords offers us twelve accessible and enjoyable entry points into Baudrillard's thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his work: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality, and thought.

Baudrillard Dictionary

Baudrillard Dictionary
Author: Richard G. Smith
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748642919

This is the first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). It explains and contextualises more than a hundred key concepts, terms, influences and topics within his thought. An essential reference for students and scholars of Baudrillard, it also serves as an authoritative overview of how his ideas have shaped a broad range of disciplines, from art, architecture, film and photography to sociology, philosophy, human geography, media studies and cultural studies. The entries are written by 35 leading Baudrillard specialists from around the world, including Rex Butler, Mike Gane, Gary Genosko, Victoria Grace, Diane Rubenstein and Andrew Wernick.

Adsensory Financialisation

Adsensory Financialisation
Author: Pamela Odih
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 144381850X

Adsensory technology presupposes a neoliberal entrepreneurial self as an integral feature of its biopolitical financialisation of healthcare regimes. According to Michel Foucault, neoliberalism is indebted to the endeavour of its self-disciplined subjects, investing human capital in a self-regulated, entrepreneurial pursuit of responsible healthcare and well-being. Primarily informed by social network analytics and virtual ethnographic observations, this book identifies the biopolitical basis of adsensory technologies. It argues that a paradoxical feature of adsensory technologies dissimulating “that there is nothing” (Jean Baudrillard) is the proliferation of risk. This is because the dissimulation of nothing opens up the possibility that “everything can be a risk, in so far as the type of event it falls under can be treated according to the principles of insurance technology” (Francois Ewald). Adsensory wearable technologies are called upon as “a strategy of deterrence” (Jean Baudrillard) to indemnify capitalism’s production of signs which dissimulate their simulation. In a context in which much that was certain now feigns its own existence, the insurance professed by adsensory technologies provides for an unrealisable guarantee against indefinable unknowable risks. Based also on case studies of European Court of Justice personal finance insurance rulings, this book engages critically with the neoliberal construct of the entrepreneurial lifestyle insurance subject. Social network analytics are utilised here to map bio-technology onto neoliberal regimes of financialised well-being and healthcare provision. In so doing, the book situates adsensory technologies within the marketising healthcare management programmes that are currently aligning the neoliberal reengineering of health and well-being citizenship with the biopolitical healthcare financialisation of populations. Paradoxically, in their endeavour to actor network virtual well-being health communities, adsensory technologies proliferate the individuating marketised conditions of neoliberal self-regulating entrepreneurialism. This gives rise to aleatory materialist dialectics of financialised surveillance far exceeding the regulatory time and space modalities of Foucauldian panoptics and Mathiesen synoptics. Adsensory technologies are integral to a seismic transformation in the cultural economies of time presently eliding digital advertising and insurantial technologies. Axiomatic with the synchronic times of the adsensory technologies valorised by lifestyle insurance, much riskier asynchronic embodied times, transgressively dissimilating the limits of financialisation, are beginning to emerge.