Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the "false problem." One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists. - Courtesy of M.I.T Press

"Post-situationist theory from Baudrillard. Here he wrings ecstasy from interaction. 'Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.'"--PUBLISHER.

"What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. This enthusiastic dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers in philosophy and architecture today moves from these singular objects to problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics, and the exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life.". "This wide-ranging conversation bridges architecture and philosophy as Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel discuss such topics as the city of tomorrow and the ideal of transparency, the gentrification of New York City, and Frank Gehry's surprising Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Nouvel prompts Baudrillard to reflect on his signature concepts (the virtual, transparency, fatal strategies, oblivion, and seduction), and the confrontation between philosophical concerns and the specificity of architecture creates novel and striking formulations - and new ways of understanding the connections between the practitioner and the philosopher, the object and the idea."--BOOK JACKET.

"Not long ago, two friends - Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles -the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other from nowhere, met in Paris. They had a long discussion without any precise aim. It was, rather, a way of rubbing up against metaphysics without risk of contagion. They called it Exiles from Dialogue as a mirrored homage to Bertolt Brecht and shortly afterwards they parted company and went their separate ways." "In this remarkable new book based on this gnomic meeting, Baudrillard and Noailles range over the entirety of philosophy and thought underpinning Baudrillard's unique work, from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) to his recent writings on 9/11. Philosophically, the book takes in its breadth Heraclitus to Wittgenstein by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzche. Its literary sources are diverse: Gracian and Saul Bellow, Holderlin and Stanislaw Lec; and the theories of Fukuyama, Barthes and Kristeva are weighed, considered and analysed."--Jacket.

En expliquant les pouvoirs et les limites de leurs outils de prévision, médecins, météorologues, sismologues et économistes se joignent ici à des sociologues et à des critiques d'art pour cerner au plus près les multiples racines de notre désir de prévoir l'avenir.