Jean Baudrillard

This uniquely engaging introduction to Jean Baudrillard's controversial writings covers his entire career, from his early theorisation of the consumer society, his contributions to social semiotics, his neglected masterpiece Symbolic Exchange and Death , to his later works on terrorism and 9/11. The book focuses on Baudrillard's central, but little understood, notion of symbolic exchange. Through the clarification of this key term a very different Baudrillard emerges: not the nihilistic postmodernist and enemy of Marxism and feminism that his critics have constructed, but a thinker immersed in the social world and passionately committed to a radical theorisation of it. Baudrillard was a harsh critic of consumerism, of globalisation and of US foreign policy. He mocked the West's desire to unveil, to strip bare, to accumulate and to possess. He attacked pornography, advertising and reality' TV, as well as science and information technology, for exemplifying this naive and ultimately impossible 'dis-illusioning' of the world. Above all Baudrillard sought symbolic spaces, spaces where we might all, if only temporarily, shake off the system of social control. His writing sought to challenge and defy the system. By erasing our liberated' identities and suspending the pressures to compete, perform, consume and hate, that the system induces, we might create spaces not of freedom, but of symbolic engagement and exchange. With lively critical discussion, this groundbreaking text is accessible to an undergraduate audience and will be an invaluable resource for those studying sociology, contemporary social theory, cultural studies and political sociology.Pawlett, Willia is the author of 'Jean Baudrillard ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415386456 and ISBN 0415386454.