ABSTRACT
Baudrillard is widely recognised as a powerful new force in cultural and social criticism, and is often referred to as the ‘High Priest of Postmodernism’. This study presents a detached assessment of his social thought and his reputation, challenging the way his work has been received in postmodernism and proposing a new reading of his contribution to social theory. Using many sources currently available only in French, Mike Gane provides the keys to understanding Baudrillard’s project and reveals the extent and scope of Baudrillard’s challenge to modern social theory and cultural criticism. He looks at the sources of Baudrillard’s ideas, analysing how Baudrillard has turned these sources against themselves. He describes Baudrillard’s dramatic encounter with critical Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, showing how Baudrillard’s post-Marxist writings define, through the exploration of fatal theory, a new episode in cultural history: a period of cultural implosion. This balanced account of Baudrillard’s social theory emphasises the originality of his work and argues that his significance can only be understood by grasping the paradoxes of his project – Baudrillard’s work is poetic, yet, at the same time, critical and fatal.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |70 pages
Part I
chapter |12 pages
Introduction: reading Baudrillard
chapter |31 pages
Essential background and context
chapter |25 pages
Baudrillard, postmodernism, Marxism and feminism
part |55 pages
Part II
chapter |13 pages
Baudrillard's attempt to develop Marxism
chapter |8 pages
A change of position
chapter |32 pages
Baudrillard: theoretical critic
part |64 pages
Part III
chapter |14 pages
Cultural implosion
chapter |24 pages
The object's seduction
chapter |11 pages
Fatal objects
chapter |13 pages
America, the desert and the fourth world
part |21 pages
Part IV