Summary
Contents
Subject index
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary social theorists. Translated into English for the first time, this remarkable volume examines the full extent of his critical appraisal of social theories including traditional Marxism, cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. In particular, it offers the most complete elaboration of Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum and his reorientation of social theory toward the issues of fashion, the body, and death. Symbolic Exchange and Death, originally published in France in 1976, is a recognized classic and one of the most important sources for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. “Just when everyone is bored with Baudrillard, the academic establishment finally gets it together to translate the po-mo prophet's most important book. First published in 1976, this has appeared piecemeal in various guerrilla translations and already had its cultural effect. It's just a relief to get the full SP on the semiology of the death drive.” -- I-D “This is easily Jean Baudrillard's most important work. It is a key intervention in the debates on modernity and postmodernity and the site of his postmodern turn. Anyone who wants to understand the complexity and provocativeness of Baudrillard's richest period must read this book.” --Douglas Kellner, University of Texas at Austin
The End of Production
The End of Production
The Structural Revolution of Value
Saussure located two dimensions to the exchange of terms of the langue, which he assimilated to money. A given coin must be exchangeable against a real good of some value, while on the other hand it must be possible to relate it to all the other terms in the monetary system. More and more, Saussure reserves the term value for this second aspect of the system: every term can be related to every other, their relativity, internal to the system and constituted by binary oppositions. This definition is opposed to the other possible definition of value: the relation of every term to what it designates, of each signifier to its signified, like the relation ...
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