Continental Philosophy

Radical Alterity (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume
Translated by Ames Hodges

Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard’s work and his reading of the “radical exoticism” posited by Victor Segalen–ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign “primitive society of the future,” America.

In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity.

This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, “Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed.”

—

Pure War (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, translated by Mark Polizzotti

featuring a new introduction by Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, and a postscript with two new interviews

In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they had developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War was the book that first introduced Paul Virlio to English readers in 1983. It described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. In conversation with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the “accidents” that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication.

In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the “accident”–both military and economic–has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, “local” accidents–like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s–escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. “Globalization,” Virilio argues, is the planet’s ultimate accident.

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d’Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War (1988) (his first in English) and The Accident of Art (2005), both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e). In 1998, he retired from teaching to devote himself to subh projects as working with homeless people in Paris and building the first Museum of the Accident. He now lives in La Rochelle, France and no longer travels.

New edition from Semiotext(e): Fatal Strategies by Jean Baudrillard
translated by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski / with a new introduction by Dominic Pettman

No work was more important to Baudrillard himself than Fatal Strategies, and it is indeed one of the best places to start for an overview of his thought. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry’s absurdist philosophy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard.

In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy’s circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.

This edition features a new introduction written by Dominic Pettman after Baudrillard’s death.
Read the rest of this entry »

Call for Abstracts for Baudrillard Workshop (Newcastle University)

Baudrillard and International Politics
Politics — Newcastle University
Wednesday November 28th, noon-6pm

The translation and publication of Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) marked the first significant awareness of Baudrillard’s work among international politics scholars and was the source of a highly engaged debate. In the years since, Baudrillard’s work on the media, simulation, hyperreality, terror, and technology has continued to provide unique insights into contemporary international politics and the discourses in which it is framed.

International politics staff and graduate students at Newcastle University are hosting a half day workshop to explore the value and relevance of
Baudrillard’s work for international politics studies and seek papers on the following (and other) themes:

Technology/Media/War
Terrorism
Technology/Simulation/Security
Political discourses of hyperreality
Baudrillard on the USA
The political commitments of Baudrillard’s early scholarship

We envisage presentations will be of approximately 20 minutes duration with plenty of time set aside for general discussion. It is our intention to
produce an edited collection focusing on Baudrillard’s contribution to the study of international politics and so wish to solicit papers that are not
committed to other projects.

Please forward 250 word abstracts to either Mark Edward (M.D.Edward@ncl.ac.uk) or Simon Philpott (Simon.Philpott@ncl.ac.uk) no later than Friday, September 28th 2007

.

Trevor Norris explores the contribution of Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard to our appreciation of the consumer society and education.

We are, as it seems, considering not only how a city, but also a luxurious city, comes into being… Let’s look at a feverish city…This healthy one isn’t adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a bulky mass of things. Republic Book II, 372e-373b

 

 

We can’t let the terrorists stop us from shopping. George Bush, September 2001.

 

The twentieth century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are rarely connected, yet there are significant areas of overlap regarding their account of consumerism and our consumers’ society. Both explain the recent trend of making what is private become public: Baudrillard describes this as making the private ‘explicit,’ while Arendt outlines the modern ascent of the activities of the private realm or oikos into the public realm. Secondly, both observe that human relations have been altered and are increasingly mediated by objects. For Baudrillard this entails an eclipse of reality, while for Arendt it entails a loss of the polis and life in the public realm. Hannah Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of Sputnik, an exemplar for all that is wrong and dangerous in modernity. The passengers on this “earth-born object made by man”[5] would be the first to fully inhabit a realm entirely of human creation, in which humans were released from the confines of the human condition of earthly existence to fully enter the realm of the human artifice. For Arendt, this event, a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given”[6], indicates the magnitude of our worldly alienation. This rebellion means the loss of the polis and erosion of speech, in which we “adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful,” and “move in a world where speech has lost its power.”[7] Jean Baudrillard points towards similar recent events: the proliferation of signs combined with the separation of the sign from the object leaves humans inhabiting a symbolic realm entirely of their own making, entailing an “eclipse of the real”. Just as we come to inhabit the realm of the human artifice, so too do we dwell in the realm of signs, symbols, and simulations. Baudrillard’s original work in semiotics will provide a new analysis of consumer society, and help explain how communication structures and sign systems can preserve consumer society long after speech has been drained of its power and meaning.

Continue reading here 

Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005.

Reviewed by Joseph Nechvatal (Professor of Theory of Art at The School of Visual Arts in New York City and The Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA).

The first remarkable thing about Jean Baudrillard’s limited edition text Pataphysics is its passé, handmade, deckle-edged, luxury cover. I say remarkable in that I still tend to identify Baudrillard with the small, slick black covers in which Semiotext(e) introduced him to America; covers which implied more of a techno aesthetic than this solemn neo-gothic one. The second remarkable thing about this book is its slim size: it is only 14 pages long.

I was immediately struck by the nonsensical pairing of a distinguished looking façade that supposedly signified some kind of venerable “authenticity” with an interior teensy-weensy substantive content. But as I gleefully plunged past the books sign-value packaging and into the distinguished Simon Watson Taylor’s English translation (his final) of this circa-1950 text (ostensibly on the subject of Pataphysics, which Baudrillard here defines as “the philosophy of gaseous states”7, as “tautology”8 – the use of redundant language that adds no information and as “the mind’s loftiest temptation”) this pairing made a peculiarly drôle sense, as immediately I started reading about “fake” “stucco” “self-infatuation” and “vast flatulence”, followed soon after by talk of “fake universes”.9

The rest of the review

(h/t: Joseph Nechvatal )

Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (pdf file)

From IHT:

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and social theorist known for his provocative commentaries on consumerism, excess and what he said was the disappearance of reality, died Tuesday, his publishing house said. He was 77.

Baudrillard died at his home in Paris after a long illness, said Michel Delorme, of the Galilee publishing house.

The two men had worked together since 1977, when “Oublier Foucault” (Forget Foucault) was published, one of about 30 books by Baudrillard, Delorme said by telephone.

Among his last published books was “Cool Memories V,” in 2005.

Baudrillard, a sociologist by training, is perhaps best known for his concepts of “hyperreality” and “simulation.”

Le Monde’s obit is here as well.

To appreciate Baudrillard s philosophy of Seduction what is at stake in it and why it is important today – we should remember the historical situation from which it evolves, viz., the postmodern context, in which it appears that rational theory has autodestructed and truth is dead . This autodestruction is said to occur for several reasons, eg: 1) The first principles of any rational system or theory, or the first rules of any language game, cannot prove themselves without logical circularity, or else falling into an infinite regress of first principles. But if the first principle is dubious and unproven, then the whole system derived from it is also dubious and unproven. Therefore all systems are questionable and truth cannot be established. 2) Theoretical systems or language games contain within themselves their own criteria for deciding such central issues as: good evidence, proper test, right method, authority, reliability, validity, and value. The criteria differ with the system. Therefore, there is no independent position from which one could judge between the systems to ascertain which one is correct, if any. Therefore the systems are said to be incommensurable, ie, they can t be measured or judged against one another. Therefore, the correct system or the real truth cannot be established. 3) The question may be posed: Why be rational? If the modern rationalist uses reason to provide rational arguments for being rational then he or she is simply begging the question. For he or she is assuming the validity of reason to argue toward the validity of reason. 4) Epistemology (the study of knowledge) has been at the heart of the philosophical enterprise from the beginning; for it was assumed that, before we can hope to say whether this or that worldview or theory constitutes true knowledge we need to know what knowledge is. Therefore, we must study what knowledge is first. But to know what knowledge is presumes we already have knowledge in knowing what knowledge is. So an assumption about knowledge is always made at the start. But, once again, this initial assumption cannot be validated without circularity. Therefore, there is no proven knowledge or truth. 5) Can we now draw the sceptic's conclusion, then, ie, that the truth is that there is no truth? Obviously not, because that statement itself claims to be a truth, so it undermines itself. Hence: epistemology, rationalism, critical theory, philosophical scepticism, even deconstruction, all now appear aporetic. Rational theory in all its forms autodestructs. Therefore – modernity is dead. (May it rest in peace.)

Ultrapolitics: Biopower, Sovereignty and Total Mobilisation

Biological Sovereignty: EUGENE THACKER

The Task of Thinking in the State of Exception- Agamben, Benjamin and the Question of Messianism: CHRISTIAN NILSSON

The Obscene Voice: Terrorism, Politics and the End of Representation in the Works of Baudrillard, Žižek and Sloterdijk: SJOERD VAN TUINEN

“The Sovereign Disappears in the Election Box”: Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on Sovereignty and (Perhaps) Governmentality: THOMAS CROMBEZ

Freedom Ablaze: Ernst Jünger and Michel Foucault's Concept of Force: LEON NIEMOCZYNSKI AND KEVIN SÖDERGREN

Deleuze, Leibniz and the Jurisprudence of Being: SEAN BOWDEN

Levinas, 'Illeity' and the Persistence of Skepticism: DARREN AMBROSE

Link

Volume Three, Number Two (July 2006)

Articles

Louis Arnoux: Split or Die? The Innocent Fate of Humans.

Jean Baudrillard: The Riots of Autumn or The Other Who Will Not Be Mothered.

Jean Baudrillard: Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power.

Hsiang (Kevin) Hsu: The Principle of Reversal

Joseph Nechvatal: Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess.

Paul Virilio: The Museum of Accidents.

Judgment and Punishment

Stephen Smith: Furious Envy: Baudrillard and the Looting of Baghdad.

Jean Baudrillard: Our Society’s Judgment and Punishment.

Photography

Julian Haladyn: Baudrillard’s Photography: A Hyperreal Disappearance Into The Object.

Scott Lukas: Fragments of The World Thinking Me, Or How The Digital Facilitates Human Separation.
 

Looking Back On Utopia Achieved

Jean Baudrillard: Utopia Achieved: “How Can Anyone Be European”?

Jean Baudrillard: Tail Fins and Lighters Polished by the Sea: Stylization, Manipulability, and Envelopment.