They should have read his book, America.
Jean Baudrillard Did Not Die
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They should have read his book, America.
Jean had first come to America two years earlier, having been asked to teach at UCSD by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who wanted to pick his brains. (Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Marin also taught there around this time.) At this early point in Jean’s career, Jameson’s gesture toward him was a thrilling invitation. And he had, by all accounts, a wonderful time: He fell passionately in love with the wife of another faculty member, and colleagues remember the pair walking barefoot in the halls of the French Department, holding hands like two flower children. But something did end up going wrong in the kingdom of San Diego: By the following year, Jean was no longer there and Jameson was warning his students against attending lectures given by “the French camp.”
craner
Beast of Burden
It wouldn't have helped them.
craner
Beast of Burden
Jean Baudrillard Did Not Care If She Was Your Wife.
The Affair Did Not Take Place.
sus
Moderator
It's true, Sontag's entire career is misinterpreted importations of midcentury French theory
sus
Moderator
Has anyone read Kafka's Amerika? Is it any good?
sus
Moderator
This is incredible. The barefoot handholding part. Chef kiss. What went wrong do you know? Were the French just cassanovas?
sus
Moderator
Desire is the mind-killer. Desire is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my desire. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the desire has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Doesn't say. It's from Lotringer's obituary for him.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
JEAN BAUDRILLARD was buried in Paris on March 13, 2007. I had learned about his death a week earlier; I was in the middle of a seminar at Columbia University,…
www.artforum.com
A Model Material: Glass
One material sums up the idea of atmosphere and may be thought of as embodying
a universal function in the modern environment. That material is GLASS.
Advertising calls it 'the material of the future' - a future which, as we all know, will
itself be 'transparent'. Glass is thus both the material used and the ideal to be
achieved, both end and means. So much for metaphysics. Psychologically speaking,
glass in its practical, as in its imaginary uses has many merits. It is the ideal modern
recipient: it does not 'pick up the taste', it does not change over time as a function of
its content, as do wood and metal, nor does it shroud that content in mystery. Glass
eliminates all confusion in short order, and does not conduct heat. Fundamentally
it is less a recipient than an isolator - the miracle of a rigid fluid - a content that is
also a container, and hence the basis of a transparency between the two: a kind
of transcendence which, as we have seen, is the first priority in the creation of
atmosphere. Moreover, glass implies a symbolism of access to a secondary state
of consciousness, and at the same time it is ranked symbolically at zero level on
the scale of materials. Its symbolism is one of solidification - hence of abstractness.
This abstractness opens the door to the abstractness of the inner world: the crystal
of madness; to the abstractness of the future: the clairvoyant's crystal ball; and to the
abstractness of nature: the other worlds to which the eye gains entry via microscope
or telescope. And certainly, with its indestructibility, immunity to decay, colourless-
ness, odourlessness, and so on, glass exists at a sort of zero level of matter: glass is
to matter as a vacuum is to air.
sus
Moderator
I reread this closely and I think he's confused about almost everything, but I appreciate his style and subject matter
Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
Is S&S the best place to start? In my regrettable mistake of studying film instead of philosophy I am extremely behind on, well, where I feel I ought to be in "thought" compared to my peers, and Baudrillard is one of the thinkers they all talk about a lot.
I've heard the French stuff's more common studying film, media, literature, art and architecture than on actual philosophy courses. The people I know who had to read Deleuze at uni were doing art and film and the guy I know who did philosophy never went anywhere near that sort of thing.
America's a good place to start. It's a short one with him driving around the US saying Baudrillard things about Americans and their landscape and culture, like a French alien landed in a motel.
“This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars are so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.”
sus
Moderator
You should read my mighty works instead, they're like Jean Baudrillard in subject and style, but the treatment and ideas are much better
Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
This definitely tracks with my experience, the stakes around understanding Deleuze here are extremely high.
America sounds like the sort of thing I'd love, thanks!
A load of his books are on Internet Archive if you don't mind reading on a device and the odd sloppy scan.
Baudrillard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
All works by Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) that I have compiled. Incorporates 43 book files, 7 peer-reviewed articles, and 42 secondary source PDFs
archive.org