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“... appear to be the operating assumption, however, of the celebrated French sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard in America, the latest of his works translated into English. At first the reader might wonder why a prose as dense as his should be made more so by having it stretched across pages of a width and gloss more appropriate to an otherwise ...”

“... for the French thinkers who have come among us since the late Sixties, bearing what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont would like to see ostracised as fatuous, if not actually nonsensical ideas.The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in Belgium, and it’s as hard scientists that they make their complaint against the intellectual ...”

“... even sends his ex-wife wry maintenance cheques (‘the claim was unanswerable, his cheque wry’). Jean Serjeant, the twinkly protagonist of Staring at the Sun, seems to leap from the cradle to the edge of the grave in order to spend as much time as possible ‘wryly noting’. In the space of four pages, a ‘Jean thought ...”

“... cognitive, the latter relativist or even nihilist in tendency. The villains in this book are Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are ...”

“... between semi-paranoid projections (à la Philip K. Dick) and semi-cynical implosions (à la Jean Baudrillard). Such criticism has a special knack for catastrophism, which it also craves. With enormous ambition it challenges the culture of capitalism, but finally it is too much in awe of this leviathan – which it regards as the sole engine of ...”

“... and Luce Irigaray). Film theory, one of his long-standing passions, is thrown into the mix, with Jean-Luc Godard praised as at least as great a figure as any of the period’s thinkers. We are speaking of a cultural era which is sometimes compared to ancient Greece and Enlightenment Germany. Roughly speaking, it shifts from the human subject as a ...”

“... Lotringer, founder of the journal Semiotext(e), who advocated Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. In effect, Crary opted for the second group over the first: he was interested less in the deconstruction of language and representation à la Derrida than in the ...”

“... Fantasyland and Frontierland.’ Not until European intellectuals such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard began to tour the US in the Reaganite 1980s did Disneyland – by then upgraded to Disney World – again seem avant-garde or, at least, exotic. These live-in fantasies were the acme of American hyper-realism – the media-saturated world of ...”

“... go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles ...”

“... of computer-screens; the world began to experience that ‘revenge of speed in inertia’ which Jean Baudrillard has identified as a hallmark of Post-Modernity. No doubt because Virilio is a professor of architecture, he initially studied this phenomenon through its effect on the urban fabric. In L’Espace critique (1984) he claimed that ‘the ...”

“... others, before turning to consider the denial of death implicit in Enlightenment thought. As Jean Baudrillard remarks, there is a sense that for modernity ‘it is not normal to be dead’ – that the dead are committing some kind of unspeakable solecism simply by no longer being around. Not to exist at all is a disturbing form of ...”

“... rather than a person. But the disguise is heavy. Homi Bhabha, Claude Lefort, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler: an extraordinary range of theorists is included. Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas, De Certeau and Althusser are not forgotten, and even Freud (though not Marx) makes it into the ...”

“... culture in which the diffusion of mental or material goods may lead to their dilution. When Jean Baudrillard, in France, develops a critical semiology which views the ‘sign’ as an abstraction of image from product brought about by commodification, and sharply differentiates it from the more organic ‘symbol’ of pre-modern societies, we are ...”

“... it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; the New York Times routinely portrays it not as Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but as his Ship of Fools (Schwarzenegger’s election as governor ...”

“... me it became delirious one night in the early 1980s at a club called Area, as I watched Jean Baudrillard, the theorist of the simulacrum, watching Warhol posing as ‘Warhol’ in a bare diorama of his own making, as if he were the wax model of his own dead specimen. I thought one of them would have to explode.) ‘Pop art rediscovers the theme ...”