The Jean Baudrillard Reader

by Steve Redhead (Editor)

Jean Baudrillard was perhaps the most controversial of all social and cultural theorists. He has been variously vilified as a 'postmodernist', an 'overrated French theorist' and one of the 'intellectual imposters'. His comments on 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Europe's suburban riots have been eagerly
sought and digested, and there is now a chance to read Baudrillard's texts in an overall historical, social and political context and for a cool re-assessment to be made of his life and work, after his death. This book concentrates on what Baudrillard has written over five decades and the order in
which he wrote it. The Reader comprises extracts of Baudrillard's writings from the sixties to the noughties, with an editorial introduction and a concluding reading guide.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2008

About the author

Steve Redhead is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law at Flinders University,Adelaide, South Australia.

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon]

Steve's Jean Baudrillard Reader is really the beginning of Redhead's 'late style' as he sweeps through the entirety of Baudrillard's writing career. Steve's editing skills are used with incredible care in the selection and shaping of Baudrillard's quirky, pithy, confusing, contradictory but sharp theorization.

All Baudrillard's controversial essays are present: about war, art, women and - yes - pataphysics. What makes this the ideal guide through Baudrillard's career is that Steve does allow the nonsense about 'postmodernism' - a word that is used by the ignorant to confirm their lack of reading - to overshadow what is important scholarship and an important scholar.

Whatever a researcher may think about Baudrillard, they will change their thinking through a considered engagement with this book. This remains the best guide through Baudrillard's philosophy.

[Matthew James Dodson]

I'm a casual philosophical reader and found this introductory text to Baudrillard to be fairly accessible. Baudrillard was rightly criticized for taking his arguments to the extreme but his ideas are insightful and provocative. He believed that modern networked society had dispensed with culture and replaced with it with a simulated copy of itself and what we are witnessing is the death of reality. If you wake in the morning and feel that you've fallen into the rabbit hole, The Baudrillard Reader might be a reliable guidepost to get your bearings.