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Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews PDF

230 Pages·1993·0.65 MB·English
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BAUDRILLARD LIVE This book collects together many interviews which have been published in very different locations and publications into a coherent work, which with new interviews and an introduction makes available the conversational thought of one of the leading French intellectuals associated with postmodernism. The scope of the interviews is enormous, from the experience of visiting the cinema, on film and photography, through to the Gulf War and the new world order. These interviews provide a peerless supplement to Baudrillard’s often difficult sociological and theoretical writing and illuminate many points of contention in his work, particularly those relating to postmodernism. But the book is far more than a supplement. It is in its own right a contribution of the highest importance to the analysis of modern society, and it raises many disturbing issues and problems. The collection is edited by a leading authority on Baudrillard’s work. It will appeal not only to those interested in French intellectual life but also to those interested in the debate on modernity and postmodernity. It is an essential document for the understanding of one of the most creative and important French thinkers alive today. Mike Gane is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University. BAUDRILLARD LIVE Selected interviews Edited by Mike Gane London and New York First published in 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1993 selection and editorial matter, Mike Gane All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Baudrillard, Jean. Baudrillard live: selected interviews/[edited by] Mike Gane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Baudrillard, Jean—Interviews. 2. Sociologists—France— Interviews. 3. Postmodernism. 4. France—Intellectual life. I. Gane, Mike. II. Title. HM22.F82B383 1993 301´.092–dc20 92–26081 CIP ISBN 0-203-41585-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-72409-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-07037-6 (hbk) 0-415-07038-4 (pbk) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction Mike Gane 1 Part I A virtual state of rupture… Interview 1 I DON’T BELONG TO THE CLUB, TO THE SERAGLIO 19 Part II Beyond alienation… Interview 2 I LIKE THE CINEMA 29 Interview 3 BAUDRILLARD’S SEDUCTIONS 36 Interview 4 THE ‘LOOK’ GENERATION—THE MANNERISM OF A WORLD WITHOUT MANNERS 41 Interview 5 THE POWER OF REVERSIBILITY THAT EXISTS IN THE FATAL 43 Interview 6 THE REVENGE OF THE CRYSTAL 50 Interview 7 IS AN IMAGE NOT FUNDAMENTALLY IMMORAL? 67 Interview 8 INTELLECTUALS, COMMITMENT AND POLITICAL POWER 72 Interview 9 GAME WITH VESTIGES 81 Part III I stopped living… Interview 10 FORGET BAUDRILLARD 99 v CONTENTS Part IV Radicalism has passed into events… Interview 11 AMERICA AS FICTION 131 Interview 12 THE EVIL DEMON OF IMAGES 136 Interview 13 THE WORK OF ART IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 145 Interview 14 THE POLITICS OF SEDUCTION 152 Interview 15 THE END OF THE END 156 Interview 16 FRACTAL THEORY 165 Interview 17 WRITING HAS ALWAYS GIVEN ME PLEASURE 172 Interview 18 THIS BEER ISN’T A BEER 180 Interview 19 SUBLUNAR AND ATONAL LANDSCAPE 191 Part V When reality merges with the idea… Interview 20 BAUDRILLARD: THE INTERVIEW 199 AFTERWORD Amor Fati 208 Suggested further reading 210 Bibliography 211 Name index 216 Subject index 218 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the generous support of Chris Rojek, George Salemohamed and Nicholas Zurbrugg in this project. I also owe a debt to Monique Arnaud who helped at every stage of the process of preparing this book and who gave invaluable assistance with translations. Of course the book would not have been possible without the cooperation and participation of Jean Baudrillard. Mike Gane vii INTRODUCTION Mike Gane Jean Baudrillard is one of France’s leading intellectuals, with a growing world reputation. In 1989 the Paris weekly L’Evénement du Jeudi organized a ‘referendum’ of some 700 representatives of intellectual society—journalists, writers, university teachers, artists. The question required its recipients to list five personalities in order of their significance as representing ‘le pouvoir intellectuel’—intellectual power. Jean Baudrillard was eighth in the ranking, equal in fact with figures such as Georges Duby, Gilles Deleuze and François Wahl, and above Pierre Bourdieu, the rival sociologist. Certainly Baudrillard has managed to break out of the purely academic world and its confines into a wide audience interested in cultural analysis. But who is Jean Baudrillard? He comes from the Ardennes, Champagne, region of France. He was born in Reims in 1929 into a family plainly in transition from peasant farming to urban life. If Baudrillard succeeded at his studies in the Lycée he did not find it easy to get access into university teaching and in this respect his career is very different from that, say, of Michel Foucault, born only three years earlier in 1926.1 Foucault was already in the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in May 1962, in 1968 in the Chair of Philosophy at Vincennes, and in 1970 was at the Collège de France. Baudrillard, by contrast, was an outsider, a late arrival on the scene. He had taught German in a Lycèe before taking up sociology, becoming an assistant in September 1966 at Nanterre (University of Paris X), and then maître-assistant in 1970. Unlike Foucault once more, Baudrillard’s early writings of 1968–70 were not translated into English, and thus his thought played no significant part in the debate on the affluent society in English until the emergence of postmodernism in the 1980s. However, in France itself, Baudrillard’s celebrated but notorious critique (1977) of Foucault in ‘Forget Foucault’ almost certainly led to Baudrillard’s exclusion, rather like that of Derrida’s, from those sectors of academic influence under the increasing patronage of the Professor at the Collège de France. The text of the piece was originally a book review for the journal Critique but was sent to Foucault himself for possible response. After a long delay Baudrillard published it with Galilee. Foucault was not amused and is reported to have said, ‘I would have 1

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