Screened Out Pa

by Baudrillard,Jean

• ISBN13: 9781859843857
• ISBN10: 1859843859
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

'Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless ' that goes without saying ' but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly ' with its warm bitterness ' particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness ' the uselessness of the screen.'World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa , Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is ' pace his critics ' still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.

Author Biography

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X in 1966. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007. His many works include Simulations and Simulacra, America, The Perfect Crime, The System of Objects, Passwords, The Transparency of Evil, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Fragments, among others.

Table of Contents

Translator's Foreword	ix
AIDS: Virulence or Prophylaxis?	1	(8)
We are all Transsexuals Now	9	(6)
Necrospective around Martin Heidegger	15	(6)
In Praise of a Virtual Crash	21	(5)
The Viral Economy	26	(7)
The Depressurization of the West	33	(6)
The Defrosting of Eastern Europe and the End of History	39	(6)
No Pity for Sarajevo	45	(6)
Otherness Surgery	51	(6)
The Powerlessness of the Virtual	57	(5)
Western Subserbience	62	(4)
When the West Takes the Dead Man's Place	66	(4)
The Great Laundering	70	(5)
Weep, Citizens!	75	(4)
Helots and Elites	79	(6)
Information at the Meteorological Stage	85	(6)
Disembodied Violence: Hate	91	(5)
Psychedelic Violence: Drugs	96	(6)
The Dark Continent of Childhood	102	(5)
The Double Extermination	107	(5)
`Lost from View' and Truly Disappeared	112	(6)
Sexuality as a Sexually Transmitted Disease	118	(5)
Sovereignty of the Strike	123	(5)
Tierra del Fuego - New York	128	(5)
World Debt and Parallel Universe	133	(5)
The Shadow of the Commendatore	138	(6)
The Mirror of Corruption	144	(6)
Disneyworld Company	150	(5)
The Global and the Universal	155	(5)
Deep Blue or the Computer's Melancholia	160	(6)
The Racing Diver and his Double	166	(5)
Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala	171	(5)
Screened Out	176	(5)
The Art Conspiracy	181	(5)
TV Fantasies	186	(5)
Of Course Chirac is Useless	191	(5)
The Clone or the Degree Xerox of the Species	196	(7)
Exorcism in Politics or the Conspiracy of Imbeciles	203