In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, new edition

by Baudrillard, Jean; Lotringer, Sylvere; El Kholti, Hedi; Kraus, Chris

• ISBN13: 9781584350385
• ISBN10: 1584350385
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-27
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)

Summary

The masses aren't the Social. They absorb all the social energy, but no longer refract it. They absorb every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflect them. They never participate. They are the reversion of any social and of any socialism. They wander through meaning, politics, representation, history, ideology, with a somnambulent strength of denial. Indeed the only phenomenon that may be in a relation of affinity with it, is terrorism. Contemporary terrorism aims at the Social in response to the terrorism of the Social.

Author Biography

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.

Sylvère Lotringer is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University.

Kate Zambreno, the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl and the work Heroines (Semiotext(e)), teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the persistence of art, which includes Book of Mutter and the forthcoming Drifts.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

John Johnston is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of Carnival of Repetition and Information Multiplicity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Requiem for the Masses	p. 7
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities	p. 33
...Or, the End of the Social	p. 77
the Implosion of Meaning in the Media	p. 97
Event and Non-Event	p. 111
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