Utopia Deferred : Writings from Utopie, (1967-1978)

by Baudrillard, Jean

• ISBN13: 9781584350330
• ISBN10: 1584350334
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-01
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferredcollects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopieas well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka. Utopieserved as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopiewere seminal for some of his most shockingly original books: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, Simulations, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. But Utopiewas also a topical journal and a political one; the topics of these essays are often torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following the uprisings of May 1968.

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.

Table of Contents

Jean Baudrillard, ``On Utopie''	13	(18)
Dialectical Utopia	31	(2)
The Ephemeral	33	(3)
Play and the Police	36	(15)
Technics as Social Practice	51	(10)
Utopia Deferred	61	(3)
Strike Story	64	(6)
Requiem for the Media	70	(24)
DNA or the Metaphysics of the Code	94	(8)
The Mirror of Production	102	(29)
Marxism and the System of Political Economy	131	(47)
Strike Story	178	(18)
The Dramatization of Economics	196	(13)
The BNP Campaign	209	(6)
Animals Sick of Surplus Value	215	(6)
Death Trick	221	(8)
The Failure of Prophecy	229	(12)
Taking Hostages	241	(6)
Death to Savages	247	(4)
Stereo Porn	251	(9)
The Spiraling Cadaver	260	(7)
Labor Story	267	(5)
Value's Last Tango	272	(3)
The Magic Struggle or the Final Flute	275	(9)
Castrated Before Marriage	284	(13)
Our Theater of Cruelty	297	(8)
Notes	305	(20)
A Note on the Texts and Translation	325