Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard

Synopsis

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the post-modern. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard is on sparkling form and explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as outsider in the field of great French thinkers. Perhaps most interestingly, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to his contemporaries: thinkers such as Bataille and the Situationists, Barthes, Lyotard, and Deleuze, amongst others. Instead of examining his work as a project of intellectual accumulation, Baudrillard challenges all the major interpretations of his work by suggesting he has always adopted an anti-system, anti-totality strategy - here termed an 'aphoristic strategy'. Even globalisation is accompanied in his view by a Western culture which itself is no longer a well-founded confident universalism. The system of Western culture is subject today to radical uncertainty and chaos. Such fractalisation can be opposed in Baudrillard's view only by the radical form of symbolic fragment, the aphorism and the singularity for 'this form alone attacks the system'. Fragments: Conversations with Francois L'Yvonnet will be essential reading for any scholar of Baudrillard, but will also prove an attractive and informative starting point for any student trying to get to grips with his work for the first time.