Description: Jean Baudrillards work on how contemporary society is dominated by the mass media has become extraordinarily influential. He is notorious for arguing that there is no real world, only simulations which have altered what events mean, and that only violent symbolic exchange can prevent the world becoming a total simulation.
Brief description: Paul Hegarty is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author and editor of 11 books that span critical and cultural theory, rock, experimental and noise music, as well as audiovisual art including Noise/Music (Bloomsbury, 2007), Rumour and Radiation (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Annihilating Noise (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is also Co-editor of Bloomsbury's Ex: Centrics series.
Review Quotes: "Do we need another overview of Baudrillard's expanding oeuvre? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. Not any overview, but this one by French professor Paul Hegarty. Why? Hegarty tackles head-on, and with a lively and generous critical probity, the difficult questions: the relation and evolution of simulation and symbolic exchange, Baudrillard's two key concepts; the problems internal to these concepts and what replaced them, the virtual and singular, respectively. Hegarty coaxes some fascinating responses on these and related matters from a typically reticent Baudrillard in the interview that is included in this volume, in keeping with the principle of 'live theory' that defines this series...This book's greatest strength is in how it traces the parallel developments of Baudrillard's key intertwined concepts of simulation and symbolic exchange on the levels of intellectual biography and philosophical elaboration, with none of the warts and bristles smoothed over." -Gary Genosko, Philosophy in Review