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Titre:
Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel : the singular objects of architecture

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Résumé:
A revelatory conversation between two major figures in visual culture. What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life. Among the topics the two speakers take up are the city of tomorrow and the ideal of transparency, the gentrification of New York City and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. As Nouvel prompts Baudrillard to reflect on some of his signature concepts (the virtual, transparency, fatal strategies, oblivion, and seduction, among others), the confrontation between such philosophical concerns and the specificity of architecture gives rise to novel and striking formulations-and a new way of establishing and understanding the connections between the practitioner and the philosopher, the object and the idea. This wide-ranging conversation builds a bridge between the fields of architecture and philosophy. At the same time it offers readers an intimate view of the meeting of objects and ideas in which the imagined, constructed, and inhabited environment is endlessly changing, forever evolving.

Titre:
L'esprit du terrorisme

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Résumé:
" (...) Nous avons même affaire, avec les attentats de New York et du World Trade Center, à l'événement absolu, la "mère" des événements, à l'événement pur qui concentre en lui tous les événements qui n'ont jamais eu lieu. Que nous ayons rêvé de cet événement, que tout le monde sans exception en ait rêvé, parce que nul ne peut pas rêver de la destruction de n'importe quelle puissance devenue à ce point hégémonique, cela est inacceptable pour la conscience morale occidentale, mais c'est pourtant un fait, et qui se mesure justement à la violence pathétique de tous les discours qui veulent l'effacer. (...) "

Titre:
The spirit of terrorism

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«In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious.»

Titre:
The ecstasy of communication

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First published in France in 1987, The Ecstasy of Communication was Baudrillard’s summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne : a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard’s quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text immediately became a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment that looked both forward and back. By carefully distilling the most radical elements of his previous books, Baudrillard constructed the skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in the second half of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the “obscene”: a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless communication and information. The Ecstasy of Communication is a decisive, compact description of what it means to be “wired” in our braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality has been superseded by pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizophrenia, subject by object, and violence by terror. The Ecstasy of Communication is an anti-manifesto that confronted and dispensed with such influences as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Georges Bataille. It is an essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of Baudrillard’s books. Twenty-five years after its original publication, it remains not only a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition, but also a dark mirror into which we have not yet dared to look.

Titre:
The agony of power

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In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of "domination" (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of generalized "hegemony" in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force — most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation — of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history — that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits : to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.

Titre:
The system of objects

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A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.

Titre:
Les grands entretiens d'artpress: Jean Baudrillard

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Penseur aussi provocant que controversé, Jean Baudrillard a accordé une interview à artpress en 1985 à l'occasion de la sortie de son livre la Gauche divine dans lequel il développe une critique de la gauche béate,«extatique», qu'est le socialisme arrivé au pouvoir. Un an plus tard paraît America à propos duquel il précise que ses propos ne doivent pas être lus de façon réaliste, l'Amérique étant pour lui une fiction. En 1996, il est à nouveau interrogé par Catherine Francblin suite à la parution dans Libération d'une tribune intitulée «Le complot de l'art» dans laquelle il attaque violemment l'art contemporain. Revenant sur sa critique générale de la culture élaborée de livre en livre, il met en cause la consommation de l'art en tant que signe et la disparition de l'objet dans sa forme concrète derrière les «discours autour ou les regards accumulés» qui créent une aura artificielle.

Titre:
La société de consommation

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La consommation est devenue la morale de notre monde. Elle est en train de détruire les bases de l'être humain, c'est-à-dire l'équilibre que la pensée européenne, depuis les Grecs, a maintenu entre les racines mythologiques et le monde du logos. L'auteur précise : «Comme la société du Moyen Âge s'équilibre sur la consommation et sur le diable, ainsi la nôtre s'équilibre sur la consommation et sur sa dénonciation.»

Titre:
Illusion, désillusion, esthétiques

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"On a l'impression qu'une partie de l'art actuel concourt à un travail de dissuasion, à un travail de deuil de l'imaginaire, à un travail de deuil esthétique, la plupart du temps raté, ce qui entraîne une mélancolie générale de la sphère artistique, dont il semble qu'elle se survive dans le recyclage de son histoire et de ses vestiges (mais ni l'art ni l'esthétique ne sont les suls voués à ce destin mélancolique de vivre non pas au-dessus de ses moyens, mais au-delà de ses propres fins)." Jean Baudrillard

Titre:
Utopia deferred : Jean Baudrillard, writings for Utopie (1967-1978)

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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 deferred" collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie as well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka. Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were seminal for some of his 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 Utopie was 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.