“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”

—Jean Baudillard

This post is part of Banapana’s running bibliography.

From the Back Cover:

In this, his most important collection of essays since Le Systeme des object, Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western cultuer ‘after the orgy’–the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the 1960s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a confusion of the categories of man and woman–to the ‘androgynous and Frankensteinian appeal of a Michael Jackson’. The revolution in art has engendered a ‘transaesthetic realm of indifference’. The cybernetic revolution has blurred the distinction between man and machine, while the political revolution has led to ‘transpolitics’ that merely simulates old political forms. Such are the points on Baudrillard’s compass as he steers his way through the mental landscape of this febrile fin de siecle.