BAUDRILLARD NOW

• But When, Now?

Bernardo Alexander Attias, Professor of Communication Studies, CSUN

Baudrillard Now: But when, now? The title and timing of this charter issue in the Summer of 2020 calls out for comment. Not because the question lacks answers—if anything, there are today too many potential responses. In fact my phrasing of this question is inspired by the question asked by another continental philosopher and social theorist at a likewise deeply cathected global moment.

• The art of disappearing Jean Baudrillard, Truls life

Jean Baudrillard, Truls Lie

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) gave us the tools to understand the media society and counteract the total assimilation into capitalist overproduction. Truls Lie finds a previously unpublished interview he made when Baudrillard visited Oslo in 2000.

• Kairos and contingency in photography: Jean Baudrillard’s photographs

By Peter Weibel, Director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

The extraordinary impact of Baudrillard’s theoretical work on the development of art in the entire world is well known. Little known is the fact that Baudrillard himself is an artist.

• Sociology of Art, Baudrillard and Marcuse

Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

When asked to contribute to this forum on art and sociology I was working on a paper on Baudrillard and his book The Conspiracy of art, a collection of essays of recent work on contemporary art, and on a book Art and Liberation, the fourth volume of Collected Writings of Herbert Marcuse that I’m editing for Routledge, and after some reflection decided to compare both theorists for this presentation.

• The fate of energy — Wyrmwood: Road of the dead, ecology, and Baudrillard’s zombie

Brett Nicholls, University of Otago

This paper offers a reading of the Roche-Turner brothers film, Wyrmwood: Road of the dead (2014), in terms of Jean Baudrillard’s work on the fate of energy. Crowdsourced with a budget of $160,000 (Harvey 2015), it took the Roche-Turner brothers four years, working only on weekends, for the film to be completed (Internet movie database). What makes this a notable zombie film, is that a new form of zombie use-value emerges.

• Fatal Fascination, or, Counterinsurgency as Suicide

Andrew McLaverty-Robinson. Political theorist and activist based in the UK

The post-9/11 counterinsurgency project was meant to establish full-spectrum dominance in a permanently deterred reality. Yet it has not only failed to prevent insurgency; it has also created the conditions for the system to come close to destroying itself. Baudrillard already saw this in his writings on terrorism in the 1980s and after 9/11. This article will explore his theories from several points of view.