Simon Critchley

Born	27 February 1960 Hertfordshire[1], England
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental Philosophy
Main interests	Politics, Ethics, Post-Religion, Aesthetics,
Influenced by Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Laclau, Nancy, Badiou

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics.

Academic Career[link]

Critchley studied philosophy at the University of Essex (BA 1985, PhD 1988,) and at the University of Nice (M.Phil. 1987). Among his teachers were Robert Bernasconi, Jay Bernstein, Frank Cioffi, Dominique Janicaud and Onora O'Neill. His M.Phil. thesis dealt with the problem of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger and Carnap; his Ph.D. dissertation was on the ethics of deconstruction in Emmanuel Levinas and Derrida.

Following a period as a university fellow at Cardiff University, Critchley was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at Essex in 1989, becoming reader in philosophy in 1995, and professor in 1999. He was director of the university's Centre for Theoretical Studies and collaborated closely with Ernesto Laclau. Critchley was president of the British Society for Phenomenology from 1994-99. In 1997 and 2001 he held a Humboldt Research Fellowship in philosophy at Frankfurt. Between 1998-2004, he was a programme director of the College international de philosophie, Paris. In 2006-7 he was a scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Since 2004 Critchley has been professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He held the position of chair in philosophy at the New School from 2008-2011, and became the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy in 2011. He has held visiting professorships at numerous universities, including Sydney (2000), Notre Dame (2002), Cardozo Law School (2005) and at the University of Oslo (2006). In 2009 he was appointed a part-time professor of philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he runs a summer school and teaches in philosophy and liberal arts. Critchley is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Critchley is "chief philosopher" of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through proclamations, "denunciations" and live events. He has collaborated closely with the novelist Tom McCarthy on projects including the society's Declaration on Inauthenticity^[1] and their joint publications on Joyce^[2] and Shakespeare.^[3] At an event at the Tate Britain art gallery two lecturers purporting to be Critchley and McCarthy were, in mischievous keeping with the inauthentic theme, played by actors.^[4] The Declaration of Inauthenticity was presented at the opening of the Athens Biennale by Greek actors in June 2009. Critchley also frequently collaborates with his wife, the American psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. Critchley has also worked with the French artist Philippe Parreno and the British conceptual artist Liam Gillick.

Works[link]

The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992)[link]

Critchley’s first book was The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Blackwell, 1992), which became an acclaimed source on deconstruction and was the first book to argue for an ethical dimension to deconstruction. A second expanded edition was published in 1999 by Edinburgh University Press. Rather than being concerned with deconstruction in terms of the contradictions inherent in any text — an approach typical of the early Derrida and those in literary criticism aiming to extract a critical method for an application to literature — Critchley concerns himself with the philosophical context necessary for an understanding of the ethics of deconstructive reading. Far from being some sort of value-free nihilism or textual free-play, Critchley showed the ethical impetus that was driving Derrida’s work. His claim was that Derrida’s understanding of ethics has to be understood in relation to his engagement with the work of Levinas and the book attempts to lay out the details of their philosophical confrontation.

Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997)[link]

Critchley’s second book, Very Little... Almost Nothing (Routledge, 1997) develops in a very different direction and shows his concern with the relation between philosophy and literature and the problem of nihilism. A second edition with additional material and a new preface was published in 2004. At the centre of Very Little... Almost Nothing is the problem of the meaning of life and what sense can be made of this problem in the absence of any religious belief. By way of a series of ‘lectures’ on Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Cavell and romanticism, Critchley argues for a conception of meaninglessness understood as the achievement of the everyday, a view which, he thinks, redeems us from the need for religious redemption.

Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999)[link]

Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (Verso, 1999) is a collection of essays that includes his debate with Richard Rorty, as well as series of essays on Derrida, Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy. These essays also show a pronounced political and psychoanalytic turn to Critchley’s thinking. A new edition of the book appeared in Verso’s Radical Thinkers series in 2009.

Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001)[link]

Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001), is both an introduction to that tradition of thinking and an essay in meta-philosophy, which lays out the way in which Critchley sees the role of theory and reflection. It has been translated into nine languages. In the book, Critchley addresses the perennial question of the two major Western philosophical traditions, that of analytical and continental philosophy. Critchley tries to avoid sectarianism, and argues that the professional opposition between analytic and Continental philosophy is something that needs to be transcended. Critchley accepts that there is risk within continental philosophy of obscurantism, just as there is a risk of scientism in much analytic philosophy. But the primary purpose of philosophy is to understand ourselves, our world and, as Hegel puts it, to comprehend one’s time in thought. Critchley offers the example of the ‘will of God’ as the prime example of obscurantism, but within continental philosophy also the ‘drives’ in Sigmund Freud, ‘archetypes’ in Carl Jung, the ‘real’ in Jaques Lacan, ‘power’ in Michel Foucault, ‘différance’ in Jaques Derrida, the ‘trace of God’ in Emmanuel Levinas, and the ‘epochal withdrawal of being in and as history’ in Martin Heidegger. Continental Philosophy has been translated into 9 languages.

On Humour (2002)[link]

Since 2000, Critchley has turned his attention to what he calls ‘impossible objects’: humour, poetry and music. His On Humour (Routledge, 2002) continues the meditation on nihilism begun in Very Little…Almost Nothing; but he continues it in a very different key, analysing the meaning and importance of humour. Critchley argues that humour is an oblique phenomenology of ordinary bringing about a change of situation that exerts a powerful critical function. On Humour has been translated into 10 languages and has exerted considerable influence over debates around the role of humour in contemporary art practice.

Things Merely Are (2005)[link]

In Things Merely Are (Routledge, 2005), Critchley examines the relation between philosophy and poetry through an extended meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Critchley’s particular focus in Stevens’ very late poems, which attempt to describe what poetry can and cannot say about a subject-independent reality.^[5] Critchley is referenced in the commentary on Stevens's poem Another Weeping Woman. The book also contains Critchley’s influential essay on Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

Infinitely Demanding (2007)[link]

Infinitely Demanding (Verso, 2007) is the most systematic overview of Critchley's philosophical position. It combines a meta-ethics based on the concepts of approval and demand with a phenomenology of ethical experience and ethical subjectivity. At the centre of the book is a theory of ethical subjectivity based on the relation to an infinite demand. Critchley extends his analysis into discussions of aesthetics and sublimation and into political theory and practice. Critchley argues for an ethically committed political anarchism. Infinitely Demanding has been translated into 8 languages. The book has led to some heated polemics, notably with Slavoj Žižek (See below, the Critchley-Žižek Debate). “Infinitely Demanding” is the topic of a special issue of the journal Critical Horizons (August 2009).

On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008)[link]

This volume (Routledge, 2008) combines Reiner Schürmann's lectures at the New School for Social Research on Heidegger’s Being and Time with Critchley’s New School lectures on the relation between Heidegger and Husserl and his own interpretation of Being and Time. Where Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology, Reiner Schürmann's proposal is to read Heidegger ‘backward’, arguing that Heidegger’s later work is the key to unraveling Being and Time. Critchley concludes the volume with an extended critique of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity.

The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009)[link]

An extended defense of the idea that to philosophize is to learn how to die, The Book of Dead Philosophers was published by Granta in the UK (2008), Vintage in the US (2009) and Melbourne University Press in Australia (2008). It has been translated into 13 languages. “The Book of Dead Philosophers” was widely reviewed and discussed (see below). It was on The New York Times Best-Seller List in March 2009 and was a top ten bestseller in Greece in Summer 2009. The aim of “The Book of Dead Philosophers” is to examine, defend and refine the ideal of the philosophical death in the context of a culture like ours that is defined by a denial of death. However, the deeper intention of the book is to challenge and revise the way we think about the history of philosophy. More specifically, the book tries to conceive of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers and thereby rethink the way in which approach the relation between the activity of philosophy and an individual life, between conceptuality and biography.

Der Katechismus des Bürgers (2008)[link]

This small volume (Diaphanes, Berlin, 2008) on the problem of politics and religion in Rousseau was first published in German.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010)[link]

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Polity, 2010), a sort of anti-self-help book, is a series of conversations between Critchley and Carl Cederström from 2009 and 2010, originally based on Swedish television series. The conversations are intended to provide an overview and introduction to Critchley's life and work. They are based around a series topics: life, death, love, humour and authenticity. The volume also contains a discussion with Tom McCarthy.

Impossible Objects (2011)[link]

A collection of interviews with Critchley over the past 10 years, edited by Carl Cederström and Todd Kesselman, published by Polity Press in 2011.

Recent Reviews:

• The Guardian Steven Poole, Et cetera: non-fiction reviews
• We Make Meaning Review for PopMatters.com

International Necronautical Society: Offizielle Mitteilungen (2011)[link]

The International Society Necronautical has been nourished by the faded avant-garde movements of the last century, whether artistic, cultural or political. This volume gathers a selection of official communications from the INS from 1999 to 2010, the first time are available in German; meticulously documenting their manifestos, reports, statements, meetings, and trials from 1999 onwards. “We are sometimes asked: How do I join? How does one become a necronaut? Wrong question. As Paragraph Three, lines five and six of the INS’s First Manifesto make clear, willfully pilfering and re-using the tired language of deconstruction, ‘We are all necronauts, always, already.’ Our mission is to disseminate that fact: not as conceptual knowledge but rather in the way that Molly Bloom fills her husband’s mouth with seedcake, then repeats that moment, with a silent Yes.” An English version of the book is forthcoming from Sternberg Press.

The Faith of the Faithless (2012)[link]

From the paradox of politics and religion in Rousseau to the political stakes of the return to St. Paul in the work of Heidegger, Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Carl Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Žižek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence and the limits of non-violence. The Faith of the Faithless - Experiments in Political Theology will be published by Verso in 2012.

Recent Reviews:

• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Publisher's Weekly.
• PoliticalTheology.com
• The Guardian
• BookForum
• New Statesman
• The Oxonian Review
• Times Higher Education

The Hamlet Doctrine (forthcoming)[link]

Critchley is currently finishing a book on Hamlet with Jamieson Webster that will deal with the play in the light of various 'outsider' interpretations, such as those of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan.

Work in Progress (forthcoming)[link]

Critchley is currently also completing an, as of yet, unnamed short book of conversations with Philippe Parreno.

[edit] Recent Press for The Faith of the Faithless

• Cornell West on The Faith of the Faithless at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
• Tea with Simon Critchley: The Separation of Church and State Is Impossible The New Yorker reviews the The Faith of the Faithless.

The Stone[link]

The Stone is an opinion series in The New York Times, moderated by Simon Critchley, that features the writings of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless - art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more. Recent contributors include J.M. Bernstein, Arthur Danto, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer, Natasha Lennard, Nancy Bauer, Todd May, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Railton, Galen Strawson, Feisal G. Mohamed, William Egginton, Andy Martin, Gary Gutting, and Critchley.^[6] Other articles by Critchley in The New York Times also include Beyond the Sea, How to Make It in the Afterlife, and Coin of Praise.

On May 21st, 2011 The New York Times brought back The Stone, due to its widespread popularity. In the first new entry since January, Critchley discusses the aims of the column and the role of philosophy in contemporary culture (The Stone Returns). Critchley's recent contributions to the The Stone include Let Be: An Answer to Hamlet’s Question, a collaboration with Jamieson Webster that traces the logic of action in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Euro Blind, a discussion of Sophocles and the so-called “tragedy" of the European debt crisis. More recently, Critchley contributed a three-part essay on the work of Philip K. Dick entitled Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher

[edit] The Guardian Series on Heidegger's Being and Time

In an essay series^[7] for the British newspaper The Guardian, Critchley explores Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, first published in 1927. The importance of Heidegger’s work, Crtichley explains, is not limited to philosophy, but has poured over into such diverse areas as architecture, contemporary art, social and political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry and theology. Yet, because of his political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, when he assumed the position of Rector of Freiburg University in south-western Germany, Heidegger continues to arouse controversy, polemic and much heated misunderstanding: How could arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century also have been a Nazi? What does his political commitment to National Socialism, however long or short it lasted, suggest about the nature of philosophy and its risks and dangers when stepping into the political realm? Critchley argues that such political questions cannot be properly confronted without coming to terms with Being and Time. The Guardian Series is a concise attempt to understand and feel the persuasive power of this seminal text.

Recent Interviews[link]

• Pursuing Impossible Objects An interview by John Douglas Millar for Monthly Review.
• On Philosophers, Violence, Humour & Tragedy An interview by Qalandar Bux Memon and Asif Akhtar for Naked Punch.
• Tragedy, Rage, Grief and Being an Arsehole An interview by Dave Ronalds for Parallax.
• Exhausted States Concluding their three-part exchange for Mute, artist Alfredo Jaar and philosopher Simon Critchley contemplate how to keep on, artistically and politically, in the face of the spectacular violence that washed-up liberal democracy meets with daily indifference. This exchange was convened by David Morris.
• Creating Interstices: On Ethics, Politics, and Curatorship Simon Critchley discusses aesthetics, nihilism, and ethical fidelity with Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro in Manifesta Journal, V.12
• Resisting the Meaningless Simon Critchley talks power, politics, and the problem of nihilism with Tom Cutterham for Cherwell.org
• Geluk wordt overschat "Happiness is Overrated": Simon Critchley speaks with Peter Giesen for De Volkskrant in the Netherlands.
• The Last Word: Critchley on Cattelan An interview with Critchley on Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective at the Guggenheim.
• My Daily Read for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• An Interview on The Faith of the Faithless with Stir to Action.
• The Ethics of Discomfort John Douglas Millar on art and politics according to Simon Critchley for Art Monthly.
• "월가 시위는 아나키즘의 가능성 보여준 사례" An interview with the Korean newspaper Hankookilbo.

Live Talks and Interviews[link]

Video[link]

• Symposium: We, Ourselves & Us Simon Critchley speaks in conjunction with the exhibition "If We Can’t Get It Together" at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada (January 23, 2009).
• Ten Years of Terror Edited by Simon Critchley and Brad Evans. This movie was screened at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York in September 2011.
• Simon Critchley offers his personal reflections on Ten Years of Terror for the histories of violence project.
• Barack Obama and the American Void Critchley's lecture "Barack Obama and the American Void" is Fora.TV's most-watched political program for 2009.
• The Diavlog of Dead Philosophers: Bloggingheads.tv Percontations Simon Critchley and David Shields discuss topics from the empty existential core of Los Angeles to the proximity of death and humor.
• Video To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die at Fora.tv
• James Corby interviews Simon Critchley by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009

Audio[link]

• The Attractions of Mystical Anarchism Tony Curzon Price interviews Simon Critchley for Opendemocracy.net
• Fictional Force: How the Many are Governed by the Few Simon Critchley discusses Political Theology with Richard Bernstein at the New School for Social Research.
• The Heights of Ecstasy A Halloween Sermon on Self-Deification, Cabinet Magazine & Slought Foundation, 31 October 2008.
• Free Thoughts: BBC Radio Series Simon Critchley talking about being 'The First Free Thinker'.
• Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart? Frieze Art Fair Podcast: A conversation with Simon Critchley, Robert Storr, Barbara Bloom, Jörg Heiser.
• The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations Daniel Heller-Roazen and Simon Critchley discuss Heller-Roazen's latest book at Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association.
• Against the Grain Simon Critchley talks about neo-anarchism, Obama, and political mobilizations with guest host Andrej Grubacic on KPFA 94.1 FM.
• Slought Foundation Award for Creative Thought Simon Critchley and filmmaker Astra Taylor will share the 2010 Slought Foundation Award for Creative Thought. The award ceremony will be followed by a screening of Taylor's unreleased conversation with Critchley, as well as a public conversation between the recipients on the function of public intellectuals in American culture and politics.
• On Faith Simon Critchley discusses faith for the 'Elucidations' podcast (Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago).
• The Beyond Belief Series An Interview by JK Fowler for the The Mantle.

The Critchley-Žižek Debate[link]

The time-line or chronology of the Critchley-Žižek debate is usefully outlined by Critchley in a footnote to his Naked Punch article "Violent Thoughts on Slavoj Žižek".

1. Žižek’s piece, ‘Resistance is Surrender’ (London Review of Books, 15 November 2007), which criticized the (at that time) recent appearance of Critchley's Infinitely Demanding.
2. 'Resistance is Surrender' in turn occasioned some responses from readers including T.J. Clark and David Graeber, to which Žižek replied by accusing Graeber and Critchley of ‘the highest form of corruption’ (LRB, 24 January 2008).
3. Žižek’s critique was then republished in Harper's Magazine (February 2008), to which Critchley replied in a later issue (May 2008).
4. An extended version of Žižek's critique of Critchley's position appeared in Žižek's book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, London and New York, 2008), pp. 337–350. Critchley says he will "respond to Zizek’s criticisms of my ethical position and interpretation of Lacan on a separate occasion".

Bibliography of the Critchley-Žižek debate

1. Critchley: Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, London & New York, 2007; ISBN 1-84467-121-6).
2. Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender in the London Review of Books.
3. T.J. Clark's and David Graeber's Responses in the London Review of Books.
4. Zizek's Response a letter in the London Review of Books.
5. Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, London & New York, 2008), pp. 337–350.
6. Critchley: Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek in Naked Punch'
7. The Violent State Article by Robert Young on the Critchley-Žižek Debate in Naked Punch
8. "Crypto-Schmittianism" This article by Simon Critchley, published in 2005, offers a useful preamble to Critchley's position{s}

Trivia[link]

• Press Releases of the Dead Throughout October 2009 media types around the country will receive cardboard tombstones cutouts to celebrate the release of The Book of Dead Philosophers.
• The Dead Philosophers' Limbo The Dead Philosophers' Limbo is Susie Burpee's twelve-hour dance to the life of ideas and the death of philosophers as told by the living philosopher Simon Critchley in his book, The Book of Dead Philosophers.
• Askmelissa.com How do you applaud the launch of Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead Philosophers? With a séance, of course! At least that’s how the Accompanied Literary Society chose to celebrate at an out-of-this-world party at Bobo.
• Under the name of Critchley & Simmons, Critchley has produced a CD called Humiliation (2004) and a series of short films. This project was launched in an event at the Sydney Opera House in August 2004.
• Critchley gave the name The Bleach Boys to a Hitchin based band previously known as The Fur Coughs.
• Critchley himself played guitar in a number of North Hertfordshire bands including The Good Blokes and Social Class 5.
• Critchley is a devotee of football, and has since a young child been a keen supporter of Liverpool FC. He has taken this life-long love into his philosophical work, giving a lecture in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in May 2009 on French football star Zinedine Zidane, ”A puppet or a god? On Zidane”, based on Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno's film Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait from 2006.
• in 2011, Critchley co-directed (with Brad Evans) Ten Years of Terror in recognition of the ten year anniversary of September 11th. Ten Years of Terror examines the theoretical, empirical, and aesthetic dimensions of violence and the ensuing state of terror it produces. This series of reflections by key canonical thinkers such as Saskia Sassen, Michael Hardt, Noam Chomsky, Zygmunt Bauman, and others closely examines the enactment and ramifications of violence in our modern times. The film was shown at the Guggenheim in September 2011.
• The Last Word, Seven-Hour Finale: Critchley will co-host the closing of the exhibit Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Saturday January 21st, 2012.

Miscellaneous Links[link]

• Critchley's webpage at The New School for Social Research
• Simon Critchley Faculty page at European Graduate School (Biography, bibliography, photos and video lectures)
• What Is Normal? Critchley recently published an article for Adbusters which discusses the power of the political imagination and the ongoing world-wide conflicts with state power.
• Irish artist Clodagh Emoe recently made a film of Critchley's Mystical Anarchism, which will be shown in New York and elsewhere in 2012.
• Readings A list of books on the mind for The Believer Mag,

Selected bibliography[link]

• (1991) Re-Reading Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
• (1992) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, (2nd edition, 1999)
• (1996) Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. with Peter Dews, State University of New York Press, Ithaca, NY.
• (1996) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. with Adriaan T. Peperzak and Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
• (1997) Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London & New York (2nd Edition, 2004).
• (1998) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. with William J. Schroeder, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
• (1999) Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought, Verso, London (Reissued, 2007).
• (2001) Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press.
• (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge University Press.
• (2002) On Humour, Routledge, London.
• (2004) Laclau, A Critical Reader, ed. with Oliver Marchart, Routledge, London.
• (2005) On the Human Condition, with Dominique Janicaud & Eileen Brennan, Routledge, London.
• (2007) Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Verso, London & New York.
• (2008) The Book of Dead Philosophers, Granta Books, London; Vintage, New York; Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
• (2008) On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, with Reiner Schürmann, edited by Steven Levine, Routledge, London and New York.
• (2008) Der Katechismus des Bürgers, Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin.
• (2008) Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance (DVD) - Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation, Slought Books, Philadelphia.
• (2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Polity Press.
• (2011) Impossible Objects, Polity Press.
• (2011) International Necronautical Society: Offizielle Mitteilungen
• (2012) The Faith of the Faithless, Verso.

Critchley has also edited the following book series:

• Thinking the Political (Routledge)
• Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (Blackwell)
• Thinking in Action (Routledge)
• How to Read... (Granta, London, and W.W. Norton, New York)

References[link]

See also[link]

• necronauts

Bruce Sterling
Born	(1954-04-14) April 14, 1954 (age 58) Austin, Texas, U.S.
Pen name	Vincent Omniaveritas (in fanzine Cheap Truth)
Occupation	Writer, speaker, futurist, design instructor
Nationality	American
Period	1970s-present
Genres	Science fiction
Subjects	Cyberpunk
Literary movement	Cyberpunk/postcyberpunk
Influences J. G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, Samuel R. Delany, Chad Oliver
Influenced Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds[1]
Signature
www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.^[2]

Writings[link]

Sterling is, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, as well as its chief ideological promulgator, and one whose polemics on the topic earned him the nickname "Chairman Bruce".^[3] He was also one of the first organizers of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop, and is a frequent attendee at the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for his novelettes Bicycle Repairman and Taklamakan.

His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features the world Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater; the story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath the surface. It is partially a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the solar system is colonised, with two major warring factions. The Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic engineering on a massive scale. The situation is complicated by the eventual contact with alien civilizations; humanity eventually splits into many subspecies, with the implication that many of these effectively vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of The Singularity in the works of Vernor Vinge. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collection Crystal Express and the collection Schismatrix Plus, which contains the original novel Schismatrix and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Alastair Reynolds identified Schismatrix and the other Shaper/Mechanist stories as one of the greatest influences on his own work.^[1]

Bruce Sterling at the 2010 Augmented Reality Event

In the 1980s, Sterling edited the science fiction critical fanzine Cheap Truth, under the alias of Vincent Omniaveritas. He wrote a column called Catscan, for the now-defunct science fiction critical magazine, SF Eye.

He recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also contributed, along with Lewis Shiner, to the short story Mozart in Mirrorshades.

From April 2009 through May 2009, he was an editor at Cool Tools.^[4]

Since October 2003^[5] Sterling has blogged at "Beyond the Beyond", which is hosted by Wired.

Projects[link]

He has been the instigator of three projects which can be found on the Web -

• The Dead Media Project - A collection of "research notes" on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s. The Project's homepage, including Sterling's original Dead Media Manifesto can be found at http://www.deadmedia.org
• The Viridian Design Movement - his attempt to create a "green" design movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design.^[6] The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors include many of the original members of the Viridian "curia".
• Embrace the Decay - a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003.^[7] Incorporating contributions solicited through The Viridian Design 'movement', Embrace the Decay was the most visited piece/page at LA MOCA's Digital Gallery, and included contributions from Jared Tarbell of levitated.net and co-author of several books on advanced Flash programming, and Monty Zukowski, creator of the winning 'decay algorithm' sponsored by Bruce.

Neologisms[link]

Sterling has a habit of coining neologisms to describe things which he believes will be common in the future, especially items which already exist in limited numbers.

• In the December 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Sterling coined the term buckyjunk. Buckyjunk refers to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes (aka buckytubes, based on buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene).
• In July 1989, in SF Eye #5, he was the first to use the word "slipstream" to refer to a type of speculative fiction between traditional science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literature.
• In December 1999 he coined the term "Wexelblat disaster", for a disaster caused when a natural disaster triggers a secondary, and more damaging, failure of human technology.^[8]
• In August 2004 he suggested a type of technological device (he called it "spime") that, through pervasive RFID and GPS tracking, can track its history of use and interact with the world.^[9]
• In the speech where he offered "spime", he noted that the term "blobject", with which he is sometimes credited, was passed on to him by industrial designer Karim Rashid. The term may originally have been coined by Steven Skov Holt.^[10]

Personal[link]

Sterling at Robofest '94

In childhood, Sterling spent several years in India; today he has a notable fondness for Bollywood films.^[11] In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School where he is teaching Summer Intensive Courses on media and design.^[2] In 2005, he became "visionary in residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He lived in Belgrade with his second wife, Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tesanovic^[12] for several years. In September 2007 he moved to Turin, Italy.^[13] He also travels the world extensively giving speeches and attending conferences.

Awards[link]

• 2000 Clarke Award winner for the novel Distraction^[14]
• 1999 Hayakawa Award winner Taklamakan Best Foreign Short Story
• 1999 Hugo Award winner for the novelette Taklamakan
• 1997 Hugo Award winner for the novelette Bicycle Repairman
• 1989 Campbell Award winner for the novel Islands in the Net^[15]

Bibliography[link]

Lectures and speeches[link]

• http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP992407 SXSW 2012 keynote talk
• Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011 (part 1 of 3) part 2 of 3 part 3 of 3 South by South West, March 15, 2011, Austin, Texas ^[16][17]
• "Atemporality & The Passage of Time". Video lecture at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, June 2010
• "On Favela Chic, Gothic High Tech and where we are heading." Reboot 11, Copenhagen, July 2009
• "Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today". Flurb 6 Speech at the Austin Game Developers Conference. (Fall-Winter 2008).
• "A look at 2008, the boring year ahead". Lift08. Opening Keynote. 2008
• "Spimes and the future of artifacts" Lift
• "Mobiles and the urban poor" Lift Asis 08
• "The Internet of Things. What is a spime." Google, April 30, 2007
• Closing talk by Bruce Sterling South by South West, March 13, 2007, Austin Texas.
• Opening keynote speech at Ubicomp 2006 conference, Orange County, California. Bruce's speech begins at 0:10:20.
• "Impact and Sustainability of Technology." Video lecture @ European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. 2006
• "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling". Keynote address to Computer Game Developers' Conference, San Jose, 1991.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bruce Sterling

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bruce Sterling

• Bruce Sterling faculty page at European Graduate School. Biography, bibliography, video lectures.
• Bruce Sterling at the Internet Movie Database
• Bruce Sterling at the Open Directory Project
• Wired Blog : Beyond the beyond
• Bruce Sterling: author's page at 40kBooks.com
• Bruce Sterling at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Archive of Catscan columns at EFF
• Works by Bruce Sterling on Open Library at the Internet Archive

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bruce Sterling

Robert Musil
Musil in 1900
Born	(1880-11-06)November 6, 1880 Klagenfurt, Austria-Hungary
Died	April 15, 1942(1942-04-15) (aged 61) Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	Austrian
Period	1905–1942
Genres	Literary fiction
Literary movement	modernism
Influences Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Schnitzler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernst Mach
Signature

Robert Musil (German pronunciation: [ˈmuːzɪl] or [ˈmuːsɪl]; 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942)^[1] was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. However, this novel has not been widely read because of its delayed publication and also because of the lengthy and intricate plot that foresaw the impending disaster in Europe after the first world war.

Family[link]

Musil was the son of engineer Alfred Edler von^[1] Musil (1846, Temesvár – 1924) and his wife Hermine Bergauer (1853, Linz – 1924), who lived together with an unrelated "uncle" Heinrich Reiter (born 1856), the houseguest in the Musil family. The family moved to Chomutov until October 1881, and in 1891 father was appointed to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in Brno, and awarded a hereditary nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire shortly before it collapsed. He was a second cousin of orientalist Alois Musil.^[2]

Hermine Bergauer was the daughter of a Bohemian German engineer, Franz (Xaver von) Bergauer (3 December 1805, Hořovice – 11 October 1886, Linz).^[3]

Biography[link]

Commemorative plaque in Brno

The young Musil was short in stature, but strong and skilled at wrestling, and by his early teens already more than his parents could handle. Accordingly they sent him to military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892–1894) and then Hranice(1894–1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless).

After graduating as a cadet, Musil briefly studied at a military academy in Vienna during the fall of 1897, but then switched to civil engineering, joining his father's department at Technical University in Brno. During his university studies he studied engineering by day, but at night read literature and philosophy, and went to the theatre and art exhibits. Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernst Mach were particular interests of his university years. Musil finished his studies in three years, then in 1902–1903 served as an unpaid assistant to Professor Julius Carl von Bach, in Stuttgart. During this time he began work on Young Törless and invented the device "Musil'scher Farbkreisel", The Musil color top, a simple tool for continuous production of mixed colors by additive color mixing with two differently colored rotating disks.

Even then, however, Musil was growing tired of engineering and what he perceived as the limited world-view of engineers, and rather than settle into an engineering career, he launched a new round of doctoral studies (1903–1908) in psychology and philosophy at the University of Berlin under the renowned Professor Carl Stumpf. In 1905, Musil had met his future wife, Martha Marcovaldi (née Heinemann, January 21, 1874 – November 6, 1949). She had already been widowed and remarried, with two children, and was seven years older than Musil. In the midst of these studies his first novel, Young Törless, was published in 1906.

In 1909, Musil completed his doctorate and was offered a position by Professor Alexius Meinong, at the University of Graz, which he turned down to concentrate on writing of novels. Over the next two years, he wrote and published two stories ("The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" and "The Perfecting of a Love") collected in Vereinigungen (Unions) published in 1911. During this same year, Martha's divorce was completed and Musil married her. Until this time, Musil had been supported by his family, but he now found employment first as a librarian in the Technical University of Vienna, and then in an editorial role with the Berlin Literary Journal, during which time he worked on a play entitled Die Schwärmer (The Enthusiasts), which was eventually published in 1921.

Depiction of Musil at the Musilhaus in Klagenfurt

When World War I began, Musil joined the Army, stationed first in Tirol, and then away from danger at Austria's Supreme Army Command in Bolzano. In 1916 Musil visited Prague and met Franz Kafka, whose work he held in high esteem, as he did the work of Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. At the memorial service for Rilke in Berlin, Musil remarked that Rilke was "undervalued" for most of his life, and by the time of his death, he had turned into "a delicate, well-matured liqueur suitable for grown-up ladies",^[4] but that his work is "too demanding" to be "considered relaxing".^[5] After the war's end, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Musil returned to his literary career in Vienna. He published a collection of short stories, Drei Frauen (Three Women), in 1924, and then in 1930 and 1933^[6] in Berlin - 1,074-page^[7] Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction, and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and 605-page unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)) of his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften).^[8] Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Vol. 2 of 1933 while in printer's galley proofs. The novel deals with the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire through the eyes of the book's protagonist Ulrich, an ex-mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in a manner that would allow him to possess 'qualities'. It is set in Vienna on the eve of World War I.

The Man Without Qualities brought Musil only mediocre commercial success. Though he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he felt he did not receive the recognition he deserved. He sometimes expressed annoyance at the success of more famous colleagues like Thomas Mann or Hermann Broch, who admired his work deeply, and, moved by his material poverty, tried to shield him against daily worries and encouraged him to further his literary work, even though Musil was initially critical of Mann.

In the early 1920s Musil lived mostly in Berlin. In Vienna Musil was a frequent visitor to Eugenie Schwarzwald's salon (the model for Diotima in The Man Without Qualities). In 1932, the Robert Musil Society was founded in Berlin on the initiative of Thomas Mann. The same year Thomas Mann was asked to name an eminent contemporary novel and he cited exclusively The Man Without Qualities. In 1936, Musil suffered his first stroke.

The last years of Musil's life were dominated by Nazism and World War II: the Nazis banned his books. He saw early Nazism first-hand while living in Berlin from 1931 to 1933. In 1938, when Austria became a part of the Third Reich, Musil and his Jewish wife Martha left for exile in Switzerland, where he died on April 15, 1942. Martha wrote to Franz Theodor Csokor^[9] that taking off his clothes in the bathroom, maybe when doing gymnastics or just making a hefty movement, he had been hit by a stroke and, when she found him a few minutes later, did not look dead at all but so alive with some mockery and astonishment on his face. He was 61 old, but only eight people were present at his cremation. Martha cast his ashes into the woods of Mont Salève.^[10] From 1933 until his very last day, Musil was working on Part III of The Man Without Qualities. In 1943 in Lausanne, Martha published a 462-page collection of material from his literary remains including the 20 galley chapters withdrawn from Part III before publishing Vol. 2 in 1933,^[6] as well as drafts of the final incomplete chapters and notes on the development and direction of the novel;^[8] she died in Rome in 1949.

Legacy[link]

After his death Musil's work was almost forgotten in German-speaking countries. His writings began to reappear during the early 1950s. The first translation of The Man Without Qualities in English was published by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins in 1953, 1954 and 1960. An updated translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, containing extensive selections from unpublished drafts, appeared in 1995.^[11] Musil's work has been getting more attention recently^[12], including the philosophical aspects of his novels. One of the most important philosophy journals, The Monist will publish a special issue on The Philosophy of Robert Musil in 2014, edited by Bence Nanay.^[13]

Timeline[link]

This section overlaps with other sections too much. It should be combined with the rest of the article. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2010)

• 1880 November 6, Robert Musil born in Klagenfurt. Father Engineer Alfred Musil, mother Hermine.
• 1881–1882 The Musils move to Chomutov in Bohemia.
• 1882–1891 The Musils move to Steyr (Austria). Robert attends the Elementary School and the first grade of the gymnasium.
• 1891–1892 Moves to Brno. Attends the Realschule.
• 1892–1894 Attends the military boarding school in Eisenstadt.
• 1894–1897 Attends the military Militär-Oberrealschule in Hranice (present-day in the Czech Republic) During his working with artillery Musil discovers his interest in technique.
• 1897 Attends the Technische Militärakademie in Vienna.
• 1898–1901 Quits officer training and starts studies at the Technical University in Brno. His father was a professor there since 1890. First literary attempt, and first diary notations.
• 1901 doctorate exams.
• 1901–1902 Musil enlists in the infantry regiment of Freiherr von Hess Nr. 49 in Brno
• 1902–1903 Moves to Stuttgart to work at the University. Works on his first novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless
• 1903–1908 Takes up a philosophy study; his majors are "logic and experimental psychology".
• 1905 In his diaries he makes the first notes that will eventually lead to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
• 1906 Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Torless is published. Developed an apparatus to research colour experience in people.
• 1908 Beiträge zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs is the title of his doctoral thesis with which he promotes in philosophy, natural science and mathematics. Declines an offer to upgrade his last military rank to an equal civilian rank in favour of writing.
• 1908–1910 Works in Berlin as an editor for the magazine Pan and on his Vereinigungen and Die Schwärmer.
• 1911–1914 Librarian at the Technical University of Vienna.
• 1911 On 15 April Musil marries Martha Marcovaldi. Vereinigungen is published.
• 1912–1914 Editor for several literary magazines, including Die Neue Rundschau.
• 1914–1918 During World War I, Musil is officer at the Italian front. Decorated several times.
• 1916–1917 July–April: publishes the "Soldaten-Zeitung".
• 1917 On 22 October , Alfred Musil was hereditary ennobled as Alfred Edler von Musil, so Robert Musil also belonged to the nobility until it was abolished less than two years later.^[1]
• 1918 Takes up writing again.
• 1919–1920 Works for the Information Service of the Austrian foreign department in Vienna.
• 1920 April–June: lives in Berlin. Meets Ernest Rowohlt who will become, in 1923, his publisher and will remain so.
• 1920–1922 Adviser for army matters in Vienna.
• 1921–1931 Works as theatre critic, essayist and writer in Vienna. Works on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
• 1921 The play Die Schwärmer is published.
• 1923–1929 Is vice-president of Schutzverbandes deutscher Schriftsteller in Östereich. Meets Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who is president of the foundation.
• 1923 Awarded the Kleist Prize for Die Schwärmer. On December 4 Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer is premièred in Berlin.
• 1924 On 24 January his mother and on 1 October his father die. Awarded the art prize of the city of Vienna. Drei Frauen is published.
• 1927 Holds a speech on the occasion on the death of Rainer Maria Rilke in Berlin.
• 1929 4 April première of Die Schwärmer. In spite of protests by Musil, the play is shortened and therefore incomprehensible, according to Musil. In the autumn awarded the Gerhart Hauptmann award.
• 1930 The first two parts of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften are published. In spite of critical support, the financial situation is precarious.
• 1931–1933 Lives and works in Berlin.
• 1932 Foundation of a Musil-Gesellschaft by Kurt Glaser in Berlin. The foundation aims to provide Musil with the means necessary to continue working on his novel. At the end of the year the third part of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is published.
• 1933 In May Musil leaves Berlin, with his wife Martha. Via Karlovy Vary and Potstejn in Czechoslovakia they eventually reach Vienna.
• 1934–1938 After the dismantling of the Berlin Musil-Gesellschaft, a new one is founded in Vienna.
• 1935 Lecture for the Internationalen Schriftstellerkongress für die Verteidigung der Kultur" in Paris.
• 1936 Publishes his collection of thoughts, observations and stories Nachlass zu Lebzeiten. Suffers a stroke.
• 1938 Via northern Italy Musil and his wife flee to Zürich. Two days after their arrival, on September 4, they are having tea at Thomas Mann's home in Küsnacht.
• 1939 In July moves to Geneva. Musil continues to work on his novel under the worst financial circumstances, and grows lonelier with exile. Thanks to the Zürich vicar Robert Lejeune, Musil receives some financial support, including from the American couple Henry Hall and Barbara Church. In Germany and Austria Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten are banned and this ban is extended to all of his works in 1941.
• 1942 April 15, Musil dies in Geneva.
• 1943 Martha Musil publishes the unfinished remains of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften on her own account.
• 1952–1957 Adolf Frisé publishes the complete works of Robert Musil at Rowohlt.

Bibliography[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Musil

• Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Torless, 1906), later made into a movie Der junge Törless
• Vereinigungen (1911) (Unions – a collection of two short stories)
• Die Schwärmer (1921)
• Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1924)
• Drei Frauen (1924) (Three Women – a collection of three short stories)
• Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (1936) (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author – a collection of short prose pieces)
• Über die Dummheit (1937)
• Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930, 1933, 1943, published in two volumes)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• McBride, Patrizia C. The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006.
• Philip Payne, Graham Bartram and Galin Tihanov (eds), A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007).
• B. Pike, Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work, Kennikat Press, 1961, reissued 1972.
• Thomas Sebastian, The Intersection оf Science And Literature in Musil's 'The Man Without' (Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2005).

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Musil

• Comprehensive site in Dutch and English
• The website of the Robert Musil Literature Museum
• "Exhuming Robert Musil: A Fresh Look at The Man Without Qualities by Ted Gioia (Great Books Guide)

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2010)

Jean-Luc Nancy

Nancy in 2006 at European Graduate School.
Born	(1940-07-26) July 26, 1940 (age 71)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy
Main interests	Deconstruction
Influenced by Heidegger · Derrida · Lacoue-Labarthe · Hegel

Jean-Luc Nancy (born July 26, 1940, Caudéran (near Bordeaux), France) is a French philosopher.

Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre (The Title of the Letter, 1992), a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 (The Speculative Remark, 2001) on G.W.F. Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L’Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger. In addition to Le titre de la lettre, Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles. Major influences include Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Biography[link]

Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 in Paris. He taught for a short while in Colmar before becoming an assistant at the Strasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968. In 1973, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Kant under the supervision of Paul Ricœur. Nancy was then promoted to Maître de conférences at the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nancy was a guest professor at universities all over the world, from the University of California to the Freie Universität in Berlin. He has been invited as a cultural delegate of the French Ministry of External Affairs to speak in Eastern Europe, Britain and the United States. In 1987, Nancy received his Docteur d'état from the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail under the supervision of Gérard Granel and a jury including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. It was published as L'expérience de la liberté (1988).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nancy suffered serious medical problems. He underwent a heart transplant and his recovery was made more difficult by a long-term fight with cancer. He stopped teaching and quit participating in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, but continued to write. Many of his best known texts were published during this time. An account of his experience, L'intrus (The Intruder), was published in 2000.

Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and at the University of Strasbourg.^[1]

Filmmaker Claire Denis has made at least two movies inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy and his works. Many other artists have worked with Nancy as well, such as Simon Hantaï, Soun-gui Kim and Phillip Warnell [1]. Nancy has written about the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and featured prominently in the film The Ister.

Major works[link]

[edit] Les Fins de l'homme

In 1980, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe organized a conference in Cerisy-la-Salle on Derrida and politics entitled "Les Fins de l'homme" ("The Ends of Man"). The conference solidified Derrida’s place at the forefront of contemporary philosophy, and was a place to begin an in-depth conversation between philosophy and contemporary politics. Further to their desire to rethink the political, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe set up in the same year the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political). The Centre was dedicated to pursuing philosophical rather than empirical approaches to political questions, and supported such speakers as Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard. By 1984, however, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were dissatisfied with the direction work at the centre was taking, and it was closed down.^[2]

During that period Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy produced several important papers, together and separately. Some of these texts appear in Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980 (1981), Rejouer le politique (1981), La retrait du politique (1983), and Le mythe nazi (1991, revised edition; originally published as Les méchanismes du fascisme, 1981). Many of these texts are gathered in translation in Retreating the Political (1997).

[edit] La Communauté désœuvrée

Nancy’s first book on the question of community, La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community, 1986), is perhaps his best-known work. This text is an introduction to some of the main philosophical themes Nancy continued to work with. Nancy traces the influence of the notion of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought. Discarding popular notions, Nancy redefines community, asking what can it be if it is reduced neither to a collection of separate individuals, nor to a hypostasized communal substance, e.g., fascism. He writes that our attempt to design society according to pre-planned definitions frequently leads to social violence and political terror, posing the social and political question of how to proceed with the development of society with this knowledge in mind. La Communauté désœuvrée means that community is not the result of a production, be it social, economic or even political (nationalist) production; it is not une œuvre, a "work of art" ("œuvre d'art", but "art" is here understood in the sense of "artifice").

"The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader...) ...necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the togetherthat defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being." (Preface, xxxix).

La communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community, 1988), a short work by Maurice Blanchot, was a response to Nancy’s work on community (and inspired as well by Georges Bataille, whose work on sovereignty is discussed in La communauté désoeuvrée). The dialogue between Nancy and Blanchot would continue until Blanchot's death.

[edit] L'Expérience de la liberté

Nancy's dissertation for his Docteur d'etat looked at the works of Kant, Schelling, Sartre and Heidegger, and concentrated on their treatment of the topic of freedom. It was published in 1988 as L'Expérience de la Liberté (The Experience of Freedom). Since then, Nancy has continued to concentrate on developing a reorientation of Heidegger’s work. Nancy treats freedom as a property of the individual or collectivity, and looks for a "non-subjective" freedom which would attempt to think the existential or finite origin for every freedom. Nancy argues that it is necessary to think freedom in its finite being, because to think of it as the property of an infinite subject is to make any finite being a limit of freedom. The existence of the other is the necessary condition of freedom, rather than its limitation.

[edit] Le sens du monde

Nancy addresses the world in its contemporary global configuration in other writings on freedom, justice and sovereignty. In his 1993 book Le sens du monde (The Sense of the World), he asks what we mean by saying that we live in one world, and how our sense of the world is changed by saying that it is situated within the world, rather than above or apart from it. To Nancy, the world, or existence, is our ontological responsibility, which precedes political, judicial and moral responsibility. He describes our being in the world as an exposure to a naked existence, without the possibility of support by a fundamental metaphysical order or cause. Contemporary existence no longer has recourse to a divine framework, as was the case in feudal society where the meaning and course of life was predetermined. The contingency of our naked existence as an ontological question is the main challenge of our existence in contemporary global society.

All of these themes relating to world are taken up again by Nancy in his 2002 book La création du monde ou la mondialisation (The Creation of the World or Globalization), where he makes the distinction between globalization as a deterministic process and mondialisation as an open-ended "world-forming" process. Here, he connects his critique with Marx's critique of political economy, which saw "free labour" as what produces the world. Nancy argues that an authentic "dwelling" in the world must be concerned with the creation of meaning (enjoyment) and not final purposes, closed essences, and exclusive worldviews. The present system of expanding cities and nodes in the planetary techno-scientific network (tied to capitalism) leads to the loss of world, because the world is treated as an object (globe), even though the self-deconstruction of ontotheology increasingly made it the "subject" of its own creation.

[edit] Être singulier pluriel

In his book Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural, 2000), Nancy tackles the question of how we can speak of a plurality of a "we" without making the "we" a singular identity. The premise of the title essay in this book is that there is no being without "being-with," that "I" does not come before "we" (i.e., Dasein does not precede Mitsein) and that there is no existence without co-existence. In an extension from his thoughts on freedom, community, and the sense of the world, he imagines the "being-with" as a mutual exposure to one another that preserves the freedom of the "I", and thus a community that is not subject to an exterior or pre-existent definition.

“There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.”

The five essays that follow the title piece continue to develop Nancy’s philosophy through discussions of sovereignty, war and technology, identity, the Gulf War and Sarajevo. Nancy’s central concern in these essays remains the "being-with", which he uses to discuss issues of psychoanalysis, politics and multiculturalism, looking at notions of "self" and "other" in current contexts.

Artistic analysis[link]

Nancy has also written for art catalogues and international art journals, especially on contemporary art. He also writes poetry and for the theatre and has earned respect as an influential philosopher of art and culture. In his book Les Muses published in 1994 (The Muses, 1996), he begins with an analysis of Hegel’s thesis on the death of art. Among the essays in The Muses is a piece on Caravaggio, originally a lecture given at the Louvre. In this essay, Nancy looks for a different conception of painting where painting is not a representation of the empirical world, but a presentation of the world, of sense, or of existence. Nancy has published books on film and music, as well as texts on the problem of representation, on the statute of literature, on image and violence, and on the work of On Kawara, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Hölderlin.

Cinema[link]

Nancy's text L'intrus formed the basis for French director Claire Denis's film of the same name.

He has written extensively on film, including The Evidence of Film, a short work on Abbas Kiarostami.

Nancy appears in the film The Ister, based on Martin Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin's poem "Der Ister" (published as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"). The film focuses on the relation of politics, technology and myth.

See also[link]

• Deconstruction
• Deconstruction-and-religion
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• Self-deconstructed Christianity

References[link]

1. ^ See: Jean-Luc Nancy Faculty profile at European Graduate School
2. ^ For more detail on the reasons for the closure, see Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, "Chers Amis: A Letter on the Closure of the Political," in Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, Retreating the Political (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 143–47.

Bibliography[link]

Titles in French[link]

• La Remarque spéculative (Un bon mot de Hegel). Paris: Galilée, 1973.
• La titre de la lettre. Paris: Galilée, 1973 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe).
• Le Discours de la syncope. I. Logodaedalus. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.
• L'absolu littéraire. Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Seuil, 1978 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe).
• Ego sum. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.
• Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980. 1981 (ed., with Lacoue-Labarthe).
• Rejouer le politique. 1981 (ed., with Lacoue-Labarthe).
• Le partage des voix. Paris: Galilée, 1982.
• La retrait du politique. 1983 (ed., with Lacoue-Labarthe).
• La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1983.
• L'Impératif catégorique. Paris: Flammarion, 1983.
• L'oubli de la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1986.
• Des lieux divins. Mauvezin: T.E.R, 1987.
• L'expérience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée, 1988.
• Une Pensée finie. Paris: Galilée, 1990.
• Le poids d'une pensée. Québec: Le griffon d'argile, 1991.
• Le mythe nazi. La tour d'Aigues: L'Aube, 1991 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, revised edition; originally published as Les méchanismes du fascisme, 1981).
• La comparution (politique à venir). Paris: Bourgois, 1991 (with Jean-Chrisophe Bailly).
• Corpus. Paris: Métailié, 1992.
• Le sens du monde. Paris: Galilée, 1993.
• Les Muses. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
• Être singulier pluriel. Paris: Galilée, 1996.
• Hegel. L'inquiétude du négatif. Paris: Hachette, 1997.
• L'Intrus. Paris: Galilée, 2000.
• Le regard du portrait. Paris: Galilée, 2000.
• Conloquium, in Roberto Esposito, Communitas. trad. de Nadine Le Lirzin, Paris: PUF, 2000.
• La pensée dérobée. Paris: Galilée, 2001.
• The evidence of film. Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert, 2001.
• La création du monde ou la mondialisation. Paris: Galilée, 2002.
• Nus sommes. La peau des images. Paris: Klincksieck, 2003 (with Federico Ferrari).
• Noli me tangere. Paris: Bayard, 2003.
• "L'extension de l'âme". Metz: Le Portique, 2003.
• "Lil y a' du rapport sexuel". Paris: Galilée, 2003.
• La déclosion (Déconstruction du Christianisme 1). Paris: Galilée, 2005.
• Sur le commerce des pensées: Du livre et de la librairie. Paris: Galilée, 2005.
• Iconographie de l'auteur. Paris: Galilée, 2005 (with Federico Ferrari).
• Tombe de sommeil. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
• Juste impossible. Paris: Bayard, 2007.
• À plus d'un titre: Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
• Vérité de la democratie. Paris: Galilée, 2008.
• Le poids d'une pensée, l'approche. Strasbourg: La Phocide, 2008.
• Je t'aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionnément.... Paris: Bayard Centurion, 2008.
• Démocratie, dans quel état ?, with Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross and Slavoj Žižek, La Fabrique, 2009.
• L'Adoration, Paris, Galilée, 2010.
• Atlan : les détrempes, Paris, Hazan, 2010.
• À Vengeance ? de Robert Antelme, in Robert Antelme, Vengeance ?. Hermann, 2010.
• La Ville au loin. Strasbourg: La Phocide, 2011.
• Maurice Blanchot, passion politique. Paris: Galilée, 2011.
• Politique et au-delà. Interview with Philipp Armstrong and Jason E. Smith, Paris: Galilée, 2011.
• Dans quels mondes vivons-nous?, with Aurélien Barrau, Paris: Galilée, 2011.
• L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima), Paris: Galilée, 2012.

English translations[link]

• The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.
• The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
• The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.
• The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
• The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
• The Muses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
• The Gravity of Thought. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997.
• Retreating the Political. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; edited by Simon Sparks. London: Routledge, 1997.
• The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
• Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel's Bons Mots. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
• Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
• A Finite Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003
• The Ground of the Image. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
• Multiple Arts (The Muses II). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• The Creation of the World or Globalization. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
• Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
• The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
• Philosophical Chronicles (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy). New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
• Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
• Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
• On the Commerce of Thinking: On Books and Bookstores. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
• The Fall of Sleep. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
• The Truth of Democracy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.
• God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
• In Place of Utopia. In Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought. New York & London: Continuum, 2012.

Secondary literature[link]

• Armstrong, Phillip. Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
• Derrida, Jacques. On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
• Hutchens, B.C. Jean-Luc Nancy and The Future of Philosophy. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.
• James, Ian. The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• Kamuf, Peggy, ed. On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy: A Special Issue of Paragraph. Nov. 1992
• Sparks, Simon, ed. On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997.
• At the Heart: of Jean-Luc Nancy. A Special Issue of The New Centennial Review, Vol. 2, no.3, Fall 2002.

External links[link]

• Jean-Luc Nancy Faculty profile at the European Graduate School, includes bibliography, quotations, and video lectures.
• Jean-Luc Nancy article at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• On Communism, by Nancy.
• Jean-Luc Nancy. Between Story and Truth. In: Little Mag. July / August 2001.
• Emmanuel Alloa. The real outside is at the heart of the inside. Interview. Atopia. 2007.
• Jean-Luc Nancy. The Technique of the Present. Lecture. Nouveau Musée. January 1997.
• David Patrick. Review of The Sense of the World.
• Adam Kotsko. Already, Not Yet. Review of La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 87–95, Fall 2005.

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard in 2006 at European Graduate School
Born	(1929-07-27)27 July 1929 Reims, France
Died	6 March 2007(2007-03-06) (aged 77) Paris, France
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Post-Structuralism · Marxism · Post-Marxism
Main interests	Postmodernity · Mass Media
Notable ideas	Hyperreality · Simulacra · Sign value
Influenced by Marx · Nietzsche · Freud · Wiener · Mauss · Lévi-Strauss · Lefebvre · Barthes · Bataille · Debord · Dick · Borges · McLuhan · Castoriadis[1]
Influenced Braschi · Pelevin · Vizenor · Žižek · Wachowski brothers · Benoist · Zerzan

Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ])^[2] was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.

Life[link]

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.^[3] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[4] There he studied German language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[3] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.^[5]

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[6] During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the USA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer.^[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee^[10] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[11] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts," at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^[12]

Core ideas[link]

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects  — including consumerism, gender relations, the social understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school.^[13] In common with many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference - through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning  — or a "total" understanding of the world  — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.^[14] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."^[15]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa^[16] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military establishment (see below).

In 2004, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies was launched.

The object value system[link]

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, it was consumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply—despite the fact that Marx did not use the term 'genuine' in relation to needs or use-values. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs"^[17] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as follows:^[18]

1. The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools.
2. The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

Simulacra and Simulation[link]

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of Simulacra ^[19][20] also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of the model are: 1) the development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which replaced a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already reproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for all conceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois with identical twins where the fantasy comprises having perfection reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactile sense, since we already assume the reproducibility of everything, since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the imagined and the real are equally hyperreal, equally both reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, the simulation.

The end of history and meaning[link]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[21]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."^[22]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."^[23]

Political commentary[link]

On the Gulf War[link]

Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled for its provocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". His argument described the first Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "the continuation of politics by other means", but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means". Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the US coalition and the Iraqi government were actually fighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His politico-military power was not weakened, since he suppressed internal uprisings after the war. Overall, little had changed politically in Iraq, Saddam remained undefeated, and the "victors" were not victorious. Therefore, there was no war; the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book  — originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération in three parts: During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"  — was based on his critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: People died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has asserted that Baudrillard did not deny that something happened, but merely questioned that that something was a war; rather it was "an atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. In Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax ...

On the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001[link]

In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism^[24] he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event." Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction^{[clarification needed]} to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously based or civilization-based warfare, he termed the absolute event and its consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks  — as accords with his theory of society  — in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failed to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding to the notion that the Towers were "brought down by their own weight". In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

Reception[link]

Critics have found fault with some of Baudrillard's writing, ideas or positions.

For example Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest" — which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised — had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.^[25]

However only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought — Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5)  — seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand. The other — Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5)  — seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussed above) has published more than one denunciation of Norris's position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic account, which attempts to "place Baudrillard in opposition to himself." Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard's position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of Structuralist and Post-structuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel de Certeau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case).

Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor and one of a number of present day academics who argue for his contemporary relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of Selected Writings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media ...

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfill my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

In popular culture[link]

• Native American (Anishinaabe) writer Gerald Vizenor, who has made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation in his critical work,^[26] features Baudrillard as a character in a "debwe heart dance" in his 1996 novel Hotline Healers.^[27]
• The Matrix, a (1999) film by the Wachowski brothers, names Baudrillard's thought, especially Simulacra and Simulation, as an influence. While one critic went so far as to claim that if "Baudrillard... has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit,"^[28] Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection between his work and The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.^[29][30][31] Carl Colpaert's film Delusion was inspired by his book America.
• Newcastle based band Maxïmo Park wrote a song about Baudrillard which featured as a b-side to "Karaoke Plays" from their 2007 album Our Earthly Pleasures.
• Apollo 440 paid tribute to Baudrillard via direct quotes in lyrics and song titles
• Baudrillard's Blender Symbolic Exchange and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• The System of Objects (1968)
• The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970)
• For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972)
• The Mirror of Production (1973)
• Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
• Forget Foucault (1977)
• Seduction (1979)
• Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1982)
• Fatal Strategies (1983)
• Simulations (1983)
• America (1986)
• Cool Memories (1987)
• The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
• The Transparency of Evil (1990)
• The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
• The Illusion of the End (1992)
• Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (Edited by Mike Gane) (1993)
• The Perfect Crime (1995)
• Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit (1998)
• Impossible Exchange (book)|Impossible Exchange (1999)
• Passwords (book)|Passwords (2000)
• The Singular Objects of Architecture (2000)
• The Vital Illusion (2000)
• Au royaume des aveugles (2002)
• The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002)
• Fragments (interviews with François L'Yvonnet) (2003)
• The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005)
• The Conspiracy of Art (2005)
• Les exilés du dialogue, Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles (2005)
• Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978) (2006)
• Pataphysics (2007)
• Radical Alterity (2008)
• Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (2009)
• Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonisms (2010)
• The Agony of Power (2010)

Articles[link]

• “The Spirit of Terrorism”. Telos No. 121 (Fall 2001). New York: Telos Press.
• "Divine Europe". Telos No. 131 (Summer 2005). New York: Telos Press.

Audio-CDs[link]

• Die Illusion des Endes  — Das Ende der Illusion (Jean Baudrillard & Boris Groys), 58 minutes + booklet. Cologne: supposé 1997. ISBN 3-932513-01-0
• Die Macht der Verführung, 55 minutes. Cologne: supposé 2006. ISBN 978-3-932513-67-1

See Also[link]

• Psychoanalytic sociology

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Baudrillard

• Jean Baudrillard Faculty page at European Graduate School (Biography, bibliography, photos and videos)
• Jean Baudrillard entry by Douglas Kellner in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
• The Baudrillard Dictionary [2]
• Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories [3]
• Baudrillard; Cultura, Simulacro y régimen de mortandad en el Sistema de los Objetos | EIKASIA PDF (in Spanish) Adolfo Vásquez Rocca