Exiles from dialogue - Jean Baudrillard

Not long ago, two friends Jean Baudrillard and Enrique ValienteNoailles the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other fromnowhere, met in Paris. They had a long discussion without anyprecise aim. It was, rather, a way of rubbing up againstmetaphysics without risk of contagion. They called it Exiles fromDialogue as a mirrored homage to Bertolt Brecht and shortlyafterwards they parted company and went their separate ways.

In this remarkable new book based on this gnomic meeting,Baudrillard and Noailles range over the entirety of philosophy andthought underpinning Baudrillards unique work, from In the Shadowof the Silent Majorities (1983) to his recent writings on 9/11.Philosophically, the book takes in its breadth Heraclitus toWittgenstein by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaardand Nietzche. Its literary sources are diverse: Gracian and SaulBellow, Hlderlin and Stanislaw Lec; and the theories of Fukuyama,Barthes and Kristeva are weighed, considered and analysed.



With his usual incandescent brilliance, Baudrillard discusses thecentral themes of his writing: thought as (non-prophetic)anticipation; tragic acceptance of the world; the disappearance ofthe world into simulation; the death of the social (and with it theLeft). Vitally, Baudrillard corrects some of the misconceptionsthat plague his work (about his fatal strategies, for example),qualifies some of his bolder pronouncements (notably softening hisposition on the question of the virtual) and pushes other lines ofthinking further than ever before.



Razor-sharp, volatile and capacious, this book will be essentialreading for students and scholars of Baudrillard and thoseinterested in the theories and philosophies that currently aboundand rebound in the social sciences and humanities.