(P/B) SCREENED OUT

Παρουσίαση

'Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this.
However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless - that goes without saying - but so are we all... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly - with its warm bitterness - particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness - the uselessness of the screen.' World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues.
In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those he has already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disneyworld, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the 1995 French public sector workers' strike, the Rushdie fatwa, mad cow disease and genetic cloning. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is - pace his critics - still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Translator's Foreword
AIDS: Virulence or Prophylaxis?
We are all Transsexuals Now
Necrospective around Martin Heidegger
In Praise of a Virtual Crash
The Viral Economy
The Depressurization of the West
The Defrosting of Eastern Europe and the End of History
No Pity for Sarajevo
Otherness Surgery
The Powerlessness of the Virtual
Western Subserbience
When the West Takes the Dead Man's Place
The Great Laundering
Weep, Citizens!
Helots and Elites
Information at the Meteorological Stage
Disembodied Violence: Hate
Psychedelic Violence: Drugs
The Dark Continent of Childhood
The Double Extermination
'Lost from View' and Truly Disappeared
Sexuality as a Sexually Transmitted Disease
Sovereignty of the Strike
Tierra del Fuego - New York
World Debt and Parallel Universe
The Shadow of the Commendatore
The Mirror of Corruption
Disneyworld Company
The Global and the Universal
Deep Blue or the Computer's Melancholia
The Racing Driver and his Double
Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala
Screened Out
The Art Conspiracy
TV Fantasies
Of Course Chirac is Useless
The Clone or the Degree Xerox of the Species
Exorcism in Politics or the Conspiracy of Imbeciles