Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
10 - Impossible Exchange
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
Summary
By the end of the century Baudrillard had started to produce a familiar aphoristic, poetic writing style across the board, not just in his Cool Memories diaries. He had after all started in the field of literature in the 1950s and 1960s and published a book of poems called L'Ange de Stuc (‘Stucco Angel’ in English) in 1978. In 1999 Editions Galilée published L'Echange Impossible which comprised discourses on his own novel terms like ‘radicality of thought’, ‘radical uncertainty’ and ‘impossible exchange’ but which had no footnotes or referencing system at all. It is theory, but not as we know it. For the remainder of his life Baudrillard wrote everything in this ‘theory-fiction’ style. In 2001 Verso published Impossible Exchange with an English translation and added footnotes by Chris Turner. The extract here is from the beginning of the book and is a development of the implications of Baudrillard's term ‘impossible exchange’. The influence of Georges Bataille (the idea of the accursed share and general economy) and Marcel Mauss (the notion of gift-exchange) was always already present throughout most of Baudrillard's writing and it is evident here, too. Baudrillard's anthropology opens itself up to criticisms of him as nostalgic for a long gone primitive society. Yet among Baudrillard's influences in the 1960s were the likes of the semiotician Roland Barthes, not conservative, traditional anthropologists. In fact Baudrillard always wanted to go beyond classical, Marxist or structuralist anthropology to produce a new, radical anthropology of modernity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Jean Baudrillard Reader , pp. 132 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008