Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991-95 [Paperback]

Jean Baudrillard (Author), Emily Agar (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1997

"Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment enjoys an equal distinction. Even the most banal finds exceptional reader. Each, in turn, has its hour of glory. Of course, each fragment could become a book. But the point is that it will not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line..." This latest work in the Cool Memories series is culled from Baudrillard's notebooks in the period when he was composing The Illusion of the End and The Perfect Crime. It is a work of meditations and poetic musings which alight briefly and tantalisingly on: the silent wisdom and wit of objective processes, of the world and the emptiness of our political, artistic and scientific scenes; Europe, the Eastern bloc, Australia and New York; life, the universe and the stubborn non-meaning of everything.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A sharp-shooting lone-ranger from the post-Marxist left. -- New York Times

Egoiste! Egoste! Egoste! -- Julie Burchill, Sunday Times

Prophet of the apocalypse, hysterical lyricist of panic, obsessive recounter of the desolation of the postmodern scene and currently the hottest property on the New York intellectual circuit. -- Guardian

The most important French thinker of the past twenty years. -- J.G. Ballard

The most notorious intellectual celebrity to emerge from Paris since Roland Barthes and the most influential prophet of the media since Marshal McLuhan. -- i-D magazine

About the Author

Jean Baudrillard is author of, among other works, America, Cool Memories I, The Transparency of Evil, The System of Objects and The Perfect Crime (all from Verso).

Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: Verso (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841236
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841235
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 7.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #628,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars liberating,violin in water,colour in a hot-dog sexectoplasm, July 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991-95 (Paperback)

If Jean Baudrillard wrote music it would indeed transcend the musical languages and styles of modernity to popular tex/mex forms,it would have the negativity of Schoenberg mixed with the traditional beauty of Mozart with the energy of Joanie Jett,the subversiveness of The Dead Kennedys and the directness of Sharon Crow;Baudrillard indeed has paid his dues writing from the late Sixties,he also became frustrated when the revolution didn't come as quickly as expected. His work today cuts across many genres. I know painters who don't paint until they read him first. Also philosophers wanting a good time,those who need to escape the stifling air of academia,and the interlocking complexity that can be a part of todays philosophic scene of intertextual interdiscipline without being committed in anyone direction. But to call Baudrillard an compact anarchist would be too cruel his thought has too much discipline of it,although that's how his language comes across. Yet he has a deep-rooted feeling for humanity; he can't quite seem to find a place for its demise. He wants to see something happen,well people still make sex and art,and music. I think behind all the dark-edged pessimism that emanates from his sentence constructions there is a need to emote, Baudrillard is a new genre artist,there is no label yet for who he is like Hannible Lecter. For instance on politics,"There is no need to attack politicians. They are engaged in spontaneous self-destruction. You simply have to be firm about not going to their aid." Baudrillard has seen and will seen things going,jettisoning down the tubes for some time to come. And that's why we need him. He has a gift for picking the smallest nuance of reality, the tiniest particle of the life-world as a means toward whatever is larger. A political system and institution. We find value in the fragments,Wittgenstein said this of God: I always find other things in Baudrillard than what he means. Like danger zones, like tripping over a cliff,The beauty in a Chicago ho! t-dog,yet it can kill you. "In Amazonia,certain butterflies simulate the markings of their poisonous fellows to protect themselves. When you have the good fortune to be poisonous,you have to use deception." Since the world has long stood on its philosophic head(Hegel/Marx), we can find comfort in being "Other" or so it seems. To be outcast is cool soemtimes, it doesn't help pay any bills,you need to be a Derridean for that to find a normative world. To Baudrillard all culture is worth the trip to understand it. Although you feel his European roots all the time, with the heavies he introduces us to Canetti,Pessoa. He always speaks within eye-shot of a monument. Years of theory does that to you. And he searches the mysteries of expression,from one fountain head one manifold source,culture going over Niagara Falls,expression teeming with amoeba,paramecium. He also is/was the first to speak on postmodernity,another stick in the side of art. In fact we owe a debt to him for taking the rigours of the postmodernist credo to a new level of cognition. Composers would never have been able to distinguish five strains of tango without it. He finds meaning in anything today,antique sales in Pennsylvania Even pornography has a double meaning. The skinny porno-queen blond who ran for the Italian Pariliament, (La Cicciolina),she married Jeff Koons who also accelerated the postmodern language to its head,carnal ectoplasm. Baudrillard speaks of the ends of things. And since we are at the end of languages,styles,meanings,subjects and objects,we are at the beginning of them as well. Too bad Baudrillard can't give us any third base guidance. Well who can? I hear he lectures at UCLA today. But I love Baudrillard because he looks for meaning anywhere. In Egyptian pyramids(ultimate space) inside,in a hermit's life,in boredom, in Andy Warhohl,in the scar on a womens face,which lends her all her charm. I think Baudrillard's next zone should be on the mystery of women throughout the ages. "Not to think any! more. To be like a dog. To be in one's head like a dog in a kennel." After you read Baudrillard you can get high from the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. He can also look beyond his own coffe-table, The French conceit that Chernobyl didn't cross to Paris,1,000 French impervious to Russian fission. Of course the dark side to all this is that Baudrillard sees us as all in a zoo,that we all have basic fatal attraction instincts that can put the rabbit into boiling water faster than the anyone.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Baudrillard's Table Talk--Under the Salt, March 7, 2005

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard (Paperback)

"The fragment has its ideal" -- R. Barthes.

It's a little expensive for such a slim book, but it's so dense you wouldn't really want it any longer. FRAGMENTS is a very overdetermined word, too, it makes you wonder why, after Kierkegaard and Barthes and all the other writers who used the word so precisely, if Baudrillard sanctions its use or is it a "clever" device of the translator?

He's constantly fascinating, and quite a conversationalist, not a dull sentence in the book. Did you know that in Japanese there is no word for "the subject," nor for 'the universal,' nor again for "communication" itself? It makes you realize with a start that if one's vocabulary is shaped with some words and not others, than one's conceptual limits will be quite different than someone else with a different language, where perhaps there are three hundred words for rice--or love.

Ha, it's funny how Jean and Francois put down America for producing novels that last for manybe a thousand pages. This is hypertrophy they say, linking it to America's search for empire and planet glory. Well I have read some baggy monsters originated in France too. Then he (Jean) will turn around and praise something like Abbott's wonderful FLATLAND, and we see that nothing artificially determined sways his likes and dislikes, and that for Baudrillard, cities and cultures alike are controlled by language, borders, and the shock troops that keep us all from understanding one another. He follows Abbott in seeing God as an intuition, a vanishing point, very much as Antonioni found God in the American desert in Zabriskie Point. These European intellectuals with their quite touching view of the American West.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting, April 1, 2010

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GSI "Truth seeker" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995 (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)

i saw this book on my teacher's desk, so i bought it. i must say, as much as i like to philosophize, a lot of this was way over my head. but, on some pages, i found certain paragraphs that hit the spot.