Passwords [Paperback]

Jean Baudrillard (Author), Chris Turner (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2003

Offers us twelve accessible and enjoyable entry points into Baudrillard’s thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his work.

In his analysis of the deep social trends rooted in production, consumption, and the symbolic, Jean Baudrillard touches the very heart of the concerns of the generation currently rebelling against the framework of the consumer society. With the ever-greater mediatization of society, Baudrillard argues that we are witnessing the virtualization of our world, a disappearance of reality itself, and perhaps the impossibility of any exchange at all. This disenchanted perspective has become the rallying point for all those who reject the traditional sociological and philosophical paradigms of our age.

Passwords, in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze's Abecedaire, offers us twelve accessible and enjoyable entry points into Baudrillard's thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his work: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality, and thought.

Editorial Reviews

Review

First prize for cerebral cold-bloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. -- New York Times

Provocative...he brings a reading of signs and symbols most will find interesting. -- Toronto Globe and Mail

About the Author

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X in 1966. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007. His many works include Simulations and Simulacra, America, The Perfect Crime, The System of Objects, Passwords, The Transparency of Evil, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Fragments, among others.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Verso (November 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859844634
• ISBN-13: 978-1859844632
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 7.7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Baudrillard's best....., April 27, 2005

By 

Daniel Feerst (Crown Point, Indiana United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Passwords (Paperback)

Baudrillard's main thesis here is that words, rather than just generating ideas, actually metamorphize and become these ideas, which in turn do the same. We end up, then, in a sprialing evolution. Baudrillard closes the book by offering that there cannot be an end as the final word will only metamorphize into yet another concept, or will become the object. While this thesis is great fun to play around with, the book's true merits come in the presentation of a collection of Baudrillard's most important topics that he has been working with over the decades. This book is far from an anthology, but reading this book along with other difficult titles will open new routes of interpretation, thus helping readers to better understand some of Baudrillard's extremely difficult concepts.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars PASSWORDS, July 19, 2005

By 

Jan Earl Hammerquist "time1951" (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Passwords (Paperback)

This book is a very short read, but perhaps that is part of its charm. It is a window into contemporary thought, concerned with ways of viewing a super-extended human existence. As you may have noticed, humans and their gadgets, gizmos, plumbing, and bridges have conquered the world. But the imposition of the human will upon the structures of nature has its limits. When the everyday objects we take for granted in their use are seen as forms that have been forced into function, we cannot but notice, notes Baudrillard, that the object may someday take its revenge. The oceans, for example, may flood the earth. The author lets the reader become aware of the meaning that humans write into existence, mapping their desires onto an outside world that is otherwise non-human. Thus he encourages a world of the mind, of pass-words, that is, a way of adventuring with the spiraling language that humans otherwise use for politics. Although at times Mr. Baudrillard writes expecting that his meaning is self-explanatory, causing an unsure conjecture on the part of the reader, his book is a fine example of an urge to lead philosophy, the arts, the sciences, and ethics towards an interpenetrating coded language of thought, one that would encourage our minds to observe the world more brightly and, depending on where you stand, to regard it with ir/reverential I/eyes.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Step into a world, January 3, 2007

By 

Kuassivi Mensah "Gareth" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Passwords (Paperback)

In his impressive body of work, Baudrillard seems to take an infinite amount of paths leading to a small set of concepts, or vectors upon which he observes society. One of those essential concepts dominating Baudrillard's work is that we can no longer make representations of the world we live in, because by now representation precedes reality, and as such is no longer a representation, but a model. Hence the end of the principle of reality, and the birth of the hyperreal, reality as nothing more than the simulation of a model.
With this book, Baudrillard allows those concepts to come forward, very much like nerve cells, connecting and connected to his previous works, clarifying many of his obscure observations.
Each word/theme works as a model throught which the world is, for lack of better word, simulated.
In many ways, those are the models upon which Baudrillard's work is generated, but I doubt it will be of much use to those who are not familiar with his work.