Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967--1978) (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) [Paperback]

Jean Baudrillard (Author), Stuart Kendall (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1584350334 | ISBN-13: 978-1584350330

The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie as well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka.Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were seminal for some of his most shockingly original books: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, Simulations, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. But Utopie was also a topical journal and a political one; the topics of these essays are often torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following the uprisings of May 1968.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A symbiosis between a few architects and young intellectuals effectively occurred at the end of the 1960s. Their intention was to surpass architecture, just as urbanism had been surpassed and as the Situationists liquidated the university. Everyone within Utopie was trying to go as far as possible toward disappearance, just to see what would happen out there. We were looking for a point of intellectual gravity from which it would have been possible to radiate out to all disciplines." - Jean Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred"

About the Author

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Semiotext(e) (August 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584350334
• ISBN-13: 978-1584350330
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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