Forget Foucault

by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Introduction)

In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault (1977) made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality--and of his entire oeuvre--and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext(e) edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylv?re Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, France, Politics, Anthropology, Semiotics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Reviews

[Mr. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jean Baudrillard's slim and largely unintelligible critical exegesis of Michel Foucault is a largely superficial and smug critique of the late thinker's work on the history of sexuality. Baudrillard begins his essay with a complement:

"Foucault's writing is perfect in that the very movement of the text gives an admirable account of what it proposes: on one hand, a powerful generating spiral that is no longer despotic architecture but a filiation en abyme, coil and strophe without origin (without catastrophe, either), unfolding ever more widely and rigorously" (29)

and so on and so forth. The basic thesis of Baudrillard's critique is that Foucault's "discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes." (30) He believes that Foucault's analysis is "no truer than any other," and that its appeal lies in its ability to seduce. He insists that Foucault's work is "too beautiful to be true" and that there is no essential difference between repression and the power dynamics which compel society to confess its sexual history. He maintains that Foucault's thesis is false because its link to Marxist theories of capital and reproduction are erroneous in that it was always the bourgeoisie that struggled with repression, not the proletariat. However, Baudrillard neglects to include any historical analysis, whereas Foucault's work is filled to the brim with it. You can judge which thinker is more responsible and serious for yourself.

[Zeynep T.]

Baudrillard'ın akademide yükselmesine engel olan, "Critique dergisi için bir kitap tanıtım yazısı olarak kaleme alınan ve bir kopyası üzerinde kimi yorumlarda bulunabileceği beklentisiyle Foucault’ya gönderilen ve uzun bir gecikmeden sonra Galilee yayınevi aracılığıyla yayımlanan" makale. Ben akademik dedikodu için okudum. Baudrillard'ın simülasyon teorisiyle ilgili kitabını hala okumadığım için metni tam kavrayamadım ama çevirmen başta anlaşılır bir açıklama yapmış. Yorumlarda Foucault'nun daha ikna edici olduğu söylenmiş. Yazar metinde buna değiniyor zaten. İki yazarın da külliyatına hakim olduktan sonra okunsa daha iyi olur.

Çevirmen Oğuz Adanır'ın emeğine sağlık.

[The Awdude · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like reading Baudrillard because his writing style reminds me of my own: inflammatory, hyperbolic, impatient, and anything but objective or dispassionate. The title of this book is a bit misleading, in the provocative Baudrillardian fashion, in order to raise a few eyebrows and get folks all riled up. Nevertheless, it's obvious that Baudrillard respects Foucault, as everyone should, for his monumental achievements in the history of Western thought. The titular forgetting refers, rather than to a forgetting of Foucauldian theory, to a forgetting of theory in general, of the theoretical lines drawn in the sand between, say, Foucauldian power and Deleuzian desire. Baudrillard points out the similarities between power and desire, mostly with respect to their productive capacities, and suggests that contemporary theory is far too rooted in and loyal to unnecessary terminological differences. Foucauldian power and Deleuzian desire, according to Baudrillard, are both examples of a theoretical nostalgia for the real. We can only theorize about power once power has vanished, or become only a sign for itself in its simulacral disappearance. In this respect, Baudrillard has a lot in common with contemporary psychoanalysis. Especially Zizek. Both are interested in the event, which is a pure irruption of the real prior to its narratization, theorization, and symbolic appropriation. The unconscious, for example, ceased to exist after Freud theorized it. It could no longer be an event, something real. It could only thence be the metonymic displacement of itself, that which is reflected in the mirror in the spaces surrounding the image of the other. The unconscious, much like power and desire, is produced through our simulacral positing of it. Baudrillard's mission here, as always, is to destabilize such positing, to negate the referent, and to remind us that everything is real in so far as everything is a simulacra. Gosh I love this guy. The Andy Kaufman of theory he is.

[Aaron Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philosophy makes my head hurt. I can stand one book every rare once in a while (kind of like Dunhill cigarettes). There's always a terror for me at the bottom of discussions of philosophy because it really takes the hood off things, then the engine apart, then the materials that comprise the engine, than the idea of the engine itself, etc, etc add nauseum until you find yourself crying out in terror at the fact that we really don't know anything about anything when we think about it for too long. So again, this stuff is good, but usually in short order.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forget Foucault is one of those polemical tracts that aren't openly confrontational but are all the more lethal for this reason. When Baudrillard places himself in the trajectory of Foucault's obsession with tracing the material modulations of power, down to its micro-processes ("miniaturizing the State"), he reaches a heretical conclusion that all along something **Other** than either power or desiring-production was at the bottom of the story. There has to be a virtual Other than prevents power from drowning out the world in their excess--

Something at the bottom of the whole system of production resists the infinite expansion of production-otherwise, we would all be already buried. There is something in power that resists as well, and we see no difference here between those who enforce it and those who submit to it: this distinction has become meaningless, not because the roles are interchangeable but because power is in its form reversible, because on one side and the other something holds out against the unilateral exercise and the infinite expansion of power, just as elsewhere against the infinite expansion of production. This resistance is not a "desire" it is what causes power to come undone in exact proportion to its logical and irreversible extension. And it's taking place everywhere today."

This void within power is what Baudrillard coins "seduction", which consists in the fact that power is ultimately **reversible and exchangeable**, being obligated participate in the fatal game of exercising it unto death until it abolishes itself in a fascinating disappearance. According to Baudrillard, this is the heretical conclusion Foucault anticipated but never had the courage to embrace.

I feel like Baudrillard took theory more seriously than any of the old guards of French Theory. This is why his later works have the certain amusing quality of "crankery" to them. If you can look past his celebration of primitive societies, there is an annihilating negativity in the notion of "seduction" which can be read as a prophetic indictment of the vitalist and affirmationist obsession to come. All desiring-production is punctuated by a formal lack that does not belong to the order of production itself (i.e. cannot be recuperated as simply another mode of production) and which ruins the immanence/monism of all power and production. Baudrillard was a Manichean black sheep among the children of 68' who refused to buy into his siblings' theodical valorization of "difference in itself" as emanicipatory.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some striking arguments here, such as how the theory of discipline and panopticism in Discipline and Punish is “magistral but obsolete” (34).

Apparently, “ours is a culture of premature ejaculation” (39)? The body “to which we constantly refer has no other reality than that of the sexual and productive model” (40). In objecting to Foucault’s reasoning:

Why wouldn’t sex, like madness, have gone through a confinement phase in which the terms of certain forms of reason and a dominant moral system were fomented before sex and madness, according to a logic of exclusion […]? (47)

The basic criticism: “Foucault unmasks all the final or causal illusions concerning power, but he does not tell us anything concerning the simulacrum of power itself. Power is the irreversible principle of organization because it fabricates the real” (50). F apparently fails to see that “power is never there and that its institution, like the institution of spatial perspective versus ‘real’ space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of perspective—it is no more reality than economic accumulation [!]” (51). Be advised: “seduction is stronger than production” (55).

B: “radicality is not a more sublime virtue of theory” (74). Fairly plain that Baudrillard is not appreciating Foucault, something about the Foucauldian critique not carried far enough. Dunno, somewhat opaque.

Recommended for those who used sex to give themselves a glorious body, readers who think that the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, and greasers who believe that masturbation has become a categorical imperative.

[Aidan James]

Really good — i understood almost nothing 😃

[Majid · Rating 4 out of 5]

بودریار کتاب‌های خود را "داستان‌های نظریه‌ای"، "رمان" و سرانجام سناریو خوانده است. بودریار با الهام از متفکری چون "ژرژ باتای" و همسو با نگرش‌های متفکرانی چون "پل ویریلیو" و "الیاس کانِتی" و با اتکای همه‌جانبه به آموزه‌های نیچه، نظریه‌ای چنان رادیکال را طرح کرده که اغلب کمترین مجالی برای برخورد انتقادی یا حتی سازنده باقی نمی‌گذارد.
بنیان نظریه‌ای که بیش از همه‌ی آثار بودریار بحث برانگیز بوده، به بیان ساده این است که امروزه "واقعیت" جای خود را به وضعیتی "واقعی‌تر از واقعی"، وضعیتی نماینده‌ی "مرحله‌ای که تضاد امور واقعی و خیالی در آن محو می‌شود" یا همان‌ اصطلاحی که خود می‌نویسد "حادواقعیت" (Hyperreal) داده. "وانموده‌ها" (Simulacrum) جای "واقعیت‌" را گرفته، "وانمایی" (Simulation) جای "بازنمایی" (Representation) را گرفته است. از دید او امروزه دیگر نمی‌توان به هیچ‌گونه فاصله‌ی انتقادی از واقعیت یا به هیچ‌گونه رابطه‌ی دیالکتیکی بین واقعیت و بازنماییِ آن باور داشت. "واقعیتِ دیروزی، حادواقعیت امروزیِ ماست." و "حادواقعی امری فراسوی بازنمایی است."
بودریار گفتمانِ "فوکو" را نه یک گفتمان حقیقت، که گفتمانی اسطوره‌ای در اکیدترین وجه این واژه می‌خواند و عمیقا بر این باور است که خود نیز توهمی در باب جلوه‌ی حقیقتی که نمایش داده، ندارد. بودریار، قدرت و میل در گفتمان فوکویی را به چالش می‌کشد.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite finished with this and reading the all three parts at once -- What better review situation? In any case this is a short book but makes up for it in savagery. Baudrillard practices his 'fatal strategy' on the reader's subjectivity, or whatever there is after the crisis of representation spoken of. In fact, not just subjectivity is lacking; we also learn in the course of this that power as well as sexuality have vanished as well -- Baudrillard I guess takes Foucault to the mathematical limit, so to speak, where power is dispersed to nothing. It's a weird essay, hard to understand, with moments of really visceral excitement or insight (no real difference between them, is there?).

Though Sylvere Lotringer's presence looms large (he both writes an introduction and includes an interview with him and Baudrillard made years later I think), this is probably justifiable insofar as without him the book may never have been published (or something like that). Also, his comments give an outsider like myself a better view of the process of philosophy making, how it sort of happens in a community with egos and whatnot as well as providing choice historical factoids.

[Jorge Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretende Baudrillard, con este pequeño, oscuro y sobreintelectualizado escrito (como todos los demás que hizo), que olvidemos toda una vida de libros y análisis acerca del poder por parte de Foucault. “Es caduco”, escribe, mientras hace apologías a su mismo texto (en el que ya de entrada hace efectivo ejercicio de ese poder que denuncia en la denuncia misma de Foucault, en una doble espiral de ironías de sobreintelectualización retórica) asentado en buena parte en un discurso psicoanalítico… no entiendo cómo se siguen tomando en serio pensamientos y discursos provenientes de términos y asentamientos teóricos psicoanalíticos y tener el descaro de llamar a otro tipo de análisis “caducos”.
En fin, interesante y vale la pena, pero finalmente me parece en toda su oscuridad, retórica y espirales de “supuesta complejidad” lo que Sokal y Bricmont bien han llamado “imposturas intelectuales” en su libro del mismo nombre…. o sea “apantallapendejismos”.
Con este escrito me olvido un poco más de Baudrillard y refresco mis “foucaultismos”, así que algo le agradezco.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A French cultural theorist and philosopher whom many believe anounced Post-modrnism. Here he critisize Faucault's theories about "power" and sex. I've read some believe this book as postmodernism manifest ---
ظاهرن این تنها اثر بودریار است که پیام یزدانجو به فارسی برگردانده و نشر مرکز در 1379 چاپ و منتشر کرده است. ترجمه ی یکی دو مقاله از بودریار را در مجلات فارسی دهه ی هفتاد دیده ام. اما نه کتابی از انبوه آثار او و نگاه تکان دهنده اش به جهان و جوامع امروزی در غرب. بودریار که از رسانه ها گریزان بود و منتقد تلخ زبان رسانه های غربی بود، در ماه مارس سال جاری فوت کرد (2007)

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book that conservatives really should read, but they won't because they're idiots. It's the best critique of Foucault to date. It doesn't do the typical CompHet thing of demonizing Foucault. Rather, it shows he didn't go far enough. It's balanced, thoughtful, and funny. But it requires actually reasoning carefully, and most people forgot how to do that.

[Zoonanism]

few good lines

[Jude Nonesuch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fully sick.

[Pedro Pirata]

Este texto se enfoca en una crítica sobre el primer tomo de La historia de la sexualidad (La voluntad de saber). Trata, por tanto, la concepción foucaultiana de sexualidad (sobre cuya crítica no me pronuncio, pues confieso no haber leído el libro), aunque también versa sobre el poder en su versión foucaultiana y el inconsciente, conceptos que para Baudrillard caen debido a su propia enunciación. Si el inconsciente es lo secreto, precisamente ha de perecer ante la enunciación, pues deja de ser secreto. Freud es a la vez el descubridor y el verdugo del inconsciente, al igual que Foucault, que sólo puede trazar la genealogía del poder si se planta ante él como ante el borde de su tumba. Pero, según él, Foucault no quiere darse la vuelta y admitir que todo eso que él estudia ha acabado ya —que es precisamente porque ha acabado que puede analizarlo y enunciarlo— y decide inscribir su propio discurso en la genealogía que traza como término de la misma. Palabras menos admiradas, aunque igualmente corteses, tiene Baudrillard para las elucubraciones deleuzianas, cuya principal aportación, el concepto de deseo , iguala al de poder en la obra de Foucault a través de la equiparación de ambas en el marco de la positividad productiva que empezó con los planteamientos de Marx. La ausencia le la negatividad es el indicio que inspira al sociólogo a sospechar de estas formulaciones, tan en boga en su momento; y Baudrillard critica que Foucault no lleve a término su crítica del poder, a saber, mostrando el punto en que se anula, donde nunca estuvo, tal y como hace con el sexo.
La crítica al psicoanálisis, hecha como de un excurso de plusvalía en el texto, es tenaz y despiadada («admirable edificio el del psicoanálisis, la más bella alucinación del ultra-mundo, diría Nietzsche»). Sin embargo, Baudrillard usa constantemente términos psicoanalíticos para hacerse entender, lo cual me deja un poco confuso.
No me queda tan clara la parte propositiva del texto, en que salen a flote las concepciones de simulación, hiperrealidad y muerte de lo real que vertebran los escritos de Buadrillard. Lo social (que mucho recuerda al cuerpo sin órganos) se estaría densificando en su positividad y amenazando con aplastarnos a todos. No termino de captar tampoco la naturaleza de la seducción de la que habla en oposición a la producción. En fin, muchas más consideraciones que bien merecen una segunda y probablemente una tercera lectura.
P.D.: me parece pertinente apuntar el hecho de que Baudrillard envió este escrito a la revista de la que Foucault era editor, instándole a una respuesta en los términos de su propia teoría. A la apuesta siguió solamente el silencio.

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

lighting that rock up so hard and writing the most fuckinh french shit youve ever seen in your life

[Ahmet Akın · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baudrillar'ın bu eseri tamamen Foucault'nun açmış olduğu yolu ve o yoldan giden akademisyenleri topa tutan teorik bir anlatıya sahip. Foucault ve eserleri eleştirilirken yapılan argümantasyon ve örneklendirmeler bazı yerlerde güçlü iken bazı yerlerde anlam verilemeyen bir hal alıyor. Yine de Baudrillard'ın bu eleştirisi Foucault külliyatının eleştirilemezliğine kafa tutan bir eser olarak okunabilir...

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 2 out of 5]

worst Baudrillard I've read yet. I found a few things interesting (Foucaultian power = Deleuzian desire was a neat formulation with a scalding point to it, and the "transpolitical" nature of media was also articulated well) but on the whole B just goes about saying such and such does not exist like some parody of a third grader nihilist. The interviews revealed a similar attitude, wherein B seems to repeat the same simple tenants over and over (seduction & disappearance, seduction & disappearance) no matter what the subject is. Baudrillard is, ironically, at his best when he's being topical, and there's just not enough of a topic to warrant reading any of this.

[rhenvar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Baudrillard is a first-hand experience of paranoid schizophrenia for non-mentally ill readers. A ceaselessly discursive road of infinite digression and generalization (some of which is just plain wrong), it is safe to say if power in its 20th century, Foucauldian conception has disappeared, it is because coherence and logic as governance has disappeared from philosophy. Every paragraph, every sentence is a new itch on my back, just barely out of reach, and no amount of eye-straining can make sense of this convoluted pile of speculative, pataphysical sophistry. Learn to make sound arguments, bro.

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't read this book to find out whether or not Baudrillard like Foucault's philosophy. (hint: he has big problems with his genealogical and archaeological methods, but a surprising degree of respect for his writing and critical abilities at the same time). Do read this book for critical insight into Baudrillard's theories of disappearance, retreat, the media and the great post-modern nothing. Plus Lotringer asks Baudrillard if his is the apocalypse of theory.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is split between polemic and interview. Both are short but a lot of fun. Baudrillard doesn't pull any punches when he lays into Foucault, and the interview makes me want to read more of his work. I find the simulacrum stuff boring and tedious, but he's definitely more than a one-trick pony.

(Did I use enough clichés in that short review?)

[Andre Diehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much the bee's knees.

[Özge · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure who didn't quite understand Foucault: Me or Baudrillard? Seemed extremely superficial and out of context to me.

[C]

"Often the pyramid of concepts is piled up sky high on top of an empty tomb."

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this avidly, with the sense that I was getting closer to understanding Baudrillard's relationship to politics, to understanding why his thought had taken the turn it had post-68, from something recognizably Marxist to something that never quite made any sense. As a polemic against Foucault, it seemed at first to be surprisingly tepid: Baudrillard kept agreeing with Foucault. I kept waiting for the "but here is where he goes wrong". Maybe there were a couple of such moments. It is difficult to hold onto them; I could not, if I wanted to take the time, simply reread some pages and then express the ideas in my own words. Baudrillard encloses any disagreements with Foucault within a larger game, in which he endorses Foucault over and over, apparently making himself more Foucauldian than Foucault. All of this would be moderately frustrating, and yet at the same time a kind of pleasure that makes for easy reading of difficult material -- I don't say "difficult concepts" because I'm not sure that the concepts are difficult at all; and yet it is because they appear to be concepts that the mind wrestles with them as with something difficult.

The dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer is largely enjoyable, especially when Lotringer asks something that I had wanted to ask, and occasionally Baudrillard even gives a frank and revealing answer.

Ultimately, near the very end (p. 118) Baudrillard describes what he has been doing in his writing, and his description fits with my experience of reading his books and feeling enticed and yet not knowing what to do with it at all. "You know," he says, "that my way is to make ideas appear, but as soon as they appear I immediately try to make them disappear. ... Strictly speaking, nothing remains but a sense of dizziness, with which you can't do anything."

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I were solely reviewing the eponymous essay then I’d give this book top marks, Baudrillard does an extraordinary job at imploding the micropolitics/physics of both Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari’s theories, making them careen out of their orbit like a spinning top (spatial metaphors abound in here relating to the kind of moves Baudrillard makes, but that labyrinthine ratcheting up of the stakes, fully affirming the premises and pushing them to their utmost limit, is basically the gist - creating a crisis within theory itself until it has no term or end to justify it and thus causing it to disappear). I really recommend that particular essay, and it stands as a great introduction to Baudrillard’s thought more generally - I hope Baudrillard’s truly evocative statement that power no longer exists, perhaps has never existed, unless it tries to cannibalise and disintegrate itself, has been taken up by others - there’s so much to be said on the matter, and it’s endlessly fascinating. Equally impressive is just how dense the collection of interviews at the end are in comparison to the main essay, I mean the exchanges are so pithy (read as curt), and the topics glossed over so numerous, that they alone took me absolutely ages to finish. They are likely worth stumbling through for the most ardent of Baudrillard afficionados, but I think I probably could have spent my time better elsewhere. Sparknotes version - read main essay, its a real goodun, and skim the interviews at the end (the topics discussed are outlined at the start of each interview so you can jump in at random points if you’re interested in such things as seduction, nuclear warfare, terrorism, dizziness/grace, Jesuits, the event, the media, “the game”, May ‘68 etc. etc.).

[Vinay Arun]

I want to remain in suspense with Baudrillard for the moment. He’s a powerful, aggravating, thoroughly aggravated, writer - someone who takes the withdrawal of the reality principle (or, rather, the seismic skidding of its place, which cannot be fundamentally displaced but disputed) very seriously.
The critique of Foucault happens in sharp moments that constellation around Foucault’s collusion with cybernetics in his micro-physics of power. It is an appealing thesis that, strangely, feels either under or overwritten. Such has been my relation to Baudrillard’s writing for years.
I feel less seduced (ha, ha) by Lotringer, who is a guilty figure in the written history of theory to my mind. No Lotringer, no Dimes Square, as far as I can tell. That he knew this so surely, in such melancholic fashion, later in his life, is unfortunate, but hapless. Though, to be fair, the place from which I act as prophet for the failure of Lotringer et. al’s fetishism of the American city is complicated. Overdetermined

[kafilah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baudrillard is a hyper-realist who respects Foucault but also questions the mere purpose and existence of theory. By debating Foucault he implies that theory is philosophy exists, therefore nothing is real, whilst everything that we have created individually has collectively formed our reality. Baudrillards' judgement is the constant speculation of deaths arrival. Baudrillard challenged Foucault but in a way that was brotherly. Although Baudrillard agrees with Foucaults' analyzation of the bourgeoisie and their manipulation of sex and sexuality, he also thinks that sexuality does not exist therefore Foucaults' analysis is null and void.

-"I consider women the absence of desire" (HAHAHAHAH THIS IS WHERE I LAUGHED) pg. 93.

[Ajay Vienna]

Most of this text I found to be largely impenetrable, but the parts I did understand I found interesting. In his critique of both Foucault's power and Deleuze's desires, Baudrillard introduces the idea of seduction contra production. Namely, that production makes the hidden visible, it unearths; as opposed to seduction, which does the opposite, seduction takes what is visible and makes it hidden, it buries. This connects to power because, as Baudrillard thinks, it no longer exits, that those “in power” merely play as if they are in power, that they guard the secret of there being no power at all. They use seduction as a means to hide this secret.

[K]

i kind of appreciate that Baudrillard is throwing Foucault himself (and Deleuze..) into the historical blender, but i think this book veered the line between 'over my head' and 'kind of nonsense'. the interviews at the end were no longer funny, but kind of frustrating and occasionally outright insane, and Baudrillard himself seems to think there's nothing we can do with his work? well; that's just great Jean - thanks