Radical Alterity

by Jean Baudrillard, Marc Guillaume, Ames Hodges (Translator)

A focused exploration of Baudrillard's understanding and use of alterity and “otherness,” a crucial theme that appears and reappears throughout his work as a whole. Alterity is in danger. It is a masterpiece in peril, an object lost or missing from our system, from the system of artificial intelligence and the system of communication in general.—from Radical Alterity Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard's work and his reading of the “radical exoticism” posited by Victor Segalen—ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign “primitive society of the future,” America. In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity. This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, “Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed.”

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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

[Turki · Rating 4 out of 5]

ما الذي تبقى إذن من الواقع ونحن نشهد في كل مكان حقناً هائلا ومتواصلاً للواقع بالصورة والمتخيل والافتراضي ؟!
جان بودريار.

[david-baptiste · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just stumbled on this at a bookstore and have been reading it there. It is a "new" (2008) book in translation, though it appeared first in France in 1994, and the interviews/exchanges/dialogues which it contains were done in 1990-91. For myself it is the latest event of great synchronicity to find this book, which concerns itself with a series of "subjects" to put it punningly, of which I've been writing and thinking a lot in the last years, and just again wrote an essay on some aspects of. To communicate is to create distance, to make further away rather than closer, to push objects and beings into a spectral dimension, is a situation with which Baudrillard begins his examination of the relationship with the Other. Rather than "the self" Baudrillard investigates the ancient "conception" (again to pun on my part) of the anonymous, the pseudonym, heteronyms as forms of existence and communication. In a world of ever more technologies of mass communications, the object becomes ever more distant. What one is communicating with is not the "real," but the spectral.
I can't wait to get back to the store to continue reading-!
This is Baudrillard at his best, the thinker of paradoxes, inversions, reversals, which "turn upside down" the received ideas which are taken as "realities" and "truths," as well as those objects and methods which purport to be radical questionings of these and are instead only their further "confirmations" as the status quo of a manufacture of deceptions. There is a kind of wild humor to be found in Baudrillard's demolishing of the sophistries which are paraded as "truths" born of these mass deceptions and bolsterings of a status quo that can trick itself into thinking it is its own opposite, rather than its doubling, mirrored self-same.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elucidating dialogue about alterity and transcendence. Guillaume challenges Baudrillard to articulate plainly what is changing in our relationship to the other. Some observations are straightforward ("Today, we are truly in a world of multiple networks giving rise to a new form of sociality that has nothing to do with the unrest of groups in fusion"), others are more profound ("Mass consumption allowed a disconnection between social reality and social roles"). Baudrillard is too clever by half in some of his phrasing (e.g. textual transvestism) and his etymological arguments a stretch (on affectation, the root is faire, to do or make...there is the artificial and the fictive ...). I found his thoughts on spectrality (the dispersion of the modern subject ) at odds with Charles Taylor's observations on the same subject in The Making of the Modern Self. Baudrillard argues that "this dispersion opens one to the experience of the diversity (alteritas) of others, of the dust of often insignificant differences..."His debt to Barthes and his pivot away from structuralism become clearer in his critique of The Empire of Signs and the amorous languor of the West. The third chapter on The sidereal Voyage and the semiotocs of voyage offers the best exchange in the dialogue.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. If you’re a Baudrillard novice skip to the second half. The content can get choppy and awkward sometimes when he lets someone else into his thought space.

[Spitzwegayrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein großartiger Essay, der Lust macht auf mehr

[Carolyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dialogue, horrendously facilitated by Marc Guillame, in which only the most obvious iterations are to be made. This is a benign, lullaby of a work -- a perfect remedy for those in need of an afternoon nap, as I must say I did doze off after one too many pages of the self-evident truths in this volume. As Guillame comments, "I do not know whether this is true but we are not looking for the truth here." If not in search for truth, these ramblings cannot be deemed philosophy but are merely acts of sociality so scathingly critiqued by Guillame himself.

[سلمي عيسي · Rating 1 out of 5]

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