Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004ISBN: 978-0-7456-3659-7
Hardcover
132 pages
August 2006, Polity
Other Available Formats: Paperback
|
The Guardian
A sharp-shooting lone-ranger from the post-Marxist left.
New York Times
The most important French thinker of the past twenty
years.
J. G. Ballard
"Theory is never so fine as when it takes the form of a fiction or
a fable," writes Baudrillard in Cool Memories V – the latest
in a series of aphoristic journals that covers the period
2000-2004. During these years Baudrillard re-emerged strongly in
the international arena with his trenchant and controversial essay
Spirit of Terrorism, developed his work as a photographer and
developed cancer.
As his attack on the inanities of "hyperreality" has grown more
radical, Baudrillard has come to display an ever more marked
penchant for the aphoristic style he has so long admired in such
writers as Canetti, Lichtenberg and Nietzsche. "'Aphorizein'", he
writes, "from which we get the word ‘aphorism', means to
retreat to such a distance that a horizon of thought is formed
which never again closes on itself. " Cool Memories are carnets,
notebooks, but these are notes for keeping the horizon of thought
open within a daunting sphere of ideas that is no less than "a
jungle, a nature red in tooth and claw. " "Mentally and
affectively," he writes, "we have remained hunters. At every
moment, in thought and writing, there is a prey and a predator. And
survival is a miracle. "
Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims in 1929 and now lives in Paris. From 1966 to1987 he taught sociology at the University of Paris X (Nanterre). Among his works translated into English are Simulations and Simulacra, Fatal Strategies, Seduction, America, Cool Memories I- IV, The Illusion of the End and The Spirit of Terrorism