Symbolic Exchange and Death

Author: (French) Baudrillard/J. Che Jinshan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: The Symbolic Exchange and Death is Baudrillard's most influential work, widely recognized as one of the most important and classic expositions of postmodern theory and cultural studies. In this book, the author argues that since the Renaissance, human history has experienced three distinct types of simulation: "mimicry," "production," and "hyperreality," which correspond to the natural laws of value, the high-quality laws of value, and the structural laws of value. Through an analysis of various sociocultural phenomena such as labor, fashion, the body, death, and poetic language, the author points out that the principle of simulation has now replaced the former principle of reality, dominating everything from political economy to psychoanalysis. Today, both have become a revolutionary adherence to the law, losing their effectiveness and radicalism. Therefore, we need a reversibility of gift in feedback, an exchangeability of sacrifice, a reversibility of time in cycles, a reversibility of production in destruction, a reversibility of life in death, and a reversibility of linguistic units and values in transitive writing. This vast and identical form is the form of destruction and annihilation. It can terminate linear time, language, economy, and power at the limit of simulation, which is the symbolic exchange. This is the only symbolic violence equivalent to the violence of code structure. Only this paradoxical theory and practice can touch upon today's hyperreality and deliver it a fatal blow.