Not long ago, two friends Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles
the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other from nowhere, met in
Paris. They had a long discussion without any precise aim. It was,
rather, a way of rubbing up against metaphysics without risk of
contagion. They called it Exiles from Dialogue as a mirrored homage to
Bertolt Brecht and shortly afterwards they parted company and went their
separate ways.
In this remarkable new book based on this gnomic meeting, Baudrillard
and Noailles range over the entirety of philosophy and thought
underpinning Baudrillards unique work, from In the Shadow of the Silent
Majorities (1983) to his recent writings on 9/11. Philosophically, the
book takes in its breadth Heraclitus to Wittgenstein by way of Plato,
Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzche. Its literary sources
are diverse: Gracian and Saul Bellow, Hlderlin and Stanislaw Lec; and
the theories of Fukuyama, Barthes and Kristeva are weighed, considered
and analysed.
With his usual incandescent brilliance, Baudrillard discusses the
central themes of his writing: thought as (non-prophetic) anticipation;
tragic acceptance of the world; the disappearance of the world into
simulation; the death of the social (and with it the Left). Vitally,
Baudrillard corrects some of the misconceptions that plague his work
(about his fatal strategies, for example), qualifies some of his bolder
pronouncements (notably softening his position on the question of the
virtual) and pushes other lines of thinking further than ever before.
Razor-sharp, volatile and capacious, this book will be essential reading
for students and scholars of Baudrillard and those interested in the
theories and philosophies that currently abound and rebound in the
social sciences and humanities.
