''... brilliantly original ... brings cultural and post-colonial theory to bear on a wide range of authors with great skill and sensitivity.' Terry Eagleton

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. This major work occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard′s fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation. A classic in its field, Symbolic Exchange and Death is a key source for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. Baudrillard′s critical gaze appraises social theories as diverse as cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, communications theory and semiotics. This English translation begins with a new introductory essay.

The anniversary edition marks thirty years of offering an indispensable review and analysis of thinkers who have exerted a profound influence on contemporary rhetorical theory: I. A. Richards, Ernesto Grassi, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Stephen Toulmin, Richard Weaver, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, bell hooks, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. The brief biographical sketches locate the theorists in time and place, showing how life experiences influenced perspectives on rhetorical thought. The concise explanations of complex concepts are clear, engaging, insightful, and highly accessible, serving as an excellent primer for reading the major works of these scholars. The critical commentary is carefully chosen to highlight implications and to place the theories within a broader rhetorical context. Each chapter ends with a complete bibliography of works by the theorists.

"This work is the first book-length treatment of Jean Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist"--

An expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of Baudrillard's work, this new edition adds examples from after 1985.

Media is a big part of our lives. We see and hear it everywhere. In this book Miller demonstrates how media has taken the place of ritual(s). Our everyday lives are constantly facilitated by media rituals. This media ritual process exists regardless of its content and is a phenomenon that overcomes our subjective experience with a constant flux of representations and seduction. Memory and mind are in a perpetual process of re-imaging, distortion, and violence. Human relationships can be comprised of sheer information sharing from any distance around the globe. The objective world around us is experienced and interpreted through the virtual worlds we are forced to participate in. The dialectic is barred and the flood of media images captures us in the univocal. Persons then understand that truth comes from their singular, isolated, and violated self. Therefore, the body in the real world feels foreign and we feel dissociated and anxious, reaching in a vain attempt for more media to fill and restore our bodily and spiritual needs. Our personhood and everything that we are lie under the influence of this media ritual process.

The philosopher Paul Weiss once observed, "Philosophers let theories get in the way of what they and everyone else know." For many, the very word "philosophical" has become all but synonymous with "impractical". Yet whether we like it or not, almost every corner of our lives—from dissertation writing to channel surfing—brings us face to face with competing philosophies and world views, each claiming to tell us definitively what it means to be human. How can we know which one is right? And what difference does it make? To Robert McTeigue, S.J., it makes every difference in the world. Consciously or not, we all have a world view, and it decides how we live. In this book, McTeigue gives a funny and invigorating crash course in practical logic, metaphysics, anthropology, and ethics, equipping readers with a tool kit for breaking down and evaluating the thought systems—some good, some toxic—that swirl around us, and even within us. In McTeigue, classical philosophy finds a contemporary voice, accessible to the layman and engaging to the scholar. Real Philosophy for Real People is an answer to those philosophies that prize theory over truth, to any metaphysics that cannot account for itself, to anthropologies that are unworthy of the human person, and to ethical systems that reduce the great dignity and destiny of the human person. As the author insists, "A key test of any philosophy is: Can it be lived?" With Thomas Aquinas, this book teaches not only how to know the truth, but how to love it and to do it.

Traces the ways in which our culture has increasingly become a culture of simulations, and offers strategies for discerning meaning in a world where the difference between what is real and what is simulated has collapsed.

Containing two previously unpublished essays by Jean Baudrillard, this book provides a series of dazzling demonstrations of the power of Baudrillard’s thought from many of his most accomplished commentators.

This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity.