This introduction to Jean Baudrillard's controversial writings covers his entire career but focuses on his central, but little understood, notion of symbolic exchange. Through the clarification of this key term a very different Baudrillard emerges.

This paper explores the classic MGM film The Wizard of Oz from a perspective influenced by Baudrillard’s writings. The paper begins by locating its argument within Baudrillard’s influential notion of the orders of simulacra, noting the neglected distinction between the imaginary and simulation (or hyperreality). It then moves into less familiar territory, exploring some of the least known aspects of Baudrillard’s thought: symbolic exchange, destiny and radical otherness. These notions, we argue, not only suggest an alternative reading of the film, (...) they also suggest an alternative perspective on Baudrillard’s thought. Against standard views of Baudrillard’s work as relativist, postmodernist and anti-feminist (Kellner 1989), the paper draws out a very different Baudrillard, one concerned with illusion, imagination and, perhaps, a singular form of ethicality. Our reading of the film, through Baudrillard’s idiosyncratic writing on seduction, ritual and initiation, suggests an understanding of ‘ethicality’ as relational, radically contingent and subject to the play of destiny. (shrink)

This article re-examines Bataille’s increasingly influential notion of the sacred, with particular emphasis on the left or impure aspects of the sacred and their relationship to social structure or topology. Bataille’s understanding of the ‘sacred nucleus’ of society is examined in detail, particularly his suggestion that society endures only as the hardening of the conduits of sacred and profane around a radically heterogeneous, impure or ‘filthy’ central nucleus. For Bataille the sacred as heterogeneous is necessarily excluded from profane, homogeneous working (...) life, and is internally divided between left and right, or pure and impure aspects. The article then examines the theme of profanation in Bataille’s writing, and the emergence of what he calls ‘post-sacred’ society. Finally, the article turns to Baudrillard’s relationship to Bataille’s work, and, beyond their common indebtedness to Mauss, the author examines the thematic relationship between Bataille’s heterological sacred and Baudrillard’s notions of symbolic exchange, evil and transparency. Baudrillard’s work presents a version of heterology more adapted to the contemporary era of rampant consumerism and virtual technologies, but, as the author argues, it actually departs rather little from Bataille’s position. However, for Baudrillard, profanation generates conditions of hyper-positivity and transparency which reintroduce evil, repulsion and disorder into the social system. (shrink)