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poopdealer's review against another edition
2.0
lighting that rock up so hard and writing the most fuckinh french shit youve ever seen in your life
adamz24's review against another edition
3.0
The more I read Baudrillard, the more drawn I am to him as a prose artist. This book consists of an introduction, the essay "Forget Foucault" itself, and an interview in which Baudrillard discusses his early work, called "Forget Baudrillard." The intro and interview are interesting enough, but "Forget Foucault" itself is a fine piece of writing indeed, and probably one of the more focused and direct pieces I've read by Baudrillard. As always, he is intellectually stimulating and fascinating, even though I've never entirely bought into his viewpoint. As I mentioned earlier, the prose is just terrific, perhaps not as consistently terrific as in some of his later work, but here's some shit I was into:
“It flows, it invests and saturates the entire space it opens . The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals; a magistral art of decentering allows the opening of new spaces (spaces of power and of discourse) which are immediately covered up by the meticulous outpouring of Foucault's writing. There's no vacuum here, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity, a nonlinear, orbital, and flawless writing. The meaning never exceeds what one says of it; no dizziness, yet it never floats in a text too big for it: no rhetoric either.”
“what if sex itself is no longer in sex? We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason”
“We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its immediate production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure; we find no seduction in those bodies penetrated by a gaze literally absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product”
“Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene," etymologically speaking and in all senses”
“Foucault doesn't want to talk about repression: but what else is that slow, brutal infection of the mind through sex, whose only equivalent in the past was infection through the soul”
“It flows, it invests and saturates the entire space it opens . The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals; a magistral art of decentering allows the opening of new spaces (spaces of power and of discourse) which are immediately covered up by the meticulous outpouring of Foucault's writing. There's no vacuum here, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity, a nonlinear, orbital, and flawless writing. The meaning never exceeds what one says of it; no dizziness, yet it never floats in a text too big for it: no rhetoric either.”
“what if sex itself is no longer in sex? We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason”
“We never find any seduction there-nor in pornography with its immediate production of sexual acts in a frenzied activation of pleasure; we find no seduction in those bodies penetrated by a gaze literally absorbed by the suction of the transparent void. Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product”
“Pornography is only the paradoxical limit of the sexual, a realistic exacerbation and a mad obsession with the real-this is the "obscene," etymologically speaking and in all senses”
“Foucault doesn't want to talk about repression: but what else is that slow, brutal infection of the mind through sex, whose only equivalent in the past was infection through the soul”
gellok's review against another edition
4.0
This was a strange text at first. In part due to the translation but also due to Baudrillard's style. If you are unfamiliar with Baudrillard's work, then do not "judge the book by its cover" - as it were. The text is not nearly as critical of Foucault as is often assumed, and Baudrillard is, at times, remarkably supportive of aspects of Foucauldian thought (perhaps accidentally on occasion). His distillation of Foucault to a few critical concepts (e.g. milieu and power) might be considered a tad unfair given the structure of Baudrillard's own critique. Much of his writing is a patois of heavy handed theoretical quandaries and seemingly solipsistic ruminations muddied by Baudrillard's fascination with the obscure.
The best advice I could give a reader here, in the case of reading from beginning to end, is to simply give Baudrillard a wide birth with his lackadaisical use of philosophical concepts. This approach will make significantly more sense if you're willing to wade through the "Forget Baudrillard" interview. Parts of the interview read as if both parties were speaking in code, but perhaps the most explanatory section comes about at the moment Sylvère Lotringer notes that Baudrillard "theorize[s] the way others go to a casino." Hence the alternative approach to reading this text as a whole would be to start with the with the last few pages of "Forget Baudrillard" as it provides a useful lens through which one can read and partially de-code some of Baudrillard's structural peculiarities.
A fun read regardless, though perhaps not brilliant in its content - assuming that's of concern.
The best advice I could give a reader here, in the case of reading from beginning to end, is to simply give Baudrillard a wide birth with his lackadaisical use of philosophical concepts. This approach will make significantly more sense if you're willing to wade through the "Forget Baudrillard" interview. Parts of the interview read as if both parties were speaking in code, but perhaps the most explanatory section comes about at the moment Sylvère Lotringer notes that Baudrillard "theorize[s] the way others go to a casino." Hence the alternative approach to reading this text as a whole would be to start with the with the last few pages of "Forget Baudrillard" as it provides a useful lens through which one can read and partially de-code some of Baudrillard's structural peculiarities.
A fun read regardless, though perhaps not brilliant in its content - assuming that's of concern.
tgestabrook's review against another edition
3.0
It's fun to read a book dedicated to roasting Foucault, and I think a lot of Baudrillard's criticisms of him & Deleuze are valid. The entire second half ("Forget Baudrillard") requires greater familiarity with Baudrillard and largely flew over my head. Given that it ends with the interviewer fawning over Baudrillard and his work for several paragraphs, I suspect that I'm not missing much.
heliogabalous_vrz's review against another edition
5.0
Really interesting to see someone disagree with foucault who isn't an idiot. Comparing power, the libidinal, and d&Gs conception of desire and contrasting them with his own idea of seduction was interesting as well. I think too many people read this as a straight forward attack on foucault, but baudrillard clearly shows respect for his conception of power and historic account of it, this is obvious if you read baudrillards later work (the agony of power). Baudrillard just seems to argue a few minor historical points, that foucaults work can only be seen as a history of the past and not the present, and that deleuzes notion of desire and foucaults idea of power are actually caused by seduction.
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