Jean Baudrillard is one of the most significant of French philosophers from the last half century. Baudrillard is the prophet-philosopher who articulated the virtual world we all live in today. Unfortunately, his writing can also be obtuse and cryptic. Symbolic Exchange and Death is the Holy Grail which makes all other aspects of his philosophy in latter books easier at least to understand.
Baudrillard is best known for Simulacra and Simulation. Some, perhaps most, like this reviewer, started their reading of Baudrillard with this book. This is a mistake. As illuminating though it is, the entire context of simulacra and simulation and their role in Baudrillard’s philosophy is lost by starting with Simulacra and Simulation.
With this book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard lays the groundwork of all that follows in his philosophy. Briefly, societies from the beginning were organized as a series of rituals or exchanges, unitary and binary numbers as Baudrillard likes to put it. The exchange served as the model for Sacrifice. Once the Industrial Age occurred, the actual exchange became formalized and normalized to the extent that eventually the original meaning of the existing exchanges became lost in simulations, drifting progressively farther away from their original meaning, to the point where Baudrillard describes, decades before the fact, the hyper-real virtual world of Facebook, Instagram, Reality Shows, and the rest, where, quite literally, nothing is “real.”
Significantly, Symbolic Exchange explains how the corrupting influence of Capital destroyed the delicate balance of the ritualistic exchange of production, labor, value, money, and class, eviscerating the meaning and reducing them to different levels of simulacra and simulation, providing the entry of a virtual hyperreal world where each level is more detached to the real world destroyed by Capital. This is an important piece in Baudrillard’s puzzle which is alluded to but not particularly elaborated in his later works, at least those available in English translation.
Baudrillard’s writing in this book and his others are immersed in the Philosophy of Signs. It is necessary to know the fundamentals of this philosophical school to fully understand the writing in this book. But once that happens, what he has to say here will be much more clear and understandable.
Symbolic Exchange is a significant work, of interest of students of philosophy and political scientists. It comes highly recommended.
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