Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983

Jean Baudrillard's work has enraged and baffled critics and commentators in the English speaking world for over thirty years. Has he gone beyond a joke? Or do his writings on the contemporary world and its significance offer us revelatory insights? One thing is certain: Baudrillard is neither an easy writer nor a soft target.
Revenge of the Crystal supplies a corrective to those who would dismiss his work as irrelevant - and a welcome introduction to those who are coming to his work for the first time and find the range of commentary and the choice of texts bewildering. This classic anthology of Baudrillard's writings is the first to provide the English reader with substantial translations of his major writings from the 1960s through to his critiques of consumption and Marxism in the 1970s and his more speculative pronouncements in the 1980s on sexuallty, the nature of politics in postmodern society and the effects of the 'image machine' on our imaginations and systems of meaning. What these texts reveal most clearly is the extent of Baudrillard's reading of Marx and the subtlety of his thought concerning the fate of the object within society. The breadth of work presented here should at last provide the reader with the means of understanding this most provocative of thinkers.