The Ecstasy of Communication, new edition

Baudrillard's essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of his books and a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition.

“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.”
—from The Ecstasy of Communication

First published in France in 1987, The Ecstasy of Communication was Baudrillard's summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne: a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard's quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual establishment may have been doomed…