A Marxist Reading of Young Baudrillard

Zhang Yibing promovierte im August 1981 am Institut für Philosophie der Universität Nanjing. Er ist derzeit Vizekanzler der Universität Nanjing, Senior- und renommierter Professor und Doktorvater für Philosophie, Dekan des Marxismus-Instituts und Leiter des Forschungszentrums für marxistische Gesellschaftstheorien an der Universität Nanjing. Sein akademischer Schwerpunkt liegt in der Forschung zur westlichen marxistischen Philosophie und in der Textanalyse, und er beschäftigt sich intensiv im Bereich der Geisteswissenschaften. Seine Schriften werden von 1982 bis heute fortwährend veröffentlicht.

This book prefers a hard polemic on Baudrillard's post-modern turn, and deals in a direct and frontal debate against refutations claimed by early (young) Baudrillard to historical materialism and his deconstruction of Marxian theory of labor value. Making advantage of the brand-new method of Marxist context constitution, the author makes a critical and detailed reading of Youth Baudrillard's three most important academic books: For a Critique of Political Economy of Signs, The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death. And he makes a deep analysis on the academic and thinking basis of the Young Baudrillard, namely his logic of symbolic exchange based on grassroots' romanticism inspired from Mauss-Bataille; Furthermore, the author makes a clear distinction of the utmost secret transformative process of critical logic in the development of Baudrillard's thinking: from the dissolution of the ideographic material to the symbolic value of coding structure, then to the quasi-real existence without a model. And in the end the symbolic miscoding of death becomes the hopeless desire of Baudrillard's tentative salvation of the world. This is a death trilogy, which occurs in Baudrillard's academic scenery and in which the real existence is murdered. The thought of late Baudrillard, is something like a virus and paranoia. This kind of logical violence by theoretical violence has become an absurd modern academic cartoon in the excessive rational interpretation.