| The Utopie group was born in 1966
at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees The eponymous journal edited
by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau,
and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine
Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next
decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical
ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism and everyday life.
Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard
published in Utopie in their original form as well as
recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka.
Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought.
Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were
seminal for some of his most shockingly original bookCovers: For
a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign , The
Mirror of Production , Simulations , Symbolic
Exchange and Death , and In the the Shadow of the Silent
Majorities .
But Utopie was also a topical journal and a political
one. The topics of these essays are sometimes literally torn for
the headlines of the tumultuous decade following May 1968 and surpassed
Marxism itself.
Jean Baudrillard is among the most important internationally recognized
intellectuals writing today. He is the author of The Ecstasy
of Communication, Fatal Strategies, The Spirit
of Terrorism, and The Conspiracy of Art among many
other works. |
