Jean Baudrillard, a French social theorist and critic often associated with postmodernism, has been studied as sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. In Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange, Brian Gogan establishes him as a rhetorician, demonstrating how the histories, traditions, and practices of rhetoric prove central to his use of language. In addition to Baudrillard’s standard works, Gogan examines many of the scholar’s lesser-known writings that have never been analyzed by rhetoricians, and this more comprehensive approach presents fresh perspectives on Baudrillard’s work as a whole.
Gogan examines both the theorist himself and his rhetoric, combining these two lines of inquiry in ways that allow for provocative insights. The first part of the book explains Baudrillard’s theory as compatible with the histories and traditions of rhetoric, outlining his novel understanding of rhetorical invention as involving thought, discourse, and perception. The four chapters that constitute part one each conclude with an Illustration section that applies Baudrillard’s theory to Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Part two includes an additional four chapters, each of which evaluates Baudrillard’s work in terms of a perception of him - as an aphorist, an illusionist, an ignoramus, and an ironist. These chapters cover the performative nature of his rhetorical theory; illusion in Plato, Aristotle, and Baudrillard’s own work; a disagreement with Susan Sontag and its basis in differing approaches to signification; and the importance of irony to rhetorical theory. A biographical sketch and a critical review of the literature on Baudrillard and rhetoric round out the study.,br>Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange makes the French theorist’s complex concepts understandable and relates them to the work of important thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Ferdinand de Saussure, Hannah Arendt, and Kenneth Burke, providing a thorough and accessible introduction to Baudrillard’s ideas.
