BAUDRILLARD (Jean).
Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe.
A presentation copy, inscribed by the author ‘Pour Maurice Nadeau Amicalement J. Baudrillard’ in black ink to the front free endpaper. A service de presse review copy with a perforated ‘SP’ stamp to terminal leaves and rear corner. Maurice Nadeau was a literary critic and editor, collaborating early in life with Breton and later writing the major reference work History of Surrealism. His work helped bring to prominence, among others, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller.
Prior to his fame as the postmodern philosopher of simulation, Baudrillard’s work specialised in an exacting study of consumerism, bringing Marxian political economy into contact with structuralist semiotics. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign develops these ideas through an engagement with the Situationists and the philosophers on his dissertation committee: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Prescient even at the time of publication, Baudrillard’s mode of value criticism and conception of constructed rather than innate desire have only continued to accrue significance.
