"First published in France in 1987, " The Ecstasy of Communication" was Baudrill
ard's summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne: a den
se, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provoc
ative theory into an aphoristically eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alie
nation. Baudrillard's quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectua
l establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text immediately becam
e a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment that looked both forward and b
ack. By carefully distilling the most radical elements of his previous books, Ba
udrillard constructed the skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in th
e second half of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the "obscene"
a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless communication and in
formation. "The Ecstasy of Communication" is a decisive, compact description of
what it means to be "wired" in our braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality
has been superseded by pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizo
phrenia, subject by object, and violence by terror.
