Quote Originally Posted by Louis
In this postulate, the erosion of meaning via its excess, Baudrillard —against Foucault, Kantian rationalism, and liberal humanism— sought to understand the world neither in terms of the subject's desire to coherently know the world, nor in terms of the interpolation of power within subjectivity (in the manner of Foucault), but in terms of the object, and its power to seduce (its power to stand for, or to simulate). His political stance led him —drawing upon the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille— to oppose semiotic logic —meaning, sign, signification, and commodity exchange— in favor of the symbolic realm —gift exchange, potlatch (the practice of sumptuous destruction), and analyses of the principle of Evil (and the meaning of invoking said principle). This prompted him to characterize the world in terms of the binary opposition of symbolic cultures (based upon gift exchange) and the expanding 'globalized' world (based upon sign and commodity exchange), a world which has no answer to symbolic logic.
Oh, I AM sorry. Take 2 Ayn Rand's and call Don Corleone in the morning. '... a world which has no answer to symbolic logic...' is a sad (tho' pretty) place, indeed.