A fatal Maussianism: Ethnology, philosophy and psychoanalysis in the early and middle corpus of Jean Baudrillard

This thesis emphasizes how Mauss' discovery of the gift informs Baudrillard's interpretations of structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, modernity and death. Chapter One discusses Baudrillard's thought in relation to: Maussian archaeology, Foucault's genealogical elucidations of bio-power, Levi-Straussian anthropology, the structural recomposition of the human sciences, metaphysical thought, and what Derrida describes as the antipodally equivocal ends of man. These discussions highlight affinities between Mauss and Baudrillard. Chapter Two considers Baudrillard's thought with regard to Freudian socio-cultural theory and Levi-Straussian anthropology. Baudrillard Copernicizes the psychoanalytic account of OEdipus' crimes on the grounds of the Maussian disclosure. Although his Copernicization of the incest taboo owes much to structural anthropology, his concomitant inversion of the primordial parricide stresses the religious and historical dimensions of the gift, and thus reprises the latter from its Levi-Straussian secularization and de-temporalization. Chapter Three compares Baudrillard's ethnologically anchored rapprochement between historical materialism and political economy with Foucault's epistemologically grounded reconciliation of Marxian and Ricardian thought. I conclude by reiterating Baudrillard's debt to Mauss, and by recalling the transformative potentials inherent in the Maussian discovery.;Keywords gift, death, symbolic, archaic, exchange, structuralism, social, human, anthropology, metaphysics, religious, secularization, disenchantment, modernity, civilization...