This week's podcast is a ghostcast featuring Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture for the Teaching Company on Jean Baudrillard's book "Fatal Strategies. For the Diet Soap podcast this represents a departure, because while Baudrillard and Guy Debord came out of the same milieu (both were influenced by Henri Lefebvre for example) Baudrillard came to believe that Late Capitalism had defeated history while Debord did not.

Thanks to Jason C, Benjamin B, Christian A, and David B for becoming regular subscribers to the Diet Soap podcast and signing up for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. Using Talkshoe to host a monthly international conversation, the Diet Soap Philosophy workshop will include one 45 minute presentation/lecture monthly as well as a discussion wherein the lecture and submitted writings will be discussed.

Rick Roderick was a philosophy professor who worked at Duke University and who came from Abilene, Texas. The son of a "con-man" and a beautician, Roderick was (according to Wikipedia) revered by many students for a socratic style of teaching combined with a brash and often humorous approach. He died too young in 2002.

From Roderick's Lecture:

In the world of Baudrillard social relations have begun to disappear between humans because humans have begun to disappear. In fact Baudrillard thinks that reality itself is in the process of disappearing; what has been learned and understood under the name of “the real”...The self under siege in modernity has always presumed that there was a self to be under siege, but in the view of Baudrillard society has reached a point at which it has literally been overcome by its technology and the new and important issues aren’t about things like the non-believer or the non-offender, but about the non-person.