My text, modeled after the late works of Roland Barthes, is composed of fragments in order to better facilitate the creation of this non-hierarchal space, meaning that I do not have central claims or concrete conclusions as a result of my research. The aim of this thesis is not to determine which of these views is more viable than the others, but rather to create a space in which these diverse texts can work with and against each other to produce different images of how identities are formed and altered in a subject's daily interactions with self, other subjects, pets, objects and environment.

In addition to these sources, I also consider the work of James Gee, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Blanchot, Chantal Akerman and Dan Graham. Though I examine many materials, the recurring texts include Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Walter Abish's How German Is It, Michael Haneke's film The Seventh Continent, Franz Kafka's short story 'Community,' and Jean Baudrillard's System of Objects.

Fragments: Conversations with Francois L'Yvonnet will be essential reading for any scholar of Baudrillard, but will also prove an attractive and informative starting point for any student trying to get to grips with his work for the first time.This thesis draws from a variety of theoretical, artistic and literary sources to explore representations of and approaches to the construction and transformation of a subject's identities. Such fractalisation can be opposed in Baudrillard's view only by the radical form of symbolic fragment, the aphorism and the singularity for 'this form alone attacks the system'. The system of Western culture is subject today to radical uncertainty and chaos. Even globalisation is accompanied in his view by a Western culture which itself is no longer a well-founded confident universalism. Instead of examining his work as a project of intellectual accumulation, Baudrillard challenges all the major interpretations of his work by suggesting he has always adopted an anti-system, anti-totality strategy - here termed an 'aphoristic strategy'.

Perhaps most interestingly, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to his contemporaries: thinkers such as Bataille and the Situationists, Barthes, Lyotard, and Deleuze, amongst others. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard is on sparkling form and explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as outsider in the field of great French thinkers. Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the post-modern. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fragments by Jean Baudrillard