Butler, Rex
Butler, Rex
Bio Sketch
Rex Butler is an Australian art historian, writer and critic, currently Professor of Art History & Theory at Monash University (formerly University of Queensland, where he remains an Honorary Professor, and UNSW Art & Design). He writes mainly on Australian contemporary art and art criticism, post-war American art and critical theory, and is the author of books on a series of literary and philosophical figures — Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari, Stanley Cavell — as well as, with ADS Donaldson, the UnAustralian Art volumes (2023). His study of Baudrillard is the book version of the Core Cultural Theorists series entry (SAGE, 1999), notable for carrying Baudrillard's own endorsement on its back cover as a book that "sees what I see and at the same time what I am unable to see" (publisher's blurb, web-verified). (Bio web-verified via the Monash University research portal and the Sydney Review of Books contributor page.)
Key Works
- *Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real* (1999) — the wiki's ingested source: the book-length internal reading of Baudrillard around the paradox of the sign, simulation, seduction and doubling.
- Jean Baudrillard (SAGE, 1999; the series edition of the same study).
- Borges and Translation: The Untimeliness of Translation and books on Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari, and Stanley Cavell (not yet ingested).
- UnAustralian Art: 10 Essays on Transnational Art History (with ADS Donaldson, 2023) (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- doubling — Butler's name for the operation of Baudrillard's language and theory on total systems.
- the-real — the real as the internal limit of systems, Butler's central reading of Baudrillard.
- double-strategy — the analyst's discipline extracted from In the Shadow and made a criterion of judgement.
- paradox-of-the-sign — the "one simple paradox" Butler finds repeated throughout Baudrillard's work.
- internal-and-external-readings — the forced methodological choice Butler's book is organized around.
- medium-of-exchange — the paradoxical status of the thing that mediates exchange (money, painting, hostage).
- ceremonial-and-linear-time — the two time-forms of 'The Year 2000' as read by Butler.
Relevance to the Core Research
Butler matters to the wiki as the secondary literature that systematizes the Baudrillard cluster the researcher has been ingesting from the primary texts (The System of Objects, The Mirror of Production, Simulacra and Simulation, Fatal Strategies). His reading does three things the primary texts alone do not: it supplies the methodological frame (internal vs. external reading) for using Baudrillard at all; it names the meta-concepts (doubling, the-real, double-strategy, paradox-of-the-sign) through which the primary concepts (simulation-hyperreality, seduction, symbolic-exchange, the-masses, consumption) hang together as one argument; and it documents the reception history (Kellner, Gane, Genosko, Levin, Morris) the wiki's Baudrillard pages have so far lacked. For the architecture-and-image registers (spectacle, iconic architecture, semiocapitalism), Butler's caution — that simulation is not an empirical phenomenon to be "confirmed" in buildings but a hypothesis that doubles the world — is a standing check on over-application.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
