BOOK REVIEW: OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY, VIDEOTAPE, NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2025, 160P
BOOK REVIEW: OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY, VIDEOTAPE, NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2025, 160P

Summary/Abstract: Material culture has never been denied its due share of attention within philosophical discourse. From Plato’s Theory of Forms to Martin Heidegger’s concept of Zuhandenheit, and from Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic migration of objects from the area of utility to the realm of social theory to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, the utility, ephemerality, and symbolic function of objects have undergone significant conceptual scrutiny and empirical analysis. When, in the mid-1960s, Baudrillard asked whether “we could classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna” (The System of Objects 1996:1), little did he imagine that an answer would come from a book series that developed a systematic taxonomy of artifacts.

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