Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard (UK: /ˈboʊdrɪjɑːr/ BOHD-rih-yar,^[17] US: /ˌboʊdriˈɑːr/ BOHD-ree-AR, French: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet,^[18] with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.^[19][20] Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism,^[21][22] and had distanced himself from postmodernism.^[23][24]

Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard in 2004 at the European Graduate School
Born	(1929-07-27)27 July 1929 Reims, France
Died	6 March 2007(2007-03-06) (aged 77) Paris, France
Alma mater	University of Paris
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy^[1]^[2] (debated^[3]) French Nietzscheanism Post-Marxism^[4] Non-representational theory^[5] Nihilism Pataphysics Post-structuralism (debated) Postmodernism (disavowed)
Institutions	Paris X Nanterre European Graduate School
Thesis	Le système des objets (1968)
Doctoral advisor	Henri Lefebvre
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of death^[6]^[7] Philosophy of war Philosophy of architecture Philosophy of information Philosophy of art Philosophy of social science Philosophy of history critique of economy Social philosophy Sociology (early) anthropology 'Pataphysics photography semiotics Terrorism studies social history Western foreign policy popular culture
Notable ideas	Hyperreality sign value desert of the real transpolitics^[8]^: 87^[9] transaesthetics^[10]^[9] raw phenomenology^[11] transfinite^[12]^[13]^[14]^[15] theory-fiction^[16]

Biography

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers and his father a gendarme. During high school (at the Lycée at Reims), he became aware of 'pataphysics via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet, which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.^[25]: 317 He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne.^[26] There he studied German language and literature,^[27] which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[25]: 317

Teaching career

While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.^{[25]: 317–328} While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesis Le Système des Objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching Sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^{[28]: 2(Introduction)} During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".^[29] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the United States (Aspen, Colorado), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Kyoto, Japan. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer.^{[25]: 317–328} In 1986, he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full-time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to academia. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[30] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de 'Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,^[31] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. He also purportedly participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (as of 2022 hosted on Bishop's University domain) from its inception in 2004 until his death.^[32]

In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[25]: 319 In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^{[25]: 317–328}

Personal life

 

Grave of Jean Baudrillard with flowers and vines planted and growing over it in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France.

Baudrillard enjoyed baroque music; a favorite composer was Claudio Monteverdi. He also favored rock music such as The Velvet Underground & Nico.^[33] Baudrillard did his writing using "his old typewriter, never at the computer".^[33][24] He has stated that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", whereas with a typewriter he has a "physical relation to writing".^[34]

Baudrillard was married twice. He and his first wife Lucile Baudrillard had two children, Gilles and Anne.^[35][36] In 1970, during his first marriage, Baudrillard met 25-year-old Marine Dupuis when she arrived at the Nanterre where he was a professor. Marine went on to be a media artistic director. They married in 1994 when he was 65.^[37][33] Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Baudrillard battled the disease for two years from his apartment on Rue Sainte-Beuve, Paris, dying at the age of 77.^[35][33] Marine Baudrillard curates Cool Memories, an association of Jean Baudrillard's friends.

Key concepts

Baudrillard's published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school.^[38]

James M. Russell in 2015^[1]: 283 stated that "In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or 'signs' interrelate". Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference—through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the system of other objects; for instance, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.^[39]

From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total" understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to Post-structuralism (such as Michel Foucault), for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject is, rather, seduced (in the original Latin sense: seducere, 'to lead away') by the object. He argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality". This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.^[40] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."^[41]

Russell states that Baudrillard argues that "in our present 'global' society, technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning. Because of this, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted, not a 'global village,' but a world where meaning has been obliterated"^[1]: 283 Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village", to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic^[42] acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa^[43] or, indeed, the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States and its military and economic establishment.

Value criticism

 

Book cover, Éditions Gallimard

Further information: Value criticism and Value-form

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society [fr], Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and Situationism), but in these books he differed from Karl Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, as for the situationists, it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value". Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs" precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.^[44]: 63

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are:^[44]

1. The functional value: an object's instrumental purpose (use value). Example: a pen writes; a refrigerator cools.
2. The exchange value: an object's economic value. Example: One pen may be worth three pencils, while one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The symbolic value: an object's value assigned by a subject in relation to another subject (i.e., between a giver and receiver). Example: a pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The sign value: an object's value within a system of objects. Example: a particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death).^{[citation needed]} But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed, it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

Simulacra and Simulation

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As Baudrillard developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to mediation and mass communication. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood version of structural semiology. According to Kornelije Kvas, "Baudrillard rejects the structuralist principle of the equivalence of different forms of linguistic organization, the binary principle that contains oppositions such as: true-false, real-unreal, center-periphery. He denies any possibility of a (mimetic) duplication of reality; reality mediated through language becomes a game of signs. In his theoretical system all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear".^[45]

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality.^[46] Baudrillard argues that this is part of a historical progression. In the Renaissance, the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit, where people or objects appear to stand for a real referent that does not exist (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.). With the Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. In current times, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

The end of history and meaning

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present-day societies use the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress,

The aim of this world order [...] is, in a sense, the end of history, not on the basis of a democratic fulfillment, as Fukuyama has it, but on the basis of preventive terror, of a counter-terror that puts an end to any possible events.

— Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact . New York: Berg Publishing, 2005, Translated by Chris Turner^[47]

but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War did not represent an ideological victory; rather, it signaled the disappearance of utopian visions shared between both the political Right and Left. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as The Illusion of the End argues, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[48]: 263

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."^[48]: 2

Russell stated that this "approach to history demonstrates Baudrillard's affinities with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard",^[1] who argued that in the late 20th century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives". (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of positive progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion used in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed were universal and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."^[49] This involves the notion of "escape velocity" as outlined in The Illusion of the End, which in turn, results in the postmodern fallacy of escape velocity on which the postmodern mind and critical view cannot, by definition, ever truly break free from the all-encompassing "self-referential" sphere of discourse.

Political commentary

On the Bosnian War

Baudrillard reacted to the West's indifference to the Bosnian War in writings, mostly in essays in his column for Libération. More specifically, he expressed his view on Europe's unwillingness to respond to "aggression and genocide in Bosnia", in which "New Europe" revealed itself to be a "sham." He criticized the Western media and intellectuals for their passivity, and for taking the role of bystanders, engaging in ineffective, hypocritical and self-serving action, and the public for its inability to distinguish simulacra from real world happenings, in which real death and destruction in Bosnia seemed unreal. He was determined in his columns to openly name the perpetrators, Serbs, and call their actions in Bosnia aggression and genocide.^[50]

Baudrillard heavily criticized Susan Sontag for directing a production of Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo during the siege.^{[51][26][52][53][a][b]}

On the Persian Gulf War

Baudrillard's provocative 1991 book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,^[56] raised his public profile as an academic and political commentator. He argued that the first Gulf War was the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: not "the continuation of politics by other means," but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means." Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Coalition, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power.^[56]: 72 The Coalition fighting the Iraqi military was merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight.^[56]: 61 So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the U.S.-led Coalition and the Iraqi government were actually fighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His power was not weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991 internal uprisings that followed afterwards. Over all, little had changed. Saddam remained undefeated, the "victors" were not victorious, and thus there was no war—i.e., the Gulf War did not occur.

The book was originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération, published in three parts: "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place," published during the American military and rhetorical buildup; "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place," published during military action; and "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" published afterwards.

Some critics, like Christopher Norris^[57] accused Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (which was related to his denial of reality in general^[57]). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism, and Berkelian subjective idealism. Sympathetic commentators such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media, have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what that means for the present possibility of war. Merrin argued that Baudrillard was not denying that something had happened, but merely questioning whether that something was in fact war or a bilateral "atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based on a misreading. In Baudrillard's own words:^{[56]: 71–2}

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him. […] Even […] the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence[...] to preserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not shameful and pointless.

On the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001

In his essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism", Baudrillard characterises the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event".^[58] Baudrillard contrasts the "absolute event" of 11 September 2001 with "global events", such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and World Cup. The essay culminates in Baudrillard regarding the U.S.-led Gulf War as a "non-event", or an "event that did not happen". Seeking to understand them as a reaction to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously based or civilization-based warfare, he described the absolute event and its consequences as follows:

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.^[58]

In accordance with his theory of society, Baudrillard portrayed the attacks as a symbolic reaction to the inexorable rise of a world based on commodity exchange.

Baudrillard's stance on the 11 September 2001 attacks was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failed to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry, argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding to the notion that the Towers were "brought down by their own weight." In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.^[vague][59]

Debate with Jacques Derrida

19 February 2003, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq impending, René Major [fr] moderated a debate entitled "Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" between Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, co-hosted by Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis and Le Monde Diplomatique. The debate discussed the relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion.^[20] "Where Baudrillard situates 9/11 as the primary motivating force" behind the Iraq War, whereas "Derrida argues that the Iraq War was planned long before 9/11, and that 9/11 plays a secondary role".^[60]

The Agony of Power

During 2005, Baudrillard wrote three short pieces and gave a brief magazine interview, all treating similar ideas; following his death in 2007, the four pieces were collected and published posthumously as The Agony of Power, a polemic against power itself.^[61] The first piece, "From Domination to Hegemony", contrasts its two subjects, modes of power; domination stands for historical, traditional power relations, while hegemony stands for modern, more sophisticated power relations as realized by states and businesses. Baudrillard decried the "cynicism" with which contemporary businesses openly state their business models. For example, he cited French television channel TF1 executive Patrick Le Lay who stated that his business' job was "to help Coca-Cola sell its products."^[61]: 37 Baudrillard lamented that such honesty pre-empted and thus robbed the Left of its traditional role of critiquing governments and businesses: "In fact, Le Lay takes away the only power we had left. He steals our denunciation."^{[61]: 38–9} Consequently, Baudrillard stated that "power itself must be abolished—and not solely in the refusal to be dominated [...] but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate."^[61]: 47

The latter pieces included further analysis of the 11 September terrorist attacks, using the metaphor of the Native American potlatch to describe both American and Muslim societies, specifically the American state versus the hijackers. In the pieces' context, "potlatch" referred not to the gift-giving aspect of the ritual, but rather its wealth-destroying aspect: "The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection."^[61]: 67 This criticism of the West carried notes of Baudrillard's simulacrum, the above cynicism of business, and contrast between Muslim and Western societies:^{[61]: 67–8}

We [the West] throw this indifference and abjection at others like a challenge: the challenge to defile themselves in return, to deny their values, to strip naked, confess, admit—to respond to a nihilism equal to our own.

Reception

Jean-François Lyotard's 1974 Économie Libidinale criticised Baudrillard's work.

Lotringer notes that Gilles Deleuze, "otherwise known for his generosity", "made it known around Paris" that he saw Baudrillard as "the shame of the profession" after Baudrillard published his views on Foucault's works.^{[62]: 20 [63]}

Sontag, responding to Baudrillard's comments on her reactions to the Bosnian war, described him as "ignorant and cynical" and "a political idiot".^[64]

James M. Russell in 2015 wrote that "The most severe" of Baudrillard's "critics accuse him of being a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism".^{[1]: 285–286} One of Baudrillard's editors, critical theory professor Mark Poster, remarked:^[65]

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media 

But Poster still argued for his contemporary relevance; he also attempted to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics:^[66]

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters), carry out the action, and finally fulfill my goal by arriving at the point in question. What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War,^[57] to Russell, "seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand".^[1]: 285

Frankfurt school critical theorist Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond^[67]—seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (discussed above) published more than one denunciation of Norris' position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive.^[vague][68]

Kellner stated that "it is difficult to decide whether Baudrillard is best read as science fiction and pataphysics, or as philosophy, social theory, and cultural metaphysics, and whether his post-1970s work should be read under the sign of truth or fiction." To Kellner, Baudrillard during and after the 1970s "falls prey to a technological determinism and semiological idealism which posits an autonomous technology".^[69]

In 1991, writing for Science Fiction Studies, Vivian Sobchack alleged that "The man [Baudrillard] is really dangerous" for lacking "moral gaze", while J. G. Ballard (whose novel Baudrillard had written on) commented that Baudrillard was "trapped inside your [Baudrillard's] dismal jargon".^[70]

Sara Ahmed in 1996 remarked that Baudrillard's De la séduction was culpable of "celebrating [...] is precisely women's status as signs and commodities circulated by and for male spectators and consumers".^[71] Kellner described De la séduction as an "affront to feminism".^[67]

Art critic Adrian Searle in 1998 described Baudrillard's photography as "wistful, elegiac and oddly haunting", like "movie stills of unregarded moments".^[51][26][52]

Tone and attitude

Mark Fisher pointed out that Baudrillard "is condemned, sometimes lionised, as the melancholic observer of a departed reality", asserting that Baudrillard "was certainly melancholic".^[3] Poster stated that "As the politics of the sixties receded so did Baudrillard's radicalism: from a position of firm leftism he gradually moved to one of bleak fatalism",^[72] a view Felix Guattari echoed.^[63] Richard G. Smith, David B. Clarke and Marcus A. Doel instead consider Baudrillard "an extreme optimist".^[73] In an exchange between critical theorist McKenzie Wark and EGS professor Geert Lovink, Wark remarked of Baudrillard that "Everything he wrote was marked by a radical sadness and yet invariably expressed in the happiest of forms."^[74] Baudrillard himself stated "we have to fight against charges of unreality, lack of responsibility, nihilism, and despair".^[75] Chris Turner's English translation of Baudrillard's Cool Memories: 1980–1985 writes, "I accuse myself of[...] being profoundly carnal and melancholy [...] AMEN [sic]".^[76]: 38

David Macey saw "extraordinary arrogance" in Baudrillard's take on Foucault.^[62]: 22 Sontag found Baudrillard 'condescending'.^[53]

Russell wrote that "Baudrillard's writing, and his uncompromising – even arrogant – stance, have led to fierce criticism which in contemporary social scholarship can only be compared to the criticism received by Jacques Lacan."^[1]: 285

Influence and legacy

Native American Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation in his critical work.^{[77][clarification needed]}

In popular culture

See also: Jonas Baes – Filipino composer, Apollo 440#Jean Baudrillard – British electronic group, Karaoke Plays#7" vinyl No. 1 (Numbered white vinyl with free poster) – 2007 single by Maxïmo ParkPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback, and J Church (band)#Partial discography – American punk rock band

The Wachowskis said that Baudrillard influenced The Matrix (1999), and Neo hides money and disks containing information in Simulacra and Simulation. Adam Gopnik wondered whether Baudrillard, who had not embraced the movie, was "thinking of suing for a screen credit,"^[78] but Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection to The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.^[79][80][81]

Some reviewers have noted that Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York seems inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.^[82][83][84]

The album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? by rock band Deerhunter was influenced by Baudrillard's essay of the same name.^[85][86][87]

Bibliography

Books (English translations)

• 1968. The System of Objects
• 1970. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [fr]
• 1972. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
• 1973. The Mirror of Production
• 1976. Symbolic Exchange and Death
• 1977. Forget Foucault
• 1979. Seduction
• 1981. Simulacra and Simulation
• 1982. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
• 1983. Fatal Strategies
• 1983. Simulations
• 1986. America
• 1987. Cool Memories 1980–1985
• 1987. The Ecstasy of Communication
• 1990. The Transparency of Evil
• 1991. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
• 1992. The Illusion of the End
• 1995. The Perfect Crime
• 1996. Cool Memories II 1987–1990
• 1997. Fragments: Cool Memories III 1990–1995
• 1998. Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit
• 1999. Impossible Exchange
• 2000. Passwords
• 2000. The Singular Objects of Architecture
• 2000. The Vital Illusion
• 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism And Requiem for the Twin Towers
• 2003. Fragments (Interviews with François L'Yvonnet)
• 2003. Cool Memories IV 1995–2000
• 2005. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
• 2005. The Conspiracy of Art
• 2006. Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967–1978)
• 2006. Cool Memories V 2000–2004
• 2007. Exiles from Dialogue
• 2008. Radical Alterity
• 2009. Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
• 2010. Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonisms
• 2010. The Agony of Power
• 2011. Telemorphosis
• 2014. Screened Out
• 2014. The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977–1984

Articles and essays

• The Evil Demon of Images. Power Institute of Fine Arts. 1987. pp. 83–98. ISBN 0909952078.
• . www.egs.edu. European Graduate School. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
• 1996. "No Pity for Sarajevo; The West's Serbianization; When the West Stands In for the Dead." Pp. 79–89 in This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. NYU Press. JSTOR j.ctt9qfngn.7.
• 2001. "The Spirit of Terrorism." Telos 121(Fall):134–42.
• 2005. "Divine Europe." Telos 131(Summer):188–90.
• 2006. "The Pyres of Autumn." New Left Review 2(37).
• Radical Thought (CTheory)
  • [2]

Interviews

• Jocks, Heinz-Norbert: Die Fotografie und die Dinge. Ein Gespräch mit Jean Baudrillard. In: Kunstforum International., No: 172, Das Ende der Fotografie. Editor: Heinz-Norbert Jocks, 2004, p. 70–83.
• Smith, Richard G., David B. Clarke, eds. 2015. Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-9429-7.
• Smith, Richard G., David B. Clarke, eds. 2017. Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture: Uncollected Interviews. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-4744-1778-5.

Audio CDs

• 1997. Die Illusion des Endes – Das Ende der Illusion [58 minutes + booklet], Jean Baudrillard & Boris Groys. Cologne: supposé. ISBN 3-932513-01-0
• 2006. Die Macht der Verführung, [55 minutes]. Cologne: supposé. ISBN 978-3-932513-67-1.

See also

• Hyper-real Religion – New consumer trend in acquiring and enacting religionPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Reza Negarestani – Iranian philosopher and writer (born 1977)
• The Real – Philosophical category of inexpressible reality
• Code (semiotics) – set of conventions or sub-codes currently in use to communicate meaningPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback
• Freud's seduction theory – Abandoned 1890s psychological hypothesis
• Friedrich Nietzsche's views on women
• Symbolic violence – Term coined by the 20th-century French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
• Psychoanalytic sociology

Notes

1. Baudrillard (trans. Chris Turner):

   even Susan Sontag [...] came to stage Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo. [...] the worst part [...] [is] the condescending attitude and the misconception regarding where strength and weakness lie. They are the strong ones. It is we who are weak, going over there searching for somethin g to compensate for our weakness and loss of reality.
   [...] In her opinion pieces, Susan Sontag confesses that the Bosnians do not really believe in the distress all around them [...] find the whole situation unreal, senseless, unintelligible. It is [...] an almost hyperreal hell [partly due to] media and humanitarian harassment [...] But Susan Sontag, who is from New York, must know better than they do what reality is because she has chosen them to embody it. [...] And Susan Sontag comes to convince them [...] of the 'reality' of their suffering, by culturalizing it, of course, by theatricalizing it so that it can serve as a point of reference in the theatre of Western values, one of which is solidarity.
   Yet Susan Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely fashionably emblematic of what has now become a widespread situation, in which harmless, powerless intellectuals trade their woes with the wretched [...] Not so long ago, we saw Bourdieu and the Abbe Pierre offering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, trading off between them the pathos-laden language and the sociological meta-language of misery.^[54]

2. Baudrillard (trans. Patrice Riemens):

   [...]Susan Sontag [...] came to have "Waiting for Godot" played in Sarajevo [...][...] the worse [sic] [...] is about the condescending manner in making out what is strength & [sic] what is weakness. They are strong. It is us who are weak and who go there to make good for our loss of strength and sense of reality. [...]
   Susan Sontag herself confesses in her diaries that the Bosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them [...] finding the whole situation unreal, senseless, and unexplainable. It is [...] hell of [...] a hyperreal kind, made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and the humanitarian agencies [...] But then Susan Sontag, hailing herself from New York, must know better than them what reality is, since she has chosen them to incarnate it [...] Susan Sontag comes to convince them of the "reality" of their suffering, by making something cultural and something theatrical out of it, so that it can be useful as a referent within the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But Susan Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal instance of [...] the general situation whereby toothless intellectuals swap their distress with the misery of the poor [...] Thus, not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and Abbe Pierre offering themselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each other pathetic language and sociological garble about poverty.^[55]

References

1. James M. Russell. "Meaning and Interpretation: The Continental Tradition". A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics: From Plato to Winnie the Pooh.
2. Gane, M. (2017). Baudrillard. In A Companion to Continental Philosophy (eds S. Critchley and W.R. Schroeder). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405164542.ch53
3. Fisher, Mark (9 March 2007). . Archived from the original on 6 January 2022. Baudrillard was never quite laborious or detached enough to qualify as a Continentalist, nor even as a philosopher (he was based, improbably, in a Sociology department). Always an outsider, projected out of the peasantry into the elite academic class, he ensured his marginalization with the marvellously provocative Forget Foucault, which wittily targeted Deleuze and Guattari's micropolitics as much as it insouciantly announced the redundancy of Fo[u]cault's vast edifice.
4. Baker, Stephen (2000). The Fiction of Postmodernity. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 64.
5. Smith, Richard G. (2003). "Baudrillard's nonrepresentational theory: burn the signs and journey without maps". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 21 (1): 67–84. Bibcode:2003EnPlD..21...67S. doi:10.1068/d280t. S2CID 18273234.
6. (PDF), 14 October 2016, archived from the original (PDF) on 24 July 2020
7. . An application of Achille Mbembe's study of Necropolitics to Baudrillard's notion of death.
8. Fatal Strategies Semiotext(e) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Originally published in 1983 as Les Strategies fatales by Editions Grasset, Paris. Translated by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski ISBN 978-1-58435-061-3
9. (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 12 September 2021, Baudrillard calls this situation "transaesthetics" which he relates to similar phenomena of "transpolitics," "transsexuality," and "transeconomics," in which everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that these domains, like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, their distinctness. The result is a confused and imploded condition where there are no more criteria of value, of judgment, of taste, and the function of the normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia.
10. Baudrillard, J. (2005) The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, New York, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
11. 'Chapter Four: Raw Phenomenology and the Fundamental Rule of Reversibility' "Baudrillard has referred to his work as raw phenomenology"
12. Simulacra and Simulation, "Value's Last Tango", "Moebius: spiralling negativity"
13. Seduction, Jean Baudrillard, English language copyright New World Perspectives, 1990. translated by Brian Singer, ISBN 0-920393-25-X, page 134, "The Passion for Rules" "For us the finite is always set against the infinite; but the sphere of ritual is neither finite nor infinite- transfinite perhaps. It has its own finite contours, with which it resists the infinity of analytic space. To reinvent a rule is to resist the linear infinitude of analytic space to recover a reversible space." "For us the finite is always set against the infinite; but the sphere of games is neither finite nor infinite – transfinite perhaps. It has its own finite contours, with which it resists the infinity of analytic space. To reinvent a rule is to resist the linear infinitude of analytic space to recover a reversible space."
14. "The transfinite is a concept originating in set theory, and was developed for linguistics by Julia Kristeva." "Baudrillard introduces the idea of a new stage of value, beyond the structural revolution, and uses the concept of the "transfinite" to further characterize the generalized implosion of categories and erasure of distinctions that characterized modern thought and modern societies." Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo. Ashley Woodward (2009). ISBN 978-1-934542-08-8. The Davies Group, Publishers
15. Mike Gane: the transfinite "indicates that which has passed beyond the finite, which is thus 'more than' a finite figure, but is not infinite." Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1991). 126-7.
16. Zurbrugg (2006), pp. 482–500; Poole (2007a); Poole (2007b); Poole (2007c)
17. . Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021.
18. Poole (2007a); Poole (2007b); Poole (2007c); Gane (1993); Coulter (2008); Smith (2010)
19. Kellner (2019); Aylesworth (2015); Redhead (2013)
20. Brennan, Eugene (2017). "Pourquoi la guerre aujourd'hui? by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida (review)". French Studies: A Quarterly Review. 71 (3): 449. doi:10.1093/fs/knx092. Project MUSE 666299.
21. Attias (2011); Poole (2007a); Poole (2007b); Poole (2007c); Wolters (2015)
22. "'Nobody Needs French Theory' – an extract from Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance". Edinburgh University Press. 15 July 2015. from the original on 5 January 2023. Retrieved 16 February 2023.
23. Antonio (2007): "Asked about postmodernism, Baudrillard said: “I have nothing to do with it. I don’t know who came up with the term... But I have no faith in ‘postmodernism’ as an analytical term. When people say: ‘you are a postmodernist,’ I answer: “Well why not?’ The term simply avoids the issue itself.” He declared that he was a “nihilist, not a postmodernist.” (Baudrillard and Lie 2007:3–4)."; Zurbrugg (2006), pp. 482–500; Aylesworth (2015); Kellner (2019)
24. . 22 January 2021. Archived from the original on 22 January 2021. Retrieved 2 March 2022. Transmodernism is "better terms than "postmodernism". It is not about modernity; it is about every system that has developed its mode of expression to the extent that it surpasses itself and its own logic. This is what I am trying to analyze." "There is no longer any ontologically secret substance. I perceive this to be nihilism rather than postmodernism. To me, nihilism is a good thing – I am a nihilist, not a postmodernist." "Paul Virilio uses the term 'transpolitical'."
25. Francois L'Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de l'Herne special volume on Baudrillard, Editions de l'Herne, 2004
26. Poole 2007b.
27. In 1948, he completed his diplôme d'études supérieures [fr] (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Luther (see Journées Jean Baudrillard Musée du quai Branly Paris 17-18/09/2010).
28. The Intelligence of Evil, Berg (2005), Introduction and English translation by Chris Turner 2005 ISBN 9781845203276
29. Simmons, Arthur (1982). French Philosophers in the 20th Century. London: MacMillan. p. 9.
30. cf. Barry Sandywell's article "Forget Baudrillard", in Theory, Culture and Society (1995, issue 12)
31. Jean Baudrillard Faculty page at European Graduate School
32. . Ubishops.ca. Archived from the original on 17 March 2019. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
33. "Reinventing the Real: A Conversation with Marine Dupuis Baudrillard ...by Tomasso Fagioli and Eleonora de Conciliis, Kritikos V.15, Summer 2018". intertheory.org. from the original on 5 August 2021. Retrieved 18 November 2020.
34. Violence of the Virtual and Integral Reality by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Marilyn Lambert-Drache. Taken from: Light Onwords / Light Onwards, Living Literacies Text of the 14–16 November 2002 Conference – Part Three: E-Literacy
35. "Jean Baudrillard". The Independent. 9 March 2007. Retrieved 18 November 2020.
36. Samoyault, Tiphaine (13 January 2017). Barthes: A Biography. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-5095-0569-2 – via Google Books.
37. "Marine Dupuis Baudrillard". Delere Press. Retrieved 18 November 2020.
38. Trifonas, Peter Pericles (2001). Barthes and the Empire of Signs. Icon Books.
39. Baudrillard, Jean (31 March 2020). The System of Objects. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78873-854-5.
40. see here Baudrillard's final major publication in English, The Intelligence of Evil, where he discussed the political fallout of what he calls "Integral Reality"
41. Baudrillard, Jean (1985). The Perfect Crime. London: Verso Books.
42. {{efn|Breindel, Jesse Glenn (2019). "Fatal and Banal Reality: Comparative Thoughts on Simulation and Concreteness". The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. 6 (1): 29–45. doi:10.1353/ujd.2019.0001. S2CID 216774594. Project MUSE 751101. I am not interested in the rules of the game of the symbolic. By 'symbolic' I do not mean the Lacanian symbolic but the universe of mental simulation. . . . For me the symbolic order is the register of desire, where ideology is fatal. The Lacanian sign is a chain of representations, but I am interested in another kind of sign, which is elliptical, as in poetry, where the sign is fatal
43. see here The Transparency of Evil, Verso (1993)
44. Baudrillard, Jean (1983). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. London: Verso Books. ISBN 9781788734844.
45. Kvas, Kornelije (2020). The Boundaries of Realism in World Literature. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-7936-0910-6.
46. Baudrillard, Jean. . European Graduate School. Translated by Glaser, S. F. Archived from the original on 29 July 2010.
47. Retrieved 14 March 2022. "Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power" ISSN 1705-6411. Jean Baudrillard. Translated by Chris Turner. From The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact.
48. Baudrillard, Jean (1994). The Illusion of the End. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804725019.
49. Baudrillard, Jean. "," translated by F. Debrix. European Graduate School. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010.
50. Baudrillard, Jean; Petterson, James (1996). "No Pity for Sarajevo; The West's Serbianization; When the West Stands in for the Dead". This Time We Knew. NYU Press. pp. 79–89. JSTOR j.ctt9qfngn.7.
51. Poole 2007a.
52. Poole 2007c.
53. Antonio 2007.
54. Baudrillard (2002). "No Pity for Sarajevo". Screened Out. Translated by Turner, Chris (translated ed.). Verso. ISBN 1-85984-385-9.
55. Baudrillard, Jean (8 January 1994). . University of Victoria. Translated to English by Patrice Riemens. Archived from the original on 13 March 2021.
56. Baudrillard, Jean. 2004 [1991]. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
57. Christopher Norris (1992). Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War. Lawrence & Wishart. ISBN 0-87023-817-5.
58. Baudrillard, Jean. [2001] 2010. "The Spirit of Terrorism," translated by R. Bloul. European Graduate School. 25 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
59. Latour, Bruno (2004). "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern" (PDF). Critical Inquiry. 30 (2): 228. doi:10.1086/421123. JSTOR 10.1086/421123. S2CID 159523434. Retrieved 12 October 2017.
60. Vincent Leitch. . University of Oklahoma. Archived from the original on 28 March 2021.
61. Baudrillard, Jean. [2007] 2010. The Agony of Power, translated by A. Hodges, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 6. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350927.
62. Forget Foucault SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES ISBN 978-1-58435-041-5, published in 1977 as Oublier Foucault. Translated by Nicole Dufresne
63. Lotringer, Sylvère (July 2009). "On Jean Baudrillard". International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. 6 (2). Deleuze let it be known around town that he considered Baudrillard the shame of the profession. Felix condemned his fatalism and irresponsible politics, not realizing that Jean was political, if in very different ways
64. Antonio (2007); Poole (2007a); Poole (2007b); Poole (2007c)
65. Poster 2002, p. 8.
66. Poster 2002, p. 7.
67. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. ISBN 0-8047-1757-5.
68. Zurbrugg, Nicholas. Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact.
69. Kellner 2019.
70. *N. Katherine Hayles; David Porush; Brooks Landon; Vivian Sobchack; J.G. Ballard. "In Response To Jean Baudrillard (Hayles, Porush, Landon, Sobchack, Ballard)". www.depauw.edu. 18. Retrieved 19 February 2023.
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78. Gopnik, Adam \author-link=Adam Gopnik (19 May 2003). "The Unreal Thing". The New Yorker. {{cite magazine}}: |first= has generic name (help)
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82. Dargis, Manohla (23 October 2008). ""Dreamer, Live in the Here and Now" (review of Synecdoche)". The New York Times.
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84. Hoby, Hermione (13 May 2009). "The ultimate postmodern novel is a film". The Guardian.
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86. "Reseña: Deerhunter /// Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?". 30 January 2019.
87. "Deerhunter Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?". Exclaim!.

Sources

• Antonio, Robert J. (2007). "The Passing of Jean Baudrillard". University of Texas at Arlington. Retrieved 23 February 2023.
• Attias, Bernardo (26 May 2011). . Archived from the original on 15 April 2021. Retrieved 16 December 2022. A radical defense of structuralism against poststructuralism, although worded as a radical defense of "fatality" (i.e. destiny) against "chance" and "randomness." Rather than accepting the view of meaning/order as something imposed on disorder by the discourse of rationality, Baudrillard defends precisely the reverse; disorder is imposed upon order by the discourse of innocence (if everything is left up to chance, we escape human responsibility for social situations).
• Aylesworth, Gary (Spring 2015). "Postmodernism". In Zalta, E. N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 1 January 2020. The French, for example, work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and Freud. For this reason they are often called "poststructuralists." They also cite the events of May 1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and its institutions, especially the universities.
• Coulter, Gerry (December 2008). (PDF). NEBULA: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship. 5 (4). ISSN 1449-7751. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 March 2022.
• Gane, Mike, ed. (4 March 1993). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415070386. I really don't think of myself as a philosopher, my impulse comes from a radical temperament which has more in common with poetry than philosophy.
• Kellner, Douglas (Winter 2019). "Jean Baudrillard". In Zalta, E. N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Poole, Steven (7 March 2007a). . Archived from the original on 14 June 2022. Baudrillard had once said, kindly: "I admire Derrida, but it's not my thing." He sympathized ironically with Americans who felt invaded by Derridean acolytes spreading the gospel of deconstruction: "That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory."
• Poole, Steven (7 March 2007b). "Jean Baudrillard. Philosopher and sociologist who blurred the boundaries between reality and simulation". The Guardian. London, England.
• Poole, Steven (8 March 2007c). . The Guardian (published 8 March 2007). Archived from the original on 29 March 2022. Baudrillard had once said, kindly: "I admire Derrida, but it's not my thing." He sympathized ironically with Americans who felt invaded by Derridean acolytes spreading the gospel of deconstruction: "That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory."
• Poster, Mark (2002). "Introduction". In Poster, M. (ed.). Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804742733.
• Redhead, Steve (2013). "All Things are Curves: Notes on the intersecting lives of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio" (PDF). Fusion Journal (2). (PDF) from the original on 28 April 2021. Retrieved 26 February 2022 – via Charles Sturt University Research Portal.
• Smith, Richard G. (2010). The Baudrillard Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press.
• Wolters, Eugene (18 July 2015). ""Nobody Needs French Theory," Baudrillard Slams Peers in 2005 Interview". Critical Theory. from the original on 20 December 2022. Retrieved 16 February 2023.
• Zurbrugg, Nicholas (24 May 2006). "Baudrillard, modernism, and postmodernism". Economy and Society. 22 (4): 482–500. doi:10.1080/03085149300000030. from the original on 1 November 2022. Retrieved 16 February 2023.

External links

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Jean Baudrillard.

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jean Baudrillard.

• . Archived from the original on 20 December 2009. Faculty page at European Graduate School (biography, bibliography, photos and videos).
• Kellner, Douglas. "Jean Baudrillard". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Baudrillard, Jean (11 April 2008). Fatal Strategies. Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents (New ed.). Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350613.
• , archived from the original on 21 May 2013.
• Baudrillard; Cultura, Simulacro y régimen de mortandad en el Sistema de los Objetos | EIKASIA PDF (in Spanish) Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
• "The world of Jean Baudrillard". Robertexto.com. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
• International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Retrieved 9 March 2022