Baudrillard was born inReims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers and his father agendarme. During high school (at theLycée at Reims), he became aware of 'pataphysics, aparody of the philosophy of science, via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet (1914-1973), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.[8]: 317 He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend theSorbonne.[9] There he studied German language andliterature,[10] which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.[8]: 317
While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors asPeter Weiss,Bertolt Brecht,Karl Marx,Friedrich Engels, andWilhelm Emil Mühlmann.[8]: 317–328 While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesisLe Système des Objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee ofHenri Lefebvre,Roland Barthes, andPierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching Sociology at theParis X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the uprising ofMay 1968.[11]: 2(Introduction) During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".[12] At Nanterre he took up a position asMaître Assistant (Assistant Professor), thenMaître 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 toKyoto, Japan. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer.[8]: 317–328 In 1986, he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at theUniversité 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 teachfull-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,[13] being published often in the French- andEnglish-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at theCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique and wasSatrap at theCollège de 'Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at theEuropean Graduate School inSaas-Fee, Switzerland,[14] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology reviewCTheory, where he was abundantly cited. He also purportedly participated in theInternational Journal of Baudrillard Studies (as of 2022 hosted onBishop's University domain) from its inception in 2004 until his death.[15]
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 wasClaudio Monteverdi. He also favored rock music such asThe Velvet Underground & Nico.[16] Baudrillard did his writing using "his oldtypewriter, never at the computer".[16][7] He has stated that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", and with a typewriter he has a "physical relation to writing".[17]
Baudrillard was married twice. He and his first wife Lucile Baudrillard had two children, Gilles and Anne. Not much is known about their relationship, or why they separated.[16][18][19] In 1970, while working as a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, 41-year-old Baudrillard met 25-year-old Marine Dupuis, who had just come back from a sailing trip around the world with her then-boyfriend. In 1994, more than 20 years later, Jean and Marine got married. Marine went on to be a journalist and media artistic director.[20][16] 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.[18][16] Marine Baudrillard curatesCool Memories, an association of Jean Baudrillard's friends.
James M. Russell in 2015[22]: 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 throughsystems of signs working together. Following on from thestructuralistlinguistFerdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created throughdifference—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 enoughself-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.[23]
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 toPost-structuralism (such asMichel 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 hisneologisms, 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.[24] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."[25]
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"[22]: 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 norMarxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village", to useMarshall 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 tosymbolic[26] acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through theanthropological work ofMarcel Mauss andGeorges 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 ofpotlatch. 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 theRushdie Fatwa[27] or, indeed, theSeptember 11 terrorist attacks against the United States and its military and economic establishment.
In his early books, such asThe System of Objects,For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, andThe 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 withMarxism (andSituationism), but in these books he differed fromKarl Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, as for the situationists, it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver ofcapitalist society.
Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value". Baudrillard thought that both Marx's andAdam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. Baudrillard argued, drawing fromGeorges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify somethingsocially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing fromRoland 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.[28]: 63
He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are:[28]
Thefunctional value: an object's instrumental purpose (use value). Example: a pen writes; a refrigerator cools.
Theexchange 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.
The symbolic value: an object's value assigned by a subjectin 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.
Thesign value: an object's value within asystem 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 andSymbolic Exchange and Death).[citation needed] But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates toMaussian 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.
As Baudrillard developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to mediation andmass communication. Although retaining his interest inSaussureansemiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologistMarcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work ofMarshall 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 andRoland 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".[29]
Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, ahyperreality.[30] 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 theIndustrial 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.[31]
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes washistoricity, or, more specifically, how present-day societies use the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theoristFrancis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread ofglobalization; 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, theend 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 possibleevents.
— Baudrillard,The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact . New York: Berg Publishing, 2005, Translated by Chris Turner[32]
but as the collapse of the veryidea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of theCold War did not represent an ideological victory; rather, it signaled the disappearance of utopian visions shared between both the politicalRight and Left. Giving further evidence of his opposition towardMarxist visions of global communism and liberal visions ofglobal civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, asThe 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.[33]: 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 thatattracted the ire of the physicistAlan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have theparticle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."[33]: 2
Russell stated that this "approach to history demonstrates Baudrillard's affinities with thepostmodern philosophy ofJean-François Lyotard",[22] 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). "Inthe Enlightenment,universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forwardescape."[34] This involves the notion of "escape velocity" as outlined inThe Illusion of the End, which in turn, results in the postmodernfallacy 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.
Baudrillard reacted to the West's indifference to theBosnian War in writings, mostly in essays in his column forLibération. 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 distinguishsimulacra 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.[35]
Baudrillard's provocative 1991 book,The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,[41] raised his public profile as an academic and political commentator. He argued that the firstGulf War was the inverse of theClausewitzian 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 theCoalition, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power.[41]: 72 The Coalition fighting theIraqi military was merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight.[41]: 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 (theIraqi Air Force). His power was not weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991internal 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 newspaperThe Guardian and the French newspaperLibération, 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, likeChristopher Norris[42] accused Baudrillard of instantrevisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (which was related to his denial of reality in general[42]). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism, andBerkeliansubjective idealism. Sympathetic commentators such as William Merrin, in his bookBaudrillard 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:[41]: 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.
In his essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism", Baudrillard characterises the terrorist attacks of11 September 2001 on theWorld Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event".[43] Baudrillard contrasts the "absolute event" of 11 September 2001 with "global events", such as thedeath of Diana, Princess of Wales andWorld Cup. The essay culminates in Baudrillard regarding the U.S.-ledGulf 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 orcivilization-based warfare, he described the absolute event and its consequences as follows:
This is not aclash 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.[43]
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 (inThe Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard andSlavoj 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 journalCritical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failed to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (inBaudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journalEconomy 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, inCritical 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][44]
19 February 2003, with the2003 invasion of Iraq impending,René Major [fr] moderated a debate entitled"Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" between Baudrillard andJacques Derrida, co-hosted byMajor's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis andLe Monde Diplomatique. The debate discussed the relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion.[3] "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".[45]
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 asThe Agony of Power, a polemic againstpower itself.[46] 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 theirbusiness models. For example, he cited French television channelTF1 executivePatrick Le Laywho stated that his business' job was "to helpCoca-Cola sell its products."[46]: 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."[46]: 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."[46]: 47
The latter pieces included further analysis of the 11 September terrorist attacks, using the metaphor of the Native Americanpotlatch to describe both American and Muslim societies, specifically the American state versus the hijackers. In the piece's 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."[46]: 67 This criticism of the West carried notes of Baudrillard's simulacrum, the above cynicism of business, and contrast between Muslim and Western societies:[46]: 67–8
We [the West] throw this indifference andabjection 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.
Lotringer notes thatGilles Deleuze, "otherwise known for his generosity", "made it known around Paris" that he saw Baudrillard as "the shame of the profession", in response to Baudrillard's study on Foucault's works.[47]: 20 [48]
Sontag, responding toBaudrillard's comments on her reactions to the Bosnian war, described him as "ignorant and cynical" and "a political idiot".[49]
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".[22]: 285–286 One of Baudrillard's editors, critical theory professorMark Poster, remarked:[50]
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:[51]
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 aNewtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight forX 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, norproletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.
Christopher Norris'sUncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War,[42] to Russell, "seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand".[22]: 285
Frankfurt school critical theoristDouglas Kellner'sJean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond[52]—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][53]
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 atechnological determinism and semiologicalidealism which posits an autonomous technology".[54]
In 1991, writing forScience Fiction Studies,Vivian Sobchack alleged that "The man [Baudrillard] is really dangerous" for lacking "moral gaze", whileJ. G. Ballard (whose novel Baudrillard had written on) commented in hisResponse to an Invitation to Respond excluded Baudrillard from his criticism towards the journal and its endeavour at large.[55]
Sara Ahmed in 1996 remarked that Baudrillard'sDe la séduction was culpable of "celebrating [...] is precisely women's status as signs and commodities circulated by and for male spectators and consumers".[56] Kellner describedDe la séduction as an "affront to feminism".[52]
Art criticAdrian Searle in 1998 described Baudrillard's photography as "wistful, elegiac and oddly haunting", like "movie stills of unregarded moments".[36][9][37]
One of the most commonly cited critiques of Baudrillard was written in 2013 from academic writer Andrew Robinson ofCeasefire magazine, who declares Baudrillard's work as bothsexist[56] andracist,[57] while also containingableist undertones, stating: "Many of his [Baudrillard's] formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There are also times when Baudrillard comes across as ableist in his critiques of the therapeutic." Additionally, Robison critiques the philosophy of Baudrillard as exaggeratory. Although Robinson provides a critique of Baudrillard's theory, he also describes the value of said theory. Specifically, Robinson states, "Baudrillard’s theory also helps to explain why his appropriation by leftists has been strategically unsuccessful." Robinson also describes the value of the simulacra in relation to media critique, especially in the US media.[58]
Mark Fisher pointed out that Baudrillard "is condemned, sometimes lionised, as the melancholic observer of a departed reality", asserting that Baudrillard "was certainly melancholic".[59] 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",[60] a viewFelix Guattari echoed.[48]Richard G. Smith, David B. Clarke and Marcus A. Doel instead consider Baudrillard "an extreme optimist".[61] In an exchange between critical theoristMcKenzie Wark and EGS professorGeert Lovink, Wark remarked of Baudrillard that "Everything he wrote was marked by a radical sadness and yet invariably expressed in the happiest of forms."[62] Baudrillard himself stated "we have to fight against charges of unreality, lack of responsibility, nihilism, and despair".[63] Chris Turner's English translation of Baudrillard'sCool Memories: 1980–1985 writes, "I accuse myself of[...] being profoundly carnal and melancholy [...] AMEN [sic]".[64]: 38
David Macey saw "extraordinary arrogance" in Baudrillard's take on Foucault.[47]: 22 Sontag found Baudrillard 'condescending'.[38]
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 thecriticism received by Jacques Lacan."[22]: 285
American artistJoey Skaggs has been noted for creating media hoaxes that exemplify Baudrillard's concept ofhyperreality. By orchestrating fictitious events—such as theCathouse for Dogs andPortofess—which were reported as real by major news outlets, Skaggs constructs simulations that supplant actual truths, thereby exposing the media's role in manufacturing reality.[66]
The Wachowskis said that Baudrillard influencedThe Matrix (1999), and Neo hides money and disks containing information inSimulacra and Simulation.Adam Gopnik wondered whether Baudrillard, who had not embraced the movie, was "thinking of suing for a screen credit,"[67] but Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection toThe Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.[68][69][70]
Cody Wilson, the developer of the first3D-printed gun, credits the work of Baudrillard as his theoretical inspiration, and claims him as his "master."[77][78]
1996. "No Pity for Sarajevo; The West's Serbianization; When the West Stands In for the Dead." Pp. 79–89 inThis Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. NYU Press.JSTORj.ctt9qfngn.7.
2001. "The Spirit of Terrorism."Telos 121(Fall):134–42.
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.ISBN978-0-7486-9429-7.
Smith, Richard G., David B. Clarke, eds. 2017.Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture: Uncollected Interviews. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.ISBN978-1-4744-1778-5.
even Susan Sontag [...] came to stageWaiting 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 iswe 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 sawBourdieu and theAbbe Pierre offering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, trading off between them the pathos-laden language and the sociologicalmetalanguage of misery.[39]
[...]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 witnessBourdieu andAbbe Pierre offering themselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each other pathetic language and sociological garble about poverty.[40]
^abBrennan, 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 MUSE666299.
^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)
^ab"The art of disappearing – BAUDRILLARD NOW". 22 January 2021. Archived fromthe original on 22 January 2021. Retrieved2 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 anyontologically secretsubstance. 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'."
^abcdefFrancois L'Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de l'Herne special volume on Baudrillard, Editions de l'Herne, 2004
^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
^Trifonas, Peter Pericles (2001).Barthes and the Empire of Signs. Icon Books.
^abcdefJames M. Russell. "Meaning and Interpretation: The Continental Tradition".A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics: From Plato to Winnie the Pooh.
^Baudrillard, Jean (31 March 2020).The System of Objects. Verso Books.ISBN978-1-78873-854-5.
^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"
^Baudrillard, Jean (1985).The Perfect Crime. London:Verso Books.
^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.S2CID216774594.Project MUSE751101.I am not interested in the rules of the game of the symbolic. By 'symbolic' I do not mean theLacaniansymbolic 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
^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.JSTORj.ctt9qfngn.7.
^abForget Foucault SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIESISBN978-1-58435-041-5, published in 1977 asOublier Foucault. Translated by Nicole Dufresne
^abLotringer, 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
^Fisher, Mark (9 March 2007)."My Death Is Everywhere, My Death Dreams". Archived fromthe 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.
Attias, Bernardo (26 May 2011)."S(t)imulacrum(b)". Archived fromthe original on 15 April 2021. Retrieved16 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". InZalta, E. N. (ed.).Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved1 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.
Gane, Mike, ed. (4 March 1993).Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London and New York:Routledge.ISBN978-0415070386.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.
Poole, Steven (7 March 2007a)."Transfini". Archived fromthe 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 ofdeconstruction: "That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needsFrench theory."
