From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Western Philosophy
20th / 21st-century philosophy
Full name Jean Baudrillard
School/ Post-Structuralism · Marxism ·
tradition Post-Marxism
Main Postmodernity · Mass Media
interests
Notable Hyperreality · Simulacra · Sign
ideas value
Influenced by
Marx · Nietzsche · Freud · Mauss
Lévi-Strauss · Lefebvre
Barthes
Bataille · Adorno
Lukács · Debord
Philip K. Dick · Borges
Benjamin · Mc Luhan [1]
Influenced
Victor Pelevin · Gerald Vizenor
Slavoj Žižek · Wachowski brothers · Alain de
Benoist.
Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 – March 6,
2007) (IPA: [ʒɑ̃ bo.dʁi.jaʁ][2]) was a French
cultural theorist, sociologist, philosopher,
political commentator, and photographer. His
work is frequently associated with postmod-
ernism and post-structuralism.
Life
Baudrillard was born in Reims, north-eastern
France, on July 29, 1929. He told interview-
ers that his grandparents were peasants and
his parents were civil servants. He became
the first of his family to attend university
when he moved to the Sorbonne University in
Paris [3]. There he studied German, which led
to him to begin teaching the subject at a pro-
vincial lycée, where he remained from 1958
until his departure in 1966. While teaching
Baudrillard began to publish reviews of liter-
ature, and translated the works of such au-
thors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Wil-
helm Mühlmann[4].
1
Jean Baudrillard
Toward the end of his time as a German
teacher Baudrillard began to transfer to soci-
ology, eventually completing his doctoral
thesis Le Système des objets (The System of
Objects) under the tutelage of Henri Lefeb-
vre. Subsequently, he began teaching the
subject at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre,
at the time a politically radical institution
which would become heavily involved in the
events of May 1968[5]. At Nanterre he took
up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant
Professor), then Maître de Conférences (As-
sociate Professor), eventually becoming a
professor after completing his accreditation,
L’Autre par lui-même (The Other, by himself).
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 dis-
cipline (particularly in its "classical" form),
and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely
identified himself with any particular discip-
line, although he remained linked to the aca-
demic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his
books had gained a wide audience, and in his
last years he became, to an extent, an intel-
lectual celebrity[6], being published often in
the French- and English-speaking popular
press. He nonetheless continued supporting
the Institut de Recherche sur l’Innovation So-
ciale at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de
Pataphysique. He also collaborated at the Ca-
nadian philosophical review Ctheory, where
he was abundantly cited. He died of typhoid
on March 6, 2007 at the age of 77.
Introduction to his work
Postmodernism
preceded by Modernism
Post-anarchism
Posthumanism
Post-Marxism
Postmodernity
Postmodern architecture
Postmodern art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Postmodern Christianity
Postmodern dance
Postmodern feminism
Postmodern Fusion
Postmodern literature
Postmodern music
Postmodern picture book
Postmodern philosophy
Postmodern social construction of nature
Postmodern theater
Postmodernism in political science
Postmodernist anthropology
Postmodernist film
Postmodernist school
Post-postmodernism
Post-structuralism
Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic
best known for his analyses of the modes of
mediation and of technological communica-
tion. His writing, although consistently inter-
ested in the way technological progress af-
fects social change, covers diverse sub-
jects — from consumerism to gender rela-
tions to the social understanding of history to
journalistic commentaries about AIDS, clon-
ing, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and
the attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York City.
His published work emerged as part of a
generation of French thinkers such as Gilles
Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Fou-
cault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan
who all shared an interest in semiotics, and
he is often seen as a part of the poststructur-
alist philosophical school.[7] In common with
many poststructuralists, his arguments con-
sistently draw upon the notion that significa-
tion and meaning are both only understand-
able in terms of how particular words or
"signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as
many post-structuralists did, that meaning is
brought about through systems of signs
working together. Following on from the
structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
Baudrillard argued that meaning is based
upon an absence (so "dog" means "dog" not
because of what the word says, as such, but
because of what it does not say: "cat", "goat",
"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
meaning of other objects, in other words, one
2
Jean Baudrillard
thing’s prestige relates to another’s
mundanity.
From this starting point Baudrillard con-
structed broad theories of human society
based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His
pictures of society portray societies always
searching for a sense of meaning — or a
"total" understanding of the world — that re-
mains consistently elusive. In contrast to
poststructuralists such as 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 lead al-
most 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 under-
stood according to what it signifies (and be-
cause the process of signification immedi-
ately involves a web of other signs from
which it is distinguished) this never produces
the desired results. The subject, rather, be-
comes seduced (in the original Latin sense,
seducere, to lead away) by the object. He
therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a
complete understanding of the minutiae of
human life is impossible, and when people
are seduced into thinking otherwise they be-
come 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 societ-
ies begin to bring reality together into one
supposedly coherent picture, the more insec-
ure and unstable it looks and the more fear-
ful societies become[8]. Reality, in this sense,
"dies out."[9]
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 ar-
gued, not in a "global village," to use Mar-
shall 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 acts such as, for example, terror-
ism. 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 Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 vi-
olently 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) defenceless against acts such as
the Rushdie Fatwa[10] or, indeed, the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against
the United States and its military establish-
ment (see below).
In 2004, the International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies was launched.
The object value system
In his early books, such as The System of Ob-
jects, For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign, and The Consumer Society,
Baudrillard’s main focus is upon consumer-
ism, 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 Marx in one signific-
ant way. For Baudrillard, it was consumption,
rather than production, which was the main
drive in capitalist society.
Baudrillard came to this conclusion by cri-
ticising 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. He argued,
drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs
are constructed, rather than innate. Whereas
Marx believed that uses genuinely laid be-
neath capitalism’s "commodity fetishism,"
Baudrillard thought that all purchases, be-
cause 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"[11] precedes
the production of goods to meet those needs.
He wrote that there are four ways of an
object obtaining value. The four value-making
processes are as follows:[12]
1. The first is the functional value of an
object; its instrumental purpose. A pen,
for instance, writes; and a refrigerator
3
Jean Baudrillard
cools. Marx’s "use-value" is very similar to
this first type of value.
2. The second is the exchange value of an
object; its economic value. One pen may
be worth three pencils; and one
refrigerator may be worth the salary
earned by three months of work.
3. The third is the symbolic value of an
object; a value that a subject assigns to an
object in relation to another subject. 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 last is the sign value of an object; its
value within a system of objects. A
particular pen may, whilst having no
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). But the focus on the difference
between sign value (which relates to com-
modity 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, par-
ticularly in his writings on world events.
Simulacra and
Simulation
As he developed his work throughout the
1980s, he moved from economically-based
theory to the consideration of mediation and
mass communications. Although retaining his
interest in Saussurean semiotics and the lo-
gic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by
anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard
turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan,
developing ideas about how the nature of so-
cial relations is determined by the forms of
communication that a society employs. In so
doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both
Saussure’s and Roland Barthes’ formal semi-
ology to consider the implications of a
historically-understood (and thus formless)
version of structural semiology. The concept
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
of Simulacra also involves a negation of the
concept of reality as we usually understand
it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no
such thing as reality.
The end of history and
meaning
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of
Baudrillard’s most common themes was his-
toricity, or, more specifically, how present
day societies utilise the notions of progress
and modernity in their political choices. He
argued, much like the political theorist Fran-
cis 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, but as the
collapse of the very idea of historical pro-
gress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold
War was not caused by one ideology’s victory
over the other, but the disappearance of the
utopian visions that both the political Right
and Left shared. Giving further evidence of
his opposition toward Marxist visions of glob-
al communism and liberal visions of global
civil society, Baudrillard contended that the
ends they hoped for had always been illu-
sions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the
End argued, he thought the idea of an end it-
self 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.[13]
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 physi-
cist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the
4
Jean Baudrillard
speed society moved at had destabilized the
linearity of history: "we have the particle ac-
celerator that has smashed the referential or-
bit of things once and for all."[14]
In making this argument Baudrillard
found some affinity with the postmodern
philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who
famously argued that in the late Twentieth
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 col-
lapse of history, Baudrillard also went bey-
ond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how
the idea of forward progress was being em-
ployed in spite of the notion’s declining valid-
ity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine
belief in a universal endpoint of history,
wherein all conflicts would find their resolu-
tion, had been deemed redundant, universal-
ity was still a notion utilised in world politics
as an excuse for actions. Universal values
which, according to him, no one any longer
believed universal were and are still rhetoric-
ally employed to justify otherwise unjustifi-
able choices. The means, he wrote, are there
even though the ends are no longer believed
in, and are employed in order to hide the
present’s harsh realities (or, as he would
have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlighten-
ment, universalization was viewed as unlim-
ited growth and forward progress. Today, by
contrast, universalization is expressed as a
forward escape."[15]
On the Gulf War
Part of Baudrillard’s public profile, as both
an academic and a political commentator,
comes from his 1991 book, titled for its pro-
vocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not
Take Place." His argument described the first
Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian
formula: it was not "the continuation of polit-
ics by other means", but "the continuation of
the absence of politics by other means". Ac-
cordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting
the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his
soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his
power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied
Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were
merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs
daily, as if proving to themselves that there
was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were
the Western media complicit, presenting the
war in real time, by recycling images of war
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jean Baudrillard

to propagate the notion that the two enemies, an alibi for those who do not want to have
the US (and allies) were actually fighting the been excited for nothing: at least these dead
Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case: Sad- will prove this war was indeed a war and not
dam Hussein did not use his military capacity a shameful and pointless hoax ...
(the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military
power was not weakened (he suppressed the
Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war’s
On the September 11,
end), so, concluding that politically little had 2001 terrorist attacks
changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated,
In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf
the victors were not victorious, therefore,
War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism he
there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur.
characterised the terrorist attacks on the
Much of the repute that Baudrillard found
World Trade Center in New York City as the
as a result of the book — originally a series
"absolute event." Seeking to understand
of articles in the British newspaper The
them as an (ab)reaction to the technological
Guardian and the French newspaper Libéra-
and political expansion of capitalist globaliza-
tion/Libération in three parts: During the
tion, rather than as a war of religiously-based
American military and rhetorical buildup as
or civilization-based warfare, he termed the
"The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during
absolute event and its consequences as fol-
military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking
lows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):
Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf
This is not a clash of civilisations or reli-
War Did Not Take Place" — was based on his
gions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and
critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectu-
America, on which efforts are being made to
al, as Baudrillard portrayed it: People died,
focus the conflict in order to create the delu-
the political map was altered, and Saddam
sion of a visible confrontation and a solution
Hussein’s regime was harmed. Some critics
based upon force. There is indeed a funda-
accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a
mental antagonism here, but one that points
denial of the physical action of the conflict
past the spectre of America (which is perhaps
(part of his denial of reality, in general). Con-
the epicentre, but in no sense the sole em-
sequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy
bodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of
amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism,
Islam (which is not the embodiment of terror-
and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic com-
ism either) to triumphant globalisation bat-
mentators (such as William Merrin, in his
tling against itself.
book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued
Baudrillard thus placed the attacks — as
that Baudrillard was more concerned with
accords with his theory of society — in con-
the West’s technological and political domin-
text as a symbolic reaction to the continued
ance and the globalization of its commercial
expansion of a world based solely upon com-
interests, and what it means for the present
modity exchange. This stance was criticised
possibility of war. Merrin has asserted that
on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduc-
Baudrillard did not deny that something
tion of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudril-
happened, but merely questioned that that
lard and Slavoj Zizek, of all but celebrating
something was a war; rather it was "an atro-
the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that
city masquerading as a war". Merrin’s book
the United States of America received what it
viewed the accusations of amorality as re-
deserved. Zizek, however, countered that ac-
dundant and based upon misreading; Baudril-
cusation to Wolin’s analysis as a form of intel-
lard’s own position was more nuanced. In
lectual barbarism in the journal Critical In-
Baudrillard’s own words (p. 71-72):
quiry, saying that Wolin fails to see the differ-
Saddam liquidates the communists, Mo-
ence between fantasising about an event and
scow flirts even more with him; he gases the
stating that one is deserving of that event.
Kurds, it is not held against him; he elimin-
Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued
ates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam
that Baudrillard’s position affords the terror-
makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000
ists a type of moral superiority. In the journal
dead will only have been the final decoy that
Economy and Society, Merrin further noted
Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money
that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of
paid in forfeit according to a calculated equi-
society unfair privilege above semiotic con-
valence, in order to conserve his power.
cerns. Second, authors questioned whether
What is worse is that these dead still serve as

5
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour,
in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard be-
lieved that their destruction was forced by
the society that created them, alluding 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.
Critiques of Baudrillard
Baudrillard’s writing, and his uncomprom-
ising positions, has led to his being criticised
fiercely by many. For example Denis Dutton,
founder of Philosophy & Literature’s "Bad
Writing Contest" — which listed examples of
the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for
which Baudrillard was frequently criticised —
had the following to say:
Some writers in their manner and stance
intentionally provoke challenge and
criticism from their readers. Others just
invite you to think. Baudrillard’s
hyperprose demands only that you grunt
wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He
yearns to have intellectual influence, but
must fend off any serious analysis of his
own writing, remaining free to leap from
one bombastic assertion to the next, no
matter how brazen. Your place is simply
to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and
drop his name wherever possible.[16]
However only one of the two major confront-
ational books on Baudrillard’s thought —
Christopher Norris’s Uncritical Theory: Post-
modernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War
(ISBN 0-87023-817-5) — seeks to reject his
media theory and position on "the real" out of
hand. The other — Douglas Kellner’s Jean
Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodern-
ism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5) —
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 (as discussed above)
has published more than one denunciation of
Norris’s position. The latter Baudrillard him-
self characterised as reductive (in Nicholas
Zurbrugg’s Jean Baudrillard: Art and
Artefact).
Willam Merrin’s work has presented a
more sympathetic account, which attempts to
"place Baudrillard in opposition to himself."
6
Jean Baudrillard
Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard’s
position on semiotic analysis of meaning
denies himself his own position on symbolic
exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the com-
mon criticism of post-structuralist work (a
criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard,
Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising inter-
relation as the basis for subjectivity denies
the human agency from which social struc-
tures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and
Michel de Certeau have made this point gen-
erally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as
much in Baudrillard’s specific case).
Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard’s main
editor and one of a number of present day
academics who argue for his contemporary
relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster’s 2nd
ed. of Selected Writings):
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 ...
Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most
extreme of Baudrillard’s critics, the likes of
Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a pur-
veyor of a form of reality-denying irrational-
ism (ibid p. 7):
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 fulfil 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
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jean Baudrillard

privileged access to truth. In an • For a Critique of the Political Economy of

important sense individuals are no the Sign (1972)
longer citizens, eager to maximise their • The Mirror of Production (1973)
civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating • Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
the onset of communism. They are rather • Forget Foucault (1977)
consumers, and hence the prey of • Seduction (1979)
objects as defined by the code. • Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
Representations of and (1982)
• Fatal Strategies (1983)
references to Baudrillard • America (1986)
• Cool Memories (1987)
• Native American (Anishinaabe) writer
• The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
Gerald Vizenor, who has made extensive
• The Transparency of Evil (1990)
use of Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation
• The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
in his critical work,[17] features
• The Illusion of the End (1992)
Baudrillard as a character in a "debwe
• Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews
heart dance" in his 1996 novel Hotline
(Edited by Mike Gane) (1993)
Healers.[18]
• The Perfect Crime (1995)
• The Matrix, a (1999) film by the
• Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit
Wachowski brothers, purports to be
(1998)
influenced by Baudrillard’s thought. One
• Impossible Exchange (1999)
critic went so far as to claim that if
• Passwords (2000)
"Baudrillard... has not yet embraced the
• The Singular Objects of Architecture
film it may be because he is thinking of
(2000)
suing for a screen credit.[19] Baudrillard
• The Vital Illusion (2000)
himself stated in interviews that The
• Au royaume des aveugles (2002)
Matrix has nothing to do with his work,
• The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for
and is at best a misreading of his ideas. It
the Twin Towers (2002)
has been suggested that Baudrillard never
• Fragments (interviews with François
saw the film, and this may prove to be his
L’Yvonnet) (2003)
symbolic epitaph to posterity.[3]
• The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity
• The Economist of London published a kind
Pact (2005)
and humorous obituary on 15 March
• The Conspiracy of Art (2005)
2007.[20] It referred to his description of
• Les exilés du dialogue, Jean Baudrillard
the U.S.A. as the "last primitive society"
and Enrique Valiente Noailles (2005)
and readers commented further in the
• Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie
style of Baudrillard on 29 March.
(1967-1978) (2006)
• Newcastle based band Maxïmo Park wrote
• ’Pataphysics (2007)
a song about Baudrillard which featured
http://www.atlaspress.co.uk/theLIP/
as a b-side to "Karaoke Plays" from their
index.cgi?action=departmental
2007 album Our Earthly Pleasures.
• , a reciprocating, no-frills, low-brow
Articles
design, self-writing-montage-machine for
Symbolically Exchanging the 2008 U.S. • “The Spirit of Terrorism”. Telos No. 121
Presidential Election TV Coverage - by (Fall 2001). New York: Telos Press.
Cultural Farming. • "Divine Europe". Telos No. 131 (Summer
2005). New York: Telos Press.

Bibliography Audio-CDs
• Die Illusion des Endes — Das Ende der
Books Illusion (Jean Baudrillard & Boris Groys),
• The System of Objects (1968) 58 minutes + booklet. Cologne: supposé
• The Consumer Society: Myths and 1997. ISBN 3-932513-01-0
Structures (1970)

7
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jean Baudrillard

• Die Macht der Verführung, 55 minutes.
Cologne: supposé 2006. ISBN
978-3-932513-67-1
References
[1] The world of Jean Baudrillard
[2] See How to pronounce Jean Baudrillard.
[3] Guardian Obituary
[4] Chris Turner’s introduction to The
Intelligence of Evil, Berg (2005), p. 1
[5] Chris Turner’s introduction to The
Intelligence of Evil, Berg (2005), p. 2
[6] cf. Barry Sandywell’s article "Forget
Baudrillard", in Theory, Culture and
Society (1995, issue 12)
[7] Peter Pericles Trifonas, Barthes and the
Empire of Signs, Icon (2001)
[8] 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"
[9] as he argued in the book The Perfect
Crime, Verso (1995) for instance
[10] see here The Transparency of Evil, Verso
(1993)
[11] p. 63 in For a Critique ... (1983)
[12] as set out in For a Critique ... (1983)
[13] The Illusion of the End, or Selected
Writings, p. 263.
[14] The Illusion of the End, p. 2.
[15] taken from the essay The Violence of the
Global, in the journal Critical Theory
[16] Dutton, Denis, "Jean Baudrillard",
Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990)
234-38.
[17] Review of Postindian Conversations by
Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee [1]
[18] Gerald Vizenor, Hotline Healers (1996),
Chapter 5.
[19] Adam Gopnik, "The Unreal Thing", The
New Yorker 19 May 2003 [2]
[20] Jean Baudrillard Economist.com
External links
• Jean Baudrillard entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Douglas
Kellner
• International Journal of Baudrillard
Studies
• Welcome to the World of Baudrillard
• Online Baudrillard resources

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard"

Categories: 1929 births, 2007 deaths, University of Paris alumni, People from Reims, 20th-
century philosophers, 21st-century philosophers, Continental philosophers, French philosoph-
ers, 20th-century French philosophers, French sociologists, Nihilism, Pataphysicians, Post-
modern theory, Postmodernists, Poststructuralism, Hyperreality theorists

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