Here is a bio. Here are obituaries. It is easy enough to attach his apparently outrageous claims and paint him as a postmodern nihilist. Looking past the surface, virtually all of his books have at least five startling and insightful sentences. Here is one:
“Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price”
Or try this:
“At male strip shows, it is still the women that we
watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more
obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.”
Here are many others. I always read him as a moralist. None of the summaries do him justice. Baudrillard was a major thinker of our age, and I am sad I can no longer look forward to new books from his hand.
Hm. I’m afraid postmodernists never qualified on my reading list. I skimmed his publication regarding the 9/11 attacks and wasn’t impressed.
As far as I’ve gathered, the quality of philosophical discourse in a time is invertly proportional to the number and strength of the postmodernist authors. The fewer journals publishing nonsense – or rather, willing to publish nonsense (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/15/specials/sokal-text.html?_r=1&oref=slogin), the better.
The two comments say even more about it. Namely, that even our most “educated” (i.e. the university-graduate, blog-reading, tech-savvy middle-class) are still not above 1. superficial analysis – classifying a whole genre/movement as “nonsensical” (though a great deal of so-called post-modernist/post-structuralist writing really is impenetrable)(though this may be inevitable, given the medium) and 2. gross, empty, and often shockingly pessimistic generalisations – “perceptions like that …reduce the distinction between our culture …”
I haven’t read any of his serious philosophy, but Simulacra and Simulation is a work of comic parody of the highest order. I defy anyone to read more than two pages – especially out loud – without collapsing in hysterical laughter.
I am actually not familiar with the writings of Jean Baudrillard – can someone recommend some of his work that I should start with?
Is he the guy who is quoted in “The Matrix”? (“The wasteland of the real” or something like that.)
Singularity forever, and happy forever till the time showing LIFES IS JUST ALONG LONG GAME
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