Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) - taken from simulation.dk
Artforum says:
03.07.07 - The French critic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality were intensely discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies like The Matrix, died yesterday in Paris, reports Patricia Cohen for the New York Times. He was seventy-seven. Michel Delorme, director of Galilee, Baudrillard's publisher, announced his death, which he said followed a long illness. Baudrillard, the first in his family to attend a university, became a member of a small caste of celebrated and influential French intellectuals who achieved international fame despite the density and difficulty of their work. The author of more than fifty books and an accomplished photographer, Baudrillard ranged across different subjects, from race and gender to literature and art to 9/11.
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As someone who read a lot of Baudrillard in my early student days, when I first started studying philosophy and communication, this is an event to notice. I have loved his thoughts, his books, especially La transcendence du mal, in which he diagnosed the danger of the fear of viral difference in our culture, a fear which he predicted would have fatal consequences. No doubt in my mind that this is proved to be right again and again.
The only point he forgot was that this is not just the West, it's a tendency of an era that was much larger than that.
Anyway, what JB's death really makes me think about is that the event isn't really about his death, today. The event in this is the way in which JB's comments have become more and more obsolete, as their evidence became more and more obvious (which could also indicate that he was losing the edge over time that he had in his younger days). Today, the point that we could be living in an age of simulacra has not just been expressed by The Matrix, let that be, I am not of the ones to be totally lost in awe over that. And the point is being shown every single day, I hear it, I feel it around me when I talk to my students, I see it in windows, on people's faces, on the news: we don't wonder about what he said about the simulacrum any more, because we are so visibly there. We live in an era that doesn't ask the question "is it actually real?" any more. That is one of the reason's why things are beginning to move faster - where, I don't know - but they are moving, and the speed of change is partly due to the combination of a desperate need to be sure that we get there in time and before the others (read America for that one) - and the gradual realisation that if you want to change, you can't stay in the actual. You have to be virtual, and in order to be virtual, you have to be potentially virtual. Or maybe even virtually virtual. The more companies, inventors, citizens, artists, realize this, the more the statements made by JB will seem irrelevant. But they should be read again, as the words of someone who may, in a very French way, have been a materialist romantic of the unity of the system. But with his sense he saw something else moving, and wrote about it. And that means that he also wrote about some of the dangers of the age that we are in.
Fare in peace, Jean.
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