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.
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