Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is a sociologist and Philosophe French, born the July 27th 1929 with Rheims and dead the March 6th 2007 with Paris. Its thought strongly evolved/moved since the publication, at the end of the years 1960, the Système of the objects and the Consumer society , to concentrate on the concept of “disappearance of reality”.

Biography

Of country origin, his/her father is gendarme and it is only sons. Noticed at the elementary school by its teachers, those help it to integrate the college and into becoming stock-broker. It is with the Lycée Henri-Iv in Paris, where it prepares the entrance examination to the National university, which it makes his first radical rupture, at the same time friendly, in love, studious and revolutionary, while turning the back on the contest, to go to be established as farm laborer then mason with the task, in the area of Arles. He is thus regarded as the first intellectual Maoist " établi" from France.

On its return, it finishes its higher learning at the university of the languages of the Sorbonne, and obtains German aggregation. Named successively in various colleges in France, then reader resident of the universities in Germany and reader of German literature to the editions of the Threshold, it translates several works, in particular with Gilbert Badia " Dialog of exilés" of Bertolt Brecht, for the Arch, " Marat-Sade" of Peter Weiss, others with Gilbert Badia, Henri Auger, and Renee Cartelle, for the Social Editions, like the German Ideology of Karl Marx. It also translates the poems of Hölderlin which will remain new until their publication in the books of Herne , in 2005. It publishes several critical articles in international literature in Modern times .

Of its first marriage with Lucile, it has two children, Gilles and Anne. In full war of Algeria, its paternity is worth to him to remain in the Paris region during its military service, as archivist in the Center of the cinema of the armies (where it meets the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant).

Nanterre

Jean Baudrillard makes his second rupture by ceasing secondary education, and chooses political philosophy by undertaking a thesis of doctorate in third cycle of sociology of the daily life, disciplines associated with urban and founded sociology in France by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, while following the courses of Roland Barthes to the practical School of the high studies.

In 1968, its doctorate gains the congratulations of the jury and gives place to its first work, the System of the objects. At the same time, Jean Baudrillard became part-time lecturer (then assistant and lecturer) at the university of Nanterre, in the department of Henri Lefebvre.

Jean Baudrillard is one of the teaching figures of reference of the activists of the movement of March 22nd. Years later, Baudrillard will declare:

“One passed from the transcendent history, the great History, with a kind of against-history. One went down towards the pain-killer and the banality which became objects worthy of interest on the historical level (…) One was already gone down again of the History, of the great social movements and histories. And finally, under its airs a little benign, this diving in daily life, even if I do not like much this term which is a little reducing, it were nevertheless a species of revolution. In fact, rather a Involution compared to the History. One went down from the Transcendance of the History in a species of Immanence of the daily life, and through them all these things such as the sexuality which one had largely forgotten in the historical Idéalisme. ”

It is also one of the creators of the review-group “Utopia” (1967/1980), teaching with the Université of Paris X Nanterre and scientific director with the Université of Paris IX Dauphine (1986/1990), and cofounder with Paul Virilio of the editorial board of the review of the CNAC Pompidou, " Traverses". He was finally member of the direction of the anglophone Canadian review Ctheory .

One of the frontier runners of the work of Jean Baudrillard in the United States is the editor of Semiotext (E) and former member of Cerfi, of which the thesis was also informed by Roland Barthes, Sylvère Lotringer; he emigrated in New York to become professor in comparative literature and French, at the university of Columbia, and continues his activity of enquiring editor avant-gardist. In particular, in the years 1980, it organizes the access of the philosopher to the contemporary art and the New Yorkean avant-gardes and its meeting with Andy Warhol, on which the author will write the Snobbery machinal , inaugural text of the retrospective of the CNAC Pomppidou, in 1997. Previously, in the years 1970, Jean Baudrillard makes a first stay in Colorado at the time of the conference of Aspen in 1971, then he discovers the Californian universities, meeting at the time of his voyages the great intellectual and literary figures of the moment, such Marshall Mac Luhan, Philip K. Dick, Paul Watzlawick and probably of other members of the school of Palo-Viola or the Cyber thought. It is also the time of an Italian career of the philosopher, guest each year by the semiotic movement of Umberto Eco, in Urbino. At the same time and afterwards, the other countries require it. One does not need more than one ten years so that it becomes known with the four corners of the world, whereas its country persists in not attaching importance to him, except at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs which receives arts centres and consulates the offers of invitation to the philosopher.

Critical of rationalism and epistemology scientists and the relative concepts of reality and virtuality, its philosophy led it to accept the honor of Satrape of the College of 'Pataphysique in 2001. In fact, Pataphysique is known for him since its class of Philosophy in Rheims, where it was introduced at 18 years by its professor even, in this " science of realities imaginaires". He is member of the Research institute on the social innovation with CNRS and writes many articles and criticisms in the press. He shows how contemporary sociological tendencies like the commemorations, “tsunactions” (reaction of the company as that which took place after the Tsunami which struck the south-Asian coasts in 2005) and other excesses are the average obscenes of the “totalitarian” extension quasi of the Bien to obtain a cohesion.

He inspires by many artists and musicians, and also by the scenario writers, since the Simulationnistes of New York to the brothers Wachowski, who declare it in connection with Matrix ; he does not repudiate these works but which they can represent his thought. Reader of poetry and French and foreign modern literatures, moreover of philosophy and the social sciences and exact, art lover (even if he wrote the Plot of art and contemporary art is disunited), his passages and the files in Whitney museum attest of it, of musics, and literature of science fiction, where undoubtedly he finds various ideas stylistics, in particular a prefiguration of hyperbolic excess, rhetoric resulting from the fiction, which he will apply in experiments within his own framework of sociological writing.

Engagement of the life by work

The singular energy of its work engaged publicly in the events of its time, wanting to be critical event acting by itself, with the wire of the mediatized events that it interacts at the present, for example its series of articles published in the Libération newspaper since the years 1980, always translated abroad, always provocants by their critical freedom, were worth at the same time honors and discredit to him. Moreover, it there with the source of an anachronistic sedimentation of knowledge, in the emergent concepts of Baudrillard, which releases the crossing multidisciplinarity from it, and several reading levels exceeded by the effect which they produce. Beyond the “Baudrillard effect”, transfer of communication of the events to the social sciences, it paradoxically builds a personal philosophy of the existential division, for which it gets an answer by the clean dynamism of the object like illusion of the world, including the style. Of what consists at the same time the hybrid and the prediction of the concepts in its theoretical work: the search of an integral work and " intégrale" thought and company (which is innovated outside the field of the knowledge even if it requires them), and the opening of a going beyond (otherwise than in succession or progress of the references), lance with the posterior generations an original challenge in the creation, without which the knowledge takes statute of indifference; what undermined the capacity. Such the coherence of its criticism in Oublier Foucault (1977) arises still today, at the same time critical praise of the literary excellence of the scientific speech of exhaustive description, like thought of the capacity (knowledge), but in one plagiarized ironic, manifest test by the metaphor and rhetorical figures, visionaries, like thought of knowledge by the risk. What opposes here two forms of thought and of writing of anything the lapse of memory Foucault quite to the contrary does not carry out, each thought being the critical mirror there the other (Ian Robert Douglas). It remains that the impact of this test, carrying out the rival debate of the two speeches, made violence of the alive topicality of the two authors.

Thus, in the line nietzschéenne of the immanence to be it, it takes up the challenge of the loss of direction of the contemporary subject in the world, in an escape (perhaps the ultimate one of modern philosophy which remained just of falsification in the universe of the signs - according to Mckenzie Wark) beyond the study of the subject like knowledge reasoned and rationalized, to consider the object itself (to hear " sujet" and " objet" in philosophy) like clean body of its study. The object like agent moving of the movement, and it explores of them the possibilities, of which reversible, including the reversible possibility on the subject and perhaps, reversibility of the subject - object itself - or the " peuple" - " silencieuse" majority; - compared to all its demolished history, like way out of crisis… Beyond the " badly radical" thought, i.e. the moment when the object exceeds the subject which thinks it, where the subject cannot control the direction any more, this moment when the object will start to reign with its own rules, proud: " all the destiny of the subject passes in the objet" - Fatal strategies (1983). Then its dialog with the object in philosophy starts, but also in our world deprived of the direction of the subject, after the realization of the system of the value. It produces a conceptual grammar which generates a current interpretation of the random device of the things, which are predicted between them (seduction of the signs). Contemporary emergence exceeds the Marxist system of the production, the criticism of the political economy, the critic of the system of equivalence of the value; the practical value and the exchange value, the reports/ratios of production and the reports/ratios social, like the company itself, are integrated by the general equivalence of the value (what abstracts them from their coherence symbolic system). What results from the signs of the goods after the bursting of the code of the value, it is at the same time a strategy of the social things and a strategy of the thought of the philosopher, who is exerted in languages of communication under the mode of autonomy (compared to the concrete world) - " the arbitrary one of the signe" is a concept of the Saussure linguist who informed the possibility of the mathematical languages and their grammars, but initially it allows to conceive in what the words are free their concrete referents (in what the word table is not a particular table, for example, and in this case the concept it is not this certain table, but the generic word for all the tables). In what it can be known as that this concept " prédise" tables. The events and the company form as many prédictibles signs the made-to-order of the languages (but not only), and accidental (thus differently): " poetic transfer of situation". Philosophy of real-time in real-time, it saw of all the transfers at the same time as its time, which delivers its own thought to the poetic creation of situation. The style of Baudrillard forms the place of a writing organic (object, structure of the language and structure of the thought integrated, in the form of the style which contracts the dialectical one in a paradoxical provision with double relaxation, to combinative infinite among which it chooses; but not only. It is far from the situationnism, if it is not the situationnism of the writing itself like praxis. Jean Baudrillard is those thinking that a work does not have a destiny that with the adventure, unchained of its creator, free, and still, following the example Paul Valéry, that glory often arrives by misunderstanding. Few writers saw their texts as much reproduced and translated freely in particular on Internet (it is enough to surfer with its key words in several languages to note it), to the great displeasure royalties. It forever prevented the free diffusion of its work, nor even sometimes of the falsifications built by the use of extracts out of their context within the framework of cabals at the place of its provocations or its challenges.

He said in any thing: " I do not find my solutions in the loi".

Thus the life of Jean Baudrillard, it is also the social engagement of its insolence against the academism, in the form of a true attack against the capacity (in any thing) by the attack of its thought itself, which is often carried out like a cultural accident. As many misunderstandings to the periphery results from it. In fact, all its choices of reserve and the radicalism of its work are dependant, the freedom of its thought being its power (which it could push it with its limits) - and the intellectual form of its activism giving body to its work, including in its beauty (if one concedes some to him).

Song

Jean Baudrillard is also the author of texts sung by Megumi Satsu, singer Japanese. " commit suicide moi" and " Face lift zodiacal" http://megumisatsu.com/

photographs

Photographic work constitutes a parallel exploration of the voyages and decorations collective or familiar of the philosopher. It would have started with an automatic apparatus which would have been offered to him at the time of its first voyage like guest in Japan, in 1981; it is certain that the gadget became an inseparable companion, accompanying all displacements by that become l'" objector of vision" ; then the developed photographs changed format, structuring work second… It constitutes an experimental diptych exogenic, but precisely complementary, of its written work; " the object which comes to get rid of the subject while being given to the objectif" , which the writing could not have brought up to date of the existence of the objects, of which its own body like object of the photograph. Its first exposure took place at the European House of Photography in 2000, in Paris, and since moved in the world. Moreover, photography in general inspired by superb texts with Jean Baudrillard, including answering the call of photographers like the collective " fuzzy Tendency " , of which the last book " Do we Somme? " , with a text of the philosopher who followed them since the first work of their acts, comes to gain Infinity award 2007 of the best book of photography, of the International Center Of Photography in New York. With the conference about its philosophy, in the center of Art ZKM of Karlsruhe, it '' the disappearance of the world '' in the space of Documenta was the very great exposure, in Kassel, recension of its photographs since the years 1970, for the German celebration of its 75 years, in homage to its work, 2004-2005.

The interdependent critical debate

Jean Baudrillard was interdependent and friendly modern philosophers post of his generation and visited them until in their last moments. Itself met the solidarity of its friendly close relations, in particular Michel Maffesoli, Edgar Morin, Marc Guillaume, Jacques Donzelot, François Barré, Francoise Gaillard, Sylvère Lotringer, but also Hubert Tonka, Jean Nouvel, Yann Kersalé, François Seguret, Henri-Pierre Jeudy and others met later such François Yvonnet. And then, this large intellectual History with conflict alternations, of its friendship with Paul Virilio.

In 1995, he marries Marine (Martine Dupuis, director of the photography of the support of press " Sciences and Avenir" , amongst other things), which will accompany it in the majority by its displacements for the conferences and the exposures.

a ceremony without condolences

March 13rd, 2007, Jean Baudrillard is put out of ground at the cemetery of Montparnasse, in Paris. Laic ceremony and without condolences with official and private interventions contradictory, situation cocasse making say to the philosopher Rene Schérer, among the public present: “All that is perfectly normal, the burial of Baudrillard did not take place and it is so much better, now it will live”.

Its work forms an experimental device in triptych of which each part presents a mirror criticizes other: published work, media work, photographic work, are inspired in their progress. Or - architecture of thought.

Introduction to work

“the seduction represents the control of the universe symbolic system, whereas the capacity represents only the control of the real universe. ”

Jean Baudrillard is a theorist of the contemporary company, known especially for his analyzes of the modes of mediation and communication of the Post modernity, although the range of its work extended through time on more varied subjects and sometimes related to the events (or nonevents) present, and presented as such by the whole of the media system (which exceeds simple the Média S) like consumption, the relations of couples, the social comprehension of the history through comments on the AIDS, the Clonage, the business Rushdie, the first war of the Gulf and the attacks against the World Trade Center.

Contemporary of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and other thinkers of the years 1970, it moves away, at least seemingly, of the Psychanalyse and of the Marxisme and places itself in shift of the Structuralisme”, while insisting in particular on the Sémiotique, i.e. the reflection on the signs (linguistic, economic, etc). Its first books present a criticism of the Consumer society (1970) and “ system of the objects ”, title of its first opus in 1968. Inspired by the theses of Saussure which will provide the pivot of what one called “movement Structuraliste” (although all its representatives defend themselves to form part of it), Baudrillard thinks simultaneously and in a reciprocal relation systems of significance and interpretation. Consequently, the concept of Signifié loses its statute of neutral object to enter in complex relationship to not simply the Locuteur but rather the whole of the social system. He is thus the initiator of the Post-structuralist movement .

Instead of analyzing the field of the multiple power struggles and in continuous variation, like Foucault does it, or to seek the conditions of possibility of all “of knowing”, or discursive Formation, Baudrillard, inspired by the work of Nietzsche, is interested on the contrary in the events of the object and their payments or disordered states: “seduction”, “simulation” and the “Hyper-reality”. One of these central theses, which continues, in a certain way, the criticism of the Société of the spectacle started by Guy Debord, rests on the analysis of the “disappearance of the reality”, for which a series of shows is substituted which do not cease car-being generated.

These ideas associate all the general principle according to which the significance, and consequently the value, become autoreferential (interpreted, according to structuralist semiotics, in terms of absence - thus “dog” means “dog” not because of what the word indicates, but because it does not indicate “cat”, “goat”, “tree” etc). Baudrillard employs this principle to support the idea that in our current “total” company, where the technology of the communication S.A. created an excessive proliferation of direction, the autoreferential one of the direction encouraged with creation not “total Village” (McLuhan model), but with that of a world where the significance was unobtrusive and where the company was reduced to an opaque mass, where the “real one” was tiny room to the only autoreferential signs of its existence. In a discussed way, Baudrillard presented by this theory a manner of better including/understanding the events of September 11th.

Having posed its postulate of the erosion of the significance by its excess, Baudrillard continuous contrary to Foucault, but also against rationalism Kant IEN and the traditional design of the Lights to the base of the Humanism Liberal current, criticized in its Humane form which abolishes any possible policy, while becoming the other form of the military Ingérence and appears of the arrogance Occidentale. He seeks to include/understand the world, neither in the concept of a subject who would have the desire to apprehend the world with coherence , nor either in the concept of an interpolation of power in subjectivity (Foucault). Baudrillard presents the concept of the object and its power to be allured (its power to pass for , or to simulate). From the political point of view of Baudrillard, such an effort led it to be opposed more and more to logic Sémiotique (significance, sign, direction, facility of exchange) to return to the anthropological logic of a system symbolic system : that of the exchange of gifts, the Potlatch (practical of the sumptuous destruction) and of the analyzes of the principle of the Evil (and what the evocation of the principle means). It prolongs in that the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille. However, the work which Baudrillard made thereafter “to extirpate” itself of the gravity of its own writing, by a poetic and ironic dynamics, places it in the movement of the Postmodernisme.

At the end of its life, the anthropological result of its work led it to characterize the world in terms of binary opposition , the cultures symbolic systems (based on the exchange of gifts) and of the “globalized” world (based on the exchange of goods and signs, i.e. a world which does not have any answer to the symbolic logic). Consequently opinion current of Baudrillard is that expansion of capitalism and of Néolibéralisme (and the increasing extension of the financial goods which accompanies it), unconsciously sows seeds of what reacts against him , because of its lack of comprehension of the aspect symbolic system of the social existence.

Theory of the history

To tell the truth " question of the histoire" would be appropriate better than " theory of (...) ". Because Baudrillard adopts as solved the history according to the design of Elias Canetti on the Fin of the history (Masse and power and the territory of the man) at the conclusion of the second world war, and according to the philosophers post-Marxists (Overflow, Baudrillard, Lyotard and others) which indicate the process of the disappearance of the system of equivalence of the value, which it is through the development of the goods and/or the evolution of the Monnaie after the disappearance of the gold standard (1933) and the introduction of the mode of the floating exchanges (as from 1973), the political economy seeing its term in the total realization of the value under generalized equivalence. Moreover, after the end of the modern history expressed by Canetti it could be the end of the policy that Baudrillard is with work to express into clean.

As for the history, it worked out an assumption being opposed frontally to the preceding ones philosophies of the history formulated initially by Hegel, then by Marx and Engels (cf the Communist Manifesto ), and explicitly calling into question the idea of a linear Causalité in the historical field. Following the example Jean-François Lyotard which announced in the post-modern condition the end of “great the narrative accounts”, giving a total direction and a direction coherent, and unified, with the history, it also approaches the design deleuzienne of “becoming” which is opposed to the history (to become it does not come from the history, but it falls down in it). In short, he is opposed to a linear reading history which chronologically sees in her a continuous succession of events localisables. Baudrillard comments on thus, in the fatal Strategies , a passage of Elias Canetti where this one wonders about the possibility, for humanity, to cross a point beyond whose the history loses its reality, a kind of “Fin of the history”. Questioned on this subject, he declared:

“That always was for me, not a method, but a form of anticipation: to go by anticipation at the end of a process , to see what occurs beyond. I always think that what occurs , or could happen beyond, is in fact already there in the process even , and which the end is already there, starting from the beginning . All develops at the same time. The beginnings and the ends go in parallel. That upsets obviously a little all the field of the causes and from the effects, one passed a little beyond! … However, I do not see any means, as Canetti seemed to believe it, to return to the point where the distinction was possible between the Good and the Evil, Truth and the Forgery, etc In other words, to return in the conditions of a rational and traditional exercise of the thought. My vision is undoubtedly more catastrophic, but not with the apocalyptic direction, rather of a revolution or a change of the things. And this change is due to an acceleration: one tries to go more and more quickly, so that one makes some already arrived at the end. Virtually! But one is there nevertheless. ”

This theory joined, by other ways, problems of the Virtual and Current at Deleuze, or the Spectrologie invented by Derrida in Spectra of Marx . Thus, written Baudrillard, in connection with the “disappearance of reality”, notion forged on the design of “reality” like theoretical principle:

“In fact, that returned for me problematic of the hantology, '' the history haunted by its disappearance '', etc with the very general problem of reality, waited until reality is anything else only one principle. The “principle of reality”, objective reality and the process of recognition which it calls, disappear to some extent… At this time precise, the delivered reality of its principle becomes, in an exponential development, integral. One has then to make with a reality where all is operationnality, or nothing any more remains except field. If all is carried out or is achieved, it is initially on the basis of disappearance of the “gasoline”, the “Transcendance” or the “principle” of reality. This spectral base carries out us, in a certain way, with virtual, and all these worlds where reign virtuality. ”

One could oppose, with this speech known as of the “Fin of the ideologies”, in vogue after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the resurgence of new forms of Nationalisme S, Tribalisme ethnic S and other conflicts, having carried out, in Balkans, in Rwanda and elsewhere with Génocide S, as well as a “return of the monk”, who insists more on the existence of the Islamisme that on that of others Fondamentalisme S religious. But for Baudrillard…

“These stories it is “repairing”. If I want to analyze terrorism, I will not do it according to the islamist speech. It is a way of exorcizing the things which to return them to a religion, an ideology, a conviction. If I observe terrorism, it is the terrorist act as a fracture of a world power. That can come from anywhere, and that there is religious convictions behind does not interest me. The resurgence of the ethnic, religious, linguistic speeches shows that something is contracted, crystallizes against the Hégémonie, against “the empire”, against this doctrinaire approach, this power single. Of aucuns call it a shock of cultures, a shock of ideologies. But it is insoluble. To take bet for or against does not interest me. what I seek to see, it is true antagonism. However, antagonism appears on a mode symbolic system, it is thus anything else: it is about the setting concerned of dead in a system which seeks to exclude, which wants to be “zero died”, and whose power rests on this exclusion. death disappears from the system and the capacity of the Empire rests on this species of not-death, of nonevent. Alors of the singularities emerges, but different from the speech which they hold. I cannot consider rhetoric islamist, I do not return there… It is necessary to try to see what it is act outwards of the ideology of the actors. ”

This refusal to take into account the Ideology actors to be interested in the acts approaches with more close to political philosophy of Foucault. In its test Power Inferno (2002) devoted precisely to the problem of the Terrorism, he criticized the Western refusal of any negativity and any outside, analyzing the resistance of the “singularities” against the universality of the Idea. Following the example Genealogy of morals nietzschéenne, this analysis wanted to be “beyond the good and the evil”, in any case stripped of any value judgment. As, Baudrillard could criticize the consumer society as well, of the years 1970 with today, as the movement Altermondialiste post- Cold war:

“What can make failure with the system, they are not positive alternatives, they are singularities. However the singularities are neither good nor negative. They are not an alternative, they are of another kind. They do not obey any more one value judgment nor to a political principle of reality. They can thus be best or the worst. One cannot thus federate them in an overall historical action. They make failure with any doctrinaire approach and dominant, but they are not a single against-thought — they invent their play and their own rules of the play. ”

In this test, Baudrillard thus as well criticizes the Western Impérialisme, whose humane universalism, assisted military arm of NATO, remains the concrete figure, as any theory of a “Choc of civilizations”, supported as well by a Samuel Huntington, which returned celebrates this formula, that by the radical Islamisme which opposes the Oumma (community of the believers) to the “Occident”. He writes as follows:

“It thus does not act of a shock of civilizations, but of a confrontation, almost anthropological, between an undifferentiated culture universal and all that, in some field that it is, guard something of an irreducible otherness. For the world power, quite as integrist as religious orthodoxy, all the different and singular forms are heresies… The mission of the Occident (or rather of the ex-Occident, since it does not have for a long time any more of eigenvalues) is to subject by all the means the multiple cultures to the wild law of equivalence. ”

He thus opposes the radical otherness of the singularities to the empty universality represented by the current consumer society. But these singularities can emerge as well inside as outside this company: this why it is not a question of a “shock of civilizations”. He criticizes our land incapacity thus to consider the possibility of a different existence, different from our western world - without to carry value judgment:

“For such a system, any form refractory is virtually terrorist. Thus still Afghanistan. That, on a territory, all the licenses and democratic liberties - the music, the television or even the face of the women - can be prohibited, that a country can take the total opposite course to the fact that we call civilization - whatever the religious principle which are called upon, that is unbearable with the free rest of the world. It is not question which modernity can be disavowed in its universal claim. ”

Such theses inevitably attract the Polémique, which constitutes probably one besides their strategic objectives.

Shows and simulation

The development of the work of Baudrillard, throughout the years 1980, emerges from the theories centered on the criticism of the economy of the signs, with the profit of considerations on the mediation and the communication of the masses. Although it maintained an interest for the Sémiotique of Saussure and its logic of exchange symbolic system (under the influence of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard more and more turned its attention towards the theories of Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about the way in which the nature of the social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a company uses. In this Baudrillard manner really moved beyond the semiology formal of Saussure and Roland Barthes to consider the implications historically included/understood, and thus abstract, of a version of structural semiology.

In a notorious way, it supports - in the book the symbolic system Exchange and death - that the Western companies underwent a “precession of Simulacre”. The Precession, according to Baudrillard, took the form of arrangement of shows, since the era of the original, until the counterfeit, with the produced and mechanical copy (cf Walter Benjamin, “the work of art at the era of the mechanical reproduction”), and through “the third order of show” by which the copy replaces the original. Baudrillard distinguishes nevertheless the show from the copy, in what the copy remains in a report/ratio of reference compared to the original (a copy of a table takes its direction only with regard to the original table), while the show does nothing but simulate other shows: any concept of an original work, from an authentic event, a reality first disappeared, not to leave more the place but to the play of the shows. In this, Baudrillard joined the analysis nietzschéenne truth like veil, and of the decency of femininity, together of veils which do nothing but veil other veils. To remove all the veils, and there remain nothing any more.

Referring with fable of Borges - which itself could write a news under the name of Suarez Miranda, and called into question as well notion traditional of author, that of chronology necessary to any history of ideas (its news posed the possibility thus that a determined author could influence a former author) - Baudrillard affirmed that in our current society, the show replaced the original, as in a news of Borges the chart of the Empire replaced the territory itself. Baudrillard tested, in particular in the years 1990, its theories with the ell, not of reality since this one disappeared, but of the successive media events. Thus, in its book the War of the Gulf will not take place , it writes that the show of the war preceded the real conflict. Although it was heavily attacked, as well within the French university system as by authors being posed as a defender of the heritage of the Lights, the analysis of Baudrillard does not destroy therefore, in spite of its appearances, any concept of reality or policy. One thus could even qualify it the “apolitical one” of “reactionary”. However, he wrote, as of Simulacres and simulation , that simulation precedes reality, thus having a producing value. To in no case that thus means it which what we have habit to call “reality” has any more no value and which Baudrillard was misled in a kind of nihilism or preserving cynicism. Its reflection on the statute of the singularities is the witness. Partly taking again criticism Situationniste of town planning, it could take the example of the urban developments which claim to remove the possibility even of the “delinquency” by modelling the territory and by erasing any place likely to function like public place of gathering (in short, “the street”).

While using this line of the reasoning, Baudrillard comes from there to characterize the current time - while continuing and by radically modifying the criticism of the Idéologie of Ludwig Feuerbach and that of the company of the spectacle of Guy Debord - as “a hyper-reality” where truth comes from there to be unobtrusive or replaced by the signs of its existence. Such an assertion - that for which Baudrillard contributed the most and was most heavily criticized - is typical “fatal strategies” consisting in formulating theories on the social world, beyond themselves, through the language. Baudrillard could affirm that what was important, it was to formulate “interesting theories”, and not truth, which lent the occasion of several denunciations of sound supposed “cynicism”. Rather than to say, for example, “our hysteria around the pedophilia is such as we only include/understand more really is childhood”, Baudrillard wrote, in The Dark Continent off Childhood (2002), that “the child does not exist any more”. Let us stress that Goethe itself considered inaccessible childhood; and that Nietzsche did not speak about a “return to the Greeks”, but aimed, by the approach of ancient Greece, a radical otherness with which we could confront ourselves. In the same way rather than to argue - in a way similar to Susan Sontag in its book On photography - that the notion of reality was muddled by the profusion of its images, Baudrillard came from there to affirm that: “reality does not exist any more”. By doing this did Baudrillard characterize, in the perfect crime , its challenge philosophical as being more the question of Leibniz “to you there Why is something rather only nothing? ”, but rather: “Why to you there is nothing rather than something?”

Critical discussions

Marx - desire/need - Faye - the currency - on Baudrillard; Deleuze, Anti Oedipus and Thousand plates, seminar of Vincennes (5/28/1973). Designs of the statement, continuation - in connection with the political economy of the sign; Deleuze, Anti Oedipus and Thousand plates, seminar of Vincennes (6/4/1973).

Baudrillard Vs. Foucault; wire of discussion moderated by Daniel Makagon on the list Foucault.info (11/4/1996).

Baudrillard' S seduction; wire of discussion moderated by Ian Robert Douglas on the list Foucault.info (10/26/1998).

Irony and Sadness-After Jean Baudrillard 2, on the irony and the radical sadness, correspondence by email between Geert Lovink and McKenzie Wark, published in the site Network Cultures (03/2007).

Criticisms

Baudrillard was the subject of many criticisms. Thus, Thomas Florian denounced in a book published in 2004 like deeply reactionaries (and even a little more than that) the remarks of Baudrillard on the AIDS and homosexuality ( That which lives by the same one will perish by the same one. The impossibility of the exchange, the reciprocity, of the otherness, secret this other invisible, diabolic otherness, imperceptible, this Other absolute which is the virus , declared Baudrillard in total Écran , p. 12, inter alia sentences quoted by Thomas Florian, like that still where Baudrillard describes the AIDS like a “self-defense of the mankind” against homosexuality called “sexual dilapidation” - literary cf Magazine , April 1989)), like on the “masses” and the war of the Gulf (cf Thomas Florian, Hello Baudrillard (Baudrillard without shows) , Editions Cavatines 2004). Thomas Florian goes until describing, in the foreword of his book, the work of Baudrillard like a “recycling” under “radical pace” of “all the commonplaces of the beaufery of bar”.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont - both physicists - wonder in intellectual Impostures , who attacks the authors of the postmodern philosophy, of which Baudrillard, which there would remain thought of the latter “if one withdrew from them all the varnish which recovers it”.

On the contemporary art, while launching “the contemporary art is null” ( Libération , on May 30th, 1996), Jean Baudrillard durably put at back the art lovers contemporary, like criticizes it André Rouillé who, less than one month after the death of Baudrillard, said: With the approach of the new millenium, at one moment when the “lepenisation of the spirits” made its work cunningly, Jean Baudrillard and his followers thus made possible to some to be openly enemy contemporary art as others could be racist: without complex, sure of the founded good their positions, in a total ignorance of the object of their hatred or their contempt, and… with this advantage of not risking penal sanctions!
“It did not act of a critical speech, but of a posture of exclusion and ignorance, undoubtedly of panic in front of an unknown universe and immaîtrisable of forms, attitudes and values.

Sources

  • Jean Baudrillard in '' Stanford Encyclopedia off Philosophy ''

  • Discussion with Jean Baudrillard carried out by Raphaël Bessis and Lucas Degryse, published in the review Philosophoire (University of Toulouse it Mirail - Philosophoire), n°19 devoted to the history, pp.4-21
  • Extracts from Power Inferno (2002) published in Manière of seeing n°75, June-July 2004
  • Simulacres and Simulation (1981)
  • the System of the objects (1968)
  • the Consumer society (1970)
  • Of the Seduction (1979)

Works

  • the System of the objects (1968), ED. Gallimard, Paris.
  • the Consumer society (1970)
  • For a criticism of the political economy of the sign (1972)
  • the Mirror of the production (1973)
  • the symbolic system Exchange and death (1976), ED. Gallimard, Paris.
  • the Consumption of the signs (1976)
  • To forget Foucault (1977), coll Spaces critical, to dir. Paul Virilio; ED. Galileo, Paris.
  • the Effect Beaubourg (1977)
  • In the shade of the silent majorities (1978)
  • the Angel of stucco (1978)
  • Of the seduction (1979)
  • Enrico Baj (1980)
  • Cool Memories (1980 - 1985)
  • Shows and simulation (1981)
  • In the shade of the silent majorities (1982)
  • fatal Strategies (1983), ED. Grasset, Paris.
  • divine Left (1985), ED. Grasset, Paris.
  • the Other by itself (1987), ED. Galileo, Paris.
  • Cool Memories 2 (1987 - 1990)
  • the Transparency of the evil (1990)
  • the War of the Gulf did not take place (1991)
  • the Illusion of the end or the strike of the events (1992)
  • Fragments, Cool Memories 3 (1991 - 1995)
  • Figures of the otherness (1994)
  • the radical Thought (1994)
  • the Perfect crime (1995)
  • indifferent Paroxyste (1997)
  • America (1997)
  • total Screen (1997)
  • Of exorcism in policy, or the conspiracy of the imbeciles (1997)
  • Because the illusion is not opposed to reality (1997)
  • the Plot of art (1997)
  • Illusion, disillusion esthetics (1997)
  • the great change; inquire into the one millenium end (1998)
  • In the shade of the millenium or the suspense of the Year 2000 (1998)
  • the impossible Exchange (1999)
  • Into the destiny (1999)
  • Into photography (1999)
  • Cool Memories IV (2000)
  • the singular Objects: structure & philosophy (2000)
  • the Plot of art, interviews (2000), ED Sens & Tonka, Paris; Semiotext (E), New York.
  • From one fragment to another (2001)
  • Passwords (2000)
  • the Breeding of dust (2001)
  • the Ludic one and the police officer (2001)
  • With the kingdom of the blind men (2002)
  • Power Inferno; Requiem for Twins Towers; Assumption on terrorism; The violence of World the (2002)
  • the Spirit of terrorism (2002)
  • Pataphysique (2002)
  • the Violence of the world with Edgar Morin; ED. the Cat-like one, Paris; (2003)
  • From day to day, 2000-2001 (2003)
  • the Pact of clearness or intelligence of the evil (2004)
  • Book of Herne n°84, February 2005
  • Cool Memories V (2005), ED. Galileo, Paris.
  • In connection with Utopia , discussion with Jean-Louis Violeau (2005)
  • To forget Artaud , dialog with Sylvère Lotringer (2005), ED. Semiotext (E) (?), New York.
  • Exiled dialog ; Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente-Noailles, maintenance (2005), ED. Galileo, Paris

See too

Internal articles

  • the Business Sokal.

External bonds

  • Baudrillard on France-Culture, recension in place since the homage (bonds, biblio., emissions).

  • roots of the evil - Chronic' art
  • Beyond the end Human Associated the
  • Reality off Simulation
  • Ctheory, many texts of Baudrillard and many analyzes of its work.
  • '' Vidéo: '' Jean Baudrillard in 2005. It is expressed here on the concept of exemption from payment, a file of the French-speaking Switzerland Télévision.
  • French Theory, abstract in Confabulated; ED. The discovery, Paris, 2003.
  • To listen to Baudrillard in two emissions presented by Elisabeth Levy and a report on Arte:
  • '' Vidéo '' and '' Audio ''

A point of view of the scientific interdisciplinarity on the Sokal business

By the founder of the group for the scientific interdisciplinarity with UNESCO

  • Scientism - the other business Sokal, Basarab Nicolescu, physicist of the particles,

  • CNRS High energies; (.pdf of the article in the site of the author)
  • References of the author of the article.

Tombs

Tests, Press, Speech

  • The spirit off Jean Baudrillard, Gone drank still breathing new life into his field, Arthur Kroker (original text), John Armitage, in The thing.net (New York, 3/8/2007, 3/16/2007)

  • Baudrillard' S terror, photographic creation and quotation, Daniel Perlin (New York, 3/7/2007).
  • “My death is everywhere, my death dreams”, Portrait, on death symbolic system and origins social, K-punk (the Netherlands, 7/9/2007).
  • Joy Gerard Dupuy, leading article, Release, (3/7/2007).
  • Baudrillard beyond reality, Robert Maggiori, article, Release (3/7/2007).
  • reactions, on Jean Baudrillard, Nouvel Observateur (3/7/2007):
  • Edgar Morin, Michel Wieviorka, François Yvonnet, Paul Virilio, François Gusset (author of French Theory), Al Laïdi,
  • Bernard Lallement - cofounder of the newspaper Release, specialist in Jean-Paul Sartre, died in 58 years (the day of the burial of Jean Baudrillard),
  • Gilles de Robien, Minister for State education.
  • Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, Minister for the culture and Transport (3/13/2007).

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