Jean Baudrillard's Obituary

From the Guardian website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2028749,00.html

James Harkin
Thursday March 8, 2007

"Au revoir, then, Jean Baudrillard, who appeared to die on Tuesday at the ripe old age of 77. I say appeared, because if the French thinker's oeuvre teaches us anything at all, it is surely that you can't believe what you read in the papers. This hero of the polo-necked, pointy-spectacled classes made it his life's work to argue that, under the weight of our relentless consumption of objects and media, simulated experiences had come to replace the real thing and reality and fantasy had blurred into one impenetrable edifice called "hyper-reality". That the term sounded like something out of Star Trek tells us something of the contradictions embodied by his work.

Baudrillard is much sneered at by almost all Anglophone philosophers, but at least he took the trouble to engage with the real world, even if he didn't believe it was entirely real. His method of rhetorical exaggeration in order to make a point could always be relied on to wind up the stuffed shirts. In 1991, for example, he was moved to argue that the first Gulf war did not really exist, but was yet another "simulacrum" rehearsed in simulations and then presented as entertainment by the broadcast media. The point he was trying to make, ignored by his critics, was our remoteness and our powerlessness in the face of this new kind of war. It looked like a computer game, after all, and was fought largely from TV screens thousands of miles away from the battlefield.
Live by the media-generated simulation, however, and you are likely to die with it draped across your coffin. Baudrillard's tragedy is that, at least for anyone under the age of 30, the reputation of this homme sérieux will for ever be linked with a gimmicky Hollywood film. In their Matrix triology, the filmmakers Andy and Larry Wachowski lobbed in copious references to Baudrillard to give their work a little philosophical heft. Baudrillard was reportedly unimpressed, but he could console himself that it was only a simulacrum, and that it finally cemented his reputation across the pond. For all his criticism of America, Baudrillard ended up enchanted with a place he called "the original version of modernity". France, he pointed out, was nothing more than "a copy with subtitles".

SUMMARY

Believed that our idea of reality is merely fed to us through the media (similar to Plato's Cave)

Discussed hyperreality and Simulacra

Famously said that the gulf war never happened

His thinking is reference in the Matrix films

BOOKS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

The System of Objects (1968)
The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970)
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972)
The Mirror of Production (1973)
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
Forget Foucault (1977)
Seduction (1979)
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1982)
Fatal Strategies (1983)
America (1986)
Cool Memories (1987)
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
The Transparency of Evil (1990)
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
The Illusion of the End (1992)
Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (Edited by Mike Gane) (1993)
The Perfect Crime (1995)
Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit (1998)
Impossible Exchange (1999)
Passwords (2000)
The Singular Objects of Architecture (2000)
The Vital Illusion (2000)
Au royaume des aveugles (2002)
The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002)
Fragments (interviews with François L'Yvonnet) (2003)
The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005)
The Conspiracy of Art (2005)
Les exilés du dialogue, Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles (2005)
Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978) (2006)