Jean Baudrillard – France (1929 – 2007)

Linked with This is the Fourth World War. Read also Definitions: The Intelligentsia.

Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929  – March 6, 2007) … was a French cultural theorist, sociologist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism … (full text).

More on wikipedia:

French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing … (full text, April 22, 2005, Stanford Encl. of Philosophy).

He said: … « There are really only two interesting moments in history: the Big Bang and the Apocalypse » (citation used by Andy Martin as a comment about CERN) … (full text, 10 Sep 2008).

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Jean Baudrillard – France (1929 – 2007)

His video in french/en français (one of many): Jean Baudrillard, French Super-philosopher Who Inspired Matrix, 12 min.

A moment of Baudrillardian irony appeared in the NY Times this morning. Jean Baudrillard is the French philosopher-critic whose concepts of the Hyperreal and Simulacra landed him many frequent flier miles during the late 1980s and 1990s. Mistaken for a post-modernist, he’s actually more of a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic modernist, I think. His passage on the hyperreal was summarized in The Matrix by Morpheus in the oft-sampled: « Welcome to the Desert of the Real » … (full text, Oct. 21, 2005).

… It also summarizes the way modern warfare has become central to the media overload that French media philosopher Jean Baudrillard (a Brown favourite) calls the « whole pornography of information and communication » … (full text, Sept. 18, 2008).

hannah arendt and jean baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society, by Trevor Norris, 2004.

… These children of Jean Baudrillard dare you to deny their ball-busting bounce, ear-bleed volume, and bloodless hooks, sans even the cartoon/anime-cool, featureless, anti-human « faces » of Daft Punk, or the too-cool-for-school ‘tude of, say, Death From Above 1979. As with their recently banned video for « Stress, » Justice are tinkering with pop violence, devoid of true gore, a.k.a. passion … (full text, Sept. 17, 2008).

… Wow. This means that a Turkish professor in a university who sympathizes with, say, Jean Baudrillard rather than Auguste Comte might find himself to be on the “traitor” side. And if he travels to somewhere to join a conference sponsored by some “global power,” his “treason” will be confirmed. Similarly, media pundits who toy with postmodern ideas could also be on the black list of the military … (full text, Sept 6, 2008).

… « Smile and others will smile back, » Jean Baudrillard thinks. « Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say or your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile » … (full text, Sept. 6, 2008).

Find him and his publications on wikipedia /bibliography; on Google Video-search; on inauthor Google-search; on Google Book-search; on Google Scholar-search; on Google Group-search; on Google Blog-search.

His Google download-books:

  • Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser, 1994, 164 pages: Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure;
  • Art and Artefact, by Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Zurbrugg, 1997, 184 pages;
  • Selected Writings, by Jean Baudrillard, Mark Poster, 2001, 294 pages: This is an expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most fascinating thinkers on the French intellectual scene. To the original selection of his writings from 1968 to 1985, this new edition adds examples of Baudrillard’s work since that time … ;
  • Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Jean Baudrillard, Iain Hamilton Grant, 1993, 254 pages: Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary social theorists. Translated into English for the first time, this remarkable volume examines the full extent of his critical appraisal of social theories including traditional Marxism, cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought … ;
  • Le système des objets, by Jean Baudrillard, 1972, 255 pages;
  • The Consumer Society, by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner, 1998, 208 pages: This is the first English-language translation of Jean BaudrillardÃs contemporary classic on the sociology of consumption. Originally published in 1970, the book was one of the first to focus on the processes and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. At a time when others were fixated with the production process, Baudrillard could be found making the case that consumption is now the axis of culture … ;
  • … and many more (on Google inauthor).

… Neither disagrees with the basic facts of the prosecution case, simply the interpretation; they claim for themselves a more nuanced, subtle intent than might otherwise have been inferred. It’s a similar thought process to that behind Jean Baudrillard’s key postmodernist text, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard didn’t suggest that the tanks and soldiers and deaths following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait didn’t exist; simply that the notion of a « Gulf war » was a subjective definition, imposed by American political and media elites … (full text, Sept. 27, 2008).

… The exhibition’s subtitle quotes from a statement delivered by the so-called French Group at the environmentally focused 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), Colorado. Written by Jean Baudrillard and partly aimed at the conference’s advisor Reyner Banham, the statement questioned the motives behind the conference’s embrace of ecological issues. Since its inception in the early 1950s, the conference had acted as an exchange platform between renowned designers and architects with business leaders and corporate magnates to discuss relations between design and industrial production. The French Group argued that the conference’s new found interest in ecology masked the larger political struggles of the time. By diverting ideology “onto rivers and national parks” rather than “class discrimination”, “wars” and “neo-imperialist conflicts”, the conference would bypass the real challenges that society faces. As they put it, “the opposition between chlorophyll and napalm exists only in appearance” … (full text, 19. September 2008).

links:

CTHEORY, friends of Baudrillard, March 7, 2007;

Sha Na Na: Founders of the Modern Conservative Movement, Sept. 23, 2008;

When news becomes a rival brand, Sept. 9, 2008;

Simulation of the Civil Society: Civil Society Organizations in Turkey, Sept. 15, 2008;

Definitions: The Intelligentsia, Sept. 26, 2008;

El medio somos todos, Sept. 29, 2008;

Les élites américaines se cherchent un super-héros, par Jean-Marie Chauvet, 29 septembre 2008;

No hay mal que por bien no venga, Sept. 9, 2008.