Jean Baudrillard (1929)
Jean Baudrillard, notorious French sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of
postmodernity, was born in 1929 in the northern town of Reims. His early life is
influenced by the Algerian war in the 1950s and 60s. He taught German in a Lycée
before completing his doctoral thesis in sociology. He then became an Assistant
in September 1966 at Nanterre University of Paris X. He was associated with
Roland Barthes, to whose semiotic analysis of culture his first book, "The
Object System" (1968) is clearly indebted. Influenced by the student revolt at
Nanterre University in 1968, he cooperated with a typical journal of the time,
Utopie, evidently influenced by anarcho-situationism, structural Marxism and
media theory.
Baudrillard is a thinker who builds on what was being thought by others and
breaks through via a key reversal of logic to make fresh analysis. He has been
influenced by Mauss (important to Levi-Strauss in the Durkheimian objectivity
and linguistic-sociological interface) and Bataille (who wrote surreally and
erotically), as well as Satre, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, the Situationists and
Surrealism. Another background influence is Freud and pyschoanalysis, but far
more direct is Marxism. Baudrillard's philosophy centers on the twin concepts of
"hyperreality" and "simulation." These terms refers to the virtual or unreal
nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass
consumption.
Works: "The System of Objects and Consumer Society" (1968), "For a Critique of
the Political Economy of the Sign" (1972) and "The Mirror of Production" (1973),
"In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities" (1983), "The Perfect Crime" (1996).
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