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Baudrillard Dies
He was 77. That particular generation of thinkers gets thinner every month, it seems. French announcement can be found here, with an write-up or two below the picture, though it will likely be a day or two before the really interesting obits start appearing. Of course, that won't stop the sea of idiotic and malicious sentiment reminding us just how stupid Baudrillard was; that sentiment ends up being rather quick in its delivery, at least judging from the recent reaction to Derrida's death.
By kenrufo | March 6, 2007 in Baudrillard | Permalink
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International Herald Tribune and Nouvel Observateur
Posted by: Craig | Mar 6, 2007 6:26:13 PM
Mitten im Land der Dichter und Denker, am ICE-Bahnhof der Republik, entdeckte das Bundespresseamt ein provinzielles Tagesschau-Bild. Dieses Optiksignal war kein wahrer Kanzler, sondern nur die Liniendarstellung eines zeitlich begrenzten Kanzlers im Fernsehen eines Unionsbuergers in der Deutschen Provinz. Auf der Grundlage des ungesetzlichen "Domainrechtes" liess ein Rechtkreativer der Bundesregierung eine einstweilige Verfügung vom Landgericht Berlin gesetzlos abstempeln. Dem Unionsbuerger wurden 6 Monate Gefängnis für seine Internetdichtung versprochen. Ihm wurde verboten, sein unabhängiges kanzlerschroeder.de-Bild "reserviert und/oder konnektiert" zu halten. Gegen diesen undemokratische Beschluss wurde im Geist der Bürgerrechtsdeklaration widerstanden und zum Glück für die Republik wurde der Unionsbuerger.de von Prozessanwalt.de im Geist von I. Kant verteidigt. Nach einem geistreichen Disput vorm Landgericht Berlin vertrugen sich sich die Parteien auf der übernationalen Grundlage der Europäischen Charta der Grundrechten .
Das Bundespresseamt der Bundesregierung versprach Wahlleiter.de, Unionsbuerger.de, Praesidentin.de, Stoiberkanzler.de und eine-frau-soll-kanzler-werden.de nicht zu belegen. Der Unionsbuerger versprach kanzlerschroeder.de zu aus seiner Uchronie zu radieren.
Moral dieser Leitkulturellen Uchronie geschrieben am 1.12.2003 im Landgericht Berlin
OHNE AUTORITÄT KEIN RECHT !
www.leitkulturevolution.de
Posted by: Leitkulturevolution.de | Mar 7, 2007 12:24:53 PM
Posted by: Craig | Mar 7, 2007 6:00:50 PM
Posted by: Matt | Mar 7, 2007 6:16:56 PM
Posted by: s0metim3s | Mar 7, 2007 10:23:47 PM
Pagina 12 of Argentina,also known as "The Official Bulletin" have a very good article
on Baudrillard.
www.Pagina12.com.ar
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 18, 2007 12:21:19 AM
Baudrillard Dies!
Posted by: Raoul | Mar 18, 2007 10:52:39 AM
Some of his lighter stuff - Cool Memories and the like - and some of his photos were pretty, er, cool at least as objects if not always for the intellectual substance, but his whole postmodern bender was awful. Even his 'Spirit of Terrorism' blast in Le Monde a few years back, though causing consternation, was a bit of a let down. He started waffling on about "evil" - which gave me an analogous "come down" to reading an interview with Derrida, a few years ago, after grinding my way through 'On Grammatology' in which he blithely confessed to being a middle of the road social democrat...
Posted by: Steve Brown | Mar 18, 2007 5:45:42 PM
Well it doesn't get more vitriolic than this piece in the Chronicle. It's behind the subscriber wall, so I'll strategically quote (all of the) sections of it:
From the issue dated March 23, 2007
CRITIC AT LARGE
The Death of Jean Baudrillard Did Happen
By CARLIN ROMANO
The death of the 77-year-old French thinker Jean Baudrillard — best known
for the flamboyant title of his 1991 screed, The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place, and the salute to his doubts about reality in The Matrix (1999) —
did take place on March 6. No one spent an instant wondering if it might be
one of the eccentric thinker's "simulacra" shimmering in a world of faded
authenticity. Newspapers, no fans of mere appearance, provided blunt takes
on the man.
Libération, founded by the realer-than-real Jean-Paul Sartre, ran a
full-front-page photograph and covered Baudrillard's death over three
inside pages. Le Figaro expressed its view of his less-than-rigorous work
by calling Baudrillard "a sociologist by training and a philosopher by
vocation." The words that festooned French- and English-language reports —
"celebrated," "provocative," "controversial" — were not accompanied by
"convincing," "persuasive," "groundbreaking," or other words a thinker
might prefer.
Born in Reims in 1929 to a family of civil servants one generation removed
from peasantry, Baudrillard ran away from school, à la Rimbaud, in his
teens. He later studied German in Paris and began a 10-year career as a
lycée teacher of German in the provinces, translating into French such
German writers as Marx, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Weiss.
Only at age 37 did Baudrillard earn his Sorbonne doctorate in sociology,
under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu.
He then started teaching at the University of Paris at Nanterre, from which
he retired in 1987 to concentrate on his whirlwind "postmodernist bad boy"
career and his photography.
When Baudrillard wanted to be understood, he tilted to the simplistic and
outrageous. His greatest act of intellectual decadence came after 9/11. In
The Spirit of Terrorism, he wrote, "It is we who have wanted it. ...
Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalization that is itself
immoral." Baudrillard asserted that "the horror for the 4,000 victims of
dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them."
He observed that "we can say that they did it, but we wished for it."
As always, Baudrillard whacked the United States, the country from which
the self-declared enemy of modern "consumerism" — its corruption of reality
into oppressive "hyperreality" — accepted innumerable free trips,
honoraria, lecture invitations, visiting appointments, and publishing
contracts. America is the superpower that "by its unbearable power, has
fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world, and hence
that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwells in all of us."
Other notable Baudrillardean insights in that miserable book? The action of
the terrorists "does not seek the impersonal elimination of the other."
What happened at the World Trade Center "was not enough to make it a real
event." And the capper, re the twin towers: "It was, in fact, their
symbolic collapse that brought about their physical collapse, not the other
way around."
Many Baudrillard critics quote these lines because of their distinct moral
stench. But Baudrillard's blithe idiocies ran throughout his work: "To jog
is not to run but to make one's body run. ... Jogging strives to exhaust
and destroy the body" (The Transparency of Evil). "The masses are no longer
social" (Fragments). "Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation" (Forget
Foucault).
Like a French Ann Coulter with stumpy legs and nicotine-ruined lungs, but
sans Coulter's gift for punchy images, Baudrillard stalked fame by making
outrageous declarations he knew to be false. In Fragments and other
collections of interviews, he brayed egotistically about his brilliance
while admitting he made up quotations in his scholarly work.
Authors of the Baudrillard obituaries, like the writers of encyclopedia
articles on him, found it easier to list subjects he'd written about
(Marxism, the "ecstasy of communication," symbolic exchange, seduction) or
the usual-suspects list of influences (Nietzsche, Mauss, Debord, Bataille)
than to articulate what he claimed about them.
As The Times of London politely put it, his writing was "not always clearly
understood," his "nihilism and hermetic language were unique, lending
themselves neither to codification nor to being organised into a coherent
doctrine." The Daily Telegraph less politely noted, "Critics complained
that his complexities amounted to pretentious gibberish and dismissed him
as a charlatan — or at best an ironic postmodern joke."
In fact, few could make heads or tails of Baudrillard's prose, typically a
hodgepodge of undefined abstractions. They could only regurgitate labels —
postmodernist, post-postmodernist, Situationist, post-Situationist —
because his sentences often didn't make sense. More than any other modern
French "master of thought," Baudrillard exemplified the calculated strain
in French academic culture that elevates a handful of thinkers in its
lucid, elegant language to superstardom precisely because they perform the
dance of opaqueness best.
All veteran humanities people know the reasons: Intentionally obscure
French philosophy is an established performance art; there's money to be
made, appointments to be secured, prestige to be garnered. Just as rich,
white American pop-music execs grasp that giving a tyro singer one name
automatically wins teenage fans, operators in the "master of thought" biz
know that positioning a properly hieratic obscurantist correctly can lead
scholarly publishers to issue any dreck the thinker produces and eventually
trigger secondary trots on the "masters" by the same acolytes driving the
whole process. Once a French thinker hits the mark, of course, no one dares
shut him or her up, or suggests such plebeian activities as editing or
rewriting.
Baudrillard, though, may be the screw-up who endangered the brand. His
published writings were so bad, and his publicity-hound manner so obvious,
that the image of incomprehensibility and clownishness attached itself to
the "respectful" profile drawn by his advocates and they couldn't rub it
off.
Physicists Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in their stinging book,
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (Picador
USA, 1998), devoted a whole chapter to Baudrillard. Quoting him at length,
the authors accused Baudrillard of making references to scientific terms
"with total disregard for their meaning," offering "unwarranted
philosophical claims," putting forward "no argument whatsoever" for the
idea that science arrives at hypotheses "contrary to its own logic,"
repeatedly producing sentences "devoid of meaning," and descending into "a
gradual crescendo of nonsense."
Even one of Baudrillard's shepherds in America, historian Mark Poster of
the University of California, Irvine, sounds like a man with an
embarrassing franchise in the second edition of his Jean Baudrillard:
Selected Writings (Polity, 2001). In his writings till the mid-80s, Poster
observes, Baudrillard "fails to define his major terms ... his writing
style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic
analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to
qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences,
television images, as if nothing else in society mattered. ... He ignores
contradictory evidence."
Imagine such comments on a submitted doctoral dissertation at an American
graduate school. And the scholarly world published every Baudrillard
hiccup?
Another French writer died two days earlier than the sainted postmodernist
master. Henri Troyat (né Lev Aslanovitch Tarrasov), the 95-year-old Russian
expatriate who won the Prix Goncourt at age 27 and produced 105 books,
finally ground to a halt.
No school of disingenuous acolytes will tend Troyat's flame. Troyat didn't
need any. Every sentence he wrote delivered clear information or judgment.
French departments don't teach graduate seminars in Troyat's work. Yet in
his biographies of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev,
Flaubert, Verlaine, Zola, Balzac, and more, the immigrant who came to
France at age 9 and religiously measured his sentences against Flaubert's
grappled more with issues that arise when imaginative intelligence
confronts the world than the "philosopher by vocation" ever did.
No one will read Jean Baudrillard in 50 years, once those who made money
off his antics fade. As in show business, so in academe. No fraud survives
his enablers. Troyat, by contrast, will endure as long as his subjects. The
same Le Figaro that tweaked Baudrillard opined of Troyat's death, "the
favorite writer of the French is dead."
If Baudrillard had pulled off the trick (accomplished by premodernist Art
Buchwald) of commenting on his own demise, would he have accused himself of
suicide, mirroring his repulsive suggestion that the twin towers and their
doomed inhabitants committed suicide in a reciprocal gesture to the 9/11
hijackers?
Not likely. That would have required the spirit of criticism, which he
lacked.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for
The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the
University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B9
Nice, eh?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Mar 21, 2007 9:19:50 AM
Some of it was interesting. These things don't matter, and Baudrillard deserves criticism as much as praise. Much of what he says in the Requiem for the Twin Towers is both true and ridiculous at the same time. Having worked in them (nevermind lived 'with them' and the rest, including their destruction), the talk about 'the horror of living in them' [the Towers] is truly definitely garbage, because it was not worse than many other office-work situations, and was in some ways actually better. So that really is one thing he just made up and spat out. When he talks about the 'wishing for it', it's an intuitive thing that either seems to resonate or doesn't. I did recall from 1988 being way up in them one time, in a temp agency in one of the towers, and thinking there was something in particular quite monstrous about these particular buildings, that were the very specific malignant anti-soulful thing that cut out certain kinds of free thinking, but I wasn't sure whether it didn't have as much to do with the receptionist as the buildings even then (both she and they seemed to be singularly opaque.)
It doesn't matter how someone got into a position like this, and it's even true what this guy says about the rarefied hothouse thing full of unfair favoritism going on: Those very unfair things sometimes release original things you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Those 'Cool Memories' books and things like 'Paroxysm' and 'Impossible Exchange' are all very idiosyncratic, but if you pick up on this, it can be very instructive on how to loosen up brain cells of your own--and that's one of the things Baudrillard is for.
As for predicting what people will read in 50 years, that's shit, because nobody ever knows--and this guy is also writing within a prescribed format in which he has to say a lot of things that could be criticized for the exact same things he is criticizing Baudrillard for, etc., etc.
But the main point is that it doesn't matter about these obituaries. A violent diatribe on Baudrillard's sloppiness is maybe offensive, but who cares? It can't extend itself, and it says much more about the work than the parallel ones for Derrida, which were a lot more disrespectful, but there, too, it was a reaction to the style, from which people can easily feel excluded.
Posted by: patrick j. mullins | Mar 21, 2007 12:33:29 PM
""""Quoting him at length,
the authors accused Baudrillard of making references to scientific terms
"with total disregard for their meaning," offering "unwarranted
philosophical claims," putting forward "no argument whatsoever" for the
idea that science arrives at hypotheses "contrary to its own logic,"
repeatedly producing sentences "devoid of meaning," and descending into "a
gradual crescendo of nonsense.""""
Bricmontism, however cogent and scientifically informed, means the pink-slipping not only of Baudrillard and postmod, but most likely humanities, theology and a great deal of "social sciences"---including the end of the grand pseudo-platonic dreams of one Numb Chimpsky. Are Lit. hepcats reddy for RN courses, neo-Darwinian determinism, or partical physics. Ich denke nicht. (that said, a Bricmont [and his pal Sokal) quite superior in force of intellect to a department full of Ivy league pissdykes)
Posted by: Nominalist | Mar 21, 2007 2:14:02 PM
The world as a complete illusion is the problem that faced all great cultures and they solved it thanks to art and symbolization. What we did invent in order to put up with this pain is a simulated real, a virtual universe cleansed of everything dangerous or negative and wich now override the real, to wich it is the final solution. Now, The Matrix is totally that! Everything that is related to dream, utopia, phantasm is present there, “realized”, a complete transparency. The Matrix is like a movie about the Matrix that could have produced the Matrix 1 ."
Posted by: BoredofLynch | Apr 1, 2007 1:56:34 AM
Baudrillad and Derrida ...both bear a common feature. Both denied the presence of any MASTER SIGNIFIER. Derrida's deconstruction suggests an endless free play of signification and Baudrillard's hyperreality suggest a perpetual continuation of signification of reality through the simulation. All are welcome to Share the ideas. Mail me : rizku_eng@yahoo.com
Posted by: rizwan | Nov 5, 2008 2:36:13 AM
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