50 Facts About Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies.

Jean Baudrillard is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality.

Jean Baudrillard's work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.

Nevertheless, Jean Baudrillard had opposed, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929.

Jean Baudrillard's grandparents were farm workers and his father a gendarme.

Jean Baudrillard became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne.

In 1970, Jean Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the United States, and in 1973, the first of several trips to Kyoto, Japan.

Jean Baudrillard was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer.

Jean Baudrillard nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the College de 'Pataphysique.

Jean Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology review CTheory, where he was abundantly cited.

Jean Baudrillard purportedly participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies from its inception in 2004 until his death.

In 2004, Jean Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Jean Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Jean Baudrillard enjoyed baroque music; a favorite composer was Claudio Monteverdi.

Jean Baudrillard did his writing using "his old typewriter, never at the computer".

Jean Baudrillard has stated that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", and with a typewriter he has a "physical relation to writing".

In 1970, while working as a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, 41-year-old Jean Baudrillard met 25-year-old Marine Dupuis, who had just come back from a sailing trip around the world with her then-boyfriend.

Jean Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together.

From this starting point Jean Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality.

In contrast to Post-structuralism, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Jean Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion.

Jean Baudrillard argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality".

Jean Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value".

Jean Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply.

Jean Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate.

Jean Baudrillard stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side.

Jean Baudrillard wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value.

Later, Jean Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally.

In so doing, Jean Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood version of structural semiology.

Jean Baudrillard denies any possibility of a duplication of reality; reality mediated through language becomes a game of signs.

Simulation, Jean Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality.

Jean Baudrillard argues that this is part of a historical progression.

Jean Baudrillard argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress,.

Jean Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion used in world politics as an excuse for actions.

Jean Baudrillard reacted to the West's indifference to the Bosnian War in writings, mostly in essays in his column for Liberation.

Jean Baudrillard was determined in his columns to openly name the perpetrators, Serbs, and call their actions in Bosnia aggression and genocide.

Jean Baudrillard heavily criticized Susan Sontag for directing a production of Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo during the siege.

Jean Baudrillard's power was not weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991 internal uprisings that followed afterwards.

Consequently, Jean Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism, and Berkelian subjective idealism.

Merrin argued that Jean Baudrillard was not denying that something had happened, but merely questioning whether that something was in fact war or a bilateral "atrocity masquerading as a war".

The essay culminates in Jean Baudrillard regarding the US-led Gulf War as a "non-event", or an "event that did not happen".

Merrin argued that Jean Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority.

Jean Baudrillard decried the "cynicism" with which contemporary businesses openly state their business models.

Jean Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms.

Jean Baudrillard fails to define key terms, such as the code; 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.

Jean Baudrillard writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base.

Jean Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe, plan a course of action, carry out the action, and finally fulfill my goal by arriving at the point in question.

Mark Fisher pointed out that Jean Baudrillard "is condemned, sometimes lionised, as the melancholic observer of a departed reality", asserting that Jean Baudrillard "was certainly melancholic".

David Macey saw "extraordinary arrogance" in Jean Baudrillard's take on Foucault.

The Wachowskis said that Jean Baudrillard influenced The Matrix, and Neo hides money and disks containing information in Simulacra and Simulation.

Adam Gopnik wondered whether Jean Baudrillard, who had not embraced the movie, was "thinking of suing for a screen credit," but Jean Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection to The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.