Death of Baudrillard

[laika]

Le sociologue et philosophe Jean Baudrillard est mort, mardi 6 mars,

à Paris, à l'âge de 77 ans. (AFP)



http://www.lemonde.fr/



http://www.liberation.fr/</p>

</p>

Just thought I would pass along the news. [51]</p>

[pbt]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

<DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">Last great aphorist?</SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">Almost all of them are good. Smattering:</SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.?</SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them: the mindless luxury of a rich civilization?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;">?A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth -- either epileptic or dead.?</SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153); font-size: 12px;"></SPAN></DIV>

[Faust]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

That's sad. I've never read him, although I might read his writing on consumerism.

[PrinceOfCats]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



But can an author die one might ask...(one being Roland Barthes in this case)</p>

RIP Baudrillard, I didn't think much of his work but it's always sad when someone dies.
</p>

[laika]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

LOL, PrinceofCats, you made me think of Derrida (is my death possible?) which always makes me giggle (in a most inappropriate way, ahem), especially now that he has died . RIP indeed.

[PrinceOfCats]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



<p class="MsoNormal">Super-speedy translation of Liberation's (www.liberation.fr) obituary (Intellectual Impostures is a hoot, one of my lecturers banned me from quoting from it)</p><p class="MsoNormal">
Sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who died
Tuesday in Paris at the age of 77 following a long illness, held for 40 years a
critical view of the consumer society, of which he denounced the lack of
significance and prophesised the decline of.</p>

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<p class="MsoNormal">On the issue of May ?68, this internationally renowned
thinker, and photographer of well-known works, put forward a radical critique
of the media, bathed in dark humour and with a joyous pessimism which he
instilled into over 50 books.



Born 20 July 1929 in Reims, trained in German and translator of Brecht, close
to Guy Debord?s Situationists in the ?60s, Jean Baudrillard taught sociology
from 1966 onwards at the University of Nanterre.



"Regarding my degrees, I had no choice. In 1965, sociology was the only
discipline that remained open. From the start, I had to learn as I went along
that which I was supposed to teach to my students", he explained. In 1968
his first book on sociology appeared, "The system of objects",
followed in 1970 by "The consumer society".



Jean Baudrillard then distanced himself from Marxism and pursued his research
independently. "The masses" are no longer for him victims of the
social order, but its accomplices who further it, in this dying age of the
?trente glorieuses?.



A round face behind thick glasses, he derided the pretension of the established
left to try to change life and that of intellectuals to weigh in on political
decisions. His philosophy, based on the criticism of traditional scientific
thought, developed ideas based around simulation and seduction.



"Disinterested intellectual", for some, "undertaker of
utopia" for others, Baudrillard is an indefinable thinker, become hostile
to the left, capable of resurrecting the reactionary thinking of the
philosopher Joseph de Maistre in "The transparency of evil" (1990).



"One must live in cooperation with the system and in revolt against its
consequences. One must live with the idea that we have survived at the
worst", he argued.



His scathing style, creating aphorisms sometimes perfectly-crafted, became his
trade-mark. "That which I will write will have less and less chance of
being understood. But that, that?s my problem. I am caught in a logic of
defiance", he warned.



In 1986, a journey to the USA, from which he came back awed, inspired
"America", trick images philosophical tracts : "America is the
original version of modernity, we are the copy with subtitles"...
"America, it is Utopia created".



Evading the press which he strove to lay bare, he created in 2001 in the pages
of Libération several narratives entitled "Loft Story",
"laboratory of a conviviality of synthesis, of a sociability telegenically
changed".



But Baudrillard was interested in all the news and the attacks of 11 September
inspired him to write "Requiem for the Twins Towers" the next year.



Considered by turns a nihilist or a moralist, he has often been strongly
criticised. "In conclusion one can ask oneself what remains of the thought
of Baudrillard if one removes all of the veneer which covers it", wrote
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in ?Intellectual Impostures?.



Jean Baudrillard saw himself as in resistance. "Intellectual laxness, he
claimed, has become the Olympic sport of our times".</p>

[laika]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



Thank you for the translation. What do you study, if I may ask?</p>

I have been pretty much trained (I am ashamed to say) to disregard Baudrillard myself. I rather like his writing (although the aphorisms are almost comical to me), but I do find his system very reductive. (Faust, perhaps you will like it after all [:P].)</p>

The last line is rather good though. [8-|]</p>

[destroyed]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



that's terrible. what's worse is i thought he was already dead.</p>

i wrote my final thesis (undergrad) on baudrillard and warhol</p>

often formal study kills my enjoyment of a writer/philosopher/artist, but not so with baudrillard.</p>

RIP</p>

</p>

PS: </p>

</p>

this struck me as funny: "In conclusion one can ask oneself what remains of the thought
of Baudrillard if one removes all of the veneer which covers it"
</p>

this is the very topic of baudrillard's SEDUCTION. he might answer that under the veneer, there is nothing. and it is the void that attracts us.

</p>

[PrinceOfCats]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



^ I think Sokal and Bricmont would probably call that circular reasoning.</p>

Thank you for the translation. What do you study, if I may ask?

</p>

French... though, as you can probably tell, translation is certainly not my specialism...</p>



</p>

[pbt]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

Like the title of Julian Baggini's obit in the guardian, The Shadow of his former self.

[Fuuma]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



[quote user="pbt"]Like the title of Julian Baggini's obit in the guardian, The Shadow of his former self.[/quote]</P>


Another one bites the dust, meanwhile BHL keeps on breathing and talking and breathing and talking, too bad you can't choke on hot air....[6]</P>

[pbt]

Re: Death of Baudrillard



Ah yes, the simulacronym</P>


</P>

[justine]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

[quote user="Fuuma"]

Another one bites the dust, meanwhile BHL keeps on breathing and talking and breathing and talking, too bad you can't choke on hot air....[6]</P>[/quote]Is BHL studied anywhere? I am wondering.

[Fuuma]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

[quote user="justine"][quote user="Fuuma"]


Another one bites the dust, meanwhile BHL keeps on breathing and talking and breathing and talking, too bad you can't choke on hot air....[6]</P>


[/quote]Is BHL studied anywhere? I am wondering.
[/quote]</P>


He's "studied" on TV, in magazines and at l'Elysée, in other words he's more of a public figure than a philosopher, unless you really think Paris Match has an interest in philosophers (which would make you quite deluded...)</P>

[laika]

Re: Death of Baudrillard

Alright, I am starting to feel rather dumb--who is BHL? [*-)]