Jean Baudrillard
One of the greatest thinkers of our time, Jean Baudrillard, has passed away in his home in Paris after a long illness. Baudrillard was a sociologist, philsopher and cultural critic. But more than that, he was a talented wordsmith who mapped the world of ideas with creative and probing phrases and expressions. He understood and […]
One of the greatest thinkers of our time, Jean Baudrillard, has passed away in his home in Paris after a long illness. Baudrillard was a sociologist, philsopher and cultural critic. But more than that, he was a talented wordsmith who mapped the world of ideas with creative and probing phrases and expressions. He understood and made clear that both the author and the philosopher’s shared calling was and has always been, the art of intellectual seduction.
I first encountered his books in the early 90s, and they helped me struggle past the simplistic representations of postmodernity that were being passed on at theological college. I found his books to be readable, reasoned and revealing. Over the time the congruencies between his concepts and my insights became clearer and clearer.
Whilst his most commonly quoted work is probably either Simulacra and Simulation or The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, for me the most frutiful read was and continues to be The Consumer Society. Whilst I am not as big a fan of that book as I once was, it still remains a powerful and telling account of the social forces at work in late captialism and globalisation.
I’ve already commented on Baudrillard’s work here on this blog (Baudrillard Was Right, Christian Syncretism and 9/11 And The So-Called Death Of Postmodernity). But, really that is a poor return on the debt I owe. So, over the next few weeks, I plan to blog through each chapter of the book Passwords, which was Baudrillard’s own attempt at unravelling the key themes in his writing.
[tags] Jean Baudrillard, Passwords [/tags]
