Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol: Jean Baudrillard
(Reaktion Books, 2025)
'What I am, I don't know? I am the simulacrum of myself.'
I.
Unlike Michel Surya's 2002 biography of Bataille (608 pages), or Benoît Peeters' 2012 biography of Derrida (700 pages), this new paperback biography of Jean Baudrillard by Fantin and Nicol is very slim in size; just 184 pages (although it does come with 31 illustrations).
Once hailed as an historian of the future, many people now regard Baudrillard as yesterday's man; the only thing my friend said when I told her I wanted to buy the book was: Why?; the implication being that it no longer made sense to be interested in the life and work of the high priest of postmodernism in 2025.
Obviously, I beg to differ ... In fact, I would suggest that many aspects of his thinking have never been more relevant and that even though he has been dead for eighteen years he is still a far more vital figure than the majority of commentators and talking heads I see on TV (as Nietzsche said, some thinkers really only come into their own posthumously) [a].
II.
The book is the first biography of Baudrillard in English and whilst it obviously provides details of his life, it's not these that particularly interest me.
In fact, I'm happy for Baudrillard to remain enigmatic and elusive (two terms often applied to him, both as a thinker and as a man); to allow him the disappearance (or seductive departure) he desired. It was the fresh insights into his philosophy that I was promised by the publishers that persuaded me to hand over my £12.99.
Having said that, as we read through the book here, if there are any tasty titbits about his personal life or his journey from little-known French intellectual to famous cult figure on the global stage, I will of course share them (though without pretending that these biographical facts "capture the 'essence' of Baudrillard" [11]).
III.
The Introduction rightly picks up on the aesthetics and ethics of disappearing: In the years before he died, Baudrillard had increasingly been turning his thoughts to how he might best take his leave and become, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, imperceptible [b].
That was his goal; not to leave behind a great legacy, but to die at the right time and in the right way (a difficult and rare art, as Zarathustra says) [c].
Crucial to this is knowing how to disappear before you exhaust all possibilities and whilst you still have something to say. Fantin and Nichol suggest Andy Warhol achieved it, but for me it's David Bowie who comes first and foremost to mind [d]. And for Baudrillard, "this was more than just a matter of bowing out at the right time but one closely aligned to the key principles of his philosophy" [9].
IV.
The Introduction also rightly makes much of the fact that Baudrillard did not belong and liked to work at a distance (on the margins):
"He cared little about labels or categories [...] resisting being pinned down to any specific movement, group or academic discipline [...] He felt his 'trajectory' always 'passed through' disciplines that wished to adopt him as one of their own [...]" [11-12]
This, of course, is one of the main reasons I admire him; he has a radical detachment born of cynical indifference and a desire for independence (or a state of poetic grace) that I seek to emulate; to become an object that evades "the grasp of any system" [13] that attempts to limit (or contain).
And his fragmentary (destructive) model of writing (and provocation) is one that has shaped Torpedo the Ark:
"He wanted his writing [...] to be seductive and elusive; to read like thought-provoking fragments that gestured towards a secret whole system behind them [but which does not, in fact, exist]. He was not concerned that this meant he might not be fully understood or that his readers would be frustrated." [14]
Notes
[a] As Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol write in their Introduction to Jean Baudrillard (2025, p. 17):
"His ideas about virtuality, hyperreality, technology and sexuality, and his provocations about the end of things that defined the modern world - production, human agency, history - have only become more relevant in our age of globalization, data production, digital culture, automation and AI."
For Nietzsche's idea of posthumous individuals, see Ecce Homo, 'Why I Write Such Excellent Books' (1).
[b] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...' For D&G, becoming-imperceptible is the immanent end or cosmic formula of becoming; that which all other becomings move toward.
[c] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of Voluntary Death'. For Zarathustra, some die too early; many die too late. Dying at the right time is not easy.
[d] See the post 'On the Art of Death and Disappearance in the Case of David Bowie' (5 Feb 2026): click here.
