Love Him or Loathe Him ... Here's Jean Baudrillard -
the Marmite Philosopher
(SA/2024)
I.
In response to my Boxing Day post - click here - an anonymous correspondent writes:
Even a plate of cold turkey leftovers is more digestible than the turgid (if for a time fashionable) nonsense that Baudrillard passed off as philosophy and which only pretentious idiots - such as yourself - continue to take seriously.
Sokal and Bricmont were spot-on to describe Baudrillard and those figures often associated with him - I won't designate them as thinkers - as intellectual imposters whose confusions, fantasies, and postmodern jargon for a time brought philosophy into disrepute and damaged the minds of generations of students.
As the above rightly conclude: 'When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.' [1]
If this email is anything to go by, it would seem that the Christmas spirit doesn't last long; one wonders what would remain of my correspondent's argument if the vitriolic veneer were stripped away.
II.
Of course, the above - aligning himself with the unfunny double act of Sokal & Bricmont - is not the first and won't be the last person to be triggered by Baudrillard, who is, we might concede, something of a Marmite philosopher; i.e., a divisive and polarising figure and thus something of an acquired taste.
Indeed, even those thinkers who emerged out of the same philosophical background - and with whom he is often categorised - often found his vision of contemporary culture as cynical and overly pessimistic; i.e., one that offered no critical solutions and seemed to render direct (political) action impossible.
He was, they said, merely a bleak fatalist trapped inside his own ideas and, according to Sylvère Lotringer, during the mid-late 1970s Deleuze quietly let it be known around Paris that he considered Baudrillard to be the shame of French intellectual life [2].
Despite this, here we are at the fag end of 2024 and I find that just as I prefer cool memories to cold turkey, so I'd sooner spend time reading Baudrillard than M. Deleuze; a philosopher whom everyone seems to love and have acquired a taste for these days (apart from my Sokal & Bricmont quoting correspondent of course).
Notes
[1] My correspondent is referring to the book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (Profile Books, 1998). The line quoted is the closing sentence of the chapter specifically written on Baudrillard (chapter 8). The book was first published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles (Editions Odile Jacob, 1997).
[2] See Sylvère Lotringer, 'On Jean Baudrillard', in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 6, Number 2 (July, 2009): click here.
Lotringer explains how the publication of Baudrillard's Forget Foucault (1977) not only anatgonised the subject of the essay, but Foucault's close friend Gilles Deleuze and that whilst the work made Baudrillard (in)famous on the one hand, it got him excommunicated from French intellectual circles on the other.
