Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Four)

Baudrillard's grave (Cimetière du Montparnasse)

Photo from Jean Baudrillard by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer 

have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Late period Baudrillard produced some great works; not least his collection of essays - or, rather, theory-fictions - on extreme phenomenona [a]: The Transparency of Evil (1990); which was book-length, but far from being a conventional academic text as "there was no progressive synthesis of ideas, no patiently developed overall thesis" [116] [b]. 

 

Obviously, the content interests and is of import, but it's the style of writing that matters most; the speed at which ideas appear and disappear that counts (Baudrillard liked to work quickly and without preparatory notes; editing was kept to a minimum and involved the removal of lines, but never the addition of new material.)  

 

 

II.

 

Sometimes, it's hard to keep up with Baudrillard. 

 

It's not just the breathless pace of his books, it's the fact that he constantly redescribes his own thinking using new terms. He "loved the fact that words had a life of their own" [117] and that re-labelling a concept "invigorated it by revealing it from a different vantage point" [117].

 

But this wasn't just something fanciful; "he also felt his vocabulary needed to be renewed" [119] in the face of a volatile world that was accelerating towards (and beyond) its own end point. 

 

Thus one possible answer to the question what are you doing after the orgy? is inventing a new language ... one in which the word evil plays a central role. 

 

For Baudrillard, evil "was neither moral category nor theological principle" [120], so should not be confused "with any religious understanding of this term" [120]. What he means by evil is something "that can radically contradict the operationalization of the world" [120] - something that perverts and seduces and shines through as a ghostly form (a trans-apparition).   

  

 

III. 

 

La vie domestique ...

 

Baudrillard and his wife Marine enjoyed "a contented life in Montparnasse" [126] and didn't see many people. 

 

Fantin and Nicol continue: 

 

"Baudrillard enjoyed playing table tennis. He would read, and go watch the sunset. At weekends, [he and Marine] would go on bike rides in the Forêt de Compiègne [...] where they had a small house. Although he tended to think and write at speed, he was given to moderation in most things, including drinking. He would watch TV [...] and listen to the radio, though not much." [126]   

 

 

IV. 

 

La vie politique ...

 

"It became something of a commonplace in the 1990s to accuse Baudrillard of lacking political commitment or, worse, being a reactionary. [c] [...] Baudrillard rejected the criticism, reasoning that it was founded upon an old-fashioned and in fact conservative understanding of the social. He remained scornful of the moral petitioning his intellectual contemporaries pretended was true political engagement." [128-129] 

 

 

V. 

 

Le crime parfait ...

 

Baudrillard's 1995 work, trans. into English by Chris Turner as The Perfect Crime (1996), is about the murder of reality and the attempts to cover it up by eliminating all signs of otherness and making everything appear the same (as normal): Nothing to see here, move along ...

 

Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this dastardly deed, "the extermination of the world is not undetectable" [130]; there are clues - signs of simulation and traces of imperfection - left at the scene of the crime and Baudrillard, like Sherlock Holmes, is a great detective. 

 

Speaking of crimes ... It's difficult to overlook Baudrillard's response to 9/11; an event which "from the perspective of social and political theory" [137] was as if made for him in heaven. For it illustrated perfectly his idea of a primitive (and terroristic) challenge to modernity in the form of a gift to which it cannot fully respond.   

 

Baudrillard's reading of 9/11 in terms of potlatch and his "apparent lack of empathy for the victims" [138] caused outrage and again brought a lot of abuse his way:

 

"Yet once again he brushed off the opprobrium, resolute in his determination not to compromise his writing by slipping into a sentimental or depressive intellectual position. In interviews he patiently acknowledged [...] that it would be 'idiotic' to praise murderous attacks. But he refused to back away from his conviction that there was nevertheless a symbolic meaning to the catastrophe, one that went way beyond any intention that the attackers may have had." [139] [d]

 

Ultimately, for Baudrillard, if it is to bring chance into play then an artwork, an event, or a crime must be a challenge to someone or something ...

 

 

VI. 

 

As well as a pataphysician and a situationist and a hundred other things, Baudrillard was a thanatologist; i.e., someone for whom death was an important trope in their thinking; someone who wishes to give death back its power and challenge.

 

After his own passing, in March 2007, Chris Kraus gave one of the most insightful descriptions of him as an artist-philosopher; that is to say, one who understands "' in a profound [...] way that one speaks always through masks and [the] elusions of personae that make up what's known as identity'" [143]. 

  

And I agree also with J. G. Ballard's assessment of him as "'the most important French thinker of the last twenty years'" [144]. Or, at any rate, the most amusing. 

 

I'm told by some that Baudrillard's work is now passé and that we can do without his irony and indifference in this new age of sincerity. But, actually, like everything that disappears, his ideas continue to "'lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence'" [150]. 

 

Or as Fantin and Nicol say, they are still active, "lingering like the disembodied grin of the Cheshire Cat" [151] and Baudrillard's ghost continues to haunt "conventional academic pretension" [151].    

 

His biographers close their book with this final assessment: 

 

"Baudrillard's unique and uncompromising critical life was dedicated to writing not as a means of resistance [...] but as a way to construct an alternative kind of world [...] It is this need to build something different, something singular, which explains his determination to remain outside intellectual movements or academic systems [...] His writing reminds those who read it that orthodoxy and power can always be countered by irony, seduction, art or surprise." [152-153]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] By extreme phenomena Baudrillard referred to things, events, situations, or individuals that pushed categories beyond the limit; pornography, for example, is an extreme phenomenon that forces sex outside the limits and collapses its meaning - just as terrorism does to violence. 

 

[b] Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol, Jean Baudrillard (Reaktion Books, 2025), p. 116. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.  

 

[c] Susan Sontag described Baudrillard as a political idiot and maybe "a moral idiot too". 

      See Evans Chan, 'Against Postmodernism, etcetera - A Conversation with Susan Sontag', in Postmodern Culture, Issue 901 (John Hopkins University Press, 2001): click here. 

      Fantin and Nicol quote from this interview in Jean Baudrillard, p. 129. 

 

[d] Similarly, the war porn produced by members of the US military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had terrible symbolic meaning beyond what the perpetrators intended; the images were obscene not just in the ordinary sense, but in a Baudrillardian sense too. 

      See Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2002) and the essay 'War Porn', which can be found in The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. Ames Hodges (Semiotext[e], 2005). 

 

 

To read part one of this post: click here. 

 

To read part two of this post: click here.

 

To read part three of this post: click here. 

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Three)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

 

I.

 

Baudrillard liked objects. And he liked gift giving. And, perhaps surprisingly, he liked that desert of the real that is the United States; the place where the future is always present. And in the mid-late '70s his fascination with America flourished. 

 

Fantin and Nicol note: "Baudrillard loved the United States, especially the empty apparently transient communities he visited while working in San Diego." [69] 

 

They continue: "As a 'primal scene', the United States was often a touchstone for Baudrillard's interpretation of contemporary reality, providing ready examples of what he was diagnosing." [70] 

 

He even wrote one of the great books on America: Amérique (1986) [a]; a kind of conceptual (and cinematic) travel guide to a hyperreal land where "things unfold as pure fiction [and] the question of being real or unreal was not relevant anymore" [103] [b]. 

 

It was an earlier work, however  - Oublier Foucault (1977) - which really put the cat among the Parisian pigeons ...

 

Forget Foucault essentially sealed Baudrillard's fate; "the book reinforced the impression of Baudrillard as outsider-within, and had profound and lasting implications for his career" [73]. 

 

Why? Because respected intellectuals, including Foucault himself, now regarded him as a snake in the grass. Deleuze and Guattari even described publication of the essay as "a shameful and irresponsible act" [73] and he was excommunicated from philosophical circles:

 

"Ten years after Forget Foucalt, in the late 1980s, Baudrillard confessed he still felt 'quarantined' as a result of the influence of Foucault allies in the university system and media." [73]

 

The irony is, the essay isn't actually as critically dismissive as the provocative title might suggest. Nevertheless, it was a challenge laid down to Foucault and "the intellectual establishment as a whole" [74]. Baudrillard was essentially exposing (and diverting) the logic of Foucault's system of thought; seducing it, as he would later say [c].       

 

 

II.  

 

One of the criticisms of Simulacra and Simulation is similar to a criticism often made of Torpedo the Ark: namely, that it is little more than "a collection or recollection of material (essays, articles, notes, lectures)" [82] previously written and that such self-recycling can make the project "seem like one vast, never-ending conversation or monologue" [82].    

 

That might, at some level, be true. But it also reflects the consistency of my preoccupations and beautiful obsessions. 

 

 

III.

 

Published in the same year as De la séduction, came another of Baudrillard's key texts: Les stratégies fatales (1983) [d] ...

 

Fatal strategies are strategies that "push the logic of a system as far as it could go, to force it to reckon with its own contradictions, or to implode" [90]. According to Baudrillard, objects are fond of such strategies in their battle with know-it-all subjects.

 

It was another book loved by the art crowd, particularly in the United States (so good on them). Though, perhaps predictably, Baudrillard would soon piss them off by declaring contemporary art was "staging its own disappearance by becoming a commodity" [94] and that those who regarded themselves as Simulationists had completely misunderstood his work. 

 

"Many New York artists who had acknowedged Baudrillard's influence considered this rejection a betrayal [...]" [94]. That's unfortunate, but Baudrillard didn't want a legion of loyal followers and wasn't trying to produce a manifesto of some kind.   

 

 

IV. 

 

1987: Baudrillard quits academia and his writing becomes post-theoretical; the five books in the Cool Memories series (written between 1980 and 2004 and published between 1987 and 2005) are "fragmentary, aphoristic, more poetic" [99] in style.  

 

For Baudrillard, writing in such a way was intended as an effront to the canonical form of the well-argued and formerly structured essay: "Each Cool Memories volume can be skimmed, or started on any page" [107] and each "is filled with often dissociated lines, notes, poetical snippets, dream narratives, desires, fantasies, speculations, bits of political commentary, passages of travel writing" [108].   

 

The secret of the world, like the devil, is, Baudrillard suggests, always in the detail ... 

 

 

V. 

 

It is during the 1980s that Baudrillard also began to take photography seriously; "an activity he practised enthusiastically and with considerable talent" [100], as demonstrated by the fact that his pictures are still exhibited all over the world [e]. 

 

Photography "complemented his theory, offering him another way to reflect - and reflect on - the society he explored in his books" [101]. 

 

As someone who also likes to take snaps - albeit on my i-Phone and not on a camera which makes them digital images rather than photographs in a true sense - I understand Baudrillard's passion for taking pictures and I would suggest that Torpedo the Ark be understood as an attempt to "capture the world through fragments and snapshots, rather than fully fledged logical analyses" [101]. 

 

Whether these fragments and snapshots also "provide enticing views" [101] into my own biography and personality is debatable (although, if so, let's hope these views are restricted and one retains a certain degree of mystery).   

 

 

VI.

 

Like all the best photos, Baudrillard's are "distinctive for what they do not include" [111]. He was "uninterested in capturing individuals, animals, events or dramatic or violent scenes - anything that would provide an 'aura' of personal feeling" [111]. 

 

Baudrillard wanted to allow objects to present themselves as objects in all their strangeness and for the world to think us.   

 

All his images are "defamiliarized because of the choice of perspective - an object often appears through a close-up or as a fragment of a wider view - or the peculiar effects of the light on colour" [111]. They are rarely titled. 

 

Of course, as Fantin and Nicol remind us, Baudrillard's relationship to the image is somewhat paradoxical and conflicted; he was torn "between an absolute captivation by images and an impulse to condemn the very idea of the image" [111] as something demonic; as something "at the heart of the problem of simulation in contemporary society" [112], contaminating the real and making the world ever more obscene. 

 

Nevertheless, perhaps it is the solitary photograph in all its stillness and silence wherein the saving power lies [f]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Translated into English by Chris Turner as America and published by Verso Books in 1988.

 

[b] Fantin and Nicol spend quite a bit of time discussing Baudrillard's America; see pp. 101-106. 

 

[c] For Baudrillard, seduction is an ironic and playful counterforce to production; where the latter brings things forth and gives them a value, the former is a process of diverting from that value and from identity. 

      See Baudrillard's brilliant text, De la séduction (1979); translated into English as Seduction by Brian Singer (St. Martin's Press, 1990). 

      With this book, Baudrillard finally becomes who he is; "casting off the established mode of academic writing" [77]. Feminist critiques of the concept - which Fantin and Nicol discuss and, ultimately, agree with, saying that seduction cannot be cleansed of misogyny - are, I think, misunderstandings.    

 

[d] The English version was published as Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchmann and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (Semiotext[e] / Pluto Press, 1990). 

 

[e] Baudrillard first took up photography, the authors of this biography inform us, "when the hosts of a conference in Japan [...] presented him with a miniature camera as a gift" [110]. Despite his success with the camera, Baudrillard never thought of himself as a photographer, but always just a "'maker of images' that were intended to make the world more unintelligible" [110].

      See Jean Baudrillard, Photographies (1985-1998), Christa Steinl and Peter Weibel (Hatje Kantz, 1999).  

 

[f] This is important: photographs must be seen individually in order to counter the Spectacle. When displayed as a collection of images in a gallery, they are "absorbed into the art sysem" [115] and have an aesthetic meaning imposed upon them. The role of the photographer - as an artist - is also brought to the fore and that's another problem.  

 

 

Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Two)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

Part three of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nichol (Part One)

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.  

 

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post can be read by clicking here.  

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

  

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 2: Sections VI - XII)

Cover of the paperback edition 

(Seagull Books, 2016)

  

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

VI.

 

The human subject - that product of power, knowledge, and history - with its free-willing moral agency, is also, says Baudrillard, disappearing today, but leaving "its ghost behind, its narcissistic double, more or less as the Cat left its grin hovering" [27].

 

Freed from an actual subject, this ectoplasmic remnant of subjectivity is to be found everywhere today (just like sexuality, freed from the biological reality of sex, is found everywhere but in bodies); enveloping and transforming everything; remaking the world in its own image, ensuring that there's no outside, no otherness, no objective world.  

 

Consciousness has been smashed to smithereens and dispersed into "all the interstices of reality" [28] producing a smart world of interconnected systems and artificial intelligence; a digital utopia. And in such a world, who needs human subjects in the old-fashioned sense? They have become superfluous and so may as well disappear ...

 

 

VII. 

 

But again the question will be raised: have there not been some positive disappearances? Certain diseases, for example, and other threats to human health and safety. 

 

Well, yes, that's true - although it should be remembered that things we thought had gone for good often come back with a vengeance; "we know", writes Baudrillard, "that everything repressed or eliminated [...] results in a malign, viral infiltration of the social and individual body" [30-31] sooner or later.  

 

Disappearance is never the end of the matter any more than appearance is the beginning of the matter: things come and go and eternally return and life itself is nothing other than this vital game of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance [g].

 

 

VIII. 

 

Moving on, Baudrillard brings the discussion around to the image, behind which, he says, something has always and already disappeared: "And that is the source of its fascination" [32]. 

 

In other words, it's not virtual reality that excites us - is anything more boring at last? - it's the fact that behind it lies a vital dimenson of existence, albeit one that is withdrawn and concealed. It's the real - or, more precisely, the disappearance of the real - that excites everyone. 

 

(Baudrillard often seems at pains to stress the total ambiguity of his own position on this issue, which throws up paradox after paradox and "cannot, in any way, be resolved" [32].) 

 

 

IX. 

 

The destiny of the image is to make the revolutionary move from the analogical to the digital. Baudrillard thinks of this as an irresistible process which leads to a world which "no longer has need of us, nor of our representation" [34]; for when "software wins out over the eye" [37] who needs the photographer?  

 

When the photograph is liberated "from both the negative and the real world" [34], this has consequences for objects too; who needs them to be present when they can now be digitally generated (and erased) by AI? 

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"The traditional photograph is an image produced by the world, which, thanks to the medium of film, still involves a dimension of representation. The digital image is an image that comes straight out of the screen ..." [ 37] [h] and lacks punctual exactitude. 

 

Again, for anyone who cares about the art of photography - "conceived as the convergence of the light from the object with the light from the gaze" [38] - this is not merely an advance in technology, it's a disaster; "the sophistication of the play of presence and absence, of appearance and disappearance" [38] is abolished with the arrival of the digital age. 

 

The world - "and our vision of the world" [39] - is changed forever. It seems you cannot liberate photography via digitalisation, only destroy it with violence inflicted upon the "sovereignty of images" [59], subjecting them to a single perspective.   

 

Now, non-photographers might shrug their shoulders and ask so what. But what is happening in the world of photography is "just one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields [...] The same destiny of digitalisation looms over the world of the mind and the whole range of thought" [39-40], so philosophers had better beware too!

 

 

X. 

 

When you replace the "entire symbolic articulation of language" [40] with an endless flow of information, then there are no silences or spaces suspended between illusion and reality in which to pause and think. 

 

Just as photography is about more than the proliferation and circulation of images, thinking is about more than word processing and fact checking - and the further we advance in the direction of digitalisation the further we shall be from "the secret - and the pleasure - of both" [43]. 

 

The brain is not a type of computer. And AI is not a form of thinking and knows nothing of the intelligence of evil [i]. 

 

 

XI. 

 

Should we save silence? 

 

Obviously, as someone who has argued that silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows should be central to the practice of occultism in an age of transparency - click here - I'm going to answer yes to this question. 

 

But I also think we should preserve the absence; i.e., the nothingness that lies at the heart of the world and which is "as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove" [j]. 

 

 

XII. 

  

However else we might describe Baudrillard's thinking on the triumph of the machine, it's certainly pessimistic. 

 

Human beings, he concludes, may now be free to "operate within an integral individuality, free from all history and subjective constraints" [62], but it comes at a price: "it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death" [62]. 

 

In other words, our immortality is achieved only via our own technological disappearance and our "inscription in the digital order (the mental diaspora of the networks)" [92]. 

 

Lawrence would agree: Heidegger would agree: Byung-Chul Han would agree: and I think, ultimately, I agree too (even though I like taking snaps on my i-Phone - many of which end up here on TTA).  

 

And who knows, perhaps if we push the process of digitalisation all the way to its outer limits something surprising will happen and all that has disappeared will reappear in brutal solidity once more (just as impressionism's escape into pure light and colour gave way to post-impressionism and the return of great lumpy bodies and landscapes that made one nostalgic for mud and substance [k]).    

 

Perhaps objects will rediscover their singularity and we'll rediscover our analogue duality on the other side of digital integrity; i.e., the most radical - most demonic - element of human being that is also the most necessary and from which we derive our antagonistic vitalism.  

 

For as Zarathustra said, "'man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him'" [l].  

 

  

Notes 

 

[g] Any Heideggerians reading this might be mumbling the word Unverborgenheit to themselves at this point and I suppose that Heidegger's concept might be borrowed (and adapted) in order to discuss the appearance (disclosure) and disappearance (concealment) of beings and worlds, although Baudrillard makes no such attempt to do so.

 

[h] Later in his text, Baudrillard will describe CGI as an ultimate form of violence committed against the image; one which "puts an end even to the imagining of the image" [45]. 

 

[i] For Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil is a dualistic principle of reversability which underlies the world operating outside of moral reason and challenges the integral reality (and hegemony) of the digital world. In other words, it's a force of instability and conflict that reveals the cracks and contradictions in a system which thinks itself whole and perfect. 

 

[j] Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue (Polity Press, 2007), pp. 134-35.

      This line is quoted by François L'Yvonnet in his Foreword to Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and he reminds readers that this is a reference to (and rejection of) Kant's idea that a bird would fly even faster and higher were it free of all resistance. For L'Yvonnet, nihilism isn't the affirmation of nothingness, but the forgetting (or negating) of nothingness in order to bring everything to full presence.  

 

[k] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 182-217. See pp. 197-199 in particular for Lawrence's analysis of impressionism and post-impressionism. 

 

[l] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330. The line comes from the section entitled 'The Convalescent', in Part 3 of Zarathustra.  

 

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Seagull Books (2009)

 

 

I. 

 

Every day, one reads of yet another plant or animal facing extinction, or of natural resources rapidly being depleted [a].

 

But extinction, of course, is a natural phenomenon; just as the exhaustion of reserves is a physical process, whereas disappearance - at least in the sense that Baudrillard uses the term with reference to human beings - is something very different.    

 

For Baudrillard, just as reality vanishes into the virtual, man disappears as a result of his own idealistic transformation of the world: 

 

"The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature's law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance." [b]   

 

II. 

 

Whilst our mode of disappearance may perhaps be an art, nevertheless the modern transformation of the world into something that can be unambiguously known, was accomplished via science and technology. 

 

It's one of those ironic things that just as we create a world of value and meaning for ourselves, a world over which we can exercise mastery with our minds and our machines, we set the stage for our own disappearance.   

 

"But doubtless we have to go back even further - as far as concepts and language. By representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualising them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality." [11]

 

Things - objects - do not like to be dragged into the light and subject to human analysis; it is their nature to withdraw into ontological darkness and thus retain a reality that always exceeds their relations to other objects (including us) [c].

 

The moment a thing is identified - "the moment representation and concepts take hold of it" [12] - that's the precise moment when it begins to lose its volcanic vitalism and begins its disappearance. 

 

Just as, on the other hand, the moment concepts or ideas (but also fantasies, dreams, and desires) achieve their realisation, the game is up and they begin to dissolve before your very eyes. That's why one should be careful of what one wishes for ...

 

 

III. 

 

One should also be careful not to achieve one's full potential. 

 

For despite what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his followers teach, "what is proper to human beings is not to realise all their possibilities" [15], but, rather, recognise their limitations, celebrate their imperfections, and hold on to those negative traits that we need to exist as mortals (only God doesn't cast a shadow). 

 

Self-actualisation - driven by "an impulse to go as far as possible" [19] in the expression of all one's power and potential  - may promise a type of immortality, but this extreme endeavour results ultimately in the "virtual disappearance of the human species" [19]. 

 

In other words, the dream of defeating death and becoming immortal results in a fate that is arguably worse than death. 

 

 

IV. 

      

Having said that, Baudrillard at this point makes a sort of U-turn and suggests we might, after all, conceive of disappearance differently: "as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire to no longer be there, which is not negative at all" [21]. 

 

In staging our own disappearance as a material art (beyond aesthetics), we might be able to "see what the world looks like in our absence [...] or to see, beyond the end, beyond the subject, beyond all meaning, beyond the horizon of disappearance, if there is still an occurrence of the world, an unprogrammed appearance of things" [21] [d].  

 

In other words, is it possible to see the world as it is and not as the real world (which is only ever a world of representation)?

 

It's an interesting question ... Perhaps one that only those artists who know how to "play on their disappearance, make use of it as a living form, exploit it by excess" [22] will find the answer to [e].

 

The trick, ultimately, is "to disappear before dying and instead of dying" [25]; not to artificially survive.

 

 

V. 

 

This is important: "nothing just vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces" [25] (my italics). 

 

Think of the Cheshire Cat, for example, "whose grin still hovers in the air after the rest of him has vanished" [25]. Or think of God - he's been dead for ages, but, his shadow, as Nietzsche says, will still be seen for thousands of years (and I wonder if mankind will ever have done with his judgement) [f].  

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"We may thus suppose that everything that disappears - institutions, values, prohibitions, ideologies, even ideas - continues to lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence, as was said of the ancient gods who, in the Christian era, assumed the form of demons. Everything that disappears seeps back into our lives in infinitesimal doses, often more dangerous than the visible authority that ruled over us." 

 

That's true: we are masters at internalising everything and allowing the invisible souls of the dear departed to find a home within us; the dead they do not die and, ultimately, nothing ever disappears.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently has over 47,000 species on their Red List of Threatened Species: click here. 

      The United Nations Environment Programme produced a 2024 report on the manner in which the global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, at an ever faster rate: click here.   

 

[b] Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, trans. Chris Turner, with images by Alain Willaume (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 9. Future page references to this book will be given in the post itself.  

      This text - one of the last that Baudrillard wrote before his death in March 2007 - was originally published in French as Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu? (L'Herne, 2007). 

      When I first read this little book fifteen years ago I wasn't sure I understood it. In fact, I'm not sure I correctly understand it even now, so readers are advised that the notes assembled here may give a mistaken interpretation of (or false gloss to) Baudrillard's thinking.   

 

[c] Graham Harman has discussed this at great length and in great detail in his work; see, for example, his 2018 book Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books). 

      I have discussed this book in a post dated 24 March 2018: click here. And for another post discussing Harman's philosophy, click here.  

 

[d] Later on, Baudrillard writes: "Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?" [52]. 

      One thinks of Rupert Birkin's dream of a post-human world of nothing but grass and the odd hare sitting up in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). 

 

[e] Baudrillard remains sceptical about the role that art will play. He writes:

      "Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance - not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice [...] It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it as disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and [...] continues in its trajectory in a vegetative state." [22]

      The same, of course, might be said of politics today.  

 

[f] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §108. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post (sections VI-XII) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

A Brief Note on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

 Charlie Kirk and the man accused of his murder Tyler Robinson

  

One of the great ironies of politics today - noted by Jean Baudrillard on more than one occasion in his writings [1] - is that whilst those on the paleoconservative right claim to be Christians and to represent moral values, it is actually those on the radical left who most faithfully (and fanatically) subscribe to the moral distinction good/evil (as opposed to the non-moralistic distinction good/bad) [2].  

 

And it's because of this that whilst the former tend to think their political opponents mistaken (and possibly a little naive, foolish, or crazy), the latter are prone to believe anyone who doesn't share their worldview must be a Nazi; i.e., irredeemably evil and thus not someone with whom one can reason or debate but, rather, someone who, like Charlie Kirk, must be killed (and deserves to die) [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See, for example, what Baudrillard writes in his essay 'A Conjuration of Imbeciles' (1997), which can be found in The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodes (Semiotext(e), 2005), pp. 30-35. 

      In brief, Baudrillard attempts to address the question of why it is "everything moral, orthodox and conformist, which was traditionally associated with the right, passed to the left?" (p. 30), whilst, on the other hand, all the political and intellectual vitality once associated with the latter has moved to the far right, allowing figures like Charlie Kirk (and his hero Donald Trump) to come to the fore and gain huge followings.

      Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 10 November 2016 in which I discuss this: click here.     

 

[2] Nietzsche famously analysed this crucial first step in what he terms the slave revolt in morals in the first essay of the Genealogy (1887).

      Unlike those strong natures confident enough to affirm themselves as good and who only feel the need to ascribe the term bad to others as a kind of afterthought, those who identify as marginalised or victimised in some manner and who seek revenge (or what they call social justice), define themselves as good only having first demonised others as evil and by cancelling all ideas that do not fit into their moral-ideological conception of the world. 

 

[3] We see this in some of the shameful videos uploaded to social media by those who think it acceptable to openly celebrate his murder.  

      Whilst we don't yet know the suspect's motivation for shooting Kirk, investigators say there's evidence to suggest he may have been politically radicalised online and sympathetic to Antifa, a far-left movement with members who are not opposed to violent direct action.

      This evidence includes inscriptions and symbols made on unfired shell casings, one of which had lyrics from the anti-fascist resistance song 'Bella Cioa' which honours Italian partisans who fought against Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War. 

      One is almost tempted to wonder whether Robinson - despite not being Jewish - saw himself as some kind of Basterd, i.e., a member of the fictional black ops commando unit led by Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglorious Basterds who were tasked with "doin' one thing, and one thing only - killin' Nazis". 

      (I'm quoting from page 19 of Tarantino's script to the film, which is available via scriptslug.com to down load as a pdf: click here.)   

 

Thoughts on The World Without Women and the Elimination of Otherness

The Dial Press (1971) [a]

I. 

 

I recently came across the above novel by the Italian writer Virgilio Martini (1903-1986); a work which, when originally published in Fascist Italy in 1936, was soon banned on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity.  

 

It tells the story of the last woman of childbearing age on earth, after a homosexual plot to exterminate the fairer sex with a deadly virus almost succeeds. 

 

I don't know if the author was genuinely plagued by fears of a gay planet, or if he just thought this would make an amusing piece of satirical science fiction, but, either way it's a curious work that even many ardent fans of the SF genre haven't read (or even heard of). 

 

However, one person who was familiar with Martini's novel was Jean Baudrillard, who references the work in Le crime parfait (1995) [b] ...

 

 

II. 

 

For Baudrillard, the perfect crime is the murder of reality and the vital illusion of the world. 

 

But Baudrillard is not simply interested in solving this crime (in finding clues, for example, that might reveal the identity of the perpetrator); he's a philosopher, not a private detective and, ultimately, he's more concerned with what happens after the event (i.e., on the other side of the crime) than in lamenting the disappearance of the Real. 

 

It's man's entrance into the era of the Virtual that really excites his interest; an era born of the liquidation of the Real (and the referential), but which is characterised by the extermination of the Other and all forms of otherness - including the feminine principle.   

 

Describing the novel's central idea as a terrifying allegory for what we ourselves are now experiencing, Baudrillard predicts that, as in Martini's novel, "no science will be able to protect us" [111] from the fate that awaits us: 

 

"Though, for the moment, this virus does not affect the biological reproduction of the species, it affects an even more fundamental function, that of the symbolic reproduction of the other, favouring, rather, a cloned, asexual reproduction of the species-less individual. For to be deprived of the other is to be deprived of sex, and to be deprived of sex is to be deprived of symbolic belonging to any species whatsoever." [112] 

 

It's this idea of "a world given over entirely to the selfsame" [112] that is truly terrifying. 

 

It might mark the end of alienation, but, whereas in the past many saw this as an ideal goal, today "we can see that alienation protected us from something worse: from the definitive loss of the other, from the expropriation of the other by the same" [112].

Why's that so dreadful? 

 

Well, because to be dispossessed of the other results in an irrevocable and fatal destabilisation of the self. 

 

Think of what happens, for example, when the lamb lies down with the wolf; Christians might believe that to neutralise predators will bring about a future of universal peace and safety, in which even natural adversaries live in harmony (see Isaiah 11:6-9), but Baudrillard recognises that this results only in a tragic destiny for both animals. 

 

And it's the same for us:

 

"The best strategy for bringing about someone's ruin is to eliminate everything which threatens him, thus causing him to lose all his defences, and it is this strategy we are applying to ourselves. By eliminating the other in all its forms (illness, death, negativity, violence, strangeness), not to mention racial and [sexual] differences, by eliminating all singularities in order to radiate total positivity, we are eliminating ourselves." [113] 

  

 

Notes

 

[a] This first English edition was translated by Emile Capouya; dustjacket by Paul Bacon. The original Italian edition of Martini's novel - Il mondo senza donne - was published in 1936.

 

[b] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Laying Off of Desire', in The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner  (Verso, 1996), pp. 111-114. Page references to this work will be given directly in the post.