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. 

 

 

The Slop-ification of Literature: One Night at the UnHerd Club

Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West, 

and Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the UnHerd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely and without fear of retribution'. 

 

In other words, it's a members' club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.

 

My friend cynically described it as:  

 

A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.     

 

Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).  

 

II. 

 

Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers: 

 

(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.

 

(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who has worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.      

 

(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

III. 

Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.  

 

This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.  

 

And, err, that was really about it ...

 

It's not that I don't - as a Lawrentian - in part agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.  

 

And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs. 

 

Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection. 

 

It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network. 

 

 

IV.

 

What the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing. 

 

For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the greater danger lies. 

 

To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen, is to entirely fail to understand that the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism. 

 

I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333. 

      See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one, or here for part two.    

 

[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here. Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a new Baudrillard biography published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post. 

      I think a good book to start with by Baudrillard might be The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), described by Fantin and Nicol as "one of Baudrillard's most prophetic texts, valuable even now, more than thirty years after its publication, as a key to understanding our 'permanently online, permanently connected world'" (Jean Baudrillard, 2025, p. 96); a world where the screen has replaced the mirror and each individual exists in their own kind of bubble, like an astronaut inside their spacesuit.    

 

 

This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave. 

 

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. 

  

 

Welcome to a New Kind Of Tension: Brief Thoughts on Civilisational Erasure and the Great Replacement

Donald Trump and Wajahat Ali

 

 

I. 

 

President Donald Trump's administration has warned in a new report that, due to falling birthrates and mass (largely uncontrolled) migration from the Third World, Europe faces civilisational erasure ... [1]

 

It's a catchy phrase, but is this stark warning something that European leaders should take seriously? 

 

Most don't seem to think so - even if the native peoples of Europe are increasingly concerned with issues around changing demographics and cultural identity (thus the emergence of populist parties such as the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK).        

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, these remarks from the Trump administration are echoed (and inadvertently lent weight) by those of Wajahat Ali, an American Muslim commentator and provocateur. 

 

Speaking on The Left Hook - his Substack, which he describes as "a thoroughly opinionated and biased intellectual playground for people who enjoy political, cultural, and religious hot takes without corporate censorship and nonsense centrism" [2] - Ali had this to say to his white viewers: 

 

"You have lost. You lost. The mistake that you made is, you let us in in the first place. 

      

See, that's the thing with brown people - and I'm going to say this as a brown person - there's a lot of us. Like a lot. There's like 1.2 billion in India. There's more than 200 million in Pakistan, there's like 170 million in Bangladesh. Those are just the people there. I'm not even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants. There's a bunch of us and we breed. We're a breeding people. 

 

And the problem is you let us in [...] and once you let one of us in, you know what happens with brown folks? Our grandmother comes, our grandfather comes, our uncle comes, our aunt comes, our cousin comes, our second cousin comes, our third cousin comes, then we have kids, a bunch of kids [...] 

 

So, we're embedded. We are everywhere." [3]

 

 

III. 

 

Obviously, this is designed to be inflammatory - cheap rage bait, as Matt Walsh describes it. And one assumes it's also intended to be satirical; mocking the kind of rhetoric (and hate speech) used by those on the racist far-right whom Ali despises.   

 

The problem, however, is it's also accurate; there are a lot of brown-skinned people in the world and they do tend to have larger families than white westerners. And they are, as Ali says, embedded within European and American society in a way that they weren't fifty years ago. 

 

Thus, as I indicate above, Ali's short video gives credence to narratives concerning the Great Replacement [4] and civilisational erasure spun by white nationalists. In other words, the satire not only fails to be recognised as humour, but it backfires on the satirist and works in favour of the lampooned group by promoting their ideas to a wider audience whilst reinforcing them among their existing followers.   

 

It thus appears that Ali has never heard of Poe's Law, which informs us that without a clear indicator of the author's intent it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that someone somewhere won't mistake it for a sincere expression of those views [5]. 

     

 

Note 

 

[1] See the article by Brandon Livesay discussing the report on the BBC News website (5 Dec 2025): click here.  

 

[2] Wajahat Ali, writing on the About page of his Substack 'The Left Hook': click here.  

 

[3] The full rant (just under a minute-and-a-half in length), from which I've extracted these lines, can be found on Rumble: click here. 

 

[4] Replacement theory has its origins in the work of French author Renaud Camus, who argues that - with the complicity of governments and global elites - the native populations of Europe are being replaced by non-white peoples, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. 

      Although such claims have repeatedly been dismissed by scholars and those in the mainstream media, the idea of a Great Replacement continues to circulate in both European and American far-right circles. Readers who wish to know more, may like to begin with Camus's Le Grand Remplacement (2011). An English edition, translated by the author, was published in 2024 as The Great Replacement: Introduction to Global Replacism. 

 

[5] Poe's Law was named after Nathan Poe who came up with the idea in 2005, or rather nicely summarised what others had already noted about the need to explicitly indicate sarcasm, irony, or parody when writing online or texting on social media; that winking smiley is crucial if you don't want an attempt at trolling to be taken seriously.   

 

Sacred Lovers: On Colette Peignot and Her Bad Romance With Georges Bataille

Colette Peignot (aka Laure) and Georges Bataille
 

No one has ever seemed to me as uncompromising and pure as she, 

or more decidedly sovereign, and yet everything in her was devoted to darkness. 

                                                                                                  - Georges Bataille

  

 

I. 

 

Colette Peignot was a French writer and poet, perhaps better known by the pseudonym Laure, who - thanks to ill-health, the death of her father in the First World War, and knowledge of the sexual abuse of her sister by a Catholic clergyman [1] - endured what might be described as a challenging childhood. 

 

Out of such circumstances, however, a rebellious and free-spirited young woman emerged and, during her early 20s, she began to frequent the company of communists and surrealists and enter into tumultuous love affairs with older men who had a taste for cruelty. 

 

Once, in 1927, after discovering she was pregnant and feeling exhausted following a flare up of her tuberculosis, Peignot shot herself in the chest; like Vincent Van Gogh. Unlike the unfortunate painter, however, she survived - the bullet having been deflected by a rib away from her heart - and went on to make a full recovery. 

 

The following year, she met the German poet, physician, and pervert Eduard Trautner - a central figure in the Expressionist and New Objectivist movements - and moved to Berlin to be with him. 

 

After a few months, however, the intensity of the relationship proved too great - Trautner would regularly beat her and obliged her to wear a dog collar - so Peignot fled Germany and sought refuge in the Soviet Union, living in Leningrad, Moscow and the Black Sea resort of Sochi, before retuning to Paris penniless and in poor health once more.   

 

Figuring that she was probably never going to be rich or in good health - and not wanting a boring and bourgeois existence - she decided to throw herself into a life of dissolution, spending the last of her inheritence and pushing experience to the limit: it was thus almost inevitable that she would, sooner or later, become involved with Georges Bataille and serve as a living embodiment of one of his fictional heroines [2].

 

 

II.

 

During the summer of 1935, Laure and Bataille moved in together, having first briefly encountered one another four years earlier and become lovers in the summer of 1934. Thus began their mad affair, which combined debauchery with high culture in the company of artistic and intellectual friends. 

 

He was undoubtedly attracted by her intensity and instability and the fact that she had such contempt "for anything devout or conformist" [3]. But he also sensed that they were extremely sympathisch. Not surprisingly, therefore, Laure soon found herself at the center of Bataille's secret society or post-Nietzschean religion - Acéphale - members of whom (almost exclusively male) met in the woods and discussed human sacrifice.    

 

In a fascinating passage, Michel Surya argues that what distinguished them as a couple is that their love had nothing romantic or transformative about it: 

 

"Nothing that puts love above everything and gives it meaning and salvation [...] no unity [...], nothing of the marvellous [...], no devotion of any kind. One might even go so far as to say that happiness was ruled out of Bataille's concerns with this love (happiness was too weak a concept ever to have interested him). On the contrary, he exacerbated both their wounds, even when they came at the highest cost. In fact this love resembles a twin descent into the depths; anguish is its key." [4]   

 

Surya concludes: 

 

"Colette Peignot's courage lay in responding to all this [...] the only one unafraid of what Bataille was blindly setting in motion. [...] The only difference was that everything in her led her to seek heaven, even in hell [...], while for him everything led him to make even heaven into a hell." [5].  

 

Given this crucial difference, things were never going to end well ... and Laure confessed to Bataille before her death in 1938, aged 35, that although she had loved him and thought him a kind of god, she hated their life together, which, to be fair, can't have been a barrel of laughs [6]. 

 

Ultimately, I suppose it might be asked whether Laure was destined to die young (having lived fast): 

 

"Could another way of life - less harsh and less debauched - have saved her? How much longer would she have lived had she been 'sensible'?" [7] 

 

Probably a bit longer: but not much; her tuberculosis was already far too advanced in 1935 for any treatment to save her. 

 

And besides, some only come into their lives posthumously ...     

 

 

III. 

 

After her death, two volumes of Peignot's work were published, hors commerce, under the name Laure, edited by Bataille and Michel Leiris: 

  

Le Sacré (1939), is an assemblage of poems and fragments exploring themes of mysticism, eroticism, and revolution. 

 

It was published only a few weeks after the author's death, against the wishes of her family, and distributed furtively to a selected (and limited) group of readers. It has been argued by one commentator that Bataille "effectively sanctifies Laure" [8] as the martyed figurehead of what Blanchot calls an unavowable community (i.e., one based on otherness and difference, rather than sameness and shared identity).   

 

Histoire d'une petite fille (1943), meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical text dealing with the traumas of childhood and how the narrator rebels against her middle-class Cathlolic background, rejecting social and moral convention so as to shape life in accordance with her own dreams. 

 

As with the first book, the print run was extremely limited - just thirty-three copies of the fifty-five page book were produced - and copies were intended only for the personal use of the recipient [9].       

 

  

Notes

 

[1] When Colette confronted her mother with the facts about this abuse, she not only refused to believe them, but accused her younger daughter of having a perverted imagination. That seems terribly unjust, but, as Mark Polizzotti remarks: "She wasn't entirely wrong, for while the incident cemented Laure's hatred of organised religion and its manifold hypocrisies, it also made her believe in an unbreakable link between the holy and the erotic." 

      See Polizzotti's review of Laure's Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (1995), titled 'Dirty's Story', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 23 (November 1996): click here.    

 

[2] It is often claimed that Peignot was the inspiration for the character Dirty in Bataille's novel Le bleu du ciel (written when he was involved with her in 1935, but not published until 1957, with the first English translation following in 1978). 

      However, as Michel Surya points out, this is  doubtful as the character of Dirty was conceived long before Bataille met Colette Peignot; see p. 216 of the work cited below.  

 

[3] Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzystof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (Verso, 2002), p. 165. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 201.  

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] Bataille later expressed his feelings about their relationship in the essay Le coupable (1944), describing Laure as a unique spirit inextricably linked to his own life and work; a woman who oscillated between extreme audacity and dreadful anguish, looking for love whilst courting death and disaster. 

 

[7]  Michel Surya, Georges Bataille ... p. 257. 

 

[8] See Milo Sweedler, 'From the sacred conspiracy to the unavowable community: Bataille, Blanchot and Laure's Le sacré', in French Studies, Volume 59, Number 3 (Liverpool University Press, July 2005), pp. 338-350.  

 

[9] Fortunately for us, a complete edition of Peignot's writings, ed. Marianne Berissi and Anne Roche, was published by Éditions les Cahiers in 2019: click here for details. English readers without knowledge of French, however, will have to make do with Laure: The Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (City Lights Publishers, 1991). 

 

 

Never Ever Say Hey Ho! Off We Go: Why I'm Sceptical of the Work Ethic

       

linkedin.com 

 

 

I've expressed my contempt for those professional network hippies and Silicon Valley fascists at LinkedIn before on Torpedo the Ark - click here - but their Open to Work feature launched in 2020 (which has only just come to my attention) really takes the biscuit ...

 

Designed to let recruiters and potential employers know that you are available for new job opportunities - the feature works by securing a green-coloured slave collar round your profile picture - they may as well have asked members to hold up a cardboard sign with the words willing to work scrawled on it!

 

The primary issue, then, is that the feature makes a job seeker appear desperate: even some career experts agree with this and suggest it may warn off some employers - those who prefer to discreetly headhunt talented candidates, for example - whilst leading others to make derisory salalry offers [1].     

 

But the deeper issue, for me at least, has to do with the philosophy behind such a feature; for it echoes, does it not, those terrible words written on the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit macht frei ...

 

 

II.  

 

This infamous slogan originated from a popular 19th century novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, the title of which - Die Wahrheit macht frei (1873) - refers to the phrase used by Jesus: 'And the truth shall set you free' (John 8:32). However, the book reimagines this as 'work makes free' and that's what really struck a chord with the Nazis and other advocates of an ultra-strong work ethic. 

 

Following their coming to power in 1933, the Nazis first utilised it in programmes designed to combat mass unemployment in Germany. But it is now forever associated in the cultural imagination with the concentration camps and forced labour carried out in the most atrocious conditions imaginable; the only freedom being death.      

 

Interestingly, the Nazis seemed to have used the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz neither with the intention to mock the inmates nor provide them with false hope. It was employed, rather, in the sincere belief that endless labour and self-sacrifice does result in a form of spiritual freedom. 

 

In other words, it illustrates their idealism, not their cynicism; just as 'Open to Work' doubtless illustrates the good intentions of the good people at LinkedIn and is not an attempt to humiliate and make members look needy.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For a discussion of whether you should (or should not) use LinkedIn's 'Open to Work' feature, see Elizabeth Perarson's article in Forbes (Sept 2024): click here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Bow Wow Wow, 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)', (EMI, 1981): click here for the extended 12" remix. This track, with lyrics written by Malcolm McLaren, is an amusing rejection of the work ethic. The sleeve, designed by Jamie Reid, also makes clear of how such an ethic can become malignant and fall into the black hole of fascism: 

 

 

 

Reflections on a Punk Jesus

Fig. 1: Jesus: Punk or Cunt?  

 

 

I.

 

We all know, thanks to the Ramones, that Jackie is a punk (and Judy is a runt), but Jesus ... can the Nazarene really be conceived as such? 

 

After all, Johnny Rotten campily affirms a cod-Nietzschean position vis-à-vis the Son of God in the opening line of the Sex Pistols' debut single: I am an anti-Christ [1]. 

 

And in case there should still be some doubt regarding this matter, the infamous Destroy shirt designed by McLaren and Westwood for Seditionaries, features (along with a swastika) an inverted crucifix [2] - could that be any more sacrilegious, as Chandler Bing might say.   

 

Despite this, however, there's recently been talk in certain punk circles around the need to enthuse the diverse global subculture that has emerged from what was once simply a sound and a look born of 430 King's Road with a form of Christian spirituality (or faith) [3] - and I for one don't like it! 

 

For as my friends in Cradle of Filth once succinctly put it, Jesus is a cunt [4].  

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, even Nietzsche recognised Christ as someone in revolt against social hierarchy, writing: 

 

"This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners' [...] to oppose the ruling order [...] was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society." [5]

 

So perhaps the idea of a punk Jesus is not so absurd as it seems at first (whilst remaining profoundly problematic). 

 

Or perhaps we might instead understand punk as merely another unfolding of the slave revolt in morality [6]; the marginalised, the disprivileged, and the talentless - driven by ressentiment - attempting to invert the value system of the music business and overthrow the pop elite: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones ... [7] 

 

 

Fig. 2: Johnny Rotten: Anti-Christ / Photo by Barry Plummer (1976)   

Fig. 3: Destroy shirt by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (1977)  

  

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI Records, 1976). The track also features on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play and watch the official video on YouTube. 

      As one critic writes, the opening line of this song has become one of the most famous in rock history: "As a simple declaration, these words possess an immediate shock value familiar in the themes of transgression and iconoclasm that helped define rock and roll." 

      See Benjamin Court, 'The Christ-like Antichrists: Messianism in Sex Pistols', in Popular Music and Society, Volume 38, Issue 4 (2015), pp. 416-431.

 

[2] The figure of Christ on the Cross was adapted by McLaren from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). 

 

[3] In November 2019, for example, Francis Stewart and Mike Dines of the Punk Scholars Network, organised a two-day in person and online symposium on the theme of 'Punk and the Sacred': click here for details. 

      The peer-reviewed academic journal Punk & Post-Punk (ed. Russ Bestley) has also published several articles on punk spirituality; see, for example, Ibrahim Abraham's 'Postsecular punk: Evangelical Christianity and the overlapping consensus of the underground', in Volume 4, Issue 1, of the above (Mar 2015), pp. 91-105, which argues that "the negotiated inclusion of religiously diverse social actors in punk scenes can inform ongoing debates about diversity and inclusion ..." Abraham also edited Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020).

      This attempt to give punk a religious gloss doesn't always involve a Christian makeover, however; there have also been attempts to blend punk with Buddhist and Hindu practices and beliefs, for example. If not exactly hostile, let's just say - as an anti-theist [click here] - I'm suspicious of this creeping religiosity; I don't want punk philosophy and art to be corrupted by theologenblut.

 

[4] This line was written on the back of the Vestal Masturbation T-shirt; a controversial item of Cradle of Filth band merchandise, originally printed and distributed in 1993 (the front of the shirt features an image of a masturbating, semi-naked nun). As with several of the early McLaren-Westwood shirt designs, it garnered much controversy and resulted in some fans being arrested for wearing it. 

 

[5] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), § 27, p. 150.

 

[6] See sections 10-12 of the first essay in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

      It's important to note that this slave revolt is not merely a politics of class war and revenge; it also, crucially, introduces into history the idea of a free-willing human subject (the modern individual) whose existence is conceived in moralistic terms (i.e., as good or evil). Thus, Nietzsche does not simply condemn the triumph of this revolt nor seek to reverse it: "Such an exercise, even if desirable, would be pointless because slave morality has become an essential part of what we are." 

      See Keith Ansell-Pearson, editor's introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xv.

 

[7] Lyrics from '1977', by The Clash; B-side to 'White Riot', their debut single (CBS Records, 1977).