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.
