An Obit for a French Philosopher

Jean Baudrillard died this week. I saw his obituary today in The Economist and instantly recognized the name--not because I had read him, but rather because, as a graduate student, I had been introduced to thinkers whose starting point was his work. Usually, a particular scholar sets a standard and the rest of academia ends up responding to the standard. Most take aim, but all understand the debt they owe to the pioneer in their field. When I was doing Nationalism Studies at University of Edinburgh, everything seemed to be based upon Ernest Gellner. His theory of nationalism as a byproduct of the industrial revolution is surely overly macro, which makes it a target for everyone who wants to say, "Well, what about this?" Still, it's so intriguing and relevant that all scholars are forced to respond to it.

Baudrillard was one of those guys. I only ran into the name once or twice in my studies, but the author of one paper (I believe it was entitled "Sod Baudrillard") was filled with venom as he pointed out the backwardness and baseness of his theories even as he was admitting the overwhelming relevance of his work.

I found The Economist's obituary of Baudrillard's life particularly relevant to my thought process I blogged about this morning. You see, Baudrillard was a "philosopher of consumerism" and obsessed with cultural symbols. As such, he had an interesting relationship with America:

"In 1986 he got in a car and drove across the country, both hating and adoring it. He had never been so fully in a land of hyperreality, cluttered with meaningless symbols or, as in Disneyland, with garish synthetic versions of ordinary life. He looked for America, he worte, in 'motels and mineral surfaces...in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space. There he found himself, playing a French philosopher, roaring through 'the desert of the real'."