Jean Baudrillard, 1929 - 2007.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, one of France's leading postmodernist thinkers and a fierce critic of consumer culture, died Tuesday in Paris at the age of 77, his relatives said.

The AFP.

[C]rucially, political economy is no longer the foundation, the social determinant, or even a structural "reality" in which other phenomena can be interpreted and explained. Instead people live in the "hyperreality" of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs replace the concepts of production and class conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Updated through 3/8.

There is a misunderstanding of course, that is the reason why I previously hesitated to talk about The Matrix.... What we have here is essentially the same misunderstanding as with the simulationist artists in New York in the 80s. These people take the hypothesis of the virtual as a fact and carry it over to visible fantasms. But the primary characteristic of this universe lies precisely in the inability to use categories of the real to speak about it.

Baudrillard in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, 2003.

See also: "Simulacra and Simulations."

Updates, 3/7: Julian Baggini sets off a string of comments at the Guardian; more from the London Times and Patricia Cohen in the New York Times. A Libération package (see the sidebar) and Christian Delacampagne in Le Monde.

Updates, 3/8: Arthur Kroker: "To read his thought was to enter directly into the complexity and indeterminacy of reality as a game of anamorphic perspective."

From Rhizome, Marisa Olson points to the resources at the European Graduate School.

Nick Rombes: "His prose always reminded me of the American Transcendentalists - especially Emerson and Margaret Fuller: aphoristic, contradictory, a process rather than a product. In addition to his enormously influential refinements of the idea of the simulacra, he also contributed greatly to the revival of the poetic qualities of theory. Here is what he wrote in The Perfect Crime: 'As for ideas, everyone has them. More than they need. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas.'"

Posted by dwhudson at March 6, 2007 11:49 AM