French thinker Baudrillard dies
Baudrillard was a prolific writer, penning more than 50 works
French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died aged 77 at his home in Paris following a long illness.
Baudrillard, a leading post-modernist thinker, is perhaps best known for his concept of hyper-reality.
He argued that spectacle is crucial in creating our view of events – things do not happen if they are not seen.
He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a "dark fantasy".
Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.
He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today's world – an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.
Since little was changed politically in Iraq after the conflict, all the sound and fury signified little, he argued.
פרסם תגובה