March 06, 2007
farewell to the desert of the real (1929-2007)
American newspapers, representing a certain polity in their fear of things French and intellectual, in the anxiety stored in the black boxes of "theory" and "communism" and so on, will race to reassure us that Jean Baudrillard, dead today in Paris, was first famous, second a fool, and third a philosophe. All true, alas.
He was also a critical and seminal contributor to our understanding of the late phase of a profoundly concrete commodity capitalism (under which one might find the somewhat-more-abstract categories "postmodernism" and "globalization"), most notably in The System of Objects and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and even in the perverse but importantly provocative Mirror of Production.
Perhaps one of the important social functions of French intellectuals, in this era of U.S decline, is to provide an opportune target for the ceaseless hysteria of democratic pragmatism in its struggle to avoid confronting its own systemic failure. We have little doubt that M. Baudrillard will fulfill this obligation with as much esprit as death can muster.
Posted by jane at March 6, 2007 03:47 PM | TrackBack