Bio: (1929-2007) French sociologist and philosopher. Jean Baudrillard studied the German language and literature at the Sorbonne. In the period from 1960 to 1966, he taught at various universities and translated from German into the French works of Marx, Engels, Brecht, and other authors. During the same period, Baudrillard switched to sociology and earned a doctorate in it. From 1966 to 1987, Baudrillard taught sociology at the University of Paris X Nanterre. In 1986, he transferred to the Institute for Socio-Economic Information Research (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique). Baudrillard was and remains one of the most famous intellectual figures in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy. Since the second half of the twentieth century, he has been well known to the general public as one of the main representatives of the postmodern and poststructural upheaval in France.

Baudrillard abandoned Marxist theory and celebrates postmodernity as a signal of a decisive break with modernity itself. In his early works The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), he criticizes Marxism from a structuralist and semiological perspective. He denies the crucial role that the “base” has in Marxism and the reduction of the superstructure to a mere reflection of material infrastructure. Modern society is increasingly structured with signs and symbols. All objects can be analyzed in the context of binary oppositions that reveal the rules and internal relationships that structure objects. Marxism overlooked that goods are a sign that gives individuals a cultural identity. The sign constitutes a special material reality that is used for prestige, status, and thus for social differentiation. In premodern (symbolic) societies, social relations are organized around symbolic exchanges at festivals, rites, and rituals that strengthen the social order. Here the sign had a purely reference function.

Industrial societies have a fixed and stable hierarchy of the sign that clearly distinguishes the real from the unreal, so the sign and reality are truly equivalent, and goods reflect social statuses. Culture is organized around a social world in which words, sounds, and images have a direct relationship with object and reality: code produces coherent meanings and provokes precisely defined answers.

With the emergence of postmodern culture, the sign and its code become autonomous, producing their own inner meanings without reference to objective reality. The reference value is destroyed and replaced with total relativity, combinations, and simulation, so that the signs are exchanged with other signs, rather than with the real things. The sign becomes liberated from the archaic obligation to mean something and finally becomes free, indifferent, and indefinite, in a structural and combinatorial game that overcomes the rule of a certain equivalence. In the new "semiurgical" society, the code functions as an organizational principle that creates new forms of communication and social order.

In his later works Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Fatal Strategies (1983), Baudrillard describes the social world as dominated by the media and the explosion of the image. In modernity, copies or models represented real objects or events, while in the postmodern era, that is, in the era of "simulacrum", copy or simulacrum produces reality, objects, and events. The performance of the representation is abandoned. Television and marketing are invading all the intimate processes of our social life, while reality collapses into hyperreality. "Dedifferentiation" means that there is no difference between news and entertainment, marketing and culture. Society consists of a large, phantasmagoric superstructure of signs and images with which the individual has neither an objective nor an alienated relationship.

Main works

Le Système des objets (1968);

La Société de consommation (1970);

Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe (1972);

Le Miroir de la production (1973);

L’Échange symbolique et la mort (1976a);

La Consommation des signes (1976b);

Oublier Foucault (1977);

À l'ombre des majorités silencieuses (1978);

Simulacres et simulation (1981);

Les Stratégies fatales (1983);

La Gauche divine (1985);

L’Autre par lui-même (1987);

Cool Memories:1980-1985 (1990);

La Transparence du mal (1990);

La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (1991);

L’Illusion de la fin ou la grève des événements (1992);

Figures de l'altérité (1994a);

La Pensée radicale (1994b);

Le Crime parfait (1995);

Cool Memories II: 1987-1990 (1996);

Amérique (1997);

 L’Échange impossible (1999);

Les Objets singuliers: architecture & philosophie (2000);

L’Esprit du terrorisme: Requiem pour les Twins Towers  (2002);

Pataphysique (2002);

Le Pacte de lucidité ou l'intelligence du mal (2004).

Works translated into English :

The System of Objects (2020, in French 1968);

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (2016, in French 1970);

For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (2019, in French 1972);

The Mirror of Production (1975, in French 1973);

Symbolic Exchange and Death (2016, in French 1976);

Forget Foucault (2007, in French 1977);

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, the End of the Social (1983, in French 1978);

Simulacra and Simulation (1983, in French 1981);

Fatal Strategies (1990, in French 1983);

The Ecstasy of Communication (2012, in French 1987);

Cool Memories:1980-1985 (1990, in French 1990);

The Illusion of the End (1994, in French 1992);

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (2012, in French 1991);

The Perfect Crime (2008, in French 1995);

Cool Memories II 1987-1990 (1996, in French 1996);

America (2010, in French 1997);

Impossible Exchange (2012, in French 1999);

The Singular Objects of Architecture (1992, in French 2000);

The Spirit of Terrorism (2013, in French 2002);

The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact (2013, in French 2004);

The Agony of Power (2010, in French 2010); 

Telemorphosis (2012, in French 2011).