Jean Baudrillard RIP

“I don’t know how to ask this question, because it’s so multifaceted,” he said. “You’re Baudrillard, and you were able to fill a room. And what I want to know is: when someone dies, we read an obituary—like Derrida died last year, and is a great loss for all of us. What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you? I would like to know how old you are, if you’re married and if you have kids, and since you’ve spent a great deal of time writing a great many books, some of which I could not get through, is there something you want to say that can be summed up?”
“What I am, I don’t know,” Baudrillard said, with a Gallic twinkle in his eye. “I am the simulacrum of myself.”
The audience giggled.
“And how old are you?” the questioner persisted.
“Very young.”

Were you a friend of Susan Sontag?

We saw each other from time to time, but the last time, it was terrible. She came to a conference in Toronto and blasted me for having denied that reality exists.

hilarious nytmagazine interview from 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/magazine/20wwln_q4.html

i read most of Simulacra and Simulation over the weekend and and had a great time, on the whole. i haven't read anything else by him, but upon reading elsewhere a reference to "borges, beckett, ballard, and baudrillard" (the first 3 being some of my all time faves) i figured i should become at least somewhat familiar with his work.

some of the same tendencies that make his writing enjoyable to read (like max said above, His willingness to "go all the way," as it were, and say shit like "The real has been superceded by the Hyperreal" or "The Gulf War did not take place," no matter how "wrong" he might be.) can be infuriating, particularly when he doesn't bother to back them up with any sort of argument. for example, at one point he suggests that power doesn't really exist anymore (not in the "real", at least), which is a fascinating idea, but without any support it's just a joke.

but i love his ideas about simulacra and they gel well with the unreal malaise of life as many of us experience it. even just in the first few days after reading it i've found myself thinking about the concepts over and over, copies of copies, copies of false copies, losing track of what was real, and becoming more and more uncertain of who or what can authoritatively identify what was real in the first place, even as the memory/record of the original is fading fast or no longer exists. fox news, for example, created as a response to a perceived liberal bias, ended up creating something that really WAS completely biased and propagandist, in turn inspiring imitators.

anyway, i like him. based off of this thread i suppose i'll pick up America next.

been a long time, but i remember Forget Foucault being somewhat readable (and short).

an important newish translation from 2012:

http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/91

"The Precession of Simulacra" by Jean Baudrillard, Translated from English into American

...Have you ever heard of the Iconoclasts? They got off on destroying images of God. And at first you’re like, “Well, they didn’t want to pervert His Holiness by making Him depicted by some dude.” NOT TRUE. What the Iconoclasts really feared was that when these simulacra were put into the world, it wasn’t that they’d make God less cool, but they might actually suggest that there never was a God to begin with! Hear me now, motherfucker: there is no God. He’s like the biggest simulacrum ever. If Iconoclasts really believed that images of God made him into some form of visual witchery or made him gross to us, they wouldn’t have fucking cared at all. You see, even batshit crazy religious bros can live with a perverted idea of their Creator—what fucked them up hard was that the pictures of God didn’t actually mask anything or make anything gross. Because these weren’t pictures “of” something like the ones that you take with a camera. Pictures of God aren’t simulations, they’re simulacra. The difference is that a perfect simulacra hides the fact that there is no original to begin with. Does this make sense? Yeah it fucking does. So, they killed images of God because they were scared the images in the first place actually killed God by pointing out that He’s totes fake.

You read books and shit and people say that the Iconoclasts hated images. Naw, bitch. The Iconoclasts were the only people who fucking got the actual power of images. The Iconoclaters, the people who made the pictures, thought these were images of Bible shit so that illiterate masses could finally understand the stories. Those idiots didn’t realize that all making pictures did was show us that they weren’t pictures of shit. Oh, wait—what if the Iconoclaters were actually super fucking modern? You ever think of that? Like, because underneath these pictures of God or whatever, they’d already killed Him. Yeah, suck on that. I bet they were in on a big game where they knew they were killing Him, but were like, “This is tight. Nobody gets it and we’re the raddest.” This is the same thing the Mars Volta thinks every time that they put out a new record.