Jean Baudrillard

1929-2007 · French · Cultural Theory, Sociology, Philosophy of Media, Postmodern Theory, Political Philosophy

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Jean Baudrillard taught sociology at Nanterre through the upheavals of May 1968, trained first in German philology, and broke publicly with Marxism in the early 1970s — not because he abandoned politics, but because he decided Marx and capitalism shared the same deeper error: treating production, labor, and use as the bedrock of human reality. Against that, he set what he called symbolic exchange, the older order of the gift and counter-gift, of reversibility without equivalence, that modern systems repress.

Topics Jean Baudrillard addresses

• simulation and simulacra
• hyperreality
• symbolic exchange
• the precession of simulacra
• seduction
• reversibility
• the four orders of simulation
• sign value
• the system of objects
• the integral reality
• the perfect crime
• the ecstasy of communication
• fatal strategies
• the non-event
• the death of the real
• the critique of productivism
• the consumer society
• the code of differences
• the silent majorities
• the masses
• symbolic value vs exchange value
• the mirror of production
• use value as myth
• the terrorism of the code

Converse with Jean Baudrillard on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Jean Baudrillard's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.