Jean Baudrillard is dead

Jean Baudrillard is dead.

Horrible, terrible news. We were going to see him this summer.

I will write something about Baudrillard’s enormous influence on me, my thinking, and my life tomorrow. Perhaps I will be able to think more clearly then.

Tonight, I can only grieve. Tears keep falling, falling. I can’t process this at all. I am devastated.

Oh, Jean. Farewell, dear one.

“Contagion is not merely active within each system; it operates between systems.”

“Consider the recent release of an informational diskette on AIDS which was itself infected by a computer virus.”

“The real does no concede anything to the benefit of the imaginary: it concedes only to the benefit of the more real than real (the hyperreal) and to the more true than true. This is simulation. Presence is not effaced by a void, but by a redoubling of presence that effaces the opposition between presence and absence. Nor is a void effaced by fullness, but rather by repletion and saturation, by a plenitude greater than fullness.”

“For the problem, the only problem, is: where did Evil go? And the answer is: everywhere—because in a society which seeks—by prophylactic measures, by annihilating its own natural referents, by whitewashing violence, by exterminating all germs and all of the accursed share, by performing cosmetic surgery on the negative—to concern itself solely with quantified management and with the discourse of the Good, in a society where it is no longer possible to speak Evil, Evil has metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us.”

“If AIDS, terrorism, economic collapse and electronic viruses are concerns not just for the police, medicine, science and the experts, but for the entire collective imagination, this is because there is more to them than mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of the system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one. They are immanent phenomena which are all related to each other; they obey the same protocol of virulance and have contamination effects way beyond their actual impact.”

• Décès de Jean Baudrillard, pourfendeur de la société de consommation et des médias – Libération
• French thinker Baudrillard dies – BBC News
• Jean Baudrillard, 77, Critic and Theorist of Hyperreality, Dies – New York Times
• French philosopher and social theorist Jean Baudrillard dies – Canada.com

(Thank you, Joseph, for delivering this sad message).

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