About Jean Baudrillard

Man, I am going to miss Jean Baudrillard. Among all the so-called postmodern theorists, he was the one. Although it's not too surprising many of the obits mention his controversial comments about 9-11 and the first Iraq War, I'll remember his writing for its absurdly difficult and playful style. He prose always reminded me of the American Transcendentalists--especially Emerson and Margaret Fuller: aphoristic, contradictory, a process rather than a product. In addition to his enormously influential refinements of the idea of the simulacra, he also contributed greatly to the revival of the poetic qualities of theory. Here is what he wrote in The Perfect Crime: "As for ideas, everyone has them. More than they need. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas."

I've had many an argument with colleagues of mine in Philosophy, who scoff at Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent, Derrida) because his ideas are not rigorous, stable, rational. I suspect this is true; to me, Baudrillard was always more of a writer (a poet even) than a philosopher. I mean writer in the sense of caring about the irrationally, confoundingly beautiful character of words and phrases. By taking familiar words (such as "epilepsy" in the following quote) and using them in unexpected ways he was able to guerrilla-attack readers and catch them off-guard just long enough to expose the hidden chambers of familiar ideas: "It's a good thing we ourselves do not live in real time! What would we be in 'real' time? We would be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. A torment equivalent to that of eternal daylight--a kind of epilepsy of presence, epilepsy of identity."

And while I know that in some circles Baudrillard was detested because his philosophy seemed to glory in a sort of surface of meaninglessness, there were parts of his writing that seemed to share with Christianity a suspicion of the meaning and ultimate reality of this material world. ("For now we see through a glass, darkly," we read in Corinthians.) In his later writings, there is an occasionally fierce, almost sermon-like suspicion of our obsession with so-called reality.

2005. My daughter was taking piano lessons in the Moore Music Building on the University of Michigan campus. I was probably sitting in the hallway lounge area, beside the large plate-glass window that overlooked a hill that gently sloped down to a pond. Students would occasionally come and stand beside the window for better cell phone reception. I could hear the different instruments, faintly, in each room down the hallway: a harp, a piano, a violin. I must have been reading Baudrillard, the book below, and grown bored. I doodled on the back page. I had forgotten about that day until now, when I went to my shelf to pull out this book to write these words about Jean Baudrillard.

Comments

[LeDaddySwing]

i still think america and cool memories are two of the absolute top books produced by the frenchies. deconstruction and post-structualism were swindles of obtuse writing that got american academics to spring for free suppers in college towns around the country. at least baudrilliard, as you say, wrote with flair and verve. he achieved something poetic in his writing, even if it was pure speculation and flash.

[Nick]

I love your comment about American academics springing for "free suppers in college towns across the country." But why not? Who else but the French Poststructuralists (and some American preachers) dared to speak the truth about the rotten-ness of things? It's worth the price of a fancy dinner to be told the truth.