Jean Baudrillard is dead

This blog is turning into an obituary column. Interesting.

Anyway,  Jean Baudrillard, the French explorer of hyper-reality, died yesterday (Tuesday March 6th, 2007), in Paris, France, aged 77. He'd been ill for ages.

Jean Baudrillard, like many Frenchmen, was a poet pretending to be a scientist.

There are two main theories of Baudrillard:

One is that he was a great and original thinker who described the modern world as it really is.

The other is that he was a tremendous French bullshitter, high on his own supply, using words which he failed to define, in a style that imitated science without understanding it, and whose work made no sense.

Both theories are correct. 

 Jean Baudrillard is famous for:

1) Inspiring the makers of The Matrix films. Baudrillard later said they didn't understand his ideas at all.

2) Writing the essay "The Gulf War did not take place".  (Almost all criticism of which has been written by people who have not read the original essay, thus proving quite a few of his points about the nature of reality, in an age saturated with far too much information to process. And yes, I have read it.).

 As I have no opinions or beliefs, I neither endorse nor reject him, nor any of his ideas, nor indeed any of my own comments on his ideas, as laid out above. But he was a big influence on Jude, and it's a pity he'll never read it now.