Mindsigh

Vale Jean Baudrillard 20 June 1929 – 6 March 2007

Posted by Jerry on March 9th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Theory, Writing

French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard died on my birthday, aged 77. He leaves us with a question he himself posed in 2004 in a paper he presented at the European Graduate School in 2004:

… When the referent no longer exists, can we still speak of an image?

Where Roland Barthes spoke of language as a mediation of the real, Baudrillard realised that the mediation is what we have access to, not the thing itself – and irrespective of whether or not the thing itself was actual. The world is richer for his having been, and poorer for his departure.

Jean Baudrillard at the European Graduate School, 2004

I still think his short book Simulations was his best work.

Cheers
Jerry

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