http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/books/07baudrillard.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&ore
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原新聞內容如下:
Jean Baudrillard, 77, Critic and Theorist of Hyperreality, Dies
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: March 7, 2007
The French critic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about
consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality were intensely
discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies
like “The Matrix,” died yesterday in Paris. He was 77.
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Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Jean Baudrillard in 2001.
Michel Delorme, director of Galilee, Mr. Baudrillard’s publisher, announced
his death, which he said followed a long illness.
Mr. Baudrillard, the first in his family to attend a university, became a
member of a small caste of celebrated and influential French intellectuals
who achieved international fame despite the density and difficulty of their
work.
The author of more than 50 books and an accomplished photographer, Mr.
Baudrillard ranged across different subjects, from race and gender to
literature and art to 9/11. His comments often sparked controversy, as when
he said in 1991 that the gulf war “did not take place” — arguing that it
was more of a media event than a war.
Mr. Baudrillard was once considered a postmodern guru, but his analyses of
modern life were too original and idiosyncratic to fit any partisan or
theoretical category. “He was one of a kind,” Francois Busnel, the editor
in chief of the monthly literary magazine Lire, said yesterday. “He did not
choose sides, he was very independent.”
With a round face and big, thick glasses, Mr. Baudrillard was known for his
witty aphorisms and black humor. He described the sensory flood of the modern
media culture as “the ecstasy of communication.”
One of his better known theories postulates that we live in a world where
simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. This
seductive “hyperreality,” where shopping malls, amusement parks and
mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films dominate, is
drained of authenticity and meaning. Since illusion reigns, he counseled
people to give up the search for reality.
“All of our values are simulated,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “
What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another
car? It’s a simulation of freedom.”
This idea was picked up by the American filmmakers Andy and Larry Wachowski,
who included subtle references to Mr. Baudrillard in their “Matrix”
trilogy. In the first movie of the series, “The Matrix” (1999), the
computer hacker hero Neo opens Mr. Baudrillard’s book “Simulacra and
Simulation,” which turns out to be only a simulation of a book, hollowed out
to hold computer disks. Mr. Baudrillard later told The Times that the movie
references to his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings.”
He was also a fierce critic of consumer culture in which people bought
objects not out of genuine need but because of the status and meaning they
bestowed.
Born in 1929 in Reims, Mr. Baudrillard later attended university in Paris,
earning a doctorate in sociology while teaching German to high school
students. He published his first book, “The Object System,” in 1968.
In 1986 he published a kind of travelogue called “America,” in which he
wrote, “America is the original version of modernity,” referring to what he
considered the almost complete blurring of reality and unreality. To his
French readers, he said: “We are a copy with subtitles.”
He retired in 1987 from the University of Paris X, Nanterre, and then devoted
himself to writing caustic commentaries and developing his philosophical
theories. Although he shunned most media, he frequently wrote for newspapers.
“The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers” was published
just a year after 9/11. In it, he argued that Islamic fundamentalists tried
to create their own reality; the resulting media spectacle would give the
impression that the West was constantly under threat of terrorist attack.
The current American invasion of Iraq is an effort to “put the rest of the
world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we
are all-powerful,” he told The Times. “It’s a game.”
Like other postmodernists with whom he was often associated (despite their
differences), he was frequently criticized as obscure. “If the texts seem
incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely
nothing,” Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote in their 1998 book “
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.”
Mr. Baudrillard was not unaware of the problem. “What I’m going to write
will have less and less chance of being understood,” he said, “but that’s
my problem.”
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