[spectre] There is some irony

[Louise Desrenards]

"
There is some irony in the fact that many of those quickest to dismiss
Baudrillard don't actually have any knowledge of his philosophy at all, but
only secondhand representations of it. Perhaps the oft-derided Baudrillard
got the last laugh, after all. "

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_baggini/2007/03/the_shadow_of_his
_former_self.html

---------------

The shadow of his former self

Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who told us that everything is mere
simulacrum, is dead. But his ideas have a life of their own.

Julian Baggini


March 7, 2007 4:00 PM | Printable version

News of the death of Jean Baudrillard provokes mischievous and possibly
disrespectful thoughts about how he would have reported his own passing. "It
never happened" would be the obvious choice. For those of us who didn't know
him personally, the "death of Baudrillard" is an entirely media event, one
which we only observe through the filter of news, the internet and
television. To believe otherwise is to fail to recognise the nature of our
"hyperreal" society, in which we are no longer able to distinguish between
reality itself and its simulation.

Some readers who have learned to dismiss anything that has the vague whiff
of postmodernism about it will probably be snorting at the absurdity of all
this. But it actually makes quite a bit of sense to me. Not complete sense,
but then that's probably because, like almost everyone whose training in
philosophy took place in a British university, I've never seriously studied
Baudrillard. That sort of stuff isn't considered bona fide by most of our
team, which is why a group of Cambridge academics tried to stop their
university awarding Jacques Derrida an honorary degree in 1992.

It's certainly true that France is a philosophically foreign country: they
do things differently there. You could say they adopt a different style, but
that would be to imply that Anglo-American philosophy has any style at all,
when most of its arid writing is actually the literary equivalent to Alan
Partridge's sports-causal fashion collection. What our breed of philosophy
has is a method, and with it supposed rigour.

The French, in contrast, have, if anything, too much style. The grand
rhetorical sweep of many of Baudrillard's pronouncements - the Gulf war
never happened; history has become its own dustbin; the west, in a sense,
wanted 9/11 - sound to our commonsensical ears like absurd exaggerations.

Yet, if you get past the hyperbolic flourishes, thinkers like Baudrillard
are actually saying things that have more resonance and relevance to
contemporary society than the majority of what is written by more sober
Brits and Americans. That's why, although shunned by philosophers, the likes
of Baudrillard have been taken up by other social sciences and humanities.

The recurring theme of Baudrillard's work is that we live in a world in
which representation and simulation have come to dominate over what was once
thought of as reality, to the extent that our reality now often is our
simulation of it. That's why it is now not only possible to be "famous for
being famous", but it's what many young people actively have as an ambition.
Because of thinkers like Baudrillard, we have come to think better and
deeper about such issues, which is why we should be more prepared to forgive
him for his many excesses.

There is some irony in the fact that many of those quickest to dismiss
Baudrillard don't actually have any knowledge of his philosophy at all, but
only secondhand representations of it. Perhaps the oft-derided Baudrillard
got the last laugh, after all.

--- 
Sorry, Guardian, exceptionally I quote one article in extenso
L.