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Simulacra and simulation in french12/29/2023 The world we consider real is merely a simulacrum of reality, he argued. Baudrillard himself revived a relatively obscure word, simulacrum, and placed it at the centre of his thinking. They existed largely as illustrations of theories imported from Paris. In some circles, those who didn’t imitate the French stars were considered eccentric.Īcademics, building their careers, learned from the French that novels and poems had become irrelevant as subject matter for teaching and research. Soon it was impossible to get through Yale without encountering them, and by the early 1990s their thoughts had penetrated Western Canada, where you could hear professors talking the ugly and mostly incomprehensible language of critical theory while students struggled pathetically to keep up. They set up base camps on elite college campuses and soon began enlisting local recruits for their army of postmodernists, post-structuralists, post-Marxists and full-time professional obscurantists. He and Jacques Derrida were among the most prominent members of the platoon of French imperialist intellectuals who landed on the shores of North America and conquered a whole continent. Strange as it seems, in the 1970s much of the Western world was ready to embrace him. You think that’s reality? It’s a fraud, all of it. To the public and his students he said, in effect: “You poor fools are deluded by all your ideals, your dreams, your accomplishments. His way of thinking involved intense snobbery on his part and great tolerance on the reader’s. His real concern was always Baudrillard and the passionate drama of his daydreams. Many of his readers eventually discovered that his work, some 50 books in all, usually wasn’t about what it claimed to be about. He could make any subject more obscure just by briefly visiting it. He was intoxicated by hastily concocted theories and drunk on incomprehensible explanations of world affairs. Jean Baudrillard, who died on Tuesday in Paris at the age of 77, was a French intellectual in the most sinister meaning of that term. This obituary appeared in Canada’s National Post newspaper on Saturday, March 10, 2007
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