Jean Baudrillard. Image and Representation. 2004 

Thank you for posting this. 1990: the year Baudrillard changed my life. 2007: the year his life ended. Thank you, Jean, for sharing your thoughts with us.

s there anywhere i can get a transliteration of this? i cant understand what he's saying ta all! :(

Agree with shallnoTfear. Though I think he was more complex then both of you assume. I see Baudrillard value in his analysis of culture more then as someone who is valued for his arguments. Whatever his personal views were, he did not let that get in the way of his analysis, and I think it is that which you describe as depoliticizing and pragmatism. So ultimately you are both write in my view, though I think you both may be attempting to fit his broad claims into small margins of political fit.

Equally fascinating and flawed. There's no way a theory so depoliticising and lacking in pragmatism could belong to the left. Yet Baudrillard pictures himself as 'more left than Marx'? Baudrillard's work stands in itself like an ironic allegory for the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Good bye pessimist man! Who will we read now when another mother of all events takes place?

Sorry, but--as with its Germanic philosophical forefathers (i.e., Heidegger)--French post mod philosophy-speak now strikes me as faux-profound. A pretty thin gruel, ideas-wise, for a great deal of spade-work required to follow the thread of the thought. Read Freud and forget Lacan, read Nietzsche and forget Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, et. al. Better still, read Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats & forget the lot of 'em (except Nietzsche)! Grad school flashback time--oh, the horror! The horror!