ज्याँ बाँद्रिला / Jean Baudrillard
French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who has published over thirty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological phenomena of the contemporary era, including the erasure of the distinctions of gender, race, and class that structured modern societies in a new postmodern consumer, media, and high tech society; the mutating roles of art and aesthetics; fundamental changes in politics, culture, and human beings; and the impact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in the creation of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and social life.
Some of his major books are: “The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures” (1970), “The Mirror of Production” (1973), “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981), “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities” (1983), “America” (1986), “The Transparency of Evil” (1990), “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (1991), “Impossible Exchange” (2001), “The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact” (2005) and “The Conspiracy of Art” (2005).
(Source: Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia. Photo source: Wikimedia Commons.)
