HOWZAT

Thus it became clear with essays on topics such as fate, seduction, evil, illusion and symbolic exchange, that he was attempting to produce a new kind of theory that was quite different from Marxist theory. He called his new mode “fatal”, in contrast to critical theory, and his volume Fatal Strategies (1983) marked another turning point in his intellectual career.

His series of volumes containing his more personal writings he called Cool Memories (1990-2000). These included many different kinds of fragmentary elements, from the most childish jottings to carefully observed comments on places or events. Towards the end of the 1980s he also began to develop the idea that a new post-consumer transition was taking place in the west which required another radical reconstruction of theory.

Perhaps his most notorious short essays — those on war, notably The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) — were a fruit of this new awareness: Baudrillard predicted that no war is possible in the advanced west. This is not because of its political or social form but primarily because of the virtualisation of western culture.

His writing in the 1990s was focused on what he saw as the fundamental revolution in western culture — the very rapid and profound shifts towards a radical uncertainty, brought about by the introduction of information technology.

Baudrillard was one of the first sociologists to have written on simulation and “hyperreality” — a realm created by entertainment, communication and information technologies which is more pleasurable and “real” than ordinary life — at the moment that these concepts were beginning to play a significant role in theoretical analyses of contemporary culture and society.

The celebrity of Baudrillard’s writing was clear in the successful and stylish sci-fi film The Matrix (1999) in which there was a visual reference to his 1981 essay on simulacra and simulation.

Opposition, Baudrillard came to assert, could only now be realised in the form of singularities that could in principle never be absorbed into western cultures. Ultimately, his writing became unclassifiable, a kind of singularity itself. His own project, nihilism and hermetic language were unique, lending themselves neither to codification nor to being organised into a coherent doctrine.

As his intellectual career developed he disassociated himself from the academic world, particularly the social sciences. He also became a critic of the main forms of western politics and culture, stigmatising the doctrines of democracy and human rights as alibis for increased western penetration, globalisation, and elimination of other cultures (paradoxically after having virtualised its own).

Such radicalism was not accepted by the conventional left because it rejected all forms of political correctness, socialism, feminism, and democratisation.

In person Baudrillard was modest and relaxed, and he preserved an unfailing curiosity about the human dimension and the environment of the modern world.

He was twice married and had two children by his first marriage.

Jean Baudrillard, social theorist and writer, was born on June 20, 1929. He died after a long illness on March 6, 2007, aged 77