Read The Times obituary here

Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher and intellectual, famous for his controversial theories about the artificial nature of reality and his fierce criticism of consumer culture, has died in Paris. He was 77.

Baudrillard, one of Europe’s leading postmodernist thinkers, was perhaps best known for espousing the concept of “hyperreality” and “simulation” – that things do not happen if they are not seen to happen, and that spectacle is crucial in creating our perception of the world.

He died yesterday at his home in Paris after a long illness, said Michel Delorme, of the Galilee publishing house.

Baudrillard first attracted worldwide attention in 1991 with his deliberately provocative book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place in which he argued that neither side could claim victory by the end of the war and that the conflict had changed nothing on the ground in Iraq.

Nothing was as it appeared in the war, he said, claiming that the public’s - and even the military’s - perception of the conflict came filtered through images from the media. As a result, the conflict was best seen as a simulation - Saddam Hussein was not defeated; the US-led coalition had scarcely battled the Iraqi military and did not really win, since the political state in Iraq altered little after the carnage.

Just over a decade later, in an essay entitled The Spirit of Terrorism: Requiem for the Twin Towers, he triggered fresh debate by describing the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre as an expression of “triumphant globalisation battling against itself”.

While terrorists had committed the atrocity, he wrote, “it is we who have wanted it…terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalisation that is itself immoral.” The attacks, he argued, were a fusion of history, symbolism and dark fantasy, “the mother of all events.”

Despite once describing the US as “the only remaining primitive society”, Baudrillard was a tireless enthusiast for America. “Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the US is a paradise,” he wrote. “Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.”

His theories were drawn upon in the futuristic film trilogy The Matrix, whose makers reportedly asked Baudrillard for his input – a request he apparently refused. The film makes visual reference to his works in a scene where computer hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) opens a hollowed-out copy of one of his works, Simulacra and Simulation.

Responding to news of the death, Gilles de Robien, the French Education Minister said: “We lose a great creator. Jean Baudrillard was one of the great figures of French sociological thought.”

The son of civil servants, Baudrillard was born in Rheims, west of Paris, on July 29 1929. He studied German at the Sorbonne, before embarking on a long career as a teacher instructing secondary school students in German. His interests eventually turned to Sociology, in which he received a doctorate and taught throughout the 1960s.

A prolific writer and renowned photographer, he was the author of more than 50 works including: The Mirror of Production (1973), Forget Foucault (1977), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers.

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