Baudrillard would be the David Bowie of philosophy, the king of the carnivalesque, the avant-garde prophet of cultural pessimism. Having thus been caricatured, Baudrillard is condemned as the pope of the takeover of reality by semiotic signs, or the solipsistic denier of the existence of an externally objective real. 2 The popularized misreading of Baudrillard is that he diagnoses techno-culture as an Empire of Signs which has forfeited its connection to the real and has spun itself off aimlessly into a never-never land of meaningless funhouse simulations.
1 Some of Baudrillard’s critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations. Over the course of time, his work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts.
This is an expanded version of the lecture that I gave (in French) at the colloquium on Baudrillard at the Cerisy-la-Salle cultural center in northwestern France in August 2019.īaudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker.
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