Baudrillard, Jean (1929–2007)

Jean Baudrillard taught for most of his career at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in the Department of Sociology. He began writing as a neo-Marxist in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre and Herbert Marcuse but very quickly developed his distinctive style of social and cultural criticism. He may be understood generally as a post-structuralist who focused on the importance of language in society and invented novel concepts and terms to understand the most advanced features of electronic communications. He has been hailed as the guru of postmodernity and berated as faddish trend follower. He wrote polemical pieces like Oublier Foucault (1977) (Forget Foucault, 1987) and controversial ones such as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991b) (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995).