2024-06-26 01:39:29+00:00
Highlights
- He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne (Location 62)
- While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann (Location 68)
- Sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the uprising of May 1968 (Location 76)
- He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer.[25] (Location 84)
- In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris. (Location 98)
- Baudrillard did his writing using “his old typewriter, never at the computer”. (Location 110)
- Baudrillard’s published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics (Location 127)
- he is often seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school. (Location 131)
- In contrast to Post-structuralism (such as Michel Foucault), for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. (Location 144)
- he argued, not in a “global village”, to use Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. (Location 160)
- it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of capitalist society (Location 183)
- He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. (Location 187)
- He denies any possibility of a (mimetic) duplication of reality; reality mediated through language becomes a game of signs. In his theoretical system all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear”. (Location 217)
- In the Renaissance, the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit, where people or objects appear to stand for a real referent that does not exist (Location 221)
- With the Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. (Location 223)
- He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or “vanished” with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history’s progress, (Location 228)
- Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin. (Location 243)
- Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion used in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed were universal and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. (Location 256)
- More specifically, he expressed his view on Europe’s unwillingness to respond to “aggression and genocide in Bosnia”, in which “New Europe” revealed itself to be a “sham.” (Location 270)
- He was determined in his columns to openly name the perpetrators, Serbs, and call their actions in Bosnia aggression and genocide. (Location 274)
- Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the U.S.-led Coalition and the Iraqi government were actually fighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His power was not weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991 internal uprisings that followed afterwards. (Location 289)
- During 2005, Baudrillard wrote three short pieces and gave a brief magazine interview, all treating similar ideas; following his death in 2007, the four pieces were collected and published posthumously as The Agony of Power, a polemic against power itself. (Location 349)
- Lotringer notes that Gilles Deleuze, “otherwise known for his generosity”, “made it known around Paris” that he saw Baudrillard as “the shame of the profession” after Baudrillard published his views on Foucault’s works. (Location 373)
- Mark Fisher pointed out that Baudrillard “is condemned, sometimes lionised, as the melancholic observer of a departed reality”, asserting that Baudrillard “was certainly melancholic”. (Location 418)