Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
Jean Baudrillard: Critical Lives
by Emmanuelle Fantin and Brian Nicol
Reaktion Books
September 2025, 184 pp., ISBN-9781836391036
Why a biography of Jean Baudrillard, and why now? When postmodernism was in vogue forty or so years ago the French thinker’s ideas were seemingly ubiquitous to the point of cliché: there was a time in the 1980s when it was virtually impossible to open a contemporary art journal without running across his name. In art critic Robert Storr’s apt image, he was the “foaming crest” of the wave of high theory, much of it French, that at the time inundated the worlds of avant-garde art, media criticism, and social commentary. By the following decade his principle idea—that the simulation of reality through images propagated by electronic media and mass communications had itself become a reality—had trickled down to popular culture, most famously as the central conceit of the Wachowskis’ classic science fiction film The Matrix. In more recent years, though, his reputation declined and his ideas, which even at height of their influence attracted their share of skepticism, went out of circulation. But now with the infiltration of electronic media into every nook of life, particularly in the looming form of artificial intelligence, his assertion that reality has been replaced by a simulation of reality has once again become timely.
In choosing Baudrillard (1929-2007) as the subject of a critical intellectual biography—surprisingly enough, the first in English–Emmanelle Fantin and Brian Nicol set themselves a challenge. Baudrillard was notoriously Sphinxlike, to the point where it’s more or less obligatory to describe him as “elusive” and “enigmatic,” as Fantin and Nicol inevitably do. Like many of his generation of French intellectuals he expressed himself in a Delphic language of paradox and oblique metaphor, but his rhetoric wasn’t the only source of his apparent unknowability. He cultivated an image of himself uncannily consistent with his own key ideas. In effect, the public philosopher of the simulacrum became the simulacrum of a public philosopher.
Fantin and Nicol begin with Baudrillard’s origins in Reims as the grandson of peasants. He dropped out of an elite high school but eventually returned to academia and studied German at the Sorbonne. For a while he taught at Tübingen in then-West Germany and subsequently became a teacher of German at various French schools. In 1966 he obtained a position as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Paris’ campus in Nanterre, an institution with which he was associated for a number of years. Before he went to Nanterre he married for the first time and had two children, with whom he appears to have had a distant relationship. In 1970 he met the woman who in 1994 would become his second wife. Fantin and Nicol provide few details of Baudrillard’s private life, about which little is known. What they do focus on is his work, of which there was plenty. He was a prolific writer.
His first two books, published in 1968 and 1970, centered on the symbolic function of objects within a consumer economy. This early work reflected the related influences of semiology and structuralism, which in one form or another would recur throughout his writings; of Marxism, which he soon rejected as being too concerned with questions of production; and of psychoanalysis. With his third book, 1972’s Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (translated into English as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in 1981), Baudrillard expanded the basic position of his first two books by arguing that we must understand commodity exchange in a market economy as in fact consisting of an exchange of signs. The value of a thing is a function of what it symbolizes rather than of what it does or what it can be used for. Fantin and Nicol see this as a fundamental insight that would resonate throughout his subsequent writings.
By the time of his third book, Baudrillard was beginning to acquire some renown. But he also managed to attract his share of hostility. In 1977 he published Oublier Foucault (“forget Foucault”). Originally intended as a journal article, it was written in response to Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge. Foucault had seen the essay as a reviewer and at the time had reacted well to it, but after plans to publish it as an article were abandoned and the essay instead appeared as a book, Foucault was angered. Fantin and Nicol remark that Baudrillard’s fellow Parisian intellectuals now saw him as a “traitor” and excommunicated him. With this public provocation and willingness to take the contrary side of a proposition, he had effectively cast himself out of French intellectual life. Significantly for his future, he was in Los Angeles when the scandal broke, since it was in America that he would have his greatest success.
Baudrillard had first gone to America in 1970, to attend an international design conference in Aspen, Colorado. In 1975, he was invited to teach at the University of California, San Diego; it was also the year that The Mirror of Production became his first book to be translated into English. But the breakthrough book for Baudrillard in America was Simulations, published in 1983 by French expatriate Sylvère Lotringer’s Semiotext(e) imprint. Simulations contained the translations of two important essays: “The Precession of Simulacra,” which had originally appeared in Simulacres et simulation (1981), and “The Order of Simulacra,” from L’échange symbolique et la mort (1976). Charged by Baudrillard’s oracular prose, the book adumbrated a theory of how representation produces reality and helped provide one of the key ideas associated with postmodernism. A number of Baudrillard’s most famous formulas appeared there: the notion, borrowed from Borges, that “the map precedes the territory”; the idea of “the desert of the real”; the declaration that simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
Simulations broke through because, as Fantin and Nicol observe, it read like a manifesto or an easily digested bit of pop philosophy. My recollection is that skeptical commentators at the time dismissed Baudrillard for exactly that last reason. This would explain why, when Baudrillard toured universities to promote the book upon publication, it failed to generate any interest. Seeing this, Lotringer cannily turned instead to the artworld, where the book’s impact was enormous. It appealed to young artists experiencing a sense of belatedness—the feeling that, with both the exhaustion of the possibilities once offered by Modernism and the pervasiveness of the consumption-based market economy, as well as the easy reproducibility of images, it had become impossible to create original art. A number of artists, Peter Halley most notably among them, invoked Baudrillard as an inspiration or an alibi and became known as Simulationists. In the hot art market of the mid-to-late 1980s, Simulationism was among the hottest things. But there were objectors, particularly among philosophers and social critics with political commitments or a background in the Anglo-American analytical tradition. Mark Poster, for example, in his introduction to 1988’s Jean Baudrillard Reader, read out charges that Baudrillard “fails to define his major terms […] his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he […] refuse[s] to qualify or delimit his claims […]”. But the fact remained that for many, what Baudrillard had to say somehow felt right, no matter how he chose to say it.
The reaction of Baudrillard the contrarian to artworld adulation was perhaps predictable. He complained that simulation was being misinterpreted to imply a Platonic opposition between a real world of existence and a virtual world of images. He insisted instead that the simulation wasn’t a copy or a double of some prior reality but instead that the “real” itself was a hyperreal simulation. Baudrillard’s public disavowal of his artworld disciples was aired during a high-profile lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in March 1987. He took the occasion to complain that “There can’t be any Simulationist school, because the simulacrum cannot be represented. This is a complete misunderstanding of what I wrote.” Understandably, this alienated many of his erstwhile admirers.
Nineteen eighty-seven signaled a break not only with many in the artworld, but with Nanterre as well. After submitting a habilitation thesis (published in English by Semiotext(e) as The Ecstasy of Communication in 1988), Baudrillard was awarded the title of Professeur des Universités. And promptly left the university he had been affiliated with since 1966. Fantin and Nicol wonder if this was his “perverse way of undermining the academic support” the school had given him.
Breakups with French intellectuals, the American artworld, and now Nanterre–one can almost detect a pattern here. Which Fantin and Nicol do, but they also see Baudrillard’s leaving Nanterre as emblematic of a larger break in his career as a thinker and creative figure. During the eighties Baudrillard had begun what was in effect a second career as a photographer. Fantin and Nicol include a number of his photographs in the book. They’re strikingly evocative of an odd, silent world permeated by melancholy. The presence of humans is largely only alluded to through the objects, architecture, and outdoor spaces where they are not. Expressive of what Baudrillard once described as his “passion for emptiness,” they’re telling, perhaps in an unintended way.
It was also beginning in 1987 that Baudrillard began publishing a series of books based on the journals he’d been keeping since early in the decade. Titled Cool Memories, five volumes of these hybrids of theory and observation, which covered the years up to 2004, appeared in all. As evidenced in these and other publications from the late 1980s forward, Baudrillard’s style, already aphoristic and elliptical, became more so as he continued producing his “theory-fictions” through the 1990s and early 2000s. That he was still capable of causing controversy and outrage was evidenced by his public statements on the first Gulf War, collected and published in the book The Gulf War Did Not Happen, and especially by his pronouncements on the 9/11 attacks which, as Fantin and Nicol remind us, many found wanting in empathy for the victims.
Although still very much active, by this time Baudrillard understood that a rising generation of theorists was poised to overshadow him in influence. And when he died in 2007, he already seemed to belong to a past era. Postmodernism was passé and the wave of French theory, whose crest he’d ridden in the 1980s, had largely receded. In the inevitable sorting of reputations that occurred after the postmodern moment had ended, Baudrillard’s declined. Fairly or not, he was largely relegated to the second rank, behind Derrida and Foucault. In any event, intellectual life had moved on. And yet…it would seem to have come back to him. The hallucination of simulacra that is AI has made the “historian of the future” as he was once called, appear to be a prophet of the present. Consider that what he said in 1981 about the replica of the Lescaux cave paintings seems to capture a truth about AI: “the duplication is sufficient to render both [the original and its duplicate] artificial.” As we’re finding out, determining what’s AI and what’s real isn’t easy when we’re flooded with images and text within the closed loop of electronic communication systems. AI’s duplication of reality does indeed seem to render both itself and reality as unreal. Or hyperreal. Under these circumstances, Baudrillard is worth revisiting. And Fantin and Nicol’s brief but substantive volume is a welcome way to do so. They present the trajectory of his thought and career as clearly and accessibly as can be done with a writer whose meaning is often so–yes–elusive. Anyone provoked by the ongoing virtualization of contemporary life to want to grapple with his work would do well to start with their book.
About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a Washington, DC area writer focusing on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press); his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.