Jean Baudrillard 1929 – 2007

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the most provocative voices of late twentieth-century social theory. After early work on consumer society in the tradition of Marx and Lefebvre, he developed in Symbolic Exchange and Death and Simulacra and Simulation a sustained analysis of the modern condition as one in which signs no longer refer to anything beyond themselves and reality is replaced by hyperreality. His deliberately provocative essays The Gulf War Did Not Take Place became one of the most discussed texts of the 1990s, sometimes admired and often denounced.