The Simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007

 

General Culture

“Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take place. ‘Dying is pointless,’ he once wrote. ‘You have to know how to disappear.’” (obit) Speaking of pointless, I have to admit I only read one book by Jean Baudrillard (or actually about half of it). But when I read the book, I remembered a scene from one of the deleted scenes of the movie Waiting for Guffman, where Fred Willard, in character, goes into a convoluted recollecting of some baseball game with an ending that is entirely made up, concluding “That’s not true, but it sounds good.” Reading Baudrillard, that struck me as quite adaptable to the book: This is all crap, but it sounds good.