Radical Alterity Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity. Influenced by the student revolt at Nanterre University in 1968, he contributed to Utopie, a journal of anarcho-situationism, structural Marxism, and media theory. Baudrillard has written numerous theoretical articles on the ambience of capitalist affluence, and the critique of technology. The son of civil servants and the grandson of peasant farmers, Baudrillard was born in 1929 in Reims. He was the first in his family to attend university. His early life was influenced by the Algerian war in the 1950s and 60s. He taught German in a Lycée before completing his doctoral thesis in sociology under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre. He then became an Assistant in September 1966 at Nanterre University of Paris. His first book, The Object System, is a semiotic analysis of consumer culture. His second, Consumer society, is a critical study of consumerism. By the 1980s, Baudrillard had fully extracted himself from the shadow of Marxism to articulate his central ideas of 'simulation' and 'hyperreality' in such classic books as Simulations and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Since refining his theoretical approach, Baudriallard has extended his analysis of postmodernity to many of the major issues looming over the world, from the Gulf War to 9/11, the imagery of mass advertising to that of Abu Ghraib.