Baudrillard, Jean, 1929-2007

French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who has published over thirty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological phenomena of the contemporary era, including the erasure of the distinctions of gender, race, and class that structured modern societies in a new postmodern consumer, media, and high tech society; the mutating roles of art and aesthetics; fundamental changes in politics, culture, and human beings; and the impact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in the creation of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and social life.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), French sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity, was born in the northern town of Reims on the 27th of July 1929. The son of civil servants and the grandson of peasant farmers, he was the first in his family to attend university—eventually becoming a teacher of sociology at the Université de Paris X Nanterre and a leading intellectual figure of his time. Much of his early life and work was influenced by the French occupation of Algeria and the ensuing struggle for independence in the 1950s and 60s.