Whatever happened to Jean Baudrillard? The ‘real’ Jean Baudrillard died from cancer in March 2007. Yet always with Baudrillard there is the ‘hyperreality’, as he so accurately termed it. Baudrillard became a global celebrity intellectual during his lifetime, 1929-2007. His memory and legacy live on in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways.
This European summer there is a festival in Paris called Jean Baudrillard: Street One which culturally marks ten years since his passing and which will be attended by his widow Marine Baudrillard. Posthumously the Baudrillard estate has published a number of ground changing books from The Agony of Power to The Divine Left all of which are must reads. Then there are the publications about him which still, thankfully, keep on coming. I was recently asked to review a new edited collection of Baudrillard interviews and discussions for the journal Cultural Politics. It is a ‘beauty’ as my Australian friends would say. It arrived in our home in Adelaide in South Australia, both in e-form and book form, and ranges in content from the 1960s to the 2010s and is all about ‘disappearance’, especially of ‘culture’. As the editors of the book say in a wonderful introduction called Baudrillard Unplugged, in many ways Baudrillard set up his own disappearance a number of times in his life and even after his death. As the book’s first interview shows Baudrillard was lecturing at the University of Nanterre in 1968 when the May 68 events broke out. He stayed for twenty years, leaving French academia in the mid-1980s. In 1977 he had written ‘Forget Foucault’ which had landed him (eventually) in trouble with Michel. It certainly cut him off from much of the intellectual class in France as he started to write and discuss theory differently from anyone else on the planet, much of which he reflexively discusses in this wide ranging book of interviews. After leaving university life in 1986 he used his 1980s disappearance to publish myriad works of theoretical brilliance until his death in 2007 all in the name of a radical outsider not a university intellectual. Even death did not sting Baudrillard, and the posthumous work is a riveting body of writing worth investigating on its own terms, particularly for its close links to our mad, mad world of Trumpland.
Richard Smith and David Clarke, colleagues in Human Geography at Swansea University, edited this excellent book which has interviews first conducted in 1968 to the last interview published in 2014. Called Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture: Uncollected Interviews, it is part of Edinburgh University Press Uncollected Baudrillard books project, all involving Richard Smith. A couple of years ago there was another superb volume of uncollected interviews edited by Smith and Clarke and published by EUP called Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance. In 2018 Smith has coming out with EUP another volume called Jean Baudrillard: The Uncollected Anthology, which has colour photographs and dozens of interviews and writings not seen before. Also in 2018 Richard Smith will publish with EUP an uncollected Baudrillard interviews volume putting out English translations of all Baudrillard interviews in German.The following year in 2019 Smith will publish an uncollected interviews volume putting out English translations of all Baudrillard interviews in French.
The very idea of ‘Uncollected Baudrillard’ is really fascinating and the sum total of this innovative publishing venture is a fantastic expansion of material for Baudrillard Studies. Perhaps other publishers could look at Uncollected Virilio, Uncollected Zizek or Uncollected Badiou which would do the same for Virilio Studies, Zizek Studies or Badiou Studies, etc. There’s a publishing idea!
