Demolition Job

Robert Fulford demolishes one of the more absurd practitioners of Gallic obscurity.

Jean Baudrillard, who died on Tuesday in Paris at the age of 77, was a French intellectual in the most sinister meaning of that term.

He was intoxicated by hastily concocted theories and drunk on incomprehensible explanations of world affairs. He could make any subject more obscure just by briefly visiting it. Many of his readers eventually discovered that his work, some 50 books in all, usually wasn't about what it claimed to be about. His real concern was always Baudrillard and the passionate drama of his daydreams.

His way of thinking involved intense snobbery on his part and great tolerance on the reader's. To the public and his students he said, in effect: "You poor fools are deluded by all your ideals, your dreams, your accomplishments. You think that's reality? It's a fraud, all of it. I know better."

Strange as it seems, in the 1970s much of the Western world was ready to embrace him....

I remember..., I remember all too well. Those were the seventies, a dark and disturbing time from which we are now only beginning to recover.

Read the whole thing here. It's devastating.