Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews

230 Pages·1993·0.65 MB·English

by  Mike Gane

BAUDRILLARD LIVE
This book collects together many interviews which have been published in
very different locations and publications into a coherent work, which with new
interviews and an introduction makes available the conversational thought of
one of the leading French intellectuals associated with postmodernism. The
scope of the interviews is enormous, from the experience of visiting the
cinema, on film and photography, through to the Gulf War and the new world
order. These interviews provide a peerless supplement to Baudrillard’s often
difficult sociological and theoretical writing and illuminate many points of
contention in his work, particularly those relating to postmodernism.
But the book is far more than a supplement. It is in its own right a
contribution of the highest importance to the analysis of modern society, and it
raises many disturbing issues and problems. The collection is edited by a
leading authority on Baudrillard’s work. It will appeal not only to those
interested in French intellectual life but also to those interested in the debate on
modernity and postmodernity. It is an essential document for the understanding
of one of the most creative and important French thinkers alive today.
Mike Gane is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University.
BAUDRILLARD LIVE
Selected interviews
Edited by Mike Gane
London and New York
First published in 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1993 selection and editorial matter, Mike Gane
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Baudrillard, Jean.
Baudrillard live: selected interviews/[edited by] Mike Gane.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Baudrillard, Jean—Interviews. 2. Sociologists—France—
Interviews. 3. Postmodernism. 4. France—Intellectual life.
I. Gane, Mike. II. Title.
HM22.F82B383 1993
301´.092–dc20 92–26081
CIP
ISBN 0-203-41585-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-72409-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-07037-6 (hbk)
0-415-07038-4 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction Mike Gane 1
Part I A virtual state of rupture…
Interview 1 I DON’T BELONG TO THE CLUB,
TO THE SERAGLIO 19
Part II Beyond alienation…
Interview 2 I LIKE THE CINEMA 29
Interview 3 BAUDRILLARD’S SEDUCTIONS 36
Interview 4 THE ‘LOOK’ GENERATION—THE
MANNERISM OF A WORLD WITHOUT
MANNERS 41
Interview 5 THE POWER OF REVERSIBILITY THAT
EXISTS IN THE FATAL 43
Interview 6 THE REVENGE OF THE CRYSTAL 50
Interview 7 IS AN IMAGE NOT FUNDAMENTALLY
IMMORAL? 67
Interview 8 INTELLECTUALS, COMMITMENT AND
POLITICAL POWER 72
Interview 9 GAME WITH VESTIGES 81
Part III I stopped living…
Interview 10 FORGET BAUDRILLARD 99
v
CONTENTS
Part IV Radicalism has passed into events…
Interview 11 AMERICA AS FICTION 131
Interview 12 THE EVIL DEMON OF IMAGES 136
Interview 13 THE WORK OF ART IN THE
ELECTRONIC AGE 145
Interview 14 THE POLITICS OF SEDUCTION 152
Interview 15 THE END OF THE END 156
Interview 16 FRACTAL THEORY 165
Interview 17 WRITING HAS ALWAYS GIVEN ME
PLEASURE 172
Interview 18 THIS BEER ISN’T A BEER 180
Interview 19 SUBLUNAR AND ATONAL LANDSCAPE 191
Part V When reality merges with the idea…
Interview 20 BAUDRILLARD: THE INTERVIEW 199
AFTERWORD Amor Fati 208
Suggested further reading 210
Bibliography 211
Name index 216
Subject index 218
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the generous support of Chris Rojek, George
Salemohamed and Nicholas Zurbrugg in this project. I also owe a debt to
Monique Arnaud who helped at every stage of the process of preparing this
book and who gave invaluable assistance with translations. Of course the book
would not have been possible without the cooperation and participation of Jean
Baudrillard.
Mike Gane
vii
INTRODUCTION
Mike Gane
Jean Baudrillard is one of France’s leading intellectuals, with a growing world
reputation. In 1989 the Paris weekly L’Evénement du Jeudi organized a
‘referendum’ of some 700 representatives of intellectual society—journalists,
writers, university teachers, artists. The question required its recipients to list
five personalities in order of their significance as representing ‘le pouvoir
intellectuel’—intellectual power. Jean Baudrillard was eighth in the ranking,
equal in fact with figures such as Georges Duby, Gilles Deleuze and François
Wahl, and above Pierre Bourdieu, the rival sociologist. Certainly Baudrillard
has managed to break out of the purely academic world and its confines into a
wide audience interested in cultural analysis.
But who is Jean Baudrillard? He comes from the Ardennes, Champagne,
region of France. He was born in Reims in 1929 into a family plainly in
transition from peasant farming to urban life. If Baudrillard succeeded at his
studies in the Lycée he did not find it easy to get access into university teaching
and in this respect his career is very different from that, say, of Michel
Foucault, born only three years earlier in 1926.1 Foucault was already in the
Chair of Philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in May 1962, in
1968 in the Chair of Philosophy at Vincennes, and in 1970 was at the Collège
de France. Baudrillard, by contrast, was an outsider, a late arrival on the scene.
He had taught German in a Lycèe before taking up sociology, becoming an
assistant in September 1966 at Nanterre (University of Paris X), and then
maître-assistant in 1970. Unlike Foucault once more, Baudrillard’s early
writings of 1968–70 were not translated into English, and thus his thought
played no significant part in the debate on the affluent society in English until
the emergence of postmodernism in the 1980s. However, in France itself,
Baudrillard’s celebrated but notorious critique (1977) of Foucault in ‘Forget
Foucault’ almost certainly led to Baudrillard’s exclusion, rather like that of
Derrida’s, from those sectors of academic influence under the increasing
patronage of the Professor at the Collège de France. The text of the piece was
originally a book review for the journal Critique but was sent to Foucault
himself for possible response. After a long delay Baudrillard published it with
Galilee. Foucault was not amused and is reported to have said, ‘I would have
1