ABSTRACT
Jean Baudrillard (b.1929) was born in Reims in northeastern France. His grandparents were peasant farmers and his parents worked in civil service jobs. At the University of Nanterre, Baudrillard studied sociology under the Marxist Henri Lefebvre. From 1966 until his retirement in 1987, Baudrillard taught sociology at Nanterre. His earliest work was written from the Marxist perspective, but in subsequent texts his intellectual mentors often became the objects of his critiques, including figures such as MARX, Lefebvre, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Baudrillard’s early engagement with Marxist theory was later eclipsed by poststructuralist ideas in the 1970s. His work bears traces of the theories of Roland BARTHES, especially his work on modern mythologies, and of Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the medium is more important than the message. Baudrillard’s first book, The System of Objects (1968) is a semiotic analysis of culture influenced by the poststructuralist concept of the indeterminate play of language, FREUD’s notion of drive and desire, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, and the French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s work on symbolic exchange economies. Baudrillard is a controversial cultural theorist, particularly noted
for his critiques of contemporary consumer society. He is one of the key theorists of postmodernity.
