ABSTRACT
A few bibliographical elements might help to understand both the context of Jean Baudrillard's thoughts and his intellectual trajectory. For Baudrillard, consumer society is a fundamentally new type of society because the ontological constitution of society has changed over the last 500 years. Symbolic exchange thus defies valorization and thereby the Maussian logic of reciprocity is conceived by Baudrillard as a kind of reversibility which annuls power, a reversibility to be found in the fundamental dualism of the world. Baudrillard's conception of value and its fate differs from Marx's. Baudrillard totally rejects this Platonic understanding of simulacra. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre Klossowski, he instead understands simulacra not as false images, but as that which "hides the truth's non-existence". Foucault writes a history of representation, whereas Baudrillard writes a history of simulation. Baudrillard's genealogy of the consumption society through the order of simulacra can be seen as the establishment of a new ontology of our cultural understanding.
