July 27, 1929

Jean Baudrillard (July 27, 1929 to March 6, 2007) is one of the 20th century French thinkers who makes American commentators sputter. It is as if the academic lapdogs are happy to bark at anyone who dares speak of the obviousness of that which is invisible. The American thinkers are happy to be on the chain of binary thought and find sterility an acceptable price to pay for staying safely away from any friable edges of being.

Here's an example of Baudrillard's writing from The Uncollected Baudrillard (2001), an essay titled "Utopia: The Smile of the Cheshire Cat."

Utopia has been suspended in idealism by a century and a half of triumphant historical dialectical practise.  Today it begins in its rigorous indefiniteness to supplant all revolutionary definitions and return all the models of the revolution to their bureaucratic idealism.

Utopia is the non-place, the radical deconstruction of all the places of politics. It affords no privilege to revolutionary politics. 

Which is to say an ideal,  having played out its bloody possibilities in the last century, this imprint of an ideal --the motivating idea of an ideal -- that allowed such horrors has remained as a powerful semblance still-- even because its actualizations have sorted out the confusions in the apprehension of an historical dialectic formulation.  

Utopia is the smile of the Cheshire cat...this smile which floats in the air...some time after the cat has disappeared. This smile into which the Cheshire cat disappears, ... is itself mortal.

What Jean Baudrillard is trying to isolate by analyzing it,  is a moment of historical change. Pretending such subtleties do not exist is not an intellectual  response.  

Here is a summary of his ideas should anyone want to pursue the thought of this French philosopher.