Jean Baudrillard: the radical compliment of the damned part

Abstract

Interview with Jean Baudrillard. Thinker of the radical and extreme phenomena, Jean Baudrillard, 69, considers himself an "indifferent paroxist". Posture reduced by many of its detractors to a kind of nihilism, immobilism or even imposture. A convicted practitioner of irony and paradox, Baudrillard disconcerts, for he sees conformism where others imagine the revolution to germinate. For him, when criticism is transformed into moralism, only fatal derision can generate rebellion. Admirer Antonin Artaud, Holderlin, Georges Bataille and the German anarchist Max Stirner, Baudrillard makes no concessions: only the "damned part", which denies the "System", interests him.