On Baudrillard's Obituary: Front Page News From the French Intellectual Field

World writes obituaries to Jean Baudrillard. Some newspapers write short stately pieces on his rise to international prominence as one of the major minds behind the 1960s student uprisings and the change in the intellectual atmosphere in their wake. Others spend more time to divine the producer of Cool Memories, Simulations and Simulacra, and The System of Objects. A great mind sleeps.

Whole generation of thinkers, personalities, and activists has receded into time to make room for their young guard. Somehow modernity never ceases to supply the adrenaline that its each beat of intensity pumps up our veins. The inventor of pataphysics, the writer of post-September-11-th treatise on terrorism, the sociologist of the late modernity has left a trail of cryptic texts and allusions that are sure to occupy the generations to come with puzzlement, amusement, and inspiration.

Even if the legacy of Baudrillard will prove to be negative, as would befit the negative style of his thought, the positive anti-shadow that we will have to supply to come to terms with the shape of the present transition as it takes in the aftermath of the major contradictions, traumas, and narratives that the first modernity has left behind will continue to cast its pall on him. Hurled into the unceasing stream of events, our minds seek a point from which our theoretical glances would be able to see the parameters of the present moment even as it endlessly peels away in the rear-view mirror of our memory.

Now that his oeuvre has reached the quality of completeness of a collectible set of volumes, drafts, letters, and notes, a new wave of interest is bound to throw ashore of public attention the intellectual archive that in bits and pieces will be gathered under Baudrillard's name as another signifier newly afloat in the intertextual sphere of references, citations, and glosses. The work of mourning of the space that his complete works will fill on numerous shelves will be at the same time the work of displacement of the awareness of the historical context around his live onto the image of Baudrillard's thought as finished work.

That invisible touch of the closed brackets with two numbers that his name will be combined with thereafter may prove transformative in how his texts will be exchanging their meaning for hard currency of their reading. Equivalent of varnish on old masters' paintings this day will push his works into endless cycle of their circulation.