Abstract
Jean Baudrillard presents a playful, intriguing and heterodox view of the world. His work, taken as a singular project, is conceived in the French post-Marxism of the Sixties, while committed to what Alfred Jarry called ‘the science of imaginary solutions’, or pataphysics. With this background of both ‘sober’ scholarship and the avant-garde, Baudrillard creates radical tools and conceptual forms and figures for the study of the technological, economic and socio-political systems of the day; how they are perfectly maintained and how they are ultimately haunted by catastrophe and extreme phenomena. This thesis systematically travels through Baudrillard’s life-long project and illuminates the key concepts, providing an introduction to his approach to the object-subject relation, Marxian axioms of human nature, semiotics and an anthropology influenced by Durkheim and Mauss epitomized by the unique theory of symbolic exchange.
I identify two important concepts found throughout Baudrillard’s work: deterrence and disappearance. Deterrence is a central logic of hyperreality, where alternatives and events are precluded from occurring or retroactively mediated. Disappearance, on the other hand, is approached both positively and negatively by Baudrillard. Disappearance becomes the cosmological destiny of humans in their reaction to hyperreality and deterrence. I consider how spaceflight, the production of Earth from an external vantage point in the photo Earthrise and the assumption of an interplanetary species are characteristics of disappearance.