Genosko Gary - Baudrillard and signs: signification ablaze

Born at Reims in 1929, Jean Baudrillard has been active in French intellectual circles for thirty years. He began his career in the early 1960s as a book reviewer of German and Italian literature for Les temps modernes (Baudrillard, 1962, 1962a, 1962b; and Gane, 1991a:615). Trained as a Germanist, he translated into French major works by German playwright Peter Weiss, in addition to writings by Bertolt Brecht, social anthropologist Wilhelm E.Mhlmann, and Friedrich Engels, among others. Before the publication of his first major theoretical statement in Le Systme des objets in 1968, Baudrillard had produced a significant number of translations of quite diverse texts, many of which remain standard works. The bulk of his work in translation was in the area of theatre and, in particular, the revolutionary thtre-document of Weiss. Moreover, before his university career began, Baudrillard was a secondary school (enseignementsecondaire) teacher. He arrived in Paris at the Universit de Nanterre (Universit de Paris X) in 1966 and took up the position of assistant de Sociologie (assistant lecturer), a post in enseignement suprieur (university teaching) below that of Matre-assistant (junior lecturer), to which he rose in the early 1970s in the Facult des Lettres et Sciences Humaines at Nanterre. He retired from his teaching post in 1987.

From 1967 into the 1970s Baudrillard was associated with the sociology of urbanism group around the journal Utopie, and in 1975 he joined the founding editorial board of the cultural theory journal Traverses of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He withdrew from the latter journal in the late 1980s. Despite Baudrillards much

In 1975, together with Michel de Certeau, Gilbert Lascault, Marc Le Bot, Louis Marin and Paul Virilio, Baudrillard founded Traverses, although he did so without the clarity of vision which had helped to carry Utopie.Traverses was born from a kind of transversality, no longer a transgression, so as to regain a negativity of another type, one which was more interstitial, floating halfway in the institution. Significantly, Traverses is Beaubourg. But it is anti- Beaubourg as well (Baudrillard, 1983i: 32). Even though Traverses is still published, it has exhausted itself by enduring beyond its years, in Baudrillards estimation, since its play with collusion and the protection and cultivation of a scene is no longer tenable. If one has an interest in drawing a line between Baudrillards early and later works, I suggest that the articles contained in