Continental Drift - Jean Baudrillard

November 25th, 2005 at 20:26 Björn Hallberg

NYT - Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

Jean Baudrillard: No, the simulation of power.

At 76, you are still pushing your famous theory about “simulation” and the “simulacrum,” which maintains that media images have become more convincing and real than reality.

Jean Baudrillard: All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.

So you don’t think that the U.S. invaded Iraq to spread freedom?

Jean Baudrillard: What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It’s a game.

When you say “we,” who are you talking about? In your new book, “The Conspiracy of Art,” you are pretty hard on this country.

Jean Baudrillard: France is a byproduct of American culture. We are all in this; we are globalized. When Jacques Chirac says, “No!” to Bush about the Iraq war, it’s a delusion. It’s to insist on the French as an exception, but there is no French exception.

Hardly. France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.

Jean Baudrillard: Ah, yes. We are “against” the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn’t send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

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