Jean Baudrillard dies

French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died aged 77 at his home in Paris following a long illness.

Baudrillard, a leading post-modernist thinker, is perhaps best known for his concept of hyper-reality.

He argued that spectacle is crucial in creating our view of events - things do not happen if they are not seen.

He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did
Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks
as a "dark fantasy".

Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness
interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he
called hyper-reality.

He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a
dominant force in today's world - an argument taken to a provocative
extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on
a symbolic level.

Since little was changed politically in Iraq after the conflict, all the sound and fury signified little, he argued.

'Dark fantasy'

In his essay The Spirit of Terrorism: Requiem for the
Twin Towers, he caused controversy again by describing the 9/11 attacks
as a fusion of history, symbolism and dark fantasy, "the mother of all
events".

While terrorists had committed the atrocity, he wrote:
"It is we who have wanted it. Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to
a globalisation that is itself immoral."

Born in Rheims into a peasant family, he studied German
at the Sorbonne, later working as a teacher and translator. He taught
sociology throughout the 1960s.

He was a prolific writer, penning more than 50 works
including: Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The
Spirit of Terrorism: An Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002).