Return to Saussure

Introduction Baudrillard Before and After Simulation: Signs, Everyday Life, and the Digital Present Jean Baudrillard is often invoked today as a prophetic voice of digital culture, cited whenever images, simulations, or artificial intelligence appear to eclipse lived experience. Yet this retrospective aura tends to flatten the internal development of his work. Baudrillard did not always write as the theorist of hyperreality and simulacra. His early writings emerge from a sociological and Marxist horizon shaped decisively by the work of Henri Lefebvre, while his later texts abandon both sociological explanation and Marxist critique in favor of irony, paradox, and theoretical performance. Distinguishing between these phases is not a merely academic exercise. It clarifies what Baudrillard was attempting at different moments and helps determine how his concepts can be productively mobilized for analyzing today’s AI-saturated environment. This article argues that Baudrillard’s traject...