Forty Years of Baudrillard’s 'America'

In 1986, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) contended: “America, with its vast space … is the only remaining primitive society”.

Though that reads like the kind of anti-américanisme long typical of French intellectuals, it was meant as a compliment. Over thirteen years of visits, the maverick thinker had come to think of the US as defined, above all, by certain “primitive” or “youthful” qualities he admired—vitality, originality and religiosity—plus one about which he was rather ambivalent: a propensity for violence.