Add to ORKGThe contrast between the positive perception and reception of Jean Baudrillard in the English-speaking world and his doubtful reputation in France was thrown into relief by his recent death and the responses it produced, highlighting some interesting cultural and intellectual differences. The French resistance to his theories is not merely tradition-alist academic wariness of cross-disciplinary thought but also stems from more ideological considerations. His complicity with a postmodern worldview and his cynical celebration of the immanence of the informa-tion order seems to grate on a society in which many intellectuals are still committed to some form of transcendence, albeit relative, and refuse to accept that power and politics no longe...