Baudrillard in the 21st Century (and after)

Existence isn't everything.It is a very little thing (among Jean Baudrillard's last written fragments, March, 2007). I. IntroductionJean Baudrillard continues to exist in our libraries and the poetic spaces of our memories.What may be the fate of this unique thinker in our century and beyond?To probe some of the possible answers to this question I examine 1) some factors which tend to contribute to the durability of any writer, 2) the difficulty in disproving some of Baudrillard's claims (especially concerning simulation), and 3) the fact that perhaps a good deal of Baudrillard's continuing relevance is tied to that of poststructuralism. II. The Durability of Writers and Theorists GenerallyPlato is still with us for some good and some accidental reasons.The accidents involve his work's ongoing translation and survival around the world in the centuries immediately following his death.Many writers and thinkers from the Ancient world disappeared slowly over time.Only a few fragments of Heraclitus, one of the most interesting ancient Greek thinkers, survive in to our own time.Many others disappeared in a single event in the great fire at the Library of Alexandria which the Roman Army watched burn to the ground.Along with good fortune the survival of written thought is aided enormously by the fact that a writer's work is considered to be valuable by many in distant lands.This was the case with Plato as his works were not only widely distributed but deeply valued for the insights they provide to a myriad of important philosophical subjects.Closer to our own time a writer like Shakespeare stands a very good chance of continued survival because of the brilliance of his discourse and the interest level it has sustained in successive generations.Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Richard III are very likely to be staged in the year 3000, 4000, or 5000 as are the surviving works of Aeschylus.As language changes and English becomes less important I suspect that Richard III will be considered an interesting character in say 51st century Mandarin.As we look across more recent times we see the works of Nietzsche and Marx which stand a good chance of continued relevance for many centuries.Nietzsche's durability will likely be due to the sheer force of his contrarian originality and his sense of the inhuman.Marx is likely to remain relevant because it is difficult to imagine anyone ever doing a thesis on commodities without taking into account the role he played in the times in which he lived.Marx will remain important to scholars, as will Nietzsche, Shakespeare, and Plato as will numerous others because they provide original statements on a number of concepts that are likely to remain important at the methodological and theoretical level for scholars.All of this is predicated on the belief that scholarship will continue to exist, if not thrive, even in the digitized and modeled future into which humanity is propelling itself.Yet many today do not have difficulty imagining, if not a catastrophic end, at least a major event with incredibly negative implications for continued human life and scholarship during the current millennium.From this perspective those who would like to see the universities, libraries, and museums burn are ascending.Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, and Nietzsche are reasonable examples of thinkers and writers who have survived Baudrillard in the 21st Century (and after)