Jean Baudrillard and the Disappearance of Resistance: Indifferent Masses and the Implosion of the Social

This article examines Jean Baudrillard's overlooked engagement with political resistance. Focusing on his writings in the aftermath of May 1968 through the late 1970s, it reconstructs a trajectory marked by growing scepticism towards political action and critique. Central to this trajectory is Baudrillard's articulation of the disappearance of any viable form of resistance and his introduction of new notions, namely ‘mass’ and ‘implosion’. Particular attention is given to the 1978 silent majorities essay, where he frames the ‘indifference’ of the masses as a mode of resistance, marking the culmination of a decade-long inquiry into its disappearance. While the article reads Baudrillard's anti-critical thought as a bleak diagnostic of the end of thinking resistance, it argues that his work remains relevant as a warning about the ambivalence of indifference as resistance, which can function both as a refusal of power, akin to ‘destituent’ thought, and as a condition of contemporary domination.