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In this study, I seek to show how Baudrillard reactualizes Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. To my knowledge, no scholar has specifically tried to reconstruct how certain critical elements, strategies and figures within Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals are mobilized in Baudrillard’s work.

I first deal with Baudrillard’s genealogy of consumer society. I argue that both Nietzsche and Baudrillard are interested in analyzing the power structures and differential relations upholding moral systems. Baudrillard applies the critical tools of genealogy to Saussurean linguistics and he analyzes concepts as symptoms of the powers and forces that have become dominant. For Baudrillard, Saussurean linguistics presents us with a theory of language and it describes the consumer “morality” of late modernity.

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals anticipates the general outline of Baudrillard’s critique of the morality of consumption, but Baudrillard also transforms certain Nietzschean positions, processes, practices and figures. I show how the Nietzschean figure of the “ascetic priest” is turned into the modern advertiser in Baudrillard’s works on consumer society. In addition, I discuss whether the “ascetic ideal” lives on in consumer society, despite the “end of transcendence”.

After tackling Baudrillard’s consumer society, I scrutinize his genealogy of the orders of simulacra in relation to Nietzsche’s “reversal of Platonism”. In addition, I deal with Baudrillard’s genealogy of death and in the process, I examine Baudrillard’s (problematic) relation to Heidegger, which I do to accentuate Baudrillard’s closeness to Nietzsche.