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First of all, in this section, I give a brief overview of Baudrillard’s relation to Nietzsche, and I look at the literature surrounding this relationship. This will set the scene for my argument that Baudrillard’s work on consumer society subtly follows and adapts Nietzsche’s mode of genealogy to a modern context.

The influence of Nietzsche on contemporary French thought has been dealt with extensively and has been heavily criticized.1 Deleuze’s (2006) study Nietzsche et la philosophie, first published in French in 1962, played an important role in developing French interest in Nietzsche’s philosophy during the early 1960s and 1970s. Some of Nietzsche’s French readers came to his texts directly; others came via Heidegger2 and others through Bataille.3

In Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism,4 Alan D. Schrift (1995) traces the affiliations of certain contemporary French thinkers to Nietzsche, but he does not engage with Baudrillard in his book.5 Schrift identifies two approaches of French thought to Nietzsche; first, the one in which Nietzsche’s philosophy appears as the “object” of interpretation and the second one, in which Nietzsche is “used” as a platform for philosophers to develop their own projects. Schrift explains, for instance, how the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought on Nietzsche moved from a philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (2006), to a self-conscious utilization of Nietzsche for purposes other than the philosophical explication de texte (Schrift 1995, 60).

Unlike Deleuze, Baudrillard does not in any of his works systematically use Nietzsche. Explicit references to Nietzsche are rare and in a book of interviews collected as D’un fragment l’autre with François L’Yvonnet, Baudrillard (2001, 10) said “Nietzsche n’a jamais été à proprement parler une référence, seulement une mémoire infuse”. In an interview with Paul Hegarty, Baudrillard also admits: “I read Nietzsche in German when I was very young – all of it, and since then I haven’t opened a book of his...it’s better than a reference, as it’s hidden away, part of the fabric, in the threads” (Hegarty 2004, 149).

Baudrillard, in Nietzsche’s footsteps, practices an “interpretative violence” and it is in On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche suggests (as I already mentioned earlier) that interpretation is always a matter of “forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else essential to interpretation” (Nietzsche 2007, 112; italics in the text). The stylistic resonances of Nietzsche with Baudrillard are to be found in the latter’s use of aphorisms, especially in Baudrillard’s (1990) Cool Memories. Throughout his career, Baudrillard steadily leaves the conventions of academic writing behind and attempts to critique all systematic thought. Paul Hegarty (2004, 1) explains that Baudrillard’s texts become increasingly speculative, and often free of argument as such. “Instead, there is a wall of assertions, claims, twists of logic, fictions, spews of metaphors losing their representative value...” (Hegarty 2004, 1).

In this chapter, I focus on Baudrillard’s first two books, The System of Objects (1968; 2005) and Consumer Society (1970; 1998). The latter book proceeds, according to George Ritzer, largely according to a “scholarly format […]. Intellectual predecessors and antagonists are clear and, as a result, so are the roots of many of Baudrillard's ideas” (Ritzer 1998, 1).6 In Consumer Society, Baudrillard (1998, 75) elaborates a “genealogy of consumption”, and although Baudrillard does indeed allude to scholarship and refer to past events, his use of the past could belong more to a historical novel than to a scholarly treatise.

Following Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Baudrillard uses a complex and conditional philosophical and stylistic presentation form that contains three central elements. He puts forward a certain historical point of view of the subject and thereby puts forward a thesis about the variability of the subject. He also hypothesizes on the constitutive relation between subjectivity and structures of power (section 1.2). These theses are presented in a certain narrative rhetorical form. The most important stylistic component of such a genealogy is its exaggerated, polemical and fictional character. This style serves to ensure an urgency to the hypothesis regarding the (violent) invention of subjects.

This style also connects with Baudrillard’s and Nietzsche’s engagement with the concept of truth as perspectival (section 1.3). The fundamental task of Baudrillard’s Consumer Society, like Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, the one upon which the success of their texts rest, is to effect a change in perspective or ethical orientation of their audience. The genealogical text achieves this effect due to its mode of presentation and not only due to its contents which includes hypotheses and speculations about origins.