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Two years after arriving at Nanterre, Jean [Baudrillard] was thrown into the most momentous event in recent French history—May ’68. Many people who take him simply for a dandy or a cynic forget the significance of these weeks of intense fever and utopia suddenly realized, which he experienced firsthand. It was all the more powerful since no one had thought it possible. For a while he became an activist, even a Maoist, but it did not take him long to realize that the same media that had snowballed the Paris events around the rest of the country, bringing General de Gaulle to his knees, had also brought about the sudden deflation that followed. Nevertheless, May ’68 remained for him one of the extraordinary occasions when signs assume a singular meaning—a radical event up there with the attacks on the World Trade Center. May ’68 and the twin towers were both far more formidable in their abrupt disappearance than they ever were in actuality. Indeed, after the latter event, Jean claimed that architecture had lost its ability to define space or acquire symbolic power. Architecture had nothing left to express beyond its own flat functionality, and he notoriously concluded that only those buildings that deserve to be destroyed are worth erecting.

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