The American Ebola “Crisis” Did Not Take Place: A Baudrillardian Interpretation
of a Manufactured Pseudo-Event
As the title of this essay unequivocally implies, the purpose of this reflection is to
examine the American Ebola “crisis” through the lens of the complex, interdisciplinary
philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. Upon its release in 1991, Baudrillard’s aptly named and
provocative text The Gulf War Did Not Take Place immediately triggered a wave of polemical
reactions in American intellectual circles. However, Philip Hammond notes that Baudrillard’s
analysis of this conflict is now considered by many specialists of media studies to be the
standard interpretation of the Gulf War. Given the sensitive nature of the subject itself, the
philosopher’s central thesis was initially misunderstood by many critics and lay readers alike.
In this canonical essay, Baudrillard attempts to articulate his well-founded fears related to the
hegemonic role of the corporate, mainstream media in the effacement of reality and the
dawning of “simulated reality" or what he terms “hyper-reality.”
According to the philosopher, carefully manufactured and contrived images, which
incessantly bombard the modern subject through a myriad of divergent screens, have taken
the place of the real itself. In other words, Baudrillard posits that we can no longer discern
between concrete reality and its ubiquitous, symbolic representation in the virtual space
through which the vast majority of our experiences are now filtered in the modern world. This
investigation will highlight that the philosopher’s theories related to the disconnect between
screen-based signs of war and actual carnage itself are also applicable to epidemics such as
Ebola. The irrational climate of fear and downright paranoia deliberately fueled by a
sensational media after the latest Ebola outbreak gives credence to many of the tenets of
Baudrillard’s philosophy that were originally considered to be extreme a few decades ago.
Before delving a little further into key Baudrillardian concepts which offer a cogent
theoretical framework for understanding the baffling social phenomenon of how a couple of
isolated cases of Ebola magically became a pandemic in the United States, it would be useful
to provide a brief overview of the virus itself. The first reported outbreak took place in Zaire
(now called the Democratic Republic of Congo) in October 1976 (Breman and Johnson 1663).
This “unusually lethal hemorrhagic fever” decimated the inhabitants of this impoverished
African society (Breman and Johnson 1663). Although the local authorities were eventually
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