Getting it from Noise and Other Myths: AIDS and Intellectuals in France

The aim of this article is to offer a contrast between two competing styles of intellectual engagement around AIDS in France during the final decades of the twentieth century, and to attempt to understand the reasons why such apparently divergent approaches to the epidemic appear. Focusing on two very different exemplar sets of texts, by Jean Baudrillard and Rommel Mendes-Leite, it attempts to evaluate the forms of knowledge produced by each of these writers in terms of communicative acts with use value, in order to determine the implications of each kind of intellectual production. Equally importantly, the paper recontextualizes and reassesses what a concept such as intellectual engagement means, when undertaken in an area of human suffering such as that of AIDS.