Reviews

first essay was really good and interesting! some really potent concepts in there i'll be thinking about a lot i think. after that it's a mostly barely-readable slog that reads almost like stream of consciousness. it's extremely dull and i couldn't tell you almost anything about any of it. read the first essay and leave the rest imo

oscarhill's review

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challenging medium-paced

3.25

Thought this was pretty good, not really my thing in all honesty though I think Baudrillard gets some good points in at various parts in the book. Obviously has all the typical 1980s French philosophy unreadability going on but in a way that feels less profound than someone like Foucault and less volatile than someone like Delueze. The parts about simulacra as a concept were definitely fascinating, and I think there is something to be said for discussing abstraction on that level. I'm not the most well read on symbols and language but there's definitely something there about certain symbols no longer mapping onto comprehensible reality and in fact creating a reality of there own. I don't see this book as being completely useless to me and I ended up making loads of notes on parts that were interesting: I particularly liked "The balance of terror is the terror of balance"... On the whole I feel glad that I have read it but don't see myself rushing back for more of Baudrillard's wisdom.

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jrofrano's review

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challenging informative slow-paced

2.0

casparb's review

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5.0

O a text that shifts, refocuses thinking of the world. One of few that I feel is able to genuinely perceive societal trajectory.

I'm not sure that I've perfectly absorbed it. What I have taken has been phenomenal. But I'm quite confident that Simulacra and Simulation will be even better on the reread it entirely merits.

Baudrillard's character comes through wonderfully in his writing too. It's not always easy, and sentences at times feel endless. I do love it for that - the text's oblique style feels deserved.

"Through I don't know what Möbius effect, representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more, where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time, where even the axiological, directive, and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still incomprehensible, unrecognisable to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates, which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history, violently resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra, we are concave mirrors radiated by the social"

In a sense, I suppose it flatters the reader. I can't help but feel that Baudrillard is, in his (orthogonal) way, something approaching correct. About this world and those down the line.

ralowe's review

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4.0

it's funny, this book reminds me, yet again and again, of the first big fight i had in my first relationship: of the encounter of art and capital. i held that andy warhol's conceptual non-engagement with how he provides another platform for product placement is willfully malicious, that his refusal to engage reveals something to never really trust in the convergence of power and knowledge as it can be located in the white male middle class personage of warhol. i mean, i'm on the look out for more biographical clues to this intent, and so far what i've dug up has never decisively contradicted this conclusion. how did i wind up here? the flashback comes around the middle where i recognize my idiom of the commodity form. i really enjoyed this essay and will come back to it over and over. jean baudrillard is all over the place. not sure why there is an essay about animals, but okay. i'm pretty sure derrida got the thing about undecidability that i'm obsessed with here or hereabouts. the closing essay is humorous since the (possible?) avowed nihilist afterward would go on to publish at least 30 more books. pataphysics?

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