I still fw the vision. But I don’t think he was trying that hard. I agree with the other review who said this is provocative nonsense.

Leído de una sentada. Precisa interésenos y digno sucesor de Debord. Bellisimamente escrito y gran labor del traductor

La guerra del golfo fue como “la utilización del preservativo ampliada al acto bélico: ¡haced la guerra, como el amor, con preservativo!”

Sobre la guerra del golfo como necesidad del capital y sobreproducción de mercancías hay mucho

“Vencido o no, Sadam tiene garantizada una imagen de marca carismática inolvidable. Vencedor o no, el armamento americano habrá adquirido una imagen de marca tecnológica sin parangón. Y el gasto suntuario de material equivale ya al de una guerra real, aun cuando ésta no llegue a producirse.”

Baudrillard is a genius. A postmodern prophet.

I got it into my head that I wanted to read this back in 2021 when my lecturer mentioned it in a Media Studies class and while it was interesting it wasn't the gamechanger that he had made it out to be.

Not his strongest work tbh. I liked the discussion about the media apparatus & the virtuality of war & how it’s all scripted in the postmodern era, but what the heck else was the rest of it.

Never have I read anything nearly as interesting written in such an unintelligible manner. The ideas Baudrillard presents are interesting, but not only is the similes and analogies odd (such as the UN awaking in a glass coffin and giving birth to the New World Order), but the structure of the essays make it incredibly difficult to follow. He also descends into mindless drivel from time to time, only managing to jumble everything else up.

There are some interesting points here, but these essays do not rank anywhere close to his masterpieces. His content is summarised in a much clearer and more succinct manner by the translator in the introduction, and reading further than that was frankly a waste of time.

I understood all these words separately but together not so much

a precarious argument from the onset. kept imagining baudrillard smugly grinning and patting himself on the back as he wrote psuedo-meaningful sentences such as 'hard war and soft war go boating' - got annoyed.

Ugh! I'm sure I was supposed to get more out of this than I did, but really...

I've got mixed feelings about this.

At times it feels as though Baudrillard is taking a contrarian stance just for the sake of it.

Baudrillard’s discussion of the (first) Persian Gulf War and how, in its planning and presentation, the war was not really “real.” His writing is rather poetic, perhaps at the expense of clarity, and I think I read the book from about 12 to 2 AM, which probably didn’t help my comprehension. Still, some provocative ideas.

Probably a solid starting place with Baudrillard. Also surprisingly practical- one can struggle to put something difficult like S&S into any frame of conceptual practice, but here it is and wonderfully. [x]-drillardians talk a lot about Baud laying down the conditions, precise reactions and media hyperreality of 9/11 thirty years before it took place. One gets that sense here.