Gość przewidział przyszłość, a nawet nie był jasnowidzem...

Interesting stuff, haven’t read any Baudrillard before. Logical extension of Benjamin to Debord to Baudrillard. Excited to read Jameson and see how he fits in there.

Although it is founded on an interesting idea - the simulacrum - the writing itself falls into the trap of just saying the same thing again and again through different metaphors. Although it is deliberately provocative, I did find a lot of it to be really engaging and bold, and I can definitely see myself talking about it for a long time. However, I feel like reading each article in their entirety isn’t really necessary, it’s better in its central idea than it is in execution. I’d say probably just read the introduction.

I will also say that there is an interesting idea in its form in that, being sometimes purely an exercise of provocation, Baudrillard kind of enacts the thing which he’s talking about in his writing. When he speaks about the fact that the war has become purely a signifier, with nothing beneath the surface, it’s hard to miss the irony of the fact that he clearly doesn’t entirely believe this, and that there isn’t a real ideology behind the words on the page in the same way there is no event behind the spectacle. Although it makes the exercise seem futile, that futility itself is quite interesting in relation to the subject matter. It feels like the text itself is simulating an argument which doesn’t really exist, so I feel like, on some level, enjoyment of the book kind of depends on if you find that idea interesting or annoying.

The Emperor has no clothes. If you boil off the seemingly non-sensical claims (like, y'know, the title) the book's alleged insights are, while not wrong, deeply and utterly banal.

truuuueeeeee

Definitely interesting. Baudrillard made a couple of solid points in an un-solid manner; it seemed that the author of the introduction explained Baudrillard's points better than himself.

The book is really fantastic.

Reads like a political essay by Borges, in a parallel world where Borges is interested in the Gulf War. It seems absurd and crude but is deceptively sublime. Saddam as the rug salesman, Bush as the arms salesman, both there to perform their absurd functions in a non-war, which is happening so that it can still be proven that the war can be fought (even though it’s no WWIII), for the TV cameras to keep rolling. “The fact that the Americans never saw the Iraqis is compensated for by the fact that the Iraqis never fought them.” Strange parallels between the long wait for the Gulf War and the 2022 Russia-NATO standoff where the unbearable waiting is unavoidably transformed into a neurotic and idiotic media avalanche where the ground is being dug for tomorrow where the war has already happened and where the world has already witnessed that Ukraine is no more. The long covered wait can’t but turn into a desire for something - even violent - to happen, for some relief from looming uncertainty at last.

If only for the many semantic games with the concept of war, this politically outdated and sociologically anachronistic essay was fun to read.

Neat concept, bad execution. I liked reading about the topic of this book and philosophical ideas behind it better than reading the actual book. Which is a real shame.

These are essays originally published to be stand alone in magazines, so they read really awkwardly.

Overall not a very pleasant experience to read.

Three essays: "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place," "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place," "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place." Baudrillard argues that the First Gulf War was a media construction - not that it did not take place, exactly, but that it did not exist for us at all except through the media, which packaged it to us falsely, depicting it as a "war." What happened was a travesty, simple imperialist brutality, masquerading as a war - that is what he's saying. Baudrillard's argument is coldly ironic, never making use of a humanistic lexicon. This is intentional: his dry tone is accusatory. His tone forces us to confront the terrifying fact that an attitude of utter indifference to something such as "the Gulf War" is absolutely possible for those of us in the post-industrial, wealthiest sectors of the world. That is our isolation, our alienation. The scariest line in the book:

"A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life. Should we consider multiplying clean wars in order to reduce the murderous death toll of peacetime?"

Woke nonsense