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Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) | 
| Author: Jean Baudrillard
Creator: Sheila Faria Glaser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 9411
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 164
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0472065211
Dewey Decimal Number: 194
EAN: 9780472065219
ASIN: 0472065211
Publication Date: February 15, 1995
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought
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| Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...
 surprising April 25, 2008
Fell into this straight away, Used to reading similar but find it hard to read heavy theory, this was surprisingly easy to read, although some of the ideas are extreme, a lot can be taken from them and i look forward to reading every last word. truly tasty
Thought provoking but intense. February 5, 2008
A thought provoking book. Do not be shocked however if you find yourself reading it extremely slowly. The text is wordy and thick at best but often times necessarily to bring its points across. If you are not an avid reader, enjoy abstract thinking, or want to learn more about the differences between Simulacrum and Simulations avoid this book.
This is still a great read although convoluted at times so all others should enjoy. But those who are not well read have been warned.
Then again if you looked for this book odds are you are ready for this. I only wanted to warn those with out college education or advanced vocabulary to so that they wont lose their appetite for knowledge from heavy text, such an event would be regrettable.
The text is heavy, full of valuable info on what it pertains and much like this review it sometimes seems to repeat facts redundantly. Did I mention it was a hard read? (just kidding. lol)
 Worst translation ever! November 22, 2007
This is quite a nice book, with an horrible translation. The translator made no big efforts to find the correct names of places, books and movies. And she also does not help at all if you don't know France and Paris: many places are cited, and you will not know that Beaubourg is an modern art museum if you were not there (luckily, I was over there while reading it).
The same occurs for "Forum de Halles", which is a huge underground mall, and for "Stand on Zanzibar", which was translated back from the French version, resulting in "Everyone to Zanzibar", clearly showing that the translator did not even looked for this book name in the internet (that shows no results).
Quite interesting ideas, easy to read (you do not need a lot of philosophical background) with such poor translations... more footnotes would have helped a lot!
Baudrillard's Great Science Fiction Novel April 12, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is Baudrillard's most famous work, and indeed, it is a must-read for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the basics of postmodern thought. It is beautifully written, and comes across like a sort of non-fiction equivalent of William Gibson's Neuromancer with its glittering display of polished, gleaming words patterned into strange, mercurial sentences that are not always easy to follow. But, as with Finnegans Wake, it is not so much the particular thought of the moment that counts, as it is the impression and impact upon the mental sensorium of the total experience. Baudrillard is a dazzling word-smith and it is likely that you will come away from this book with one or two new words to add to your vocabulary.
One of the things, of course, that has made this book so popular is its visual quotation in the science fiction film The Matrix, but I must say that the book does little towards an elucidation of that film. Indeed, Baudrillard himself has stated his dislike of the film (see the book "The Conspiracy of Art" for his comments), and he has stated how it compares less favorably with films built around similar themes such as The Truman Show, Mulholland Drive and others (I think David Cronenberg's Existenz is a much better take on the virtual reality theme. The Matrix seems cliched by comparison, especially since Cronenberg was already there first with his early 80's classic Videodrome). The theme of hyperreality displacing the real is not really what The Matrix is all about (there is too little in it irony for that; and no ambiguity; instead it concerns how technology robs the human soul of its spiritual potentialities) but it is what Simulacra and Simulation is about.
The French philosophers are fond of developing a single metaphysical concept and then exploring its ramifications in numerous books and their sequels: Debord's "Spectacle," for instance, is essentially equivalent to Baudrillard's hyperreality; Foucault's "episteme," though a completely different idea, is nonetheless monolithic in Foucault's thought. And much of Baudrillard's writings are an exploration of his concept of the hyperreal and how it has displaced the real.
The point of the book is that we postmoderns live inside a media-generated dome that seals us off from the "real" world. Indeed, we are so convinced by our own fabrications that we can no longer differentiate reality from its simulacrum. When spending money on gambling in Las Vegas, are we really losing all that money, or is it just a part of the "game"?
The best essay in the book is "The Precession of the Simulacra," and it is also the longest. I saved it for last and began with the shorter essays. Baudrillard's piece on J.G. Ballard's novel Crash is one of the best in the collection, as is his essay on "Hypermarket and Hypercommodity" and "The Beauborg Effect." Each of these pieces feels more like reading a science fiction novel than anything else but, let's face it, we live in a world that is stranger than science fiction. It takes an artist to make the contours of such a world visible to our perception, and Baudrillard does a fine job of this. He is, however, less successful with his pitiful one page ramblings on Apocalypse Now, which is disappointing and sheds almost no light on Coppola's masterpiece. (For this, the reader would do well to consult Ebert's Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons).
I confess that there are paragraphs I did not understand and words that sound as if they are made up, but this is actually true of most authors who have something profound to say (Lewis Mumford, for instance, or Heidegger). But Simulacra and Simulation is an important work and should be read despite its difficulties. Read it just the way you would a poem by Holderlin or Rilke. That is, don't try too hard to understand it, just let the imagery sink into your consciousness and enjoy the alterations that it produces upon you.
--John David Ebert
author, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
 The Key to Understanding Jean Baudrillard January 9, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Baudrillard's classic is neither easy to read, nor is it the last word in continental postmodernism. It is also replete with ideas of questionable merit. So, why I have rated it with fives stars? Because buried within its pages, among the dross and the drivel, are enough intellectual gems to make the entire exercise more than worthwhile! Even with its flaws, Simulacra and Simulation reveals Jean Baudrillard to be one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. Any person deeply interested in critically understanding the postmodern, media saturated era in which we live, needs to read this book.
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