I noticed in reading about NeoCon thinkers (oxymoron I know), Jean Baudrillard's name comes up from time to time as a critic of the ideas of Francis Fukuyama. In reading synopses and reviews on Amazon this morning, I saw that Danel Pipes had gone out of his way to give "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" by Baudrillard a scathing review. To me that's one of the most glowing reviews a person could get - a bad review from a sexist zionist xenophobe.


I ordered "Simulacra and Simulation" off of the Ebay this morning. Anybody read it?

Anybody read any Baudrillard?

Any recommendations on others to pick up?

I have read bits and pieces of Baudrillard as part of my undergrad degree in Philosophy, but people in his field weren't really emphasized by my department.

The basic idea of Baudrillard is this: the state of the postmodern age is that theory has supervened on experience, and that illusion has supervened on reality. He describes the prominence humanity has given signs and symbols over authentic things in the postmodern world, and how all that remains of reality are scraps hanging to the edges of our world. His most direct analogy is a fable about an empire that has drawn a map so exquisite that it is as big as the empire itself; Baudrillard's idea is that we give the map precedence, that the map is our experience of reality before the actual terrain.

Think of The Matrix as a sign of our times. I believe Morpheus' line and reference to the "desert of the real" is a direct quotation from Baudrillard (the book is also featured in the film and is ironically hollowed out as a space for Neo to hide his contraband software). His thesis is basically that we've re-entered Plato's Cave.

I know very little of his political ideas, other than that he tends to be Leftist, and that his critique of Fukuyama is that we've entered not a perfection of civilization, but a destruction of it.