Simulacra and Simulation

The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought

The publication in France of Simulacra et Simulation in 1981 marked Jean Baudrillard’s first important step toward theorizing the postmodern. Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that replies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.

Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacrum¬—the copy without an original—and simulation, crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to address the concept of mass reproduction and reproducibility that characterizes our electronic media culture. Translator Sheila Faria Glaser provides the first complete English edition of Baudrillard’s rich speculations on the simulacrum: from the hologram to Apocalypse Now, clones to Crash, and Disneyland to Three Mile Island. Simulacra and Simulation represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), one of France’s leading intellectuals, began teaching in 1966 at Nanterre in Paris, where he spent most of his teaching career. His works in English translation include The Mirror of Production (1975), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1976), The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), America (1988), Cool Memories (1990), Fatal Strategies (1993), The Transparency of Evil (1993), Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), The Art of Disappearance (1994), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), The Consumer Society (1998), The Vital Illusion (2000) and The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002).