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I picked this book up years ago, and it was a terrible slog to get through. The ideas were absolutely fascinating, but the writing is one of the /worst/ I've ev
by makmanalp 9y ago
I picked this book up years ago, and it was a terrible slog to get through. The ideas were absolutely fascinating, but the writing is one of the /worst/ I've ever seen. I had to read and reread every single sentence to understand what on earth it was talking about. And once decoded (through reading or supplementary resources), the ideas were not as complex as the text.
- BenGosub 9y agoI've been through this as well, but I think that while for example Focault and co. use complex writing to hide their lack of ideas, if you can look past Baudrillard's complexity he's unmatched visionary. Probably the best critic of capitalism I've ever encountered.
- brianzelip 9y agoWelcome to graduate school in popular culture studies.
- GuiA 9y agoDid you read it in English? The French writing is very... French (flowery, circuitous, full of references to obscure works) so I can see how someone reading a translated version would have a hard time with it (a translation is always a diminished recreation of the original, and the average French person has many years of studying French literature in school to get used to that particular kind of writing).
- jolux 9y agoIt’s so funny that you say that translations are always diminished recreations of the original... I think Derrida would disagree.
- osteele 9y agoREADER: I didn't like your story at all. JAMES THURBER: Did you read the French translation? READER: No, I read it in English. THURBER: That explains it. It suffers greatly in the original. [This was told me by my father. I can't find a published source, and a web search doesn't turn up anything similar. My father interviewed Thurber once, but this isn't from the version that was published, and it doesn't sound like something Thurber would have told about himself. Epistemic status: probably apocryphal.]
- makmanalp 9y agoYeah, it was a translation (my French is not nearly good enough to tackle philosophy). I found my copy, it's the umich press one, translated by Glaser. Though I don't think it's the translation per se, it really was the writing. I agree that it might be a cultural thing, but I've read Montaigne, for example, and it's much clearer even though he predates Baudrillard by 350 years. :-) I'm looking through this again, and there were just so many places where he makes dubious but absolute statements without backing it up at all, and we're to take him at his word. "It is simulation that is effective, and never the real". OK, man. Or the way he throws in vague sentences for effect. I mean, I can't start a chapter with the sentence "The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear" while keeping a straight face. Anyway, like I said, I think eventually it builds into something cool and tangible it you stick through it, but it takes a lot of digging.