Thanks for sharing. Reading the (translated) piece seems more useful here than the Wikipedia summary which spends more time assuming the premise of the work and

Thanks for sharing. Reading the (translated) piece seems more useful here than the Wikipedia summary which spends more time assuming the premise of the work and connecting it to other things. I don't think it is a good series of essays. It's necessarily scattershot in its argumentation to address the pre-action, concurrent-action, and post-action angles. But almost none of the arguments come across as earnest. I feel like I'm reading a longform series of "gotcha" takedowns with the authorial intent simply to throw wrenches into any discussion without actually proposing anything or materially affecting how the discussion progresses. 'The Vietnam war wasn't a war because US Congress didn't declare war'. Oh man, I feel so dunked upon. To emphasize my point that Baudrillard is doing nothing more than getting his name into op/ed columns, here's how he disdainfully reacts to a low-casualty high-consequence war. > There is a profound scorn in the kind “clean" war which renders the other powerless without destroying its flesh, which makes it a point of honour to disarm and neutralize but not to kill. In a sense, it is worse than the other kind of war because it spares life. It is like humiliation: by taking less than life it is taking more than life. Stop disrupting supply lines, destroying infrastructure, or planning feints. Real wars are all about body counts and nothing more. And don't dare you try military strategy, as that would _humiliate_ the enemy, which we all know is a fate worse than death.