Translated by Sheila Glaser
Included in the series, The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural MaterialismThe first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernism.
The publication 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 relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.
Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra---the copy without an original---and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.
Baudrillard's book 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.
"The book is an important meditation on the postmodern and, as such, has important implications for current thinking about the problem of the body, since the whole issue of cyborgs is directly concerned. Its translation is long overdue."
---Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine
Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.
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5-1/4 x 9, ca 128 pagesISBN 0-472-09521-8
cloth 29.95E (tentative)
ISBN 0-472-06521-1
paper 13.95E (tentatiave)
September