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La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu
French
112 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 1991
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3629 people want to read
About the author
Jean Baudrillard
210 books1,977 followersJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
April 1, 2013
Three essays: "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place," "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place," "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place." Baudrillard argues that the First Gulf War was a media construction - not that it did not take place, exactly, but that it did not exist for us at all except through the media, which packaged it to us falsely, depicting it as a "war." What happened was a travesty, simple imperialist brutality, masquerading as a war - that is what he's saying. Baudrillard's argument is coldly ironic, never making use of a humanistic lexicon. This is intentional: his dry tone is accusatory. His tone forces us to confront the terrifying fact that an attitude of utter indifference to something such as "the Gulf War" is absolutely possible for those of us in the post-industrial, wealthiest sectors of the world. That is our isolation, our alienation. The scariest line in the book:
"A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life. Should we consider multiplying clean wars in order to reduce the murderous death toll of peacetime?"
"A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life. Should we consider multiplying clean wars in order to reduce the murderous death toll of peacetime?"
October 8, 2015
I thought this book was largely (but not quite entirely) provocative nonsense. There is some decent sociological analysis in it, but there is also a very large amount of utter drivel.
In spite of the title, Baudrillard accepts that military events took place in the Gulf and that people suffered and died during them, but he maintains that what took place was not a war, and the version of events we saw on TV and in other media was not what really happened. Plainly, the title is intended to attract attention (and it's a clever reference to Jean Giraudoux's play), but Baudrillard simply fails to make any sort of case to support it. He argues that the war we were presented with on TV and through government propaganda isn't the same as the war as it happened. This is true, but hardly profound or original; "In war, truth is the first casualty" has been attributed to Aeschylus two and a half millennia ago, and although he gives some modern analysis of this, Baudrillard doesn't get far beyond it.
The real trouble begins when Baudrillard attempts to describe "reality," because in using the word "reality" to mean "one person's subjective truth" postmodernists like Baudrillard muddle the distinction between fact and interpretation, and sometimes use the muddle dishonestly. For example, Baudrillard laments the lack of a declaration of war, then says "Since it never began, this war is therefore interminable". Now, if he'd said "The lack of a clearly defined declaration makes a clearly defined end very difficult, and the successors to Saddam's regime will have to deal with insurgents for a very long time" he'd have made a good point and been proved right by recent events. But he doesn't do anything of the sort. He claims that the war never began, which is simply not the case. This is simply denying facts, not commenting on perceptions of them. And to use the phrase ".....is therefore interminable" implies some logical imperative which just isn't there. It certainly won't go on for ever, which is a very long time indeed.
In another example, he asserts that we TV watchers were submitted to "the same violence" as Saddam's prisoners, tortured into "repenting" in public. I accept a parallel in the distortions of the truth by the two sides, but to maintain that I, as a TV watcher at home, was somehow subjected to "the same violence" as some of Saddam's most brutally abused victims is an obscene thing to say. He's not writing poetry or a novel here. The aim is to give clear insights into an analysis of what is really happening. The words "the same" have a specific meaning here, and it is facts, not interpretation, which are being denied.
Let me repeat, some of his poitical and sociological stuff is actually rather interesting. For example: "One of the two adversaries is a rug salesman, the other an arms salesman: they have neither the same logic nor the same strategy, even though they are both crooks. There is not enough communication between them to make war upon each other. Saddam will never fight, while the Americans will fight against a fictive double on a screen." It's overstated, of course, but thought-provoking and a pretty good analysis of the two sides' differing approaches to the war. But what *are* we supposed to make of a passage like this, about the video archive which will be studied by future historians of the war:
"The archive also belongs to virtual time; it is the complement of the event 'in real time', of that instanteneity of the event and its diffusion. Moreover, rather than the 'revolution' of real time of which Virilio speaks, we should speak of an involution in real time; of an involution of the event in the instanteneity of everything at once, and of its vanishing in information itself. If we take note of the speed of light and the temporal short-circuit of pure war (the nanosecond), we see that this involution precipitates us precisely into the virtuality of war and not into its reality, it precipitates us into the absence of war. Must we denounce the speed of light?"
Now, there really are limits and this exceeds all bounds. If he's saying that the video footage isn't the real war, fair enough. It isn't, as Magritte cleverly pointed out. But " the temporal short circuit of pure war (the nanosecond)"? I'm very sorry, but three words, the first and last of which are "oh" and "off" come inexorably to mind. And as for "Must we denounce the speed of light?" - well, words simply fail me. I genuinely cannot remember ever having had to read such abject tosh, and I have studied psychology in my time so it's up against some pretty stiff competition.
I'm sorry this is so long. I feel better now, anyway. I've given this two stars because there's the odd interesting idea, but overall I'd recommend giving it a wide berth and reading something - almost anything - else instead.
In spite of the title, Baudrillard accepts that military events took place in the Gulf and that people suffered and died during them, but he maintains that what took place was not a war, and the version of events we saw on TV and in other media was not what really happened. Plainly, the title is intended to attract attention (and it's a clever reference to Jean Giraudoux's play), but Baudrillard simply fails to make any sort of case to support it. He argues that the war we were presented with on TV and through government propaganda isn't the same as the war as it happened. This is true, but hardly profound or original; "In war, truth is the first casualty" has been attributed to Aeschylus two and a half millennia ago, and although he gives some modern analysis of this, Baudrillard doesn't get far beyond it.
The real trouble begins when Baudrillard attempts to describe "reality," because in using the word "reality" to mean "one person's subjective truth" postmodernists like Baudrillard muddle the distinction between fact and interpretation, and sometimes use the muddle dishonestly. For example, Baudrillard laments the lack of a declaration of war, then says "Since it never began, this war is therefore interminable". Now, if he'd said "The lack of a clearly defined declaration makes a clearly defined end very difficult, and the successors to Saddam's regime will have to deal with insurgents for a very long time" he'd have made a good point and been proved right by recent events. But he doesn't do anything of the sort. He claims that the war never began, which is simply not the case. This is simply denying facts, not commenting on perceptions of them. And to use the phrase ".....is therefore interminable" implies some logical imperative which just isn't there. It certainly won't go on for ever, which is a very long time indeed.
In another example, he asserts that we TV watchers were submitted to "the same violence" as Saddam's prisoners, tortured into "repenting" in public. I accept a parallel in the distortions of the truth by the two sides, but to maintain that I, as a TV watcher at home, was somehow subjected to "the same violence" as some of Saddam's most brutally abused victims is an obscene thing to say. He's not writing poetry or a novel here. The aim is to give clear insights into an analysis of what is really happening. The words "the same" have a specific meaning here, and it is facts, not interpretation, which are being denied.
Let me repeat, some of his poitical and sociological stuff is actually rather interesting. For example: "One of the two adversaries is a rug salesman, the other an arms salesman: they have neither the same logic nor the same strategy, even though they are both crooks. There is not enough communication between them to make war upon each other. Saddam will never fight, while the Americans will fight against a fictive double on a screen." It's overstated, of course, but thought-provoking and a pretty good analysis of the two sides' differing approaches to the war. But what *are* we supposed to make of a passage like this, about the video archive which will be studied by future historians of the war:
"The archive also belongs to virtual time; it is the complement of the event 'in real time', of that instanteneity of the event and its diffusion. Moreover, rather than the 'revolution' of real time of which Virilio speaks, we should speak of an involution in real time; of an involution of the event in the instanteneity of everything at once, and of its vanishing in information itself. If we take note of the speed of light and the temporal short-circuit of pure war (the nanosecond), we see that this involution precipitates us precisely into the virtuality of war and not into its reality, it precipitates us into the absence of war. Must we denounce the speed of light?"
Now, there really are limits and this exceeds all bounds. If he's saying that the video footage isn't the real war, fair enough. It isn't, as Magritte cleverly pointed out. But " the temporal short circuit of pure war (the nanosecond)"? I'm very sorry, but three words, the first and last of which are "oh" and "off" come inexorably to mind. And as for "Must we denounce the speed of light?" - well, words simply fail me. I genuinely cannot remember ever having had to read such abject tosh, and I have studied psychology in my time so it's up against some pretty stiff competition.
I'm sorry this is so long. I feel better now, anyway. I've given this two stars because there's the odd interesting idea, but overall I'd recommend giving it a wide berth and reading something - almost anything - else instead.
March 19, 2019
If only for the many semantic games with the concept of war, this politically outdated and sociologically anachronistic essay was fun to read.
Read
February 1, 2018I understood all these words separately but together not so much
June 13, 2013
Thought provoking examination about what war is designed to accomplish in the post-Cold War world. Those who have no patience for letting an argument develop might have a knee jerk reaction against this book, so let me give you a reason why you ought to keep an open mind. What Baudrillard means when he says that "the Gulf War did not take place" isn't to imply that people didn't die, acts of courage did not happen or that the war didn't do any good. What he means is that whatever objective the war had and whatever sacrifices were made were overshadowed by the spectacle of war. In an age where we are increasingly divorced from reality, due in large part to technology, the spectacle of war can overshadow the actual war. This is what happened in the 1991 Gulf War, and it has become the holotype for war in an age where there are no more great wars.
May 18, 2016
a precarious argument from the onset. kept imagining baudrillard smugly grinning and patting himself on the back as he wrote psuedo-meaningful sentences such as 'hard war and soft war go boating' - got annoyed.
July 26, 2023
Three short essays come together and form interesting point of view on Gulf War, its hyperreal vibe, depicting contradictory consequences of asymmetrical(which scale is hard to imagine) warfare(I feel like quite similar situation occuried during first weeks(month?) of Russio-Ukranian War, when the whole campaign looked like a virtual simulation of war).
Book is worth reading, especially if you're interested in learning game mechanics of nWo.
Book is worth reading, especially if you're interested in learning game mechanics of nWo.
April 3, 2024
Leído de una sentada. Precisa interésenos y digno sucesor de Debord. Bellisimamente escrito y gran labor del traductor
La guerra del golfo fue como “la utilización del preservativo ampliada al acto bélico: ¡haced la guerra, como el amor, con preservativo!”
Sobre la guerra del golfo como necesidad del capital y sobreproducción de mercancías hay mucho
“Vencido o no, Sadam tiene garantizada una imagen de marca carismática inolvidable. Vencedor o no, el armamento americano habrá adquirido una imagen de marca tecnológica sin parangón. Y el gasto suntuario de material equivale ya al de una guerra real, aun cuando ésta no llegue a producirse.”
La guerra del golfo fue como “la utilización del preservativo ampliada al acto bélico: ¡haced la guerra, como el amor, con preservativo!”
Sobre la guerra del golfo como necesidad del capital y sobreproducción de mercancías hay mucho
“Vencido o no, Sadam tiene garantizada una imagen de marca carismática inolvidable. Vencedor o no, el armamento americano habrá adquirido una imagen de marca tecnológica sin parangón. Y el gasto suntuario de material equivale ya al de una guerra real, aun cuando ésta no llegue a producirse.”
March 5, 2022
Baudrillard was indeed a naughty boy. He is on to something though ... The first essay of the three is pretty great. The last two are okay but lacks the same quality of thought. I enjoyed the Brecht quote and the random references to sex seemingly just popping up out of nowhere. Very entertaining. At times thought provoking. Baudrillard isn't exactly a subtle guy, but you just got to enjoy his framework of thought. At times his thoughts are hypercomplex, at other times banal, but that makes for interesting reading.
3,5
3,5
June 7, 2013
Definitely interesting. Baudrillard made a couple of solid points in an un-solid manner; it seemed that the author of the introduction explained Baudrillard's points better than himself.
April 21, 2024
Not his strongest work tbh. I liked the discussion about the media apparatus & the virtuality of war & how it’s all scripted in the postmodern era, but what the heck else was the rest of it.
August 7, 2016
What is vitally important to understand regarding Baudrillard's thesis was that it wasn't a literal denial of the war. Instead the media presented images of the war which told a very specific narrative of the events unfolding, it simulated a reality which didn't take place on the battlefield and censored the images of the actual reality which was unfolding which was the bloodshed, despair and suffering. This basically presented a clear instantiated example of hyper-reality for the events unfolding were "more real than real". His thesis is definitely something that appears truthful on the surface, especially if you reflect on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, preluding the Vietnam war, which was completely staged. His sentiment that this isn't a 'war' in the traditional sense is also true, shared by Bill Hicks at the time.
Since this war was won in advance. we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. (61)
"A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life" (69)
He was also right to apply Stockholm Syndrome to war by suggesting that the winner becomes hostage to the loser, which preempted the Iraqi conflict decades later which can only be described as National Stockholm Syndrome.
Recent events with the Israeli Defense Force are even more surreal in the sense that they declared an invasion of Palestine via twitter. However with the expansive growth of social media his central thesis begins to feel antiquated now as the monopolization and control of images is not as pertinent or believable now. Twitter during recent surges of conflict was used to present activism from the ground, presenting images of the dead and testimony from those hearing and feeling the war. An alternative source of media opened up to counteract the narrative running simultaneously on the television. The media sometimes used those images in their stories and bulletins thus disavowing the control of the military apparatus. However Baudrillard writes:
"In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications." (64)
His thesis suggests that the flow of information is so great that only interpretation is possible with no definitive and clear analysis available. This has been suggested by other network theorists in sociology but despite the multifarious channels and saturation of images and information, our 'desensitization' hasn't led to a lack of understanding of truth but merely a skepticism involved in accepting what is true, with the need for greater and longer analysis.
It seems apparent he wasn't concerned with objectivity as he insisted that the book could be read as a science fiction novel. The preface even states that the facts openly contradict the central thesis of the book. It also bluntly states the following:
"These are occasional essays by a writer who believes that writing should be less a representation of reality than its transfiguration and that it should pursue a "fatal strategy" of pushing things to extremes".
This feels like capitulation to obscurantism and distorting what is self evident. Being polemical with reality is fine but denying that anything and everything that you write doesn't have to have any relationship to evidence is a horrible precedent to set.
The main thesis that Baudrillard provides is that war has evolved in a manner similar to the evolution of capital: "just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space" (56)
The problem of course is that capital and war have had these definitions for a long time. War was never merely understood as being bombardment just as capital was never assumed to be fixed on a specific relationship to ostentation, even by Marx. Reading accounts of the Second Wold War also give testament to war also being fought on an abstract level. If anything his thesis works better with wars that we have no footage of because they are assembled by the narrators of history. Very messy.
Although he offers useful concepts and tools by suggesting that real events become contaminated by "the structural unreality of images" and applications of his hyper-reality thesis, his methodology paralyzes and leaves you catatonic without any way out as he states himself:
"the image and information are subject to no principle of truth or
reality.
Which merely leaves a social commentator without anywhere to go, it disassociates and dislocates him from anything important. Although I have deep respect for his work and enjoy engaging with it critically, he seems to stand for everything I actively loathe in this book:
"Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than the events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came . . . Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity"(66-7)"
And then we have this gem of bullshit:
"However consensual traditionalism (that of the Enlightenment. the Rights of Man, the Left in power, the repentant intellectual and sentimental humanism) is every bit as fierce as that of any tribal religion or primitive society." (79)
The conglomeration here is stunning particularly when he then goes onto mock Salman Rushdie and the fatwa affair as merely constituting vaudeville esque symbolic theater. This is sheer ignorance and destructive.
"If a simple fatwa, a simple death sentence can plunge the West into such depression (the vaudeville of terror on the part of writers and intellectuals on this occasion could never be portrayed cruelly enough)
if the West prefers to believe in this threat, it is because it is paralysed by its own power, in which it does not believe, precisely because of its enormity (the Islamic "neurosis" would be due to the excessive tension created by the disproportion of ends; the disproportion of means from which we suffer creates by contrast a serious depression, a neurosis of powerlessness)." (80)
Key Terms deriving from the text:
'Soft War'
'Non-Event'
'Hyper-reality'
'Spectacle'
'Simulacra'
'Contamination'
'Speculative Turn'
'Simulation
'Virtualisation'
Since this war was won in advance. we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. (61)
"A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life" (69)
He was also right to apply Stockholm Syndrome to war by suggesting that the winner becomes hostage to the loser, which preempted the Iraqi conflict decades later which can only be described as National Stockholm Syndrome.
Recent events with the Israeli Defense Force are even more surreal in the sense that they declared an invasion of Palestine via twitter. However with the expansive growth of social media his central thesis begins to feel antiquated now as the monopolization and control of images is not as pertinent or believable now. Twitter during recent surges of conflict was used to present activism from the ground, presenting images of the dead and testimony from those hearing and feeling the war. An alternative source of media opened up to counteract the narrative running simultaneously on the television. The media sometimes used those images in their stories and bulletins thus disavowing the control of the military apparatus. However Baudrillard writes:
"In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications." (64)
His thesis suggests that the flow of information is so great that only interpretation is possible with no definitive and clear analysis available. This has been suggested by other network theorists in sociology but despite the multifarious channels and saturation of images and information, our 'desensitization' hasn't led to a lack of understanding of truth but merely a skepticism involved in accepting what is true, with the need for greater and longer analysis.
It seems apparent he wasn't concerned with objectivity as he insisted that the book could be read as a science fiction novel. The preface even states that the facts openly contradict the central thesis of the book. It also bluntly states the following:
"These are occasional essays by a writer who believes that writing should be less a representation of reality than its transfiguration and that it should pursue a "fatal strategy" of pushing things to extremes".
This feels like capitulation to obscurantism and distorting what is self evident. Being polemical with reality is fine but denying that anything and everything that you write doesn't have to have any relationship to evidence is a horrible precedent to set.
The main thesis that Baudrillard provides is that war has evolved in a manner similar to the evolution of capital: "just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space" (56)
The problem of course is that capital and war have had these definitions for a long time. War was never merely understood as being bombardment just as capital was never assumed to be fixed on a specific relationship to ostentation, even by Marx. Reading accounts of the Second Wold War also give testament to war also being fought on an abstract level. If anything his thesis works better with wars that we have no footage of because they are assembled by the narrators of history. Very messy.
Although he offers useful concepts and tools by suggesting that real events become contaminated by "the structural unreality of images" and applications of his hyper-reality thesis, his methodology paralyzes and leaves you catatonic without any way out as he states himself:
"the image and information are subject to no principle of truth or
reality.
Which merely leaves a social commentator without anywhere to go, it disassociates and dislocates him from anything important. Although I have deep respect for his work and enjoy engaging with it critically, he seems to stand for everything I actively loathe in this book:
"Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than the events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came . . . Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity"(66-7)"
And then we have this gem of bullshit:
"However consensual traditionalism (that of the Enlightenment. the Rights of Man, the Left in power, the repentant intellectual and sentimental humanism) is every bit as fierce as that of any tribal religion or primitive society." (79)
The conglomeration here is stunning particularly when he then goes onto mock Salman Rushdie and the fatwa affair as merely constituting vaudeville esque symbolic theater. This is sheer ignorance and destructive.
"If a simple fatwa, a simple death sentence can plunge the West into such depression (the vaudeville of terror on the part of writers and intellectuals on this occasion could never be portrayed cruelly enough)
if the West prefers to believe in this threat, it is because it is paralysed by its own power, in which it does not believe, precisely because of its enormity (the Islamic "neurosis" would be due to the excessive tension created by the disproportion of ends; the disproportion of means from which we suffer creates by contrast a serious depression, a neurosis of powerlessness)." (80)
Key Terms deriving from the text:
'Soft War'
'Non-Event'
'Hyper-reality'
'Spectacle'
'Simulacra'
'Contamination'
'Speculative Turn'
'Simulation
'Virtualisation'
October 12, 2025
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place may at times be used to discredit Baudrillard. Those who do that ignore the concepts he is getting at to focus on how he may have missed a few details leading up to the Iraq war. For someone so prophetic, these accusations are critical to his reputation.
The book is written at the beginning of a new era of media where the knee jerk financial reactions begin to define war. Paul Virilio and Noam Chomsky are two others who can attest to this shift. Today it has only gotten worse and the strategies are more temporized to the specific neurological expectancies of the media consumer. The new face of war is double jeopardy. You can’t be held accountable for the same event twice. So power lays the groundwork to infuse an event. Then the event (or lack thereof) is used to make people complacent to anything similar.
Wars that repeat history fight in the shade of past representation. Activists bring to light the past, making power look bad. And they use the poor optics as a teaching moment to repeat that historical event’s representation. They’ll use your revolutionary catharsis against you, to condone similar violence, and scapegoat responsibility for it, in shade of the past.
Sparta, but more like the 300 movie…Real, except you don’t shoot the messenger or kick them down a well. You just kick them while they’re down. You bury them in their own representation. Imbricate their personal data with the political. This is how they unload unwanted accountability on the masses when there is a message they don’t want the public to know. They let the strategic repetition of past events shield them from all public or private territorializable responsibility.
“today I unleash virtual war, tomorrow I unleash real war”
“There will never be a monument to the unknown hostage, everyone is too ashamed of him: the collective shame which attaches to the hostage reflects the absolute degradation of real hostility (war) into virtual hospitality”
“In this process, the hostages are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange, it is their virtual death that is at issue.“
The book is written at the beginning of a new era of media where the knee jerk financial reactions begin to define war. Paul Virilio and Noam Chomsky are two others who can attest to this shift. Today it has only gotten worse and the strategies are more temporized to the specific neurological expectancies of the media consumer. The new face of war is double jeopardy. You can’t be held accountable for the same event twice. So power lays the groundwork to infuse an event. Then the event (or lack thereof) is used to make people complacent to anything similar.
Wars that repeat history fight in the shade of past representation. Activists bring to light the past, making power look bad. And they use the poor optics as a teaching moment to repeat that historical event’s representation. They’ll use your revolutionary catharsis against you, to condone similar violence, and scapegoat responsibility for it, in shade of the past.
Sparta, but more like the 300 movie…Real, except you don’t shoot the messenger or kick them down a well. You just kick them while they’re down. You bury them in their own representation. Imbricate their personal data with the political. This is how they unload unwanted accountability on the masses when there is a message they don’t want the public to know. They let the strategic repetition of past events shield them from all public or private territorializable responsibility.
“today I unleash virtual war, tomorrow I unleash real war”
“There will never be a monument to the unknown hostage, everyone is too ashamed of him: the collective shame which attaches to the hostage reflects the absolute degradation of real hostility (war) into virtual hospitality”
“In this process, the hostages are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange, it is their virtual death that is at issue.“
March 16, 2024
I have been attempting to find this book for years. I’ve always found the provocative title to be fascinating, and I hoped that reading the source material would give me insight on the farce of the Gulf War.
As it would turn out, my years of searching to get my hands on this book, in English or in French, have resulted in a remarkably anti-climatic conclusion: namely that I understand less about Baudrillard’s theory than I did before I started reading.
I remember reading somewhere that Baudrillard hesitates to place this piece of work in a specific genre, going so far as to say it could one day be read as science fiction. This confusion permeates the three essays that comprise this book. Baudrillard writes in opaque “the thought did occur to me” language that through strange conflations and indulgent analogies drives the reader further and further away from any understanding of the Gulf War.
What I envisioned as a poignant analysis of the surreal media landscape and its pseudo-events read more like the half-baked rantings of an eager undergraduate. If further confusion was his intention, boy did he succeed.
As it would turn out, my years of searching to get my hands on this book, in English or in French, have resulted in a remarkably anti-climatic conclusion: namely that I understand less about Baudrillard’s theory than I did before I started reading.
I remember reading somewhere that Baudrillard hesitates to place this piece of work in a specific genre, going so far as to say it could one day be read as science fiction. This confusion permeates the three essays that comprise this book. Baudrillard writes in opaque “the thought did occur to me” language that through strange conflations and indulgent analogies drives the reader further and further away from any understanding of the Gulf War.
What I envisioned as a poignant analysis of the surreal media landscape and its pseudo-events read more like the half-baked rantings of an eager undergraduate. If further confusion was his intention, boy did he succeed.
August 3, 2012
A really really great book that went sailing straight over the head of many American critics who wondered how someone could deny that a war had taken place.
Baudrillards' thesis runs something like; a war did not take place in that, firstly there are usually two sides in a war, capabale of having one. Secondly the war that did take place was completely removed from the standard notion of a war. A war as a media event, a spectacle created to support a sense of a palpable enemy and a just cause.
When read against Der Derians Virtuous War, one realizes how close to the mark Baudrillard is, especially in light of Schwarzkopfs acquisition of a war game, which became the blueprint for America. Context is important in reading this book otherwise you won't get a lot out of it. Persevere however and the practical applications are well worth it.
Baudrillards' thesis runs something like; a war did not take place in that, firstly there are usually two sides in a war, capabale of having one. Secondly the war that did take place was completely removed from the standard notion of a war. A war as a media event, a spectacle created to support a sense of a palpable enemy and a just cause.
When read against Der Derians Virtuous War, one realizes how close to the mark Baudrillard is, especially in light of Schwarzkopfs acquisition of a war game, which became the blueprint for America. Context is important in reading this book otherwise you won't get a lot out of it. Persevere however and the practical applications are well worth it.
March 24, 2025
prowokacyjny dziad francuski i drama queen rzuca wyzwanie, na ile możesz się zgodzić z jego agresywnym wsadzaniem kija w mrowisko.
Najkrótsze podsumowanie: Dziennikarz CNN pyta amerykańskich żołnierzy w Zatoce, jakie są ich plany i co właśnie robią. Ci odpowiadają, że nie wiedzą i muszą się dowiedzieć z CNN. baudrillian moment
Nie aplikuje się zupełnie do wszystkich konfliktów (np. inwazji na Ukrainę), ale niestety pozostaje dobrą lekturą w czasie izraelskiej destrukcji Strefy Gazy. Istotne, żeby mieć w głowie: symulakrum nie neguje kolonialzmu, ropy, krwi i śmierci.
Najkrótsze podsumowanie: Dziennikarz CNN pyta amerykańskich żołnierzy w Zatoce, jakie są ich plany i co właśnie robią. Ci odpowiadają, że nie wiedzą i muszą się dowiedzieć z CNN. baudrillian moment
Nie aplikuje się zupełnie do wszystkich konfliktów (np. inwazji na Ukrainę), ale niestety pozostaje dobrą lekturą w czasie izraelskiej destrukcji Strefy Gazy. Istotne, żeby mieć w głowie: symulakrum nie neguje kolonialzmu, ropy, krwi i śmierci.
April 16, 2025
Gość przewidział przyszłość, a nawet nie był jasnowidzem...
September 13, 2024
don’t mind me just padding my goodreads stats.
but actually these three essays written before, during, and after the gulf war, were interesting. admittedly the political commentary was mostly over my head, i’m not familiar with the titular war basically at all, but mixed with the political is a sociological commentary that is genuinely fascinating and prescient if not wholly thorough.
in brief he outlines a caustic line between technological development with increasing virtuality. essential arguing that existence in the televisual comes at the expense of the tangible, and that the symptoms of that loss have robbed even our most primordial physical acts (war) of their physical existence.
i wish he dwelled more on the philosophical aspects of the essays, but i’m assuming he left most of that for simulacra and simulation, and at the very least this has made me want to read that more.
but actually these three essays written before, during, and after the gulf war, were interesting. admittedly the political commentary was mostly over my head, i’m not familiar with the titular war basically at all, but mixed with the political is a sociological commentary that is genuinely fascinating and prescient if not wholly thorough.
in brief he outlines a caustic line between technological development with increasing virtuality. essential arguing that existence in the televisual comes at the expense of the tangible, and that the symptoms of that loss have robbed even our most primordial physical acts (war) of their physical existence.
i wish he dwelled more on the philosophical aspects of the essays, but i’m assuming he left most of that for simulacra and simulation, and at the very least this has made me want to read that more.
November 18, 2022
есть интересные идеи, пару цитат сохранил, язык красивый, метафоры, образы, но часто кажется что за ними ничего особенно нет, кроме желания произвести впечатление. такая чисто философия ради философствования. многие вещи я как будто бы уже и так понимал и знал, хотя все равно было интересно их читать. поставил бы 2.7 если бы мог.
путин хотел себе такую же войну, но ничего не вышло, слишком уж все по-другому, книжку он видно не читал.
путин хотел себе такую же войну, но ничего не вышло, слишком уж все по-другому, книжку он видно не читал.
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February 3, 2025gdyby nie imperializm to ceniłabym bardzo
February 8, 2024
I still fw the vision. But I don’t think he was trying that hard. I agree with the other review who said this is provocative nonsense.
September 3, 2021
Probably a solid starting place with Baudrillard. Also surprisingly practical- one can struggle to put something difficult like S&S into any frame of conceptual practice, but here it is and wonderfully. [x]-drillardians talk a lot about Baud laying down the conditions, precise reactions and media hyperreality of 9/11 thirty years before it took place. One gets that sense here.
September 4, 2024
In The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Jean Baudrillard offers a radically subversive critique of the 1991 Gulf War, transmuting the very notion of conflict into a dizzying vortex of hyperreality. Baudrillard doesn't so much analyse the war as he performs a metaphysical autopsy on the corpse of reality itself, revealing that the entrails of history are nothing more than televisual static - a void where the real has been obliterated by the relentless onslaught of simulacra.
Baudrillard's text is not just a work of theory, but an ideological neutron bomb that detonates the fragile superstructure of Western epistemology. The Gulf War, in Baudrillard's cunningly paradoxical formulation, is less a war than a war of signs - a shadow play where bombs are dropped not on enemy combatants, but on the very possibility of objective understanding. The war, we are told, is not an event but a media hallucination, an immaculate conception of conflict birthed from the loins of TV news cycles and the metastasising spectacle of late capitalism.
In this desert of the real, the Gulf War ceases to exist as an ontological event and becomes instead a recursive loop of signification - a war that wages itself in the ethereal realm of pixels and propagandised rhetoric. Baudrillard doesn't simply suggest that the war didn't take place; he wryly intimates that the very idea of taking place is itself a relic of a bygone era, a quaint illusion maintained by those who still cling to the naïve belief in a reality unmediated by screens.
Baudrillard's critique is not of the war itself - because what war? - but of the simulacra in which the war is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, an orgiastic profusion of images that signify nothing but their own vacuity. The Gulf War becomes the paradigmatic non-event of our hyperreal epoch, a conflict that obliterates not bodies but the very concept of conflict itself. Here, death is dematerialised, transformed into a spectral abstraction devoid of consequence, where Iraqi casualties are algorithmically erased, absorbed into the simulacral machinery of media representation.
In Baudrillard's grim vision, the war is nothing more than a mirage - a desolate illusion projected onto the sands of history by the technocratic priests of the military-industrial complex. What is left, then, of war in this postmodern abyss? Baudrillard posits a chilling answer: nothing. The Gulf War did not take place because, in the hyperreal landscape where signifiers have severed their ties to any referent, nothing can truly take place anymore. History has been swallowed by the black hole of the spectacle, leaving us with only the faint afterglow of its simulated remnants.
Ultimately, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is Baudrillard's triumphant eulogy for the real, a work that gleefully dances on the grave of traditional historiography and declares, with a knowing smirk, that all is simulacrum, all is spectacle, and nothing - absolutely nothing - remains of the world we once thought we knew. In this terminal stage of hyperreality, where even war is but a fleeting image on a screen, Baudrillard leaves us with the terrifying realisation that we are adrift in a sea of signs, with no anchor to the real and no escape from the infinite recursion of the hyperreal. And in this, perhaps, lies Baudrillard's most profound irony: that the only war that truly took place was the one waged against reality itself - and reality lost.
Baudrillard's text is not just a work of theory, but an ideological neutron bomb that detonates the fragile superstructure of Western epistemology. The Gulf War, in Baudrillard's cunningly paradoxical formulation, is less a war than a war of signs - a shadow play where bombs are dropped not on enemy combatants, but on the very possibility of objective understanding. The war, we are told, is not an event but a media hallucination, an immaculate conception of conflict birthed from the loins of TV news cycles and the metastasising spectacle of late capitalism.
In this desert of the real, the Gulf War ceases to exist as an ontological event and becomes instead a recursive loop of signification - a war that wages itself in the ethereal realm of pixels and propagandised rhetoric. Baudrillard doesn't simply suggest that the war didn't take place; he wryly intimates that the very idea of taking place is itself a relic of a bygone era, a quaint illusion maintained by those who still cling to the naïve belief in a reality unmediated by screens.
Baudrillard's critique is not of the war itself - because what war? - but of the simulacra in which the war is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, an orgiastic profusion of images that signify nothing but their own vacuity. The Gulf War becomes the paradigmatic non-event of our hyperreal epoch, a conflict that obliterates not bodies but the very concept of conflict itself. Here, death is dematerialised, transformed into a spectral abstraction devoid of consequence, where Iraqi casualties are algorithmically erased, absorbed into the simulacral machinery of media representation.
In Baudrillard's grim vision, the war is nothing more than a mirage - a desolate illusion projected onto the sands of history by the technocratic priests of the military-industrial complex. What is left, then, of war in this postmodern abyss? Baudrillard posits a chilling answer: nothing. The Gulf War did not take place because, in the hyperreal landscape where signifiers have severed their ties to any referent, nothing can truly take place anymore. History has been swallowed by the black hole of the spectacle, leaving us with only the faint afterglow of its simulated remnants.
Ultimately, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is Baudrillard's triumphant eulogy for the real, a work that gleefully dances on the grave of traditional historiography and declares, with a knowing smirk, that all is simulacrum, all is spectacle, and nothing - absolutely nothing - remains of the world we once thought we knew. In this terminal stage of hyperreality, where even war is but a fleeting image on a screen, Baudrillard leaves us with the terrifying realisation that we are adrift in a sea of signs, with no anchor to the real and no escape from the infinite recursion of the hyperreal. And in this, perhaps, lies Baudrillard's most profound irony: that the only war that truly took place was the one waged against reality itself - and reality lost.
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June 25, 2024The second and third essays are the most fleshed out, polemical, and oozing with incandescent rage. To call this a postmodern denial of reality is to be woefully ignorant of the nuance presented here. Baudrillard isn't arguing that conflict did not exist, for the acres of graveyards testify otherwise, but that the traditional concept of 'war' does not suffice. War is an engagement between two equal belligerents with, as Clausewitz characterizes it, incompatible political interest. Whereas the Iraqi military apparatus is impoverished in comparison to the Americans, whereas this difference resulted in battles between U.S drones and Iraqi men, whereas Saddam Hussein was literally coached and funded by Washington, the Gulf War did not take place. A semantic breakdown: war in the 21st century has transfigured. What is especially compelling here is Baudrillard's characterizations of Empire. Blinded by it's Enlightenment ideals, the West cannot stand the idea of alterity: it's mission is to destroy the Other, not to co-exist. Of course this is underscored by the interests of Capital, as difference poses an economic threat (the Other has its own political and developmental ambitions), but Baudrillard is right to emphasize that the hegemon's ethos and self-image as a purveyor of universal good contextualizes its geopolitical stratagems.
March 10, 2017
Can't wait for the movie.
March 1, 2022
This shit is so good and accurate, my boy Baudrillard a little racist but you know he's still my crazy-ass white boy 😘
July 27, 2023
good lord, baudrillard is so far out there. the most dense 86 pages i’ve ever read, but it was worth it for the little glimpses of “ohhhh i get it.” jean really went for it. i want a bit more explanation into the last line, he says something like “the more consensus the global hegemony gains, the higher the risk of collapse.” so, is he pointing out that western hegemony is moving at terminal velocity towards an inevitable implosion? or is it more like that the heavier the top 1% of the world becomes, with power and capital, that the collapse is inevitable because there has to be a limit? the way he discusses the simulacra of media being infinite in the book, with information being an endless well that will never stop, i can’t imagine that he imagines there to be some sort of finish line for capital, it’s an endless mess of machinations consuming and producing at the same time on and on forever, i don’t see the hegemony of western capital collapsing in the near future, without some kind of revolutionary force intervening (which is unlikely due to the level of alienation we’re experiencing, and the lack of there being a truth that exists, due to baudrillard’s idea of simulation and simulacra) this review is too long so i’m ending it
January 24, 2022
Reads like a political essay by Borges, in a parallel world where Borges is interested in the Gulf War. It seems absurd and crude but is deceptively sublime. Saddam as the rug salesman, Bush as the arms salesman, both there to perform their absurd functions in a non-war, which is happening so that it can still be proven that the war can be fought (even though it’s no WWIII), for the TV cameras to keep rolling. “The fact that the Americans never saw the Iraqis is compensated for by the fact that the Iraqis never fought them.” Strange parallels between the long wait for the Gulf War and the 2022 Russia-NATO standoff where the unbearable waiting is unavoidably transformed into a neurotic and idiotic media avalanche where the ground is being dug for tomorrow where the war has already happened and where the world has already witnessed that Ukraine is no more. The long covered wait can’t but turn into a desire for something - even violent - to happen, for some relief from looming uncertainty at last.
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February 28, 2025Funnily enough, this has been on my to-read shelf for years now and I got off my ass to read it finally after seeing a TikTok about it. Funny, given that the whole book is about how modern (at the time) media and propaganda instruments make it such that the West never really experienced the atrocities happening in Iraq. That our experience of armed conflict is mediated by carefully selected imagery, computer generated “simulations”/”diagrams” of fighting, and occasionally outright staged content. It makes so that we never really know the truth or reality of what occurs.
All to say that it’s ironic that I arrived at reading this via TikTok given that the social media-driven world of today is this hyperreality concept theorized by Baudrillard taken to the extreme. Social media is constantly producing and reproducing our realities given a jumbled mix of filtered and selected images. We’re increasingly divorced from a shared or objective reality, and political actors have continued to weaponize it to a larger degree than what Baudrillard wrote originally.
P.S. Also, random thought: it’s funny (not funny?) that the wave of populist conservatism that has swept the Western world seemingly rail against humanities education, but at the political level seemed to have fully grasped, internalized and then weaponized the use of French cultural theory to an extremely high level.
All to say that it’s ironic that I arrived at reading this via TikTok given that the social media-driven world of today is this hyperreality concept theorized by Baudrillard taken to the extreme. Social media is constantly producing and reproducing our realities given a jumbled mix of filtered and selected images. We’re increasingly divorced from a shared or objective reality, and political actors have continued to weaponize it to a larger degree than what Baudrillard wrote originally.
P.S. Also, random thought: it’s funny (not funny?) that the wave of populist conservatism that has swept the Western world seemingly rail against humanities education, but at the political level seemed to have fully grasped, internalized and then weaponized the use of French cultural theory to an extremely high level.
January 9, 2020
its happening again
tamo fudido
tamo fudido
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