Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
8 - The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
Summary
In 1991 the ‘first’ Gulf War took place. Or did it? In three separate articles, published in part by Liberation between January and March of 1991, subsequently put together in extended book form collectively as La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu Lieu by Editions Galilée in May 1991, Baudrillard seemingly demolished this proposition. There was a storm of protest at Baudrillard's supposed nihilism, relativism, postmodernism, naivety and amorality which had barely died down by the mid 1990s. For instance, Christopher Norris saw Baudrillard as a postmodernist intellectual whose work, especially on the Gulf War, should be shunned and pilloried as part of a growing body of ‘uncritical theory’. Many others barely gave it the time of day or merely laughed it out of court. Baudrillard, who had a wicked prankster-like sense of humour, always resented the fact that his work was not taken more seriously. In 1995 the English translation of the book was duly published by Power Publications in Sydney, with no let up in the global vitriolic criticism and howls of derision. The translation was by Paul Patton, veteran follower and translator of Foucault and Baudrillard from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, who also supplied a fascinating and rigorous introduction to the English edition, essentially defending Baudrillard and placing the three articles in an overall context. They were published in the book as three separate chapters: ‘The Gulf War Will Not Take Place’, ‘The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?’ and ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Jean Baudrillard Reader , pp. 99 - 121Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008