I really need to read that book I will sound so fucking smart

when the leftist at the party starts shouting about Joe Biden’s empty gestures on Palestine and literally every other aspect of his administration being a simulation of long-dead democracy:

(the other user who said just to read the first 5 paragraphs of every chapter is essentially right - but anyone who can accurately reference the part of Simulations where he basically calls the renaissance and ‘renaissance men’ an act of a worldly demiurge is a better leftist than me & I submit to their superiority)

Just read the first like 4 paragraphs of each chapter. His writing is so bad that he starts off making a point and then devolves into florid nonsense.

It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford (ChaosEditor: as well as and especially )- only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an artificial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.