Baudrillard’s article Simulacra and Simulations provides a rather grim analysis of the world: immaculately produced simulations have taken the place of reality, all reality is lost, all we have left is the hyperreal and the truth has been replaced by simulations that are impossible to determine as true or false.
This critique of the society of our times (Disneyland, Watergate, etc) rests on the nostalgia of a time when the real was represented instead of produced, nostalgia of ancient times. In his definition of the concept of simulation, Baudrillard uses a series of parallelism to show its opposition to the representations of reality that used to be: ” it no longer has to be rational, […] it is nothing more than operational. […] it is no longer enveloped by an imagery, it is no longer real at all. […] it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Baudrillard, 366).
This concept of simulation relies largely on the comparison to a time where signs and significations haven’t taken over, and that brings me back to Derrida and his analysis of non phonetic writing. According to Derrida in “Of Grammatology”, our society is experiencing an inflation of the sign “language” and hence an inflation of signs (which is echoed in Baudrillard’s critique of the proliferation of the signs of the real), and it is due to (if I understood correctly) the death of the speech – the signifier in Saussure’s term, and the dominance of the non-phonetic writing. Surprisingly, Derrida was also referring to ancient times, times of Socrates and Plato and the Middle Ages, to illustrate the importance of the signifier and its relation with truth. The sound or phonè of language is closely related to “the feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally” (Derrida, 307), and to the nature. And according to its relationship to the nature, the writing can also be divided into “natural and universal writing” which is united to the voice, and nonphonetic writing which betrays life by “sterilizing or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the letter, […] it is the principle of death and of difference in the becoming of being” (Derrida, 318). I was surprised to see a similar death of truth in nonphonetic writing as the death of real by Baudrillard, and a common nostalgia for a time where a natural connection between the real and its representations were valued.
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LitTheory 
Han Fe, I do agree with you…this all “death”/”birth” theme when it comes to ideas lead us to nostalgia (though Derrida nuances it in reminding us that the appearance of language as differance to explain the world does not follow a chronological order, it is more a “new discovery” as if it has always been there but unseen). And nostalgia is a “cliché” of every generation discourses, as “it was better before”: change and movement bringing the unknown, it also brings fear, that thinkers, artists, men try to reduce in explaining the world, putting words on novelty and underlining a difference with an ancient time that equals a loss. Montaigne was already pointing out this phenomenon in his Essays…so…
I wonder why Baudrillard traces the origins of his simulacrum back to Renaissance. Is is only then when the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit? Does nostalgia for the real apply only to the previous historical periods of time? Does reproductibility kill the real of our curent society? Or could we consider a clear diference between simulation and dissimulation. In Proust writing, simulation almost produces death. It stands for the real, it precedes it.