Simulacra and Simulation sounds like a good read. Looked into some of the main concepts and ideas in it and it seems like a interesting take on society.
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I got a little into it a long time ago, but never got too far because I was drinking almost constantly around that period. The book is pretty abstract, but not an unpleasant read (from what little I delved into it). Right now I'm reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which examines some of the same ideas in the format of a novel. Simulacra and Simulation may be next on my list if I'm happy with P.K.D.'s book.
This appears to be the entire book, if you're interested:
The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film. Later in the film, Morpheus utters these words after the main character Neo wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiencing the Real as a desolate, war-torn, yet spectacular geography. For Žižek, this represents a prime example of the 20th-century's "passion for the Real," for which the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the ultimate artistic expression. His argument is that because this passion was sublimated into the postmodern "passion for the semblance," Americans experienced the "return of the Real" in exactly the same way as Neo did in the film, i.e., as a nightmarish virtual landscape or "reality as the ultimate 'effect.'" (Source)
I think I seen the director's cut, but I was 16 or 17...I should watch it again. Here's the book, if you're interested:
http://www.ciampini.info/file/ferrari/DO%20ANDROIDS%20DREAM%20OF%20ELECTRIC%20SHEEP.pdf
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