The Illusion of the End

jean baudrillard

The year 2000, the end of the is this anything other than a mirage, the illusion of an end, like so many other imaginary endpoints which have littered the path of history? In this remarkable book Jean Baurdrillard―France's leading theorist of postmodernity―argues that the notion of the end is part of the fantasy of a linear history. Today we are not approaching the end of history but moving into reverse, into a process of systematic obliteration. We are wiping out the entire twentieth century, effacing all signs of the cold War one by one, perhaps even the signs of the First and Second World Wars and of the political and ideological revolutions of our time. In short, we are engaged in a gigantic process of historical revisionism, and we seem in a hurry to finish it before the end of the century, secretly hoping perhaps to be able to begin again from scratch. Baudrillard explores the "fatal strategies of time" which shape our ways of thinking about history and its imaginary end. Ranging from the revolutions in Eastern Europe to the Gulf War, from the transformation of nature to the hyper-reality of the media, this postmodern mediation on modernity and its aftermath will be widely read.

Genres philosophytheorynonfictionhistorypoliticssociologyessayscultural20th centuryfrance

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1991

This edition

Format: 132 pages, Paperback
Published: December 1, 1994 by Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804725019
ASIN: 0804725012
Language: English

About the author

jean baudrillard

Jean 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.