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The year 2000, the end of the millennium: 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.
Jean Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End is a fantastic read whether one chooses to take the author seriously or whether one simply wishes to loose himself in the author's creative metaphors which sum up the meaning of life and death in our modern (post-modern) society with a few hard-hitting words and phrases. Baudrillard's style is fairly simple, and I would say that his texts are easy to understand in French and in English although finding his texts in the original French can sometimes be problematic. Chris Turner's translation ... , does a great job of capturing Baudrillard's humorous and sometimes shocking ideas about the world and what he considers to be the illusion of time.The central theme of this book is that time is becoming an illusion, and I would even say that Baudrillard already believes time has disappeared. Humankind, by falsely believing that time is linear and that "ends" exist, has created a reality out of illusions and is now gradually erasing history in an attempt to make itself "feel" better about living a life that is all but certain.Baudrillard does not spend a great deal of time wading through previous critics' opinions about the nature of time or what physicists may say about the past, present, and future. He jumps right into his own theories which really ask the reader to rethink his notions about our world and where humankind is going, or as Baudrillard would say - re-visiting - in its attempt to revise all of those little unpalatable events from the past such as the Cold War, Persian Gulf War, and the Timisoara massacre.Baudrillard is refreshing and shocking at the same time. Although his style is simple and stimulating, his ideas verge on the outrageous and the unpredictable. I recommend this book highly.
