Baudrillard and the Millennium (Postmodern Encounters) Book

Baudrillard's ironical theoretical interventions have drawn contempt and praise in equal measure but, too often, have been received archly ignoring their importance. Horrocks' serious, detailed, surprisingly dense essay views Baudrillard as a man "who sees everything without illusions and who accepts that there is no cure around the corner". The Millennium will not happen because history has both speeded up and reversed. The moment between an action occurring and its transmission over various communications media has narrowed to nothing: history (always previously seen "as inseparable from the realisation of an ideal of human freedom") has been reduced to the event. It is also going backwards: replaying old wars, ethnic conflicts, racial and religious hatreds. Since conceiving of the explanatory power of his theory of the simulacrum (a copy without an original or origin) Baudrillard has moved from a maverick Marxism to being, along with Jean-Francois Lyotard, the name most associated with postmodernism. His assertions are often as uncomfortably close to the truth as philosophy masquerading as fiction and travelogue could hope to be. Horrocks' text teases out the sense in Baudrillard's flamboyance and is a welcome addition to Icon's Postmodern Encounters. --Mark ThwaiteRead More