The Illusion of the End

by 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: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Sociology, Essays

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Luna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book. It discusses the illusion of the existence of an end. Nowadays, we live in a situation in which the end as such cannot happen. The end fades away with time because we are moving in circles rather than in a linear manner, and this situation has devastating consequences on the us as human beings. We no longer expect the achievement of new things, we merely repeat what was already achieved, and the perfec example of such situation is the fact that our literary products are now the re-production of past legends. The repeating process gives us a fake sense of immortality. we can no longer live, we exist as mechanical beings whose main purpose in life is to reach perfection, or so Baudrillard believes.

[Gloomy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Right at the very heart of news, history threatens to disappear. At the heart of hi-fi, music threatens to disappear. At the heart of experimentation, the object of science threatens to disappear. At the heart of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear."

[Matija V · Rating 2 out of 5]

Srsly trying not to be a dismissive sour puss:

it just felt kinda, sorta, somewhat, a little bit, like proverbial postmodernism. I mean deconstructive philosophy of the frustratingly formulaic species... it's hard not to feel like there's little nourishment to pull from so much ressentiment...draining the given of its value through opposition, something Nietzsche himself was often guilty of (likely why he could identify it so well). no taking of the past into oneself - just chipping at past creative projects, ceaselessly. omnipresent is an atmosphere of unyielding suspicion towards developmentalism, evolution, progress, value judgements, broader ontological questions, the importance of science, etc... you might say that these are all things that Baudrillard believes in to some extent and that I'm wrong to say they are totally disregarded. I'd have to say you're right, because that's how performative contradictions look.

having said that,

being POSTmodern, this book did offer bits & pieces of what makes this style of philosophy valuable and not at all wholly "wrong"...postmodern philosophers will offer an intellectual matrix large enough to hold alternative perspectives in tension...they offer the most important service of identifying power dynamics where they hide in ideology...they will offer a playful exploration of subtly connected contexts...and this with a literary license to go where thought wills (rather then sheepishly following the mechanics of stuffy logic). nonetheless, the writings do follow the grooves of a logic. they follow the grooves of a perspective that, while condemnatory of modernity's naiveté, while offering a "higher" perspective on these critical issues, nonetheless this mode of thought offers its own style of rigidity that we should aspire to grow beyond. a rigidity of reaction & cheap relativism?

[Brett Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

information itself as scandal

What is history? Something that allows for a certain proximity to the historical event yet resists easy, endlessly reproduceable reflection thereupon. Events that resist that self-reflexive reappropriation into the signified realm of meaning and instead finds its home in that of the symbolic (qualitative, transformative). Per Baudrillard, esp. with the end of the cold war, we have (somehow, inexplicably..he offers up certain metaphors from the realm of (pata)physics to explain the phenomenon) left history and are now engaged in a seemingly endless effort, having given up historical horizons, to re-engage those narratives and ideas that have come before. We are in the midst of an 'event strike'.

For centuries, the keynote of history was glory...Whereas, in the past...glory and salvation long contended for the souls of men, like passion and compassion...what we seek now is not glory but identity...anything that can serve as evidence of a historical existence.

So "the problem then becomes one of waste...ideologies, byone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space." An endless backwards looking sort of repentance (Do we not see this today in the dominant 'liberal' ideology of the 'identity politics' of our day?) From here he goes into speculations on humanity's future or, more appropriately, post-humanity's future. Having given up on those older ideas of Platonic/Christian immortal realms awaiting us beyond our deaths, humanity now instead look backwards for origins, looking to

resurrect the whole of its past...all the relics...which...formed part of our symbolic capital, will be exhumed and resuscitated: they will not be spared our transparency; we shall turn them from something buried and living into something visible and dead; we shall turn their symbolic capital into a folkloric, museum capital.

This is all very similar to what Nietzsche talks about vis-a-vis 'falsity'/appearance serving life more than 'truth' --> too much 'truth' and we see through the illusion and lose our will to live. We are just more historical 'waste' in endless becoming regurgitation and circulation.

Baudrillard argues then that humanity is looking at this point to basically reproduce itself in perpetuity in post-humanity. That this is its answer to the loss of the illusion of traditional understandings of immortality. In doing so, of course, we will cease to be human and in some sense seek "this nostalgia for a pure contiguity of life [le vivant] and its molecular sequentiality, that Freud associated [with] the death instinct." A "negative immortality of what cannot end and thus reproduces itself indefinitely." Tellingly, this quest for immortality has now fallen to the quantitate, signified realm of science, whose goal is to render all unknown/interstitial spaces (i.e. the symbolic/life realm) "totally concrete, to wrest all its energy from it by impelling it to limit-densities, densities artificial and monstrous." In this process we lose our liberty as subjects.

One could go on like this. It's so rich in content. I loved this book to death. Not to mention that Baudrillard is laugh out loud funny throughout--> "The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins even for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history?"

Will return to this one (haha!) again sometime in the future, undoubtedly.

[Sabrina]

Ach Jean, was ist denn da passiert

[SARDON · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4 stars)


This book reveals Baudrillard's most exhaustive and explicit revocation of any belief in The End; which, for a nihilist, is the equal yet opposite profundity of a theist's conclusive renunciation of faith in god(s). True, Baudrillard already had discussed, in the concluding section of 'Simulacra and Simulation', the increasingly impractical and, even, romanticized nature of nihilism's long-term, libidinal investment in the definitive destruction of the cosmos or at least of human civilization.

Replacing this dream of supreme negation, fascination becomes the primary strategy of survival in a millennial world where the absence of both Christian rapture and global nuclear war, being mere variations on the same kind of disappointment, subjects general assumptions about linear time and its progression to a sharp line of interrogation. In this world, the unofficial motto of the news media--"if we have a script for it, it happened!"--demonstrates Baudrillard's old principle, the precession of the model: the reality-inversion occurring when a given civilization's mathematical\scientific\technological modeling becomes so sophisticated as to supplant the importance and relevance of "original referents." And while the news media creates a vacuum in which events and non-events grow more similar the more they are rapidly reported in real-time, this age's intellectual pretensions--beyond genuine technological advancements--generally reduce to the virtual necrophilia of cultural retrospectives and the cheap ironies of an already-archaic postmodernist smirk. Regarding these weak strategies contrived for the perpetuation of human culture, he writes, "[i]t is as though history were rifling through its own dustbins and looking for redemption in the rubbish."

Even if you are too enthusiastic a devotee before the altar of Science or still too sentimentally cling to the vestiges of humanism to accept this thoroughly grim perspective on contemporary civilization, I doubt that anyone can deny the intensely dark yet lucid power of Baudrillard's
prose-styling which, at its best, achieves the sardonically enlightened tone of a twenty-first century gnostic; for this reason alone, this book should strongly appeal to the currently burgeoning crowd of antinatalists and cosmic pessimists. The following passage explicitly describes the general concept--or blueprint?--of the conspiracy theory\secret society\shadow government-driven world in which we dubiously continue to exist:

[T]he idea of an agency which would itself be invisible, anonymous and clandestine: the Stealth Agency. This could equally well be called:

ANATHEMATIC ILLIMITED
TRANSFATAL EXPRESS
VIRAL INCORPORATED
INTERNATIONAL EPIDEMICS

As an agency for gathering news of unreal events in order to disinform the public of them, it remained, itself, unreal. It thus perfectly fulfilled its role, eluding all radar screens -- a formula unique and forever virtual.

[Cobramor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dig Baudrillard, but I'm not gonna pretend that I understand what he's writing about all of the time. That being said, it's a decent book, but not nearly as good as "consumer society".

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 5 out of 5]

What most caught my attention here is how Baudrillard saw the imminence of the famous 'decline of the west', but not in the Spenglerian sense, literaly extrapolating the current role reversal between West and East, specifically regarding China now. That is, the 'liberalization' process was nothing but a strategic withdrawal in order for a proper 'Asian/eastern european' capital to develop and virtualize its society too.

The War on Terror escalating and de-escalating, frozen, Cold-War-era conflicts suddenly reigniting again, colour revolutions turned into civil war and civil war, by its turn, becoming a international one, economical embargoes, floodings and resets. These are the main events at this instant and there's barely any true expectations regarding any of them let alone something more than mass hyposensitivity towards its consequences. I am convinced that this is one of Baudrillard's most pungent books even if he himself probably didn't believe on what he has written or only so much as Jarry after finishing with his pataphysician.

A quick note regarding a anachronism: The Compact Disc really didn't disappear by its use but nevertheless, instead, by its disuse up until our contemporary virtual media and internet streaming. A self-evident example of disappearance through virtualization.

[Alejandro Ortiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

¡La historia ha pasado a la Historia! Ya los hombres no nacen, no mueren, no viven, no nada. Millones de acontecimientos en tiempo real para que el mundo perpetúe su girar sobre su eje sin cambiar ni un ápice. Hegel debe estar lanzando risotadas al aire, viendo como el mundo se convierte, poco a poco, en el rostro de Dios sobre la tierra: mortalmente aburrido y por ello inmortalmente violento.

Alta fidelidad de la Realidad por la pantalla que condena al mundo del devenir a ser un mero acto televisivo.

Baudrillard lo ha vuelto a hacer. Su prosa sigue dándome sospecha y, como buen francés, abusa del buen estilo al que le hace falta algo más de tosquedad y menos de efectismo, pero su análisis es brillante.

Escrito al calor de la caída del Telón de Acero, lo que se descubre detrás es la gran farsa del capitalismo. La desmantelación final de las ideologías (de la política) corre a la par del desmantelamiento del ejército rojo. Submarinos para pasar cocaína de Colombia a Miami, plutonio en mano de fundamentalistas religiosos, no son más que el nuevo virus que puede afectar a occidente desde adentro. No hay más límites para el devenir del capital en el rostro de Dios.

Como una paradoja del Telón de Acero, el ataúd gigantesco de la central nuclear de Chernóbil que lo que intenta es evitar que la nube tóxica del comunismo lo invada todo. La huelga tiene que ser generalizada. Las cosas han dejado de ocurrir. El mundo ya se ha acabado... Solo queda administrar la muerte y la catástrofe. Solo queda sentarse a ver el discurrir de la Historia (que será historia a condición de que el hecho del acontecimiento no cambie absolutamente nada, como por ejemplo un gol o un récord deportivo histórico), ante los tranquilos ojos de quien envejece ante el televisor.

La privatización es absoluta. Lo público está condenado a desaparecer.

Un libro altamente recomendable. La edición, en la colección Argumentos de Anagrama suele estar mucho más cuidada que en la de Compactos, y esta no es la excepción. Algunos detalles de maquetación que ya solo interesan a algunos trasnochados bibliófilos como yo. Pero aún así buena edición.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baudrillard in 1992 published his book, ‘L ’illusion de la fin’ (The illusion of the end) which was a critical denunciation of Francis Fukuyma’s, ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. In this connection we should refer to Fukuyama’s, ‘Forget Iraq—history is dead,’ Fukuyama’s standpoint was pro-American and he implied the conclusiveness of American domination over the rest of the world as if history was a plaything in the hand of America. For Baudrillard Fukuyama was merely a vindication for launching a discussion of history. In this tome he fundamentally discusses two attitudes to history — circular or linear. He refers to Toynbee and Spengler. Certainly, Baudrillard has in mind Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in Paris 1930, and Barry Cooper’s ‘The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism’. He also refers to Heidegger. He makes a detailed comparative study of Christian eschatology and Judaic messianism. According to him, Pagan Europe, specifically Greece believed in fatality which indicated a cyclic or circular – a view, which may be compared with the Indian view of Karma visually demonstrated in the Asoka Chakra. The Christian conception believed in linearity — history running to doomsday. Baudrillard makes an extensive discussion on St Augustine. Then he harps on the 18th century view of secularization of history by Voltaire. Baudrillard next discusses Hegel’s theory of contradiction. He points out Hegel’s credence in the absolute and not God and his belief in reason and not faith. Baudrillard reminds us of Mircea Eliade’s discussion in his book ‘The Myth of the Eternal Archetypes and Repetition’. At the end of his discussion Baudrillard analyses the world of poverty and riches and becomes pessimistic. He does not see any Marxist solution. That is where this tome concludes. Go for it only if you can cross the steeplechases of all those circular expressions and opaque theory. I enjoyed it though.

[Thomas Hale · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's 1992 and the End of History has been declared, but not if Jean has anything to say about it. Essays and rants about geopolitics, postmodern hyperreality and media saturation, with a brief digression into the absurdities of human attempts at reconciliation with nature. Some of it has aged very well, some seems short-sighted, but all of it is delivered with the anger and eloquence you'd expect from Baudrillard.

[AJ Valls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, illuminating and a great source of enlightenment for our current condition. To see a different perspective that makes more sense now than when it was written (or at least this is how it appears to me) somehow lifts the burden of striving for betterness or otherness when it seems to me that time is no business of mine, it simply wraps around what I think about who I am.

[Julia]

read for an essay on postmodernism, got 100

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Travelling back in time to show this guy the AG Cook cover of "The End Has No End"

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The departure from modernism to postmodernism is explained very well. Leapfrogging ones own shadow to the next epoch and the blast of the nuclear bomb that shoots through the radioactive image of what once was. Think of a copy of a copy of a copy and the Xerox culture we now live in! While I think the greater project is modernism, this book is philosophically and brilliantly illuminating.

[Niels · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je ne sais pas quoi penser de ce texte. Au début on se croirait dans du post-situ / post-heidegger, et après on s’enfonce dans de la spéculation mystiquophile douteuse… ça reste tout de même édifiant.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Una completa basura posmoderna, ridícula.