Baudrillard and the Millennium (Postmodern Encounters) - Softcover

Horrocks, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840460911 ISBN 13: 9781840460919

Publisher: Icon Books, 1999

Synopsis

Here Horrocks presents Baudrillard's diagnosis of our biggest media event--the Millennium, which is the virus on everyone's mind.

About this title

Review:

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 Thwaite

Synopsis:

Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the millennium as a non-event is examined here. Key topics, such as natural catastrophes, the body, "victim culture", identity and Internet viruses are discussed in reference to Baudrillard's millennial thought from the 1980s to the threshold of the year 1000.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1840460911
• ISBN 13: 9781840460919
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80