Customer Reviews

The Illusion of the End

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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.

Jean Baudrillard - I must say that albeit he is a self-proclaimed postmodernist theorist, it is not at all fair to lump together with others (specifically those influenced from poststructuralism). Baudrillard is a materialist. In spite of that, he has other postmodern sensibilities (fragmentation, symbolic-surface function, etc.).

He talks about history and the linear construction of time, and how this has framed our thought processes. Because of this artificial linearizing of time, he pokes fun at "ends." For Baudrillard, time has, more or less, stopped. It is no longer a question of forward or backward.

He argues that we are speeding towards hyperreality, where everything is sterile and eternal. Using the example of the compact disc, he says (roughly) "If objects no longer grow old when you touch them, you must be dead." We need to see and experince death and decay to constitute life. My only concern is this implicit statement that there is a kind of default nature positon when things were right (vinyl records, no email, news travelling via mouth, etc.).

Overall, brilliant and stimulating.