The Illusion of the End

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by Jean Baudrillard,

Translated by Chris Turner

Stanford University Press

Due/Published January 1995, 123 pages, paper

ISBN 0804725012

The year 2000, the end of the millenium: is this anything other than a mirage, the illusion of an end, like so many other imaginary end-points which have littered the path of history?

In this remarkable book Jean Baudrillard - 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 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, secretely hoping perhaps to be able to begin again from scratch.