In this book Jean Baudrillard, one of the most celebrated and controversial contemporary social theorists, argues that the notion of the end of history is an illusion, and that we are now engaged in a gigantic process of historical revisionism.

Translator's Acknowledgements. 1. Pataphysics of the Year 2000. 2. The Reversal of History. 3. The Ascent of the Vacuum Towards the Periphery. 4. The Event Strike. 5. The Thawing of the East. 6. The Strategy of Dissolution. 7. The Timisoara Massacre. 8. The Illusion of War. 9. Catastrophe Management. 10. The Dance of the Fossils. 11. Maleficient Ecology. 12. Immortality. 13. How Can You Jump Over Your Shadow When You No Longer Have One?. 14. Exponential Instability, Exponential Stability. 15. Hysteresis of the Millenium.

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 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 meditation on modernity and its aftermath will be widely read.

'In the book Baudrillard weaves his argument as brilliantly as one has come to expect.... Baudrillard provides a voluble account of the withering of history, which is not lost in Turner's translation.' Environment and Planning 'The Illusion of the End is quite wonderful. In its relatively few pages, this book contains more insights and provocations than many much weightier tomes.... If you are prepared to let your sociological imagination be engaged, enraged and perhaps even changed, then The Illusion of the End more than repays the time that is spent with it.' Sociology