"Sharp, sombre, brilliant, explosive, these fragments rarely fail to find their targets: the basic supposition of the superiority and triumphant progress of our technological rationality – and our ′current forms of despair′."
Mike Gane, Loughborough University
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. This book is the third (after his acclaimed
America and
Cool Memories) in a series of personal records in hyper–reality. Here Baudrillard casts his net widely and brings in autobiographical memories and further reflections on America, the crisis of cultural production, new ideas in fiction–theory, and the "verbal fornication" of the postmodern.
His wide–ranging discussion of events and their relationship to theory moves between poetry and waterfalls, strikes and Stealth bombers, Freud and la Cicciolina, shadows and simulacra, deconstruction and the zodiac, Reagan′s smile and Kennedy′s death, the "curse" on South America and the future of the West, the last tango of French intellectual life and the exemplary disappearing act of Italian politics.
Idiosyncratic, outrageous, brilliantly original, Cool Memories II will be required reading by anyone concerned with the debates about postmodernism and the current state of theory on the social sciences and humanities.