Baudrillard and the Millennium

‘In a sense, we do not believe in the Year 2000’, says French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Still more disturbing is his claim that the millennium might not take place. Baudrillard’s analysis of ‘Y2K’ reveals a repentant culture intent on storing, mourning and laundering its past, and a world from which even the possibility of the ‘end of history’ has vanished. Yet behind this bleak vision of integrated reality, Baudrillard identifies enigmatic possibilities and perhaps a final ironic twist. ‘Baudrillard and the Millennium’ confronts the strategies of this major cultural analyst’s encounter with the greatest non-event of the postmodern age, and accounts for the critical censure of Baudrillard’s enterprise. Key topics, such as natural catastrophes, the body, ‘victim culture’, identity and Internet viruses, are discussed in reference to the development of Jean Baudrillard’s millenarian thought from the 1980s to the threshold of the Year 2000 – from simulation to disappearance.