Cool Memories II, 1987-1990 - Jean Baudrillard

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, Reagans smile and Kennedys 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.