Baudrillard dismissed Fukuyama’s end-of-history claim as premature

Evidence

As the 1990s drew to a close, Jean Baudrillard devoted a series of essays to the post-historical condition with titles both clairvoyant and metaphorical, including The Illusion of the End and The Strike of Events, source of the above epigraph. … The quote already bore the weight of retrospection. Baudrillard looked back on the decade after the “end of history” and now dismissed Fukuyama’s pronouncement as premature. “The last great ‘historic’ event—the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he wrote at the turn of the millennium, “signified something closer to an enormous repentance on the part of history.” … “Today,” Baudrillard concluded, “we are caught as a species in a similar impasse, trapped between our fossils and our clones.” Another quarter-century on, his events and conflicts from the age of industrial modernity appear to be resurfacing, consistently with the question of whether they return only as disembedded virtual phantoms—or whether this time history is truly returning, dispelling the illusion of politics’ demise. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fukuyama’s end-of-history debate, a standard reference point in the postpolitical literature this book engages.