The vital illusion - Jean Baudrillard

What does the advent of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time? What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? In "The Vital Illusion", the sociologist Jean Baudrillard grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial, topsy-turvy world. And as always, Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions.In the first part of the book, Baudrillard considers how human cloning heralds an end to both sex and death. He goes on to show that by reverting to our origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it. In the second part, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In the final se