In this book, Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western culture ''after the orgy'' - the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the 1960s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a reign of transvestism, to a confusion of the categories of man and woman - to the ''androgynous and Frankenstein appeal of a Michael Jackson''. The revolution in art has led to ''transaesthetic realm of indifference''. The cybernetic revolution has blurred the distinction between man and machine, while the political revolution has led to the end of politics - to a transpolitics that merely simulates old political forms. According to Baudrillard, AIDS is the perfect metaphor for the ''viral'' invasions that target our weakened ''political immune defences'', and Khomeini's death sentence on Salman Rushdie, epitomizes the revenge of the Third World - that ''Other World'' to which the West has in the past exported so many evils, so many germs. Such are the points on Baudrillard's compass as he steers his way through the mental landscape of the new fin de siecle.

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