After the orgy : toward a politics of exhaustion

Author(s)

    • Pettman, Dominic

Bibliographic Information

After the orgy : toward a politics of exhaustion

Dominic Pettman

(SUNY series in postmodern culture / Joseph Natoli, editor)

State University of New York Press, 2002

  • pbk. : alk. paper

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Applying Jean Baudrillard's question "What are you doing after the orgy?" to the postmillennial climate that informs our contemporary cultural moment, this book argues that the imagination of apocalyptic endings has been an obsessive theme in post-Enlightenment culture. Dominic Pettman identifies and examines the dynamic tensions of various apocalyptic discourses, from the fin-de-siècle decadents of the 1890s to the fin-de-millènnium cyberpunks of the 1990s, in order to highlight the complex constellation of exhaustion, anticipation, panic, and ecstasy in contemporary culture. Through analyses of rapturous cults, cyberpunk literature, post-apocalyptic cinema, techno-paganism, death fashion, and the Y2K prophecy, After the Orgy explores why the twentieth century swung so violently between the poles of anticipation and anticlimax. In the process, the book raises pressing questions concerning the relevance of such ideas in our new millennium and points out alternatives to the monotonous horror of traditional narratives.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: After the Orgy The Dating Game The Coming of the Lord Technological Revelation A Note on Methodology 1. Panic Merchants: Prophecy and the Satyr The Goat in the Machine 2. The Rapture of Rupture Sade and the Death of God Avoiding the Void Eroticism and the Thanatic Asymptote Nietzsche's Dionysus Nihilism and the Thirst for Annihilation 3. The Virtual Apocalypse Virilio's Accident Bacchanical Man and Ballard's Crash Technol-orgy: From Autogeddon to Infocalypse Snow Crash and Scopophilia Cyborgies in the Dionysian Landscape Carmageddon 4. Decaying Forward: Satiety and Society De-fragging the Self Technologies of the Flesh 5. Cosmic Architects Immaculate Contraception Sexless Hydrogen: The Frisson of Fission Dionysus in ‘69 The Politics of Play 6. Playing at Catastrophe Prêt-à-Mort: Necrophilia and Death Fashion Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Joachite Structure of Baudrillard’s Philosophy "A Biocybernetic Self-Fulfilling Prophecy World Orgy I": or Surviving the Necropolis Temporary Autonomous Zones and the Archaic Revival Civilization and Its Discotheques After the Orgy (But Before the Test Results) Conclusion: The Revelation Will not be Televised Y2Care: Debugging the Millennium The Owl of Minerva Versus the Millennium Falcon Means to an End Notes Works Cited Index

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