Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? - Tapa dura

"An international, intellectual superstar." - Salon "The most notorious intellectual celebrity to emerge from Paris since Roland Barthes and the most influential prophet of the media since Marshall McLuhan." - I. D. Magazine "Baudrillard got there first, many times. And now his self-imposed task is to shock us into realising that thought and the world need not be as they are." - Guardian "A sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left." - New York Times "The most important French thinker of the past twenty years." - J. G. Ballard"

'Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,' writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in "Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?" In this, one of the last texts written before his death in 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical 'subject,' whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a 'pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality'. Interspersed throughout the text are photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard's argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen - some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms - yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a 'vital dimension' of the existence of things.