ABSTRACT
If Derrida has been accused of seeking to peel away but not destroy the meaning of the Enlightenment and modernity, then Jean Baudrillard has no such delicacy. Instead he emphasises the dystopian and nihilistic implications of modernity, particularly in its later phases. He argues that capitalism has led to a technological explosion, the death of ‘authenticity’ and its replacement with a precession of simulacra that bear no relation to any reality whatever. The consequence is the hyperreal, a state where all referentiality and meaning are lost. Modernity ‘thus produces the Other of the real – fantasy – to legitimise the normativity of its own practices’ (Docherty, 1993: 14).
