ABSTRACT
In one of his essays George Orwell recalled the long extinct American journal The Booster, which used to advertise itself as ‘nonpolitical, non-ethical, non-literary, non-educational, non-progressive, nonconsistent, and non-contemporary’. I remember The Booster whenever I try to visualize the world as portrayed by Jean Baudrillard, professor of sociology at Nanterre and for the last decade or two one of the most talked about analysts of our times. Like that obscure journal, though with much more sound and fury, Baudrillard patches up the identity of his world out of absences alone. The world according to Baudrillard is like a party, noted mostly for the extraordinary number of people we knew and thought of highly, who havealas-failed to turn up.
