When we speak of the 'end of history', the 'end of the political', the 'end of the social', the 'end of ideologies', none of this is true. The worst of it all is precisely that there will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like nails and hair, continues to grow after death. Because, at bottom, all these things are already dead and, rather than have a happy or tragic resolution, a destiny, we shall have a thwarted end, a homeopathic end, an end distilled into all the various metastases of the refusal of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 116

The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. This paradox is produced by the fact that in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space of history the end cannot be located. The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 110

One of the aspects of this mania for accomplishment is the elevation to the universal, which is commonly regarded as progress, as constituting in a way the extensional equivalent of immortality. This extension actually amounts to a dilution and extenuation of values in the universal. The same goes for events: it is when they are disseminated worldwide that their intensity is at its weakest and they are most rapidly obsolescent. The universalization of facts, data, knowledge, information is a precondition of their disappearance. Every idea and culture becomes universalized before it disappears. As with stars: their maximum expansion comes at the point of death, their transformation into red giants and then black dwarfs. The death agony of concentrated solutions in high dilution, the death agony of forms and images in high definition.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 104

In the past, man thought himself immortal, but he was not. Or rather he secretly doubted that he was not. Otherwise, he would not have needed to believe it. Today, we no longer believe we are immortal, yet it is precisely now that we are becoming so, becoming quietly immortal without knowing it, without wishing it, without believing it, by the mere fact of the confusion of the limits of life and death. No longer immortal in terms of the soul, which has disappeared, nor even in terms of the body, which is disappearing, but in terms of the formula, immortal in terms of the code. That is, we are beings for whom there will soon no longer be death, nor representation of death, nor even – and this is the worst – illusion of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 99

A contradictory dual operation: man, alone of all species, is seeking to construct his immortal double, an unprecedented artificial species. He caps natural selection with an artificial super-selection, claiming the sole possession of a soul and a consciousness and, at the same time, he is putting an end to natural selection which entailed the death of each species in accordance with the law of evolution. In ending evolution (of all species including his own), he is contravening the symbolic rule and hence truly deserves to disappear. And this is without doubt the destiny he is preparing for himself, in a roundabout way, in that, in his arrogant desire to end evolution, man is ushering in involution and the revival of inhuman, biogenetic forms.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 84

Capital has cannibalized all negativity, that of history and that of work in a – literally – sarcastic fashion: devouring the very substance of the human being to transform it into its essence as productive being. It has unceremoniously devoured the dialectic by parodistically taking the opposing terms upon itself, by parodistically going beyond its own contradictions.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 52

There is in fact no insoluble waste problem. The problem is resolved by the post-modern invention of recycling and the incinerator. The Great Incinerators of history, from whose ashes the Phoenix of post-modernity is resuscitated! We have to come to terms with the idea that everything that was not degradable or exterminable is today recyclable, and hence that there is no final solution. We shall not be spared the worst – that is, History will not come to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies – are indefinitely recyclable. What is stupendous is that nothing one thought superseded by history has really disappeared. All the archaic, anachronistic forms are there ready to re-emerge, intact and timeless, like the viruses deep in the body. History has only wrenched itself form cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 27

In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean fin de siècle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories. This is doubtless linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century, just as the earth's sphericity is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or the subtle distortion of the gravitational field.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 10

The fact that we are leaving history to move into the realm of simulation is merely a consequence of the fact that history itself has always, deep down, been an immense simulation model. Not in the sense that it could be said only to have existed in the narrative made of it or the interpretation given, but with regard to the time in which it unfolds – that linear time which is at once the time of an ending and of the unlimited suspending of the end. The only kind of time in which a history can take place, if, by history, we understand a succession of non-meaningless facts, each engendering he other by cause and effect, but doing so without any absolute necessity and all standing open to the future, unevenly poised. So different from time in ritual societies where the end of everything is in its beginning and ceremony retraces the perfection of that original event. In contrast to this fulfilled order of time, the liberation of the 'real' time of history, the production of a linear, deferred time may seem a purely artificial process.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 7

To believe in God is, therefore, to doubt his existence, his manifestness, his presence. In fact, faith is the spiritual impulse which reveals the profoundest uncertainty about the existence of God (but it is the same with all theological virtues: hope is the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest despair at the real state of things and charity the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest contempt for others).

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.92

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. it is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.87

The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to collective suicide.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.83

If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away. Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live. When nature is recognized as a subject in law, as it is by Michel Serres, we have objectified it to death, and this ecological cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.80

It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sedimentations of centuries of stupidity?

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.26

The beam of memory bends, and makes every event a black hole.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.20

Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning – this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 52

Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance – not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel). It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and – this is the worst of it – continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 22

Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfilment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposites to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us.

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance, much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

Doing so not out of some death drive or some involutive, regressive disposition toward undifferentiated forms, but from an impulse to go as far as possible in the expression of all its power, all its faculties – to the point even of dreaming of abolishing death.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) pp. 16-19