After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

By Dominic Pettman

Explores the post-Enlightenment obsession with apocalyptic endings.

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-si cle decadents of the 1890s to the fin-de-mill nnium 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791453960
• ISBN13: 9780791453964
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher