After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

Contents

Contents Preface / ix Acknowledgments / xiii Introduction: After the Orgy / 1 The Dating Game / 10 The Coming of the Lord / 14 Technological Revelation / 17 A Note on Methodology / 21 1. Panic Merchants: Prophecy and the Satyr / 25 The Goat in the Machine / 31 2. The Rapture of Rupture / 37 Sade and the Death of God / 40 Avoiding the Void / 42 Eroticism and the Thanatic Asymptote / 48 Nietzsche’s Dionysus / 52 Nihilism and the Thirst for Annihilation / 57 3. The Virtual Apocalypse / 63 Virilio’s Accident / 67 Bacchanical Man and Ballard’s Crash / 71 Technol-orgy: From Autogeddon to Infocalypse / 78 Snow Crash and Scopophilia / 82 Cyborgies in the Dionysian Landscape / 88 Carmageddon / 97 vii 4. Decaying Forward: Satiety and Society / 99 De-fragging the Self / 106 Technologies of the Flesh / 110 5. Cosmic Architects / 117 Immaculate Contraception / 120 Sexless Hydrogen: The Frisson of Fission / 124 Dionysus in ‘69 / 130 The Politics of Play / 137 6. Playing at Catastrophe / 141 Prêt-à-Mort: Necrophilia and Death Fashion / 141 Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Joachite Structure of Baudrillard’s Philosophy / 144 “A Biocybernetic Self-Fulfilling Prophecy World Orgy I”: or Surviving the Necropolis / 152 Temporary Autonomous Zones and the Archaic Revival / 157 Civilization and Its Discotheques / 162 After the Orgy (But Before the Test Results) / 168 Conclusion: The Revelation Will not be Televised / 171 Y2Care: Debugging the Millennium / 171 The Owl of Minerva Versus the Millennium Falcon / 178 Means to an End / 180 Notes / 183 Works Cited / 187 Index / 199 Contents viii ...