Cool Memories

Abstract

In his Cool Memories series (and its complementary text, America) written over almost a quarter of a century (1980—2004), Baudrillard attempted to write in an aphoristic, fragmented mode in order to grasp the world without `finding a central point, a point of interpretation'. How should these notebooks be read? Are they simply an account of a way of living, or do they provide illustrations of a doctrine worked out in Baudrillard's theoretical works? This article examines a kind of writing which was envisaged as providing a mode of access to radical modernity beyond any possibility of interpretation. It suggests that the series can be considered as Baudrillard's way of living in the world as a tension between radical empiricism and mastery in the symbolic order. This then presents the reader with an impossible dilemma between critique or jouissance.