ARTICOLI / 14 / Emiliano Ilardi /
Nearly 250 years have passed since the birth of the United States but for us, the old Europeans, it continues to be, in many ways, a mysterious and incomprehensible country, capable of being, at the same time, everything and its opposite: progressive and reactionary, pacifist and imperialist, authoritarian and libertarian, optimistic and paranoid, utopian and dystopian. At exactly thirty years after its first publication, America by Jean Baudrillard remains an unequaled book to understand the contradictions of American culture, as he reduces them to one factor: the relationship between space and time. And, traveling across the vast American deserts, Baudrillard also sends us back a dark and disturbing picture of the Old Continent. An image which Europe has not yet found the courage to cope with.
