ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the past and potential future contribution to international Leisure Studies of two key theorists, Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Although pursuing dierent furrows ever since they rst began to write, or photograph, Virilio and Baudrillard were friends and colleagues for many years until Baudrillard died from cancer in March 2007. Virilio is very much alive, and still writing his provocative, pithy, short books. Baudrillard, or ‘post-Baudrillard’ as we might describe recent ventures, lives on in some very signi- cant books which were written in the last couple of years of his life and published posthumously. Together, over a long period since the 1950s, Baudrillard and Virilio have a huge back catalogue which is only now being properly reassessed, and radically reinterpreted, by scholars in various disciplines, including Leisure Studies. Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio have also both been regularly categorized as postmodernists by scholars in various dierent elds – for instance, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Leisure Studies, Jurisprudence, Politics, Architecture, Art. But this labelling is seen in this chapter to be fundamentally misconceived, misleading and ultimately debilitating for the utility of their legacy, either jointly or individually.
