In 1999 Baudrillard was asked to give the annual Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine in the USA. A subsequent book, The Vital Illusion published by Columbia University Press in 2000 and edited by Julia Witwer, contains the English text of the three lectures by Baudrillard. The ‘Vital Illusion’ in the title is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the vital illusion. Nietzsche is an ever-present influence on Baudrillard's work throughout his life. The first lecture, ‘The Final Solution’, saw Baudrillard discussing the question of cloning and in the third lecture, ‘The Murder of the Real’, he considered the accelerating virtual world and the disappearance of the Real, after Nietzsche's ‘Death of God’. The extract here is the second of the talks for the Annual Lectures, delivered on 27 May 1999. As the eve of the third millennium was rapidly approaching Baudrillard was seen here announcing ‘the great end-of-the-century sale’ where ‘everything must go’ and that ‘modernity is over (without ever having happened)’. As in many cities around the world in the 1990s, the Pompidou Centre in Paris (the ‘Beaubourg’ which Baudrillard had analysed in the 1970s) had a digital clock counting down the time to 31 December 1999. Apparently, as Baudrillard later found out, the authorities in Paris moved the clock from the building before its task was completed! In much of Baudrillard's writing about the end-of-the-millennium party there was a feeling of claustrophobia and things being put on hold, where history is endlessly an instant replay of all that has occurred before.