Camille de Toledo’s Coming of Age at the End of History takes the vision of Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zones," the incisiveness of Naomi Klein in her seminal treatise No Logo, and youthful idiosyncratic passion of William Upksi Wimsatt, and creates a new vision of political possibility for Generation Y.

Brash 20-something author Toledo recently burst onto Paris’ intellectual scene with his brilliantly incisive manifesto, examining present-day counterculture from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. He asks what it is, exactly, his generation is protesting against and contemplates how revolt against western capitalistic values has been neutralized since the time of Francis Fukuyama’s landmark 1989 article “The End of History.” Providing historical context from The Surrealists to Jean-Luc Godard; Guy Debord to Johnny Rotten, Gilles Deleuze to Kurt Cobain, he reveals how the diffusion of political power as well as media co-option have robbed all forms of cultural dissent of their critical potential, leaving behind a new generation of rebels unsure of their cause.

In the tradition of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Coming of Age at the End of History caught the European public and critics by a storm since its publication in France, Germany and Italy, but de Toledo is as influenced by Don DeLillo, Chuck Palaniuk and Hakim Bey as by his European brethren, and as much by the possibilities of language and literature to transform society as either bullets or ballot boxes.

The next revolution will be hidden, literary, nomadic and nonviolent...with Coming of Age at the End of History it has already begun.

Camille de Toledo was born in 1976. He studied history in London, photography and cinema in New York, and now lives in Paris. He is also a filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist.

Sleep Tight
The first pillar of the invisible architecture of our world is the spirit of endings. It was raised as the 80s became the 90s, around the time that people in Moscow were celebrating this new idea—Freedom—with an intensity rarely seen since. I was thirteen years old. The pillar was made out of Berlin stone, stone from the bricks of the GREAT WALL, the same bricks that now reduced to gravel, were being made into cheap jewelry destined for the flea-markets of the West. The stones of Berlin, pocked with bullet marks and scratched by razor wire on the eastern side, colored by layers of counter-culture graffiti on the western side… For those who remember, these were artifacts of a happy time. A light, pleasant breeze blew through those months. My mother bought me a T-shirt celebrating the date: November 9-11, 1989. But after a few months and several trips through the washing machine, the letters and numbers on the shirt were almost completely obliterated.
The summer before the T-shirt, an article entitled “The End of History?” appeared in the political journal founded by Irving Kristol, The National Interest . Prior to that article, the name Francis Fukuyama was known only to a handful of students and academics. The question mark suggested that Fukuyama wanted to avoid jumping to any conclusions, but it went to print anyway and instantly, the pundits were all over what they quickly recognized as the shining path to the triumphalist gravy trains of the après-Cold War. The dialectic had ground to a halt, and it was the end of the line. No more history, no more rivals, and so democracy was now free to devote all its attention to getting busy with the hot new boyfriend, turbocapitalism. As in a Vegas wedding franchise, the aisle was kind of short, but it was all the better that way, and they marched down it hand in hand, stopping only a second for the photographers. The rest of us had no choice but to fall in line with the macabre procession.
Veteran partiers and party-members of the 20th century, connoisseurs of the barbaric delights of that age, I ask you, and try to use your imagination, do you think growing up is easy when your mother is a cemetery? Was Fukuyama right? That’s a question for philosophers, not for me. But take the phrase “We’re at the end of History”. Try to listen to that with the ears of a child at bedtime. Try to hear what those words sound like as the book closes and voices are hushed, as the lights are turned out and the dim figures of the people who put us to sleep slip away with a phrase gentle and disturbing at the same time: Sleep tight. Sleep tight was our pillow and our cradle. And we did sleep tight. No missiles kept us awake. The crisis was past. We were the happy campers. There was nothing left to do but live happily ever after and sleep tight. We are the children of that funeral elegy. It would have been easy to believe it. To believe that any attempt at creating something is in vain, that writing is just a form of masturbation, that resistance is futile. The various causes that might have given us a reason to keep going were either retro or obsolete, check the right box. Independence? Retro. Alienation? Obsolete. Punk Rock? Retro. Rock and Roll? Obsolete. Unionism? Obsolete. Communism? Retro. Modernity? Outmoded.
Fukuyama caught wind of something that the rest of the world had been smelling for a while. Ever since the mid-80s, there had been something in the air, a hint of something completed, something over . Now the spirit of endings was a sold-out show all over the world. Pulling the wings off of the idea of becoming, as a child might mutilate a fly, became an international pastime. Preaching that the end times were upon us became sexy. It was sort of a weird thing to get excited about. Apparently, everything was going to vanish, or go extinct, or reach its goal, or whatever… But instead of hearing the happy sounds of weddings or baptisms, instead of wedding feasts and champagne, the services we saw being given everywhere were funereal, elegiac. It was the end, and the end was good. Obituary writing became a huge business. Hundreds of others followed, but leading the trend in last rites were the obituaries written by Hans Belting, a German art historian, and by Arthur Danto, an American philosopher a little too obsessed with Warhol’s Brillo boxes. “It was a moment—I would say it was the moment—when perfect artistic freedom had become real. […] Everything was permitted, since nothing any longer was historically mandated. I call this the Post-Historical Period of Art, and there is no reason for it ever to come to an end.” Snort a few lines from this period, and you get a feeling for it instantly: the name-dropping, the mania for citation, the growing impression of a world mesmerized by its own reflection. Art had decided that its mission was to join those producing the same dittohead regurgitations of life offered in less tony media. Banality became sacred, and all of the classical aesthetic criteria were henceforth so much gunk caked on the rim of history’s dustbin. In the same motion, art denied itself permission to confront society’s norms. “If nothing is true,” wrote Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, “then everything is permitted.” And, if everything is permitted, then obviously, transgression is no longer possible. That is is the contribution the spirit of endings has made to our captivity. To celebrate the collapse of a wall, they made a urinal into an altar. In the name of liberty, Art and History were relegated to the past, and vast swamps of banality were annexed our present.