His wide-ranging discussion of events and their relationship to theory moves between poetry and waterfalls, strikes and Stealth bombers, Freud and la Cicciolina, shadows and simulacra, deconstruction and the zodiac, Reagan's smile and Kennedy's death, the "curse" on South America and the future of the West, the last tango of French intellectual life and the exemplary disappearing act of Italian politics.

Idiosyncratic, outrageous, brilliantly original, Cool Memories II will be required reading by anyone concerned with the debates about postmodernism and the current state of theory on the social sciences and humanities.