  Baudrillard’s retirement from a sociology faculty seemed to have liberated his philosophical impulses and in addition to his diary collections and occasional forays into engagement of issues of the day, Baudrillard turned out a series of increasingly philosophical and densely theoretical texts.  The post-1990 texts continue the fragmentary style and use of short essays, aphorisms, stories, and aperçus that Baudrillard began deploying in the 1980s and often repeat some of the same ideas and stories. While the books develop the quasi-metaphysical perspectives of the 1980s, they also generate some new ideas and positions. They are often entertaining, although they can also be outrageous and scandalous. These writings can be read as a combination of cultivation of original theoretical perspectives along with continual commentary on current social conditions, accompanied by a running dialogue with Marxism, poststructuralist theory, and other forms of contemporary thought. Yet after his fierce and focused polemics of the 1970s against competing models of thought, Baudrillard’s later dialogues with theory consist mostly of occasional asides and recycling of previous ideas, a retro-theory that perhaps ironically illustrates his theses about the decline of theory and politics in the contemporary moment.