The Perfect Crime
In his new book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, Jean Baudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet be solved: the “murder” of reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the social and technological processes by which reality has quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media “real time.”
But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as “the most important event of modern history,” nor even to meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crime is also the work of a great moraliste: a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the “advanced democracies” in the (very) late twentieth century. Where critics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of “the medium,” Baudrillard lays bare the depredatory effects of an oppressive transparency on our social lives, of a relentless positivity on our critical faculties, and of a withering 'high definition' on our very sense of reality.
Paperback, 156 pages
ISBN: 9781844672035
January 2008
$19.95 / £6.99
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Part of the Radical Thinkers series
Reviews
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Rarely do words convey such urgency as on a page by Baudrillard.
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Prophet of the apocalypse, hysterical lyricist of panic, obsessive recounter of the desolation of the postmodern scene and the hottest property on the New York intellectual circuit.
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The most important French thinker of the past twenty years.
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A sharp-shooting lone ranger of the post-Marxist left.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Jean Baudrillard
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Impossible Exchange
Jean Baudrillard's now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. -
Passwords
In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze’s Abécédaire, Passwords offers us twelve entry points into Baudrillard’s thought.
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America
“A sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left.”—New York Times
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The Transparency of Evil
Sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture, after the ‘orgy’ of the 1960s.
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Fragments
Disturbing and vivid meditations on the meanings of objects and sensations.
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The System of Objects
A tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard.
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The Spirit of Terrorism
Until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. -
Cool Memories IV
In this fourth collection of fragments and sketches, Baudrillard’s stance is that of a barely participant observer, rather than an interventionist intellectual.
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Cool Memories
Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense.