The Perfect Crime

"Rarely do words convey such urgency as on a page by Baudrillard."--"Los Angeles Times""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."--"Guardian""The most important French thinker of the past twenty years."--J.G. Ballard"A sharp-shooting lone ranger of the post-Marxist left."--"New York Times"

In this 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 is becoming a thing of (empty) transparency and visibility, a place where reality, swamped by the "real time" of the news media, has quite simply vanished. 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. However, whether stripping away the layers of hypocrisy which surround our smug perceptions of the former Yugoslavia, or deploring the New European Order characterized by 'white fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination and control', the moraliste is also the deft and disturbing social theorist. 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.