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"Rarely do words convey such urgency as on a page by Baudrillard." Los Angeles Times Book Review "A golden treasury of theory" Eric Banks, Bookforum "Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The 12 authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled." Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman"
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In his newbook, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, JeanBaudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which hehopes may yet be solved: the murder of reality. To solve the crimewould be to unravel the social and technological processes by whichreality has quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media realtime. But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lamentthe disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as the most important event of modern history, nor even to meditate uponthe paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crimeis also the work of a great moraliste: a penetrating examination ofvital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the advanced democracies in the (very) late twentieth century. Wherecritics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of themedium, Baudrillard lays bare the depredatory effects of an oppressivetransparency on our social lives, of a relentless positivity on ourcritical faculties, and of a withering 'high definition' on our verysense of reality.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The image no longer imagines the real because it has become the real."
This is an immensly readable dissection of the barely living remanents of reality. In it Baudrillard contests that, in a world obsessed with the image, the reality it imagines has no place and has consequently withered behind the shell of pretence. The writing is amazingly succinct, each paragraph laden with thought provoking revelations. This book opened my eyes and my thoughts.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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2 reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
surprisingly lucid and poetic!
12 Feb 2006
Format:Paperback
I'd never read a word of Baudrillard before reading this book. I had assumed that he was an apostle of the silly side of 'postmodern' writing - of a tedious celebration of indeterminacy, advertising and globalization, like Hardt and Negri. But no - this is a powerful, tragic lament that at times sounds like a romantic elegy for the human imagination, threatened by a hubristic 'virtuality'. His argument seems to be that the old (romantic) duality of 'the real' and 'the illusory' is being replaced by a new duality of 'the real' and 'the virtual'. Whereas in the former duality, we chased the seductive shadows of a Utopia forever out of reach, in the new duality we deny to ourselves the tragic truth that this seduction is never complete by creating a virtual replica world that requires no imagination at all - in other words which simply translates 'the real' into code of various kinds, in particular that which forms virtual worlds in the media and the internet, or which turns the fallible human body into a body of pure digital knowledge in the form of genetic code on disc. This is an old story - it's a story about denying desire because it cannot be fulfilled - about denying our mortal human condition out of a childish demand for perfection. In fact one might even find parallels to the argument in mainstream Anglo-american philosopher Thomas Nagel's book 'The View From Nowhere', though I'm sure both Nagel and Baudrillard would rather eat knives than acknowledge each other. One doesn't have to buy into Baudrillard's dubious metaphysics or odd misreadings of politics to find this book rather beautiful and deeply disturbing.
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Baudrillard's Best Book
19 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
Though Simulacra has acquired Baudrillard his most cultural currency, this book in fact is the most eloquent (and witty) and well argued, filled with trenchant wit and sly insights. Baudrillard is the best cultural critic to come out of France in the last century, and this book will prove to be the greatest sample of his thought. Covering topics as disparate as Andy Warhol and Yugoslavia, Baudrillard examines the implosion of reality in the contemporary global world, exploring the moral implicatioins of the age of information. Those who seek to discredit Baudrillard as a stylish postmodernist will have difficulty dismissing this eloquent and disturbing text. Very highly recommended.
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