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Such quality and accuracy of insight indicate both the power of Baudrillard's initial position and the value of the French tradition of the grand philosophical analyst moving freely through the culture. --The Spectator
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The renowned postmodernist philosophers tour-de-force contemplation of sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture after the revolutionary orgy of the 1960s.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The intoxication induced by the first chapter of this book wears off fairly quickly. Baudrillatd asks a question that not many have asked - where do go we go now after all the 'liberation' of the past half century? - but his responses may strike many as intangible and implausiblle, however provocatively and entertainingly expressed - and fatiguing to read for more than an hour or so at a time. He is intellectually stimulating beyond doubt, but the substance is often obscure, often leaning fairly heavily on Lacan. There is a large measure of assertion and a certain absence of explicit and coherent reasoning. Still, the book is not too solemn - e.g. he takes the micky out of jogging. Recommended to those who are worried that they may be sliding into intellectual and moral complacency.
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jean Baudrillard is perhaps the finest critic of our time, though his power of objective insight is on the wane and - as great a read as 'Transparency of Evil' is - it is the beginning of the end of Baudrillard being a serious analyst of culture. A collection of thematic essays, Baudrillard critiques society in his usual cool, detached and amoral tone. The influence of Nietzsche is certainly apparent, though where Nietzsche was a fantastic stylist, Baudrillard's metaphors possess little weight and seem as superficial as his subject matter. There is no depth to the analysis, unlike previous masterpeices like 'The System of Objects' and 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place', and the author seems intent on making sweeping generalisations. In this sense the book is a good read and holds appeal for pretentious art-world types, but cannot really be taken seriously by those seeking weight in the arguements. Indeed, Baudrillard, like Foucault and Derrida, is often described as 'trendy' by academics in a somewhat derogatory sense, which is a shame because Baudrillard is capable of powerful critique...
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5 reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
a virtuoso,yet probes the surface most of the time. . .
9 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Sometimes a brilliant thinker as Baudrillard lets his own theories and perspectives confuse what is reality. Even though all the so-called revolutions and liberations have played themselves out, sexual,cybernetic,political,artistic, there are still powers in the world in all the above categories that are shaping the world in their own image. What is globalization? than the structure of the world surrounded with capital,shaped by it directing the poverty and foodchains of the world. I think Baudrillard forgets this, that there still is someone who creates and directs,and manipulates,and politicizes,and innoculates the populace to soften them up for consumption,controlled if possibly.
This collection of essays are brilliant in that Baudrillard knows how to probe beneath the surface of art,of culture, like Madonna, Michael Jackson or current Hollywood, and the politics of Europe,of the demise of communism. He does it within a formant structure,with many levels of meaning spewed out in all directions. He is a virtuoso in that respect.
What structures material reality? what directs it is not probed however with any degree of conviction and I think that is where his focus should be.You needn't be a Marxist to harbor these convictions simply ahumanist concerned with the direction of the world.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
easy fellas ....
21 Oct 2001
Format:Paperback
This book is a good introduction to the contemporary Baudrillard, it is the last step as he leaves behind the last vestiges of Marxism and ventures into something original and "fatal". Contrary to the first reviewer, Baudrillard does not assume an "Essentialist" position (namely, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for 'such and such' to be 'such and such'). Instead he operates between wildly poetic description and (implied) moral condemnation.
This means, mostly, that his comments on meaning and media are striking. It also means (unfortunately) that he provides little in the way of concrete or rigorous argumentation. Thankfully, this is not a problem if we consider the book a collection of inter-related aphorisms. In any case, Baudrillard "the poet" instead of Baudrillard "the theorist" allows us to conceptualize the expanding domain of media technologies in a different way. Whether there actually -is- anything to his claims will have to be shown by someone else.
Since this book has had something of an influence on art criticism, I recommend it (albeit, with strong reservations about its basic claims)to anyone interested in cultural theory, the arts or any sort of contemporary "critical theory".
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Baudrillard's Best Book?
9 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback
As anyone knows who has read Baudrillard, by "evil" he does not mean evil in a moral or ethical sense, but rather that principle which is antithetical to the smooth functioning of our hypermodern systems. Thus, AIDS, cancer, terrorism, computer viruses, etc. are examples of "extreme phenomena" which are a form of evil in the sense that they tend to disrupt the flow of systems. AIDS disrupts the flow of sexual promiscuity; cancer disrupts the flow of genetic programming; terrorism disrupts the flow of politcal economy, and so forth. These disruptions, moreover, may be the result on the part of these systems of a sort of homestatic tendency to preserve the system itself from even worse evils. Drugs, for example, prevent the tyranny of rationality; terrorism the tyranny of political consensus; AIDS, the absolute tyranny of sexual promiscuity, etc.
Our society, according to Baudrillard, operates in terms of virulent phenomena: that is to say, phenomena that proliferate with a metastatic or viral meaninglessness. We are saturated with media images that proliferate metastatically, like cancer cells which grow without regard for the context of the system within which they are embedded. Indeed, simulation is a form of this endless repetition of the Hell of the Same, in which ideas, tradition, and discourse have disintegrated and left behind a residue in the form of hollow ghost-like traces which proliferate around us like viruses, intent only upon destroying the system with oversaturation.
Baudrillard, like Nietzsche before him, thus sees our society as a sick one, for he draws his metaphors largely from biology and medicine. Art, he says, has become Trans-Aesthetic, producing images in which there is literally nothing to see because they make no effect and leave no trace; sexuality has become Trans-sexual in the sense that there is no longer any fixity of gender. Figures like Michael Jackson or Boy George simply discard their genders and proceed as if there is no such thing. Economics, too, he says, has become Trans-Economic, creating virtual realms of speculation that have little to do with the real world, which is why, he says, the crash of 1987 had little actual effect upon the real economy.
This is, in short, one of Baudrillard's two or three best books. It is clearly written and very readable. Nobody had a better grasp of the essentially phantom nature of postmodernity; its shallowness, and ghostly production of promiscuous forms with no relation to context or tradition of any sort. He is a kind of modern equivalent of Nietzsche, diagnosing our contemporary predicament, the way a physician would analyse a patient.
--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."
Our society, according to Baudrillard, operates in terms of virulent phenomena: that is to say, phenomena that proliferate with a metastatic or viral meaninglessness. We are saturated with media images that proliferate metastatically, like cancer cells which grow without regard for the context of the system within which they are embedded. Indeed, simulation is a form of this endless repetition of the Hell of the Same, in which ideas, tradition, and discourse have disintegrated and left behind a residue in the form of hollow ghost-like traces which proliferate around us like viruses, intent only upon destroying the system with oversaturation.
Baudrillard, like Nietzsche before him, thus sees our society as a sick one, for he draws his metaphors largely from biology and medicine. Art, he says, has become Trans-Aesthetic, producing images in which there is literally nothing to see because they make no effect and leave no trace; sexuality has become Trans-sexual in the sense that there is no longer any fixity of gender. Figures like Michael Jackson or Boy George simply discard their genders and proceed as if there is no such thing. Economics, too, he says, has become Trans-Economic, creating virtual realms of speculation that have little to do with the real world, which is why, he says, the crash of 1987 had little actual effect upon the real economy.
This is, in short, one of Baudrillard's two or three best books. It is clearly written and very readable. Nobody had a better grasp of the essentially phantom nature of postmodernity; its shallowness, and ghostly production of promiscuous forms with no relation to context or tradition of any sort. He is a kind of modern equivalent of Nietzsche, diagnosing our contemporary predicament, the way a physician would analyse a patient.
--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."
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