The Perfect Crime (Radical Thinkers)

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The thinker whose work constitutes some of the founding documents of postmodern theory turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.In his new book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, JeanBaudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet be solved: the x201C;murderx201D; 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 x201C;real time.x201C; But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as x201C;the most important event of modern history,x201D; 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 x201C;advanced democraciesx201D; in the (very) late twentieth century. Where critics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of x201C;the medium,x201D; 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.

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Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) began teaching sociology at the UniversitxE9; de Paris-X in 1966. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007. His many works include Simulations and Simulacra, America, The Perfect Crime, The System of Objects, Passwords, The Transparency of Evil, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Fragments, among others.