Customer Reviews

The Perfect Crime (Radical Thinkers)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.