| Description |
1 online resource (156 pages) |
|
Online-Ressource |
| Series |
Social theory.
|
| Contents |
The Perfect Crime -- The Spectre of the Will -- The Radical Illusion -- Trompe-l'oeil Genesis -- The Automatic Writing of the World -- The Horizon of Disappearance -- The Countdown -- The Material Illusion -- The Secret Vestiges of Perfection -- The Height of Reality -- The Irony of Technology -- Machinic Snobbery -- Objects in This Mirror -- The Babel Syndrome -- Radical Thought -- The World Without Women -- The Surgical Removal of Otherness -- The 'Laying-Off' of Desire -- The New Victim Order -- Indifference and Hatred -- The Revenge of the Mirror People |
| Summary |
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 technological and social processes by which our world 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: it is 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 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-156) |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
|
Print version record |
|
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
| Subject |
Reality.
|
|
Reality.
|
|
Cultuurverandering.
|
|
Massamedia.
|
|
Werkelijkheid.
|
|
Politieke communicatie.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
|
