French thinker Baudrillard (1929-2007) reports the murder of reality and the extermination of an illusion--and not just any illusion, but the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. Despite his title, he says, the crime was not in fact perfect, though the perpetrator is not known, nor the motives, and the corpse has never been found. But the murder weapon was the idea underpinning the book, whatever that might turn out to be. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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.
The thinker whose work constitutes some of the founding documents of postmodern theory turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.
