The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

by Jean Baudrillard

Book Overview

In this book, Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western culture after the orgy - the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the 1960s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a reign of transvestism, to a confusion of the categories of man and woman - to the androgynous and Frankenstein appeal of a Michael Jackson. The revolution in art has led to transaesthetic realm of indifference. The cybernetic revolution has blurred...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0860913872
• ISBN13: 9780860913870
• Release Date: May 1993
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Baudrillard's Best Book?

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.

easy fellas ....

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".

a virtuoso,yet probes the surface most of the time. . .

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.

Facinating but reactionary

Break out your dictionary; here is Baudrillard in all his ontogenetic glory. A wildly entertaining if ultimately depressing journey through the end of the millenia; what could be more shocking than to see J.B. bewail the lost hippy ideals of the sixties? Less a postmodernist than an essentialist critic of postmodernism, Baudrilard bwetrays a startling lack of imagination when it comes to technology and apparently views the computer screen as the fourth horseman of a Marxian apocalypse. Imagine if your kvetching grandfather had attended Yale in the '80s.