Perfect Crime

In his new 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 "e;murder"e; 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 "e;real time."e;But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as "e;the most important event of modern history,"e; 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 "e;advanced democracies"e; in the (very) late twentieth century. Where critics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of "e;the medium,"e; 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.