The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena

In his latest 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 “androgenous and Frankenstein appeal of a Michael Jackson.” The revolution in art has led to a “transaesthetic realm of indifference.” The cybernetic revolution has blurred the distinction between man and machine, while the political revolution has led to the end of politics — to a transpolitics that merely simulates old political forms.

According to Baudrillard, AIDS is the perfect metaphor for the “viral” invasions that target our weakened “political immune defenses.” and Khomeini's death sentence on Salman Rushdie, “cleverly injecting archaic elements into a modern context,” epitomises the revenge of the Third World — that “Other World” to which the West has in the past exported so many evils, so many germs. Such are the points on Baudrillard's compass as he steers his way through the mental landscape of the new fin de siecle.

For anyone who wishes to judge the most quoted, most fashionable and most misunderstood theorist of the last decade, this book is essential reading, were such a concept still conceivable.

Jean Baudrillard was born in Rheims in 1929 and now lives in Paris. From 1966 to 1987 he taught sociology at the University of Nanterre.