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