The Perfect Crime

In this 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 'murder' of reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the technological and social processes by which our world is becoming a thing of (empty) transparency and visibility, a place where reality, swamped by the 'real time' of the news media, has quite simply vanished. But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as 'the most important event of modern history', 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: it is a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the 'advanced democracies' in the (very) late twentieth century.