The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

Description

Translated by Chris Turner We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time.

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most influential philosophical and cultural critics writing today. His books include Simulacra and Simulation, The Perfect Crime, America, Seduction, The System of Objects, Cool Memories, Symbolic Exchange and Death and the Transparency of Evil. Translated by Chris Turner. Chris Turner has translated many of the key works of French theory over the last two decades, particularly the work of Baudrillard, including most recently, The Spirit of Terrorism.

'A compelling analysis of what Washington has been pleased to call the global war on terror.' Times Literary Supplement 'When it comes to mysterious paradoxes and lyrical complexity no French intellectual matches Jean Baudrillard in contemplating the New World a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left.' New York Times 'An international, intellectual superstar.' Salon.com 'Baudrillard foresaw the allure of virtual reality long before William Gibson; he was in the vanguard of Marxian critiques of modern consumerism; before it became fashionable, he wrote a scintillating analysis of man's sentimental exploitation of animals. Baudrillard got there first, many times. And now his self-imposed task isto shock us into realising that thought and the world need not be as they are.' The Guardian 'The most notorious intellectual celebrity to emerge from Paris since Roland Barthes and the most influential prophet of the media since Marshal McLuhan.' i-D magazine 'The most important French thinker of the past twenty years.' J.G. Ballard 'Jean Baudrillard is one of the best-known theorists of hyperreality in contemporary social theory. His intellectual odyssey has ranged across the spectrum of radical social and cultural analysis from an early Marxist phase, to the criticism of orthodox Marxism.' British Journal of Sociology 'Astutely translated by Chris Turner, this amalgam of gnomic diagnoses not only offer controversial takes on fourth order simulacra but also a refreshing expose of our fixation with good and evil.' Paul J. Carnegie