The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845203276
Publisher:	Berg Publishers
Publication date:	09/01/2005
Series:	Talking Images
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

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 Turbaner. Chris Turbaner 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.

Table of Contents

Integral Reality
* On the Fringes of the Real
* The World in its Profound Illusoriness
* The Easiest Solutions
* Do you want to be free?
* Do you want to be anyone else?
* The Murder of the Sign
* The Mental Diaspora of the Networks
* We are all Agnostics
* The Violence Done to the Image
* Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
* Virtuality and Events
* Evil and Misfortune
* The Intelligence of Evil
* For Whom does the Knell of Politics Toll?
* The Destruction of the Golden Pavilion
* The "blowback" of Duality
* Lines of Fracture
* Parallel Universes--Existential Divide--Time Divide
* Anamnesis

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Jean Baudrillard:
"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
"The most important French thinker of the past twenty years."—J.G. Ballard

"An international, intellectual superstar."—Salon.com

"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
"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 is to shock us into realising that thought and the world need not be as they are."—The Guardian

From the Publisher