The Intelligence of Evil or, The Lucidity Pact

Jean Baudrillard
Paperback, 176 pages
9781780935683

 

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and at the height of the "War on Terror", the controversial postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard wrote The Intelligence of Evil. In tackling the rhetoric of the so-called "clash of civilizations" between a capitalist West and a fundamentalist religious Islam, the book also provides a summation of many of the most important themes of Baurdrillard's philosophical project.

 

Baudrillard here explores how neoliberal political rhetoric has divided human cultures are divided into 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?

 

Contents
Integral Reality
At the Margins of the Real
The World in its Deep 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 Contemporary with Itself
Virtuality and Events
Evil and Misfortune
The Intelligence of Evil
For Whom does the Bell of Politics Toll?
The Destruction of the Golden Pavilion
Duality's Revenge
Fracture Lines
Parallel Universes Existential Divide Time Divide
Anamnesis