Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)

The Transparency of Evil was written in the late 1980s, and first published in French in 1990. But as I read it in 2020 it often felt up-to-the-minute. It was hard to believe that some of these observations were not rooted in the internet-mediated social environment of the 21st century.

"This society now produces only ill-defined events whose ultimate clarification is unlikely. In earlier times an event was something that happened--now it is something that is designed to happen. It occurs, show more therefore, as a virtual artifact, as a reflection of pre-existing media-defined forms" (41). "The new technologies, with their new machines, new images and interactive screens, do not alienate me. Rather, they form an integrated circuit with me. ... We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity" (58-9).

Moreover, Baudrillard's frequent attention to epidemics and virality, composed in the 1980s under the cognizance of AIDS, sounds today with the amplifying echoes of novel coronavirus. His identification of terrorism as the paradigmatic form of the "transpolitical" was likewise both current and prescient.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is untitled but has epigrams relating to the book's subtitle of "extreme phenomena." It is chiefly oriented to describing a historical moment "after the orgy" of the liberation movements that followed the middle of the 20th century. He outlines a situation characterized by "gross systemic conjunction and malfunction caused by hypertelia--by an excess of functional imperatives, by a sort of saturation" (31).

In both the first and second parts of the book, Baudrillard references the work of the French ethnographer and critic Victor Segalen (1878–1919). While The Transparency of Evil is clearly informed by Baudrillard's own signature concepts of simulation, hyperreality, and so forth, these are not called out explicitly, and there is no scholarly intertextual apparatus.

Much as I enjoyed the first part of the book, I got more out of the shorter second part titled "Radical Otherness." In it, he returns to the theme of Evil that he raised late in the first part, and he coordinates this focus with a distinction between difference and otherness. Difference allows for, perhaps even demands, assimilation through the positing of a shared continuum, whereas otherness presents genuine discontinuity. Baudrillard identifies otherness with the foreign, and relates it to traditional concepts of hospitality. He proposes that ritual and seduction are counterstrategies by which the other can and will preserve itself in the face of coercive regimes of reconciliation.

"Whereas the Good presupposes a dialectical involvement of Evil, Evil is founded on itself alone, in pure incompatibility. Evil is thus master of the game, and it is the principle of Evil, the reign of eternal antagonism, that must eventually carry off the victory" (139). Is this--optimism? show less

Is there a way to review this collection without drowning in the political?
Without getting too close and accidentally scratching off the never-healing scab of The Event?
I sense that much has been said on both sides (with much emotion) regarding Baudrillard's writings on 9/11 and terrorism in general.

Without drowning in equivocation or knotty explanations of my own thoughts on the topic let me say this:

- This is a short and (for the most part) clearly written work that tries to bring some show more balanced thought to the unavoidably antagonistic relationship between globalization (as he defines it) and cultural specification (i.e., those still resisting and still outside of the globalized political/economic/power network). The unfortunate shorthand of which is The Western World and The Terrorists. Because it is short and easily read, and also presents ideas at least worth exposing oneself to and contemplating, I would recommend this to anyone who was even remotely interested.

- Interestingly, 17 years after its first appearance, I believe these writings not only hold relevance for the situation they describe and which still exists, but also for new and more current situations. As an example, I couldn't help thinking of the rise of the alt-right and the political upheavals and violence it has triggered in the last few years. I would be interested to see if Baudrillard has written about these new situations.

- I think victim-hood in general is a horrible virus that can be dangerous (whether in genuine victims or disingenuous ones). I don't think I'm original in saying that I think 9/11 set off a whopper of an auto-immune response in America (and much of the world) from which we have still not recovered. And we may never recover. This response is dangerous the more it changes who we are, what we are willing to do, and what we won't allow ourselves to discuss.

Or just ignore me because I probably don't know shit but just felt like writing out a response to what I read to clear my head and try to face forward. show less

"America is powerful and original; America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them." (88)

Over the US semiquincentennial weekend in July 2026, I read this suite of essays written in the mid-1980s by postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard. Famous for his theory of simulation and his numinous phrase "the desert of the real," the writer keeps both of these notions on view throughout the book. He extols the hyperreality of the American show more deserts vis a vis the other deserts of the world. "The natural deserts tell me what I need to know about the deserts of the sign. ... We should always appeal to the deserts against the excess of signification, of intention and pretention in culture. They are our mythic operator" (63-4).

The book is short, and while the prose sometimes soars into a sort of postmodernist vacuity, it is not walled behind theoretical cant. Portions of it are written as travelogue. For Baudrillard, America is a pragmatic and superficial society unmoored from history and culture, and he casts these (easily disputed) diagnoses in tones of paradoxical admiration and fatalist wonder. But much of what he is saying about America is really chafing at what he sees as the peculiarities of his own European sub-modernity. He suggests that the American utopia has replaced Eternal Return with one-damned-thing-after-another (72).

While the book has praise for American multiracialism (82), it also makes strange racist implications in passing, as when referring to "Mexican slaves who have bought up their masters' old 1950s Chevrolets" (64) and alleging an American fascination with "the yellow-skinned peoples in whom they sense a superior form of cunning" (85). Perhaps he meant to mock or satirize American racism, but if so, the jibes didn't land properly.

In a chapter on "The End of US Power?" Baudrillard discusses the Reaganite measures of social austerity and disenfranchisement, which seem familiar in our allegedly "unprecedented" US forty years later. He also points out the late Cold War pivot from "hard" to "soft" power in international relations. (The Trumpist US seems to think that abandoning soft power will make hard power effective once more, but proves otherwise in Iran.)

The translation by Chris Turner seems pretty capable. There were a few points where the diction got strange, but just after reading "You can't eat your wife and fuck it too!" (111) and "irreferentiality and deconnection ... great-featured natural scenery" (126) there are footnotes indicating that the failure of idiom was in short passages that the author had originally written in English!

It's not a book I'd recommend to anyone trying to get the measure of Baudrillard as a philosopher, but for an American reader who has already digested his Simulations or Fatal Strategies, it is a brilliantly lit fun-house mirror, just what I was looking for in the ambivalent circumstance of the big dismal national anniversary. show less

There’s a long tradition of Europeans coming to America for a few weeks and then writing the definitive book about American culture and topography. They seem to do this more to annoy American readers (who have to buy the book in order to discover how much they hate the author) than to inform their fellow Europeans, who probably share their prejudices about America anyway. Baudrillard, with the unique chutzpah of a 1980s French intellectual, manages to reduce an entire continent to 140 show more pages of very literate and highly-abstract prose, seemingly based on a couple of terms teaching at Californian universities and a road-trip through the South-West. It sounds as though the only Americans he actually talked to were philosophy students and waiters (two categories that overlap quite significantly in most places).

So, of course, he sees what he came expecting to see, and misses a lot of other important things. He is fascinated by the desert and its radical semiotic emptiness — whatever signs there are in this landscape long pre-date human presence — and he imagines Los Angeles as a kind of human version of this negativity of signs. And of course he has to try to map Las Vegas in as its inverse. He doesn’t seem to be interested in the inequality, racism and violence of American society — he puts in some slightly naive comments about how much better the mingling of different ethnic groups works in the US than in postcolonial France — but he does notice the way Reagan-era America is promoting the exclusion of weaker social groups, especially the poor, from political discourse. He’s fascinated by the notion that Americans think of themselves as living in an achieved Utopia.

I was struck by how much of the difference Baudrillard saw between America and Europe forty years ago depended on the place of technology in our lives, something that has been quite radically smoothed out in the internet age. His assertions about the difference in European and American consciousness of history seem debatable too — my experience (not in California, admittedly) has certainly been that a lot of Americans are very interested in the history of the regions where they live, and that many Europeans know surprisingly little history…

It’s a very elegant and articulate little book, enjoyable to read and argue with. I only really got annoyed with him when he went into technical or scientific metaphors, which he almost invariably gets wrong and clearly didn’t bother to run past anyone who might be able to correct him. He imagines a jet engine as sucking itself along by creating a vacuum in front of itself, for example, and gets into similar messes with computers, television, lasers, etc. show less