The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

by Baudrillard, Jean; Turner, Chris

• ISBN13: 9781845203276
• ISBN10: 1845203275
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-29
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most influential philosophical and cultural critics writing today. His books include Simulacra and Simulation, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, America, Seduction, The System of Objects, Cool Memories, Symbolic Exchange and Death and The Transparency of Evil.

 

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.

Table of Contents

The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction	1	(16)
Chris Turner
Integral Reality	17	(8)
On the Fringes of the Real	25	(14)
On the World in Its Profound Illusoriness	39	(8)
The Easiest Solutions	47	(20)
Do you want to be free?	50	(5)
Do you want to be anyone else?	55	(12)
The Murder of the Sign	67	(8)
The Mental Diaspora of the Networks	75	(12)
We Are All Agnostics...	87	(4)
The Violence Done to the Image	91	(14)
Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself	105	(12)
Virtuality and Events	117	(22)
Evil and Misfortune	139	(20)
The Intelligence of Evil	159	(6)
For Whom Does the Knell of Politics Toll?	165	(8)
The Destruction of the Golden Temple	173	(12)
The `Blowback' of Duality	185	(6)
Lines of Fracture	191	(6)
Parallel Universes	197	(10)
Existential divide	198	(2)
Time divide	200	(7)
Anamnesis	207