The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

Synopsis

In this, his most important collection of essays since Le systeme des objets , Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western culture “after the orgy”—the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the 1960s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a reign of transvestism, to a confusion of the categories of man and woman—to the “androgenous and Frankenstein appeal of a Michael Jackson.” The revolution in art has led to a “transaesthetic realm of indifference.