The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

For anyone casting about for a place to begin with Baudrillard, this might be a good place to start. It is a sort of summing up of his main themes, and the curious reader who has heard about such things as 'simulacra,' 'virtual reality,' 'integral reality,' and the like can rest assured that he will find Baudrillard discoursing here upon the themes which made him most famous.

Is there enough room, Baudrillard asks, for both the world and its (virtual) double? As we attempt to seal the world shut beneath a dome of virtuality that attempts to eliminate all forms of noise and chaos, the inherent evil in the world continually resists this Western sanitization in the form of accidents, crashes, terrorist violence and natural disasters. The attempt to virtualize the world is simultaneously an attempt to eliminate all forms of evil from it, but Baudrillard seems fairly confident that this will never happen. A complete sealing shut of the world behind a dome of virtuality can never be a success since evil is part of the very nature of the world that is in process of being cloned. To clone the world is also to clone its evil.

Baudrillard is at his best when discoursing upon the death of the spectator or the effects of electronic technology upon society, but he is less effective in his discussions of ethics and evil. The reader constantly finds himself fighting the urge to categorize Baudrillard as Manichean, but this is a myth that is too radically certain of itself to fit comfortably within Baudrillard's nihilism, with its decentered and ironic gaze. At times, though, one suspects Baudrillard of being a closet mystic. Wouldn't THAT be a wonderful irony! At the root of all his sceptical perspectives would lie an urge to be free of Western culture forms and to dissolve himself into the white radiance of a non-existent certainty.

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" (McFarland Books, 2011)

This review is admittedly brief and frankly only directed at those familiar with Baudrillard's work, since it's not really possible to buy the argument of The Intelligence of Evil without having bought the notion of the Impossible Exchange. That being said, the editor's word "summation" to describe this work in relation to Baudrillard's career is a little flattering--nothing significantly new appears here, and the kinds of things Baudrillard tends to say are fairly derivative of standard polemics a la Nietzsche, Bataille, Marcuse, and so on. Baudrillard once complained that no one describes his work as being 'serious', even when he thinks there are philosophically serious things in his works. One wonders why he feels entitled to that description when nothing in his writing invites the kind of attitude he thinks should be taken to his work. It is one thing to be philosophical and quite another to do philosophy. At best Baudrillard qualifies for the former since nothing about the way he writes could pass for 'philosophy', even if one is not particularly wedded to an Anglo-American idea of what 'philosophy' should be (as I am not myself). His paragraphs are at times provocative, but rambling and more often than not vague. The translator calls Baudrillard's work "philosophical analyses of current events in the best Deleuzian fashion", which again is a little flattering--Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1 and 2 are incomparable with regard to the intellectual and philosophical challenge they present to the reader, regardless of whether or not one finds their arguments any more or less compelling than Baudrillard's. Baudrillard's jargon and terminology simply have nowhere near the rigor or historical depth of many of his compatriots.

The title 'The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact' relies on a Platonic reading of a line from Adorno (strange in itself!): "It is no longer a question of a thought critical of reality, but of a subversion of reality in its principle, in its very self-evidence. The greater the positivity, the more violent is the--possibly silent--denial. ... But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true. Hope, if we were still to have it, would be hope for intelligence--for insight into--good. Now, what we have left is intelligence of evil, that is to say, not intelligence of a critical reality, but of a reality that has become unreal by dint of positivity, that has become speculative by dint of simulation." (I read Baudrillard's reading of negation and transcendence as Platonic in this context.) In other words, Baudrillard is rehashing comments about hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation or the kinds of things said by any number of social critics since Simmel, Marx, and Nietzsche that talk about the outstripping of the subject by the objective world. (Incidentally, Baudrillard's conception of the dual illusion of subjectivity and objectivity is one that I find incoherent with other criticisms he gives about the failure of transcendence and the loss of reality.) As for the "pact" part of "the lucidity pact", this relies on a distinction between a "pact" and "contract" which is interesting, but undeveloped.

Regardless of Baudrillard's work as a whole, what I really wanted to say about this work in particular is simply that it's only really useful either for those who have already read others of Baudrillard's works or those who are tired of (in my opinion) better social critics saying much the same thing about the loss of reality (the other theorists with whom Baudrillard aligns himself, such as Zizek and Agamben, seem to have more understandable criteria for knowing when we are actually experiencing reality) and/or ungrounding the war on terror. The motive is admirable even if the execution is not.

Gotta give it for France for bringing so many heavyweights in the Postmodern ring of thoughts. Baudrillard is something of a post-Marxist academic gone wild, hitting you from every angle, slowly decentering the virtual world of the subject into the ritualistic world of objects. A must-read, Worth the time deciphering through the countless paradoxes and hints of esoterism.