Rarely do words convey such urgency as on a page by Baudrillard.
Los Angeles Times
Prophet of the apocalypse, hysterical lyricist of panic, obsessive recounter of the desolation of the postmodern scene and the hottest property on the New York intellectual circuit.
Guardian
The most important French thinker of the past twenty years.
- J.G. Ballard,
A sharp-shooting lone ranger of the post-Marxist left.
New York Times
But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as "the most important event of modern history," nor even to meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crime is also the work of a great moraliste: a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the "advanced democracies" in the (very) late twentieth century. Where critics like McLuhan once exposed the alienating consequences of "the medium," Baudrillard lays bare the depredatory effects of an oppressive transparency on our social lives, of a relentless positivity on our critical faculties, and of a withering 'high definition' on our very sense of reality.