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The Intelligence of Evil or tile Lucidity Pact
English Edition
First published in 2005 by
Berg
Editorial olliees:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 lAW, l:K
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

First published in France, 2004 by Editions Galilee

© Galilee, 2004, I.e Pact. tU lucidite au l'intl'lligcnce du Mal

Introduction and English translation © Chris Turner 2005

This work is published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture -
Cenu'e National du Livre

li institut frantais
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign AtIairs as part of the Burgess
Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Fran~ais du Royaume-Uni

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Baudrillard,Jean.
[Pacte de lucidit" ou I'intelligence du Mal. English]
The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact / Jean BaudIillard ; translated by
ChIis Turner.- English ed.
p.cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-84520-327-5 (cloth) - ISBN 1-84520-334-8 (pbk.)
1. Reality. 2. Good and evil. L Title.

B2430.B33973P33132005
194--dc22
2005017087

British library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the BIitish Library.

ISBN-13 9781 845203276 (Cloth)

971'1 I 84520 334 4 (Paper)

ISBN-IO 1 845203275 (Cloth)

1 84520 3348 (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed in the United Kingdom by BiddIes Ltd, King's Lynn

www.bergpublishers.com
 Uontents

The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction

Chris Turner 1
Integral Reality 17
On the Fringes of the Real 25
On the World in Its Profound Illusoriness 39
The Easiest Solutions 47
Do you want to be free? 50
Do you want to be anyone else? 55
The Murder of the Sign 67
The Mental Diaspora of the Networks 75
We Are All Agnostics. . . 87
The Violence Done to the Image 91
Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself 105
Virtuality and Events 117
Evil and Misfortune 139
The Intelligence of Evil 159
For Whom Does the Knell of Politics Toll? 165
The Destruction of the Golden Temple 173

The 'Blowback' of Duality 185

Lines of Fracture 191
Parallel Universes 197
Existential divide 198
Time divide 200
Anamnesis 207

v
We accept the real so readily only because we sense that
reality does not exist.
Jorge Luis Borges

Last night I had a dream about reality.

It was such a relief to wake up.
Stanislaw J. Lee
 The Intelligence of Evil
An Introdnction
CHRIS TURNER

The role of the translator is not to bring out, by a commentary,

the author's intentions and connotations ...
Claude Fages 1

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of

advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but
there is immediate publicity everywhere.
S0ren Kierkegaard 2

Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims in 1929. Among his earli-

est published writings were reviews of literature for Les Temps
modernes at a time when he was still teaching German at a
provincial lycee and translating the works, among others, of
Peter Weiss, BertoIt Brecht and Wilhelm Miihlmann. In the
1960s he made the transition to sociology, largely under the
guidance of Henri Lefebvre, and began to teach the subject

1. 'Note du traducteur' in Jose Saramago, L'annie de la mort de Ricardo Reis (Paris:

Seuil, 1988), p. 9.
2. The Present Age. Translated and with an Introduction by Alexander Du. (London:
Collins, 1962), p. 36.

1
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

in October 1966 at the (small, but very radical) University

of Nanterre. 3 In his teaching at that time, he drew, he tells
us, almost exclusively on four books: Artaud's Le theatre de la
cmaute, The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss's
Essay on the Gift and La Monnaie vivante by Pierre Klossowski,
translator of, and commentator on, Nietzsche. 4 As regards
other, perhaps even more ingrained, influences, Baudrillard
speaks freely of his early Nietzscheanism and his encounter
during his schooldays withJarry's pataphysics.
Baudrillard's first period as a social theorist began with an
analysis of the world of everyday objects and, by extension, of
advertising and the media, in such works as The System of Objects
(1968), The Consumer Society (1970) and For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign (1972). 5 These were the years of the
journal Utopie, to which he made many contributions over the
period 1967-78, publishing there for the first time chapters
from The Mirror of Production, his theoretical rejection of
Marxism as productivism. This work, which appeared in book
form later in 1973, and which takes up in its critical sweep not
only Marxism, but the 'textual productivity' of Tel Quel and
Deleuze/Guattari's machinic productivity of the unconscious,
'moves decisively to change the basis of his position away
from that of a traditional concept of class struggle to that of
opposing the symbolic order to the semiotic (or simulation)

3. Nanterre was the birthplace of the 'rnouvement du 22 mars', which played a

prominent role in the events of May 1968. Baudrillard left Nanterre in 1986, at a
point when it had been definitively 'normalized', and spent the latter part of his
teaching career at Paris-IX Dauphine. The offer of the move to Paris-IX apparently
carne from Marc Guillaume.
4. Fragments. Translated by Chris Turner (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 39.
5. Though it should be said that The Consumer Society was written to a commission
from a publisher and Baudrillard does not see it as representative of his intellectual
tr~jectory at the time.

2
 OR THE LUCIDI1Y PACf

order constituent of contemporary Western culture.'6 In par-

ticular, Baudrillard mounts an 'anthropological' challenge
to Marx's championing of use-value against exchange-value,
a position based ultimately on the assumption that use-values
merely subserve human needs aculturally and transparently.'
In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), which opens with the
assertion that 'There is no longer any symbolic exchange, as
organizing form, at the level of modern social formations',8
Baudrillard pitches his tent finnly on the ground of Mauss's
theory of gift-exchange and Bataille's 'general economy'
(and also Saussure's writings on anagrams) and begins in
earnest the elaboration of the radical anthropology on
which his analyses will draw most centrally over the coming
years. 9 Here he develops his theory of the three orders of
simulacra,10 arguing, in particular, that we have passed out
of the industrial era, in which production was the dominant
pattern, into a code-governed phase where the dominant

6. Mike Gane,Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty, p. 13.

7. Thinkers within the world of anthropology were engaged on similar critiques
at this same time, though rarely with an equal degTee of radicalism. See, for
example, Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1976).
8. L'echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 9. My translation.
9. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated
by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Marcel Mauss, The Gift: TheForm
and Reason for J£xchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls (London:
Routledge, 1990). Some have criticized Baudrillard's reliance on an anthro-
pological critique as representing a nostalgic dimension in his work (e.g. Julian
Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern [Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 1991], p. 112), but Baudrillard is always keen to dispel such a reading.
In conversation with Maria Elena Ramos at Caracas in 1994, he describes his
position as representing 'Ia nostalgia di une cultura non primitiva, sino radical'
('nostalgia for a culture not primitive, but radical').
10. L'ichange symbolique et la mort, p. 77.

3
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

schema is simulation. Simulation is, as he puts it elsewhere, the

replacement of the world with a kind of substitute universe,
a counter-world of signs. What is alien to it - and essential
to the symbolic order - is La reversibilite (the reversibility /
revertibility) of signs, particularly of life and death, proper
to symbolic exchange. Within reversibilite is understood the
possibility of actual re-version - reversion/ reverting/ turnabout
- and beneath it there are echoes of the act of re-verser. ll
paying back, making the counter-gift.
In an article entitled 'La prise d'otage' (Hostage taking),
also published in Utopie l2 and incorporated with minor
changes into Symbolic Exchange and Death, the political import
of this understanding of the symbolic is brought out: 'It is
impossible to destroy the system by a contradiction-based logic
or by reversing the balance of forces - in short, by a direct,
dialectical revolution affecting the economic or political
infrastructure. Everything that produces contradiction or a
balance of forces or energy in general merely feeds back into
the system and drives it on.'13 Hence,

the worst error, the one committed by all our revolutionary

strategists, is to think they can put an end to the system on the
real plane: that is the imaginary the system itself imposes
on them, a system that lives and survives only by getting those
who attack it to fight on the terrain of reality, a ground that is
always its own. 14

11. VIffSIff being understood here in the very basic sense of handing over, as in the
expression 'verslff une somme'.
12. In March-Apri11976.
13. Jean Baudrillard, Le ludique et le policier et autres textes pams dans Utopie [1967/78J
(Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2001), p. 335.
14. Ibid., p. 336.

4
 OR THE LUCIDITY PACT

Realism' is no kind of radicalism at all: the only solution is

'to challenge the system with a gift to which it cannot reply
- except by its own death and collapse' .10 Though the overt
pretext for this piece is a terrorist act - and we may consider
this, too, as significant - Baudrillard's political thinking in
this period is dominated, like that of many around him, by
the events of 1968 and their aftermath. 16
Baudrillard's work of the late 1970s and early 1980s spells
out the implications of his vision for the various domains
of social theory with which he was then engaged (at least
nominally) in his professional life: sexuality and the family,
the social sphere (where the 'crisis' of the welfare state had
emerged as a key problem) and politicsY In A l'ombre des
majorites silencieuses ou la fin du social (in a magnificently
suicidal gesture for a practising sociologist), he offers at least
four - not entirely compatible - lines of reasoning to support
the argument that 'le social' is no longer (or never was) a
pertinent category for study: there is no 'social', there are
only networks of symbolic obligations, which are not social
relations since the constraint they impose does not assume
contractual form. And, crucially, he also argues there that
our modern western societies, having existed up to then on
a basis of 'expansion and explosion at all levels' , were on the
point of implosion, a process heralded by the prevalence of
terrorism in its radical non-representativeness and by the -

15. Ibid., p. 337.

16. Baudrillard tells an interviewer, 'May '68 was an illogical event, irreducible to
simulation, one which had no status other than that of coming from someplace
else - a kind of pure object or event', and one senses here the traces of a kind of
'primal scene'
17. He was at this time team-teaching a seminar at Nanterre with Jacques Donzelot,
who gives a fine account of their collaboration - and the differences between
them - in 'Patasociologie a l'universite de Nanterre', L'Herne: Jean BaudriUard
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

near-heroic - inertia and non-socialization of the symbolically

astute masses ('They know there is no liberation and that a
system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic .. .'18).
With De La seduction of 1979 a further key term takes its place
among the battery of concepts that structure Baudrillard's
symbolic order: 'With the decline of psychoanalysis and
sexuality as strong structures,' he writes, 'one may catch a
glimpse of another, parallel universe ... , a universe that can
no longer be interpreted in terms of psychic or psychological
relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but
must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the
strategy of appearances - that is, in the terms of seduction. '19
And with this comes a recognition of what Baudrillard calls
'the supremacy of the o~iect', a recognition that it is not the
subject and its desire, but the object and its seduction that
orders the world. 20

18. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Translated by Paul Foss, John Johnston and
Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 46.
19. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan
Education, 1990), p. 7. My emphasis. Needless to say, this is a thoroughly post-
structuralist position. The passage continues: 'A universe that can no longer
be interpreted in terms of structures and diacritical oppositions, hut implies
a seductive reversibility.' Similarly, in La fin du social, Baudrillard writes: 'The
challenge [I.e defi] is not a dialectic, nor a confrontation between respective poles,
or terms, in a full structure [une structure pleine]. It is a process of extermination
of the structural position of each term, of the subject position of each of the
antagonists, and in particular of the one who issues the challenge.' In the Shadow
of the Silent Majorities, p. 69 (translation modified).
20. Les strategjesfatales (Paris: Grasset, 1983), p. 172. This is a radical, unprecedented
shift, engendering what one commentator has called a 'post-metaphysical tension'
in Baudrillard's writings 'De subjectobject relatie wordt dus niet zozeer opgelost,
als wel omgekeerd, waardoor een postrnetafysische spanning wordt gecreeerd ... '
Henk Oosterling. 'Filosofie als schijnbeweging. Metafoor, metamorfose en ironie
in het latere Werk van Jean Baudrillard', Lieren Boog, 7,1, (\990) p. 37.

6
 OR THE LUCIDI1Y PACT

As seduction moves to the fore (or at least La seduction,

which is not quite semantically equivalent to its English cog-
nate), so, in the spiralling movement of Baudrillard's thought,
the concept of production comes into focus once again and
mutates subtly into its underlying, etymological sense of lead-
ing forward (pro-ducere), of bringing into the open, exposing
and over-exposing. Since what is over-exposed is, of course,
obscene, the 'poetics' of the symbolic order can be seen now
virtually to volunteer the opposition between seduction and
scene, on the one hand, production and the obscene, on the
other. This spiralling play between concepts is a characteristic
and durable feature of Baudrillard's ecriture: as, in his later
work, he increasingly 'withdraws' himself as active subject and
goes over, as he puts it, to the side of the object, this sense of
a poetic (and often ironic) dynamic within language itself
underwrites the authenticity of the symbolic order and its
various 'forms', which can thereby be seen also to preserve
a secret, to guard a mystery.21 And this repeats at another
level the idea that the 'symbolic', the order of challenge,
seduction and 'play', is not only what is repressed in modern
western cultures, but also what is most resistant within them
and is, in a sense, a hidden key to their functioning. 22 What

21. One aspect of which is that canonic sociological explanations entirely miss the
point: 'Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically,
magically, irrationally, etc.' In the Shadow of the Sil£nt Majmities, p. 68 (translation
modified). Pietro Bellasi pointed long ago to the 'ingrained poetic quality'
of Baudrillard's theoretical writings: 'se non e poesia, c'e la grana profonda e
segreta della poesia'. 'Introduzione' in Jean Baudrillard, Dimenticare Foucault
(Bologna: Cappelli editore, 1977), p. 33.
22. There is also something resistant, reversible and almost initiatory in Baudrillard's
terminology itself: 'symbolic exchange' describes an order in which there is no
exchange; 'l£s strategies fatales' are 'not really strategies' and the so-called 'perfect
crime' is in actual fact a crime of perfection.

7
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

we also see here, too, is a characteristic recourse to a third

term that stands outside the apparently given dichotomy of
production/ destruction: 'seduction' is, as it were, the option
from left field (Baudrillard also says it is the 'feminine' one,
but that is another matter), the term that comes from outside
the structure - from 'elsewhere'
From this period onward, Baudrillard's understanding
of the pro-duction of the world becomes increasingly radical.
There is a sense not just that all hope of an alternative social
project has 'imploded', not merely that 'all potential modes of
expression' have been absorbed into 'that of advertising' ,23 but
that, with the merciless advance of simulation, a reality is being
produced that is extreme in itself, extreme in the absence of
critical distance it grants us, in the all-enveloping nature of
its short-circuited, real-time, asphyxiating immediacy. At the
same time, where once it was capital that caused all that was
solid to melt into air, now a process of the 'destructuration
of every referential, of every human objective' - the process
Baudrillard calls the 'deterrence of every principle'24 - has
turned around against power, capitalist or other, and reduced
every institutional reality to simulation (and hyperreality:
things do not disappear by their determinate negation, but by
being driven on to this 'hyper' level). This is the world of the
'beyond', of the 'after': The Transparency of Evil (1993) opens
with a piece entitled 'Mter the Orgy', the orgy in question
being 'the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the
moment of liberation in every sphere'. 25 In conversation

23. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Shela Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 87 (translation modified).
24. Ibid., p. 22.
25. The Transparency of Evil Translated by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993),
p.3.

8
 OR THE LUCIDI1Y PACT

with the Russian artist Boris Groys in 1995, Baudrillard says:

'What we have to deal with now is the fact that our entire
culture has, through simulation, the media etc., gone over
into something else, into a space beyond the end.' And he
adds, 'Things have no origin any longer and no end, they
cannot develop logically or dialectically any more, but only
chaotically or randomly. They are becoming 'extreme' in the
literal sense - ex terminis. they are beyond the limits. '26 A radical
implosion has taken place and we have survived 'beyond the
end', beyond a situation that could be grasped by our earlier
categories of rational or dialectical thought. The course of the
world is now dominated by a grandiose programme of total
production which itself supplants the world, realizes it in the
sense of turning it wholly into known, rationally structured
reality, seeks to produce a total simulation, a virtual reality that
aspires to obliterate entirely Baudrillard's realm of symbolic
exchange. 27
As the joint assault on the symbolic order by l'information
and l'informatique escalates and mere 'simulation' (the state in

26. From the website of the Zentrum fUr Kunst und Medientechnologie on the
occasion of the presentation of the Siemens Media Prize of 1995 (http://onl.zkm.
de/zltm/stories/storyReader$1089j. Note the 'ex terminis' here, which lays the ground
for a linkage of this excess with the exterminatory mode, just as Baudrillard's
play on croissance and excroissance (growth and excrescence/outgrowth) generates
a sense of the cancerous.
27. This goes far beyond Debord's Society of the Spectacle. 'Virtuality is different
from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and
demystification. We are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance,
and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas
we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless
before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are, in
fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with
which the horrors of alienation were very small beer.' The Perfect Crime. Translated
by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), p. 27.

9
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

which reality is supplanted by its models) yields to hyper-reality

or integral reality (where events are definitively 'deterred'),28
the anthropological term 'symbolic exchange' gives way to
the ostensibly more accurate one of 'impossible exchange'
(first used by Baudrillard in connection with the nuclear
scenario of the 1970s) and to a number of variants on the
notion of 'fate' .29 The range of forms comprehended in the
'symbolic' (challenge, seduction, play, sacrifice, counter-gift)
finds objective embodiment in a cluster of processes variously
described as strategies fatales, irreconciliation, objective irony,
and later non-unification, the principle of evil or simply
eviPo
Baudrillard sees the present work, The Intelligence of Evil
(French title: Le Pacte de lucidite ou l'intelligence du Mal) as
the closing text in a cycle of 'theory-fictions' that includes

28. Or to what Baudrillard sometimes simply calls reality (though this is the most
paradoxical - as well as the most paroxystic - term, because it is a 'reality' with
all reality 'driven out' of it (ibid., p. 4). It must be emphasized, if only because
critics who should know better come to grief over this question, that the 'obvious'
opposition between 'the real' and 'the virtual' was never at all pertinent for
Baudrillard, who is never, as a theorist, tempted into realism ('Mais moi, je ne
crois pas au reel.' Mot.! de Passe, cassette 1: de l'object au virtuel, Paris: Video
editions Montpamasse, 2000). Mter all, reality is itself a convention, as he says in
the same video, of 'framing'. And in the latest volume in the Cool Memmies series,
he writes: 'Never believed in reality: I respect it too much to believe in it.' Cool
Memories V. 2000-2004 (Paris: Galilee, 2005), p. 9.
29. 'Actually in traditional societies exchange is absent. Symbolic exchange is the
opposite of exchange. There is an order of exchange and an order of fate.'
Forget Foucault & Forget BaudriUard, an interview with Sylvere Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext( e), 1987), p. 84.
30. Glossing 'la strategie fatale', Baudrillard tells Sylvere Lotringer, 'Whether you call
it the revenge of the object, or the Evil Genius of matter, it is not representable.
But it is a power all the same. In fact, I would go along with calling it the principle
of E\~l, of irreconciliation, the way the Good is the principle of reconciliation.
That exists, it is inextricable, it cannot be destroyed' (ibid., p. 98).

10
 OR THE LUCIDI1Y PACT

such works as Les strategies fatales (1983), America (1986),

The Transparency of Evil (1990), The Illusion of the End (1992),
The Perfect Crime (1995), Impossible Exchange (1999) and also
TeLemorphose (2001), The Spirit of Terrorism (2001) and Power
Inferno (2002), not to mention the more fragmentary and
aphoristic Cool Memories series, the fifth volume of which has
just appeared. In these writings, Baudrillard has embarked on
analyses that have little to do with sociology as conventionally
and narrowly understood and has moved in to a space of theory
which he occupies with a small number of others whom he
considers significant today (the list contains the names Zizek,
Agamben, Sloterdijk and Virilio, but not perhaps too many
more), Simply put, these works are philosophical analyses
of present events and (in best Deleuzian fashion) creations
and elaborations of concepts with which to 'theorize' them,3l
though the relationship between theory (perhaps the only
strategie fatafil2) and events (or non-events) remains resolutely
consistent with the theory itself: there are two orders -
'metaphors must remain metaphors, concepts must remain
concepts' - and the relationship between them is a 'symbolic'
one of deft, of challenge,33
In these 'theory-fictions', the process of 'simulation' has
mutated into an even more extreme process of virtualization

31. In 1991, he told Anne Laurent, 'L'ichange symbolique et La mMt is the last book that
inspired any confidence. Everything I write is deemed brilliant, intelligent,
but not serious. There has never been any real discussion about it. I don't claim
to be tremendously serious, but there are nevertheless some philosophically
serious things in my work!' 'This Beer isn't a Beer: Interview with Annie Laurent'
in Mike Gane (ed.), Baudrillard Live (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
p.189.
32. Us stratigiRs fatales, p. 201.
33. 'L' extase du socialisme', A l'ombre des majontis silencieuses (Paris: Denoel/Gonthier,
1982), pp. 103-4.

11
 THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL

(and indeterminacy 34), for which Baudrillard advances

- at first playfully, but then with increasing force - the
hypothesis that, because we are unable to bear the world of
symbolic exchange (which is now transmuted into the more
philosophical terminology of 'illusion'), our collective project
of creating a virtual reality (in all its various forms, including
such technical ventures as cloning) is to be understood as a
suicidal project of termination of the human species. 35 This
connects, of course, with Nietzsche's contention that humanity
can only duplicate or destroy itself. Baudrillard now explicitly
points up the connection also with Nietzsche's concept of the
'vital illusion' In an interview dating from 1995, he says:

The world of symbolic exchange was the world of illusion in

the sense of the vital illusion in Nietzsche. These [primitive]
societies or our earlier societies still knew how to handle this
illusion. For us this radical illusion is difficult to bear. We
replace the radical world of illusion with the relative value of
simulation. For me the world of simulation isn't a world of
alienation any longer. What is involved here is something more
akin to what is perhaps a 'fateful' strategy of escaping from
the world of appearance and phenomena into the world of
simulation, into an artificial world that is, potentially, virtually
perfect. Simulation today assumes the form of virtuality,
through which we are attempting to invent a perfect, self·
identical world.

34. 'Reading Baudrillard's essays since his book Seduction reveals a sustained but not
entirely consistent attempt to think through the shift into indeterminacy' (Gane,
Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty, p. 96).
35. There is a 'softer' version of this thought, in which the whole of human life is
presented as having become experimental, 'a limitless experimentation on
human beings themselves.' See Telbnorphose (Paris: SeIlS & Tonka, 2001), p. 9.

12
 OR THE LUCIDI1Y PACT

This is, of course, what Baudrillard calls the perfect crime, the
'crime, which attempts to efface its own traces' .36 Existentially,
it drops us into a world of limitless banality; morally, we
have fallen into a state of indifference where we are not, in
Nietzschean style, 'beyond good and evil', but where good
and evil are beyond us. We are not au-dela, but en-de~a, not
jenseits, but diesseits. 37
The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is a book which
brings political issues - or at least 'supra-political' ones, as
Baudrillard puts it38 - back to the fore. Written 'within the
shadow cone of the events of 11 September', one of its central
concerns is global power and the forms of resistance to it:
those forms which surge up in abreaction to the excessive,
prophylactic order of good, including such recognizably
Baudrillardian 'objective ironies' as the globe's own 'negative
reaction' to 'globalization' (below, page 23). We are back
here, in dramatic form, with the system's reaction to its own
perfection, with a kind of violent transparence du mal - a
transparence, a 'showing-through' of evil. That phrase presents

36. Jean Baudrillard in Gesprach mit Florian ROtzer', ZKM website: hUp://on1.zkm.
de/zkm/ stories/storyReader$l 072. In a move that further reinforces the Nietzschean
underpinnings of his position, Baudrillard here dovetails his own history
of succeeding conceptions of reality into the famous passage in Nietzsche's
('.otzendiimmerungon 'How the "Real World" at last Became a Myth' (see below,
page 25).
37. "'Beyond Good and Evil" recalls Nietzsche and gives the impression of
transcending these terms in the direction of a "higher" stage. But good and
evil have already been done away with here. The global free market has no
time for them. And we stand on this side [diesseits] of good and evil. Instead of
transcendence - implosion and catastrophe.' Baudrillard interviewed by Ulrich
Muller-Scholl in 'Demokratie, Menschenrechte, Markt, Liberalismus - das geht
mich nichts mehr an', Frankfurter Rundschau, 28 November 2002.
38. Speaking on Tout arrive, France Culture, 11 May 2004.

13
 THE INTELUGENCE OF EVIL

a characteristic form of Baudrillardian (poetic) reversibility

(and compaction). Transparency, as positive value in Enlight-
enment discourse and one of the great buzzwords of modern
European politics, is (not without a little linguistic sleight of
hand perhaps) reversed into a 'transparence of evil', a state of
affairs in which, despite all fine words and good intentions,
evil repeatedly transparait. i.e. shows through. L'intelligence du
mal is a similarly polysemic, reversible title: not only does it
imply an insight into 'evil' on the part of subjects, but it can
signify also the intelligence of the object 'evil', the world's
own greater 'understanding' of its mode of operation than is
possessed by its observers. And beneath it again lies a sense
of intelligence avec le mal in the sense in which one speaks in
English of intelligence with the enemy. 39
Speaking in 2002, Baudrillard observed that 'evil has not
ceased to exist. On the contrary, it has grown, and sooner or
later it explodes. Not evil as seen from a moral point of view,
but something in reality itself which radically contradicts the
ope rationalization of the world, globalization, etc.'4O But what
exactly does Baudrillard mean by evil? First, it must be said
that it is to be understood not theologically as substance, but
metaphysically as form. It is, as Baudrillard says elsewhere,
the 'non-unification of things - good being defined as the
unification of things in a totalized world' - and, as such, it

39. In Cool Memories V. Baudrillard lists a string of writers and filmmakers - Nietzsche,
Ccline, Kazan, Riefenstahl, Heidegger and Bellow who are condemned for
intelligence avec wma~ for rooting their thinking in a form which is other than that
of 'universal reason' and pursuing an intellectual course that has nothing to do
with 'critical' intelligence, morality or political reason (pp. 132-3).
40. Miiller-Scholl, 'Demokratie, Menschenrechte, Markt, Liberalismus'.

14
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