Baudrillard’s phrase “the transparency of evil” (from La Transparence du Mal) names a paradox:
evil no longer appears as transgression, negation, or conflict — it becomes fully visible, normalized, operational, and therefore strangely invisible as evil.
It is “transparent” not because it has disappeared, but because it circulates openly inside systems that present themselves as good, neutral, rational, humane, or progressive.
Let me unpack the core layers.
1. Evil no longer opposes the good — it merges with it
Classically, evil had a dramatic structure:
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law vs transgression
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good vs evil
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norm vs deviation
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order vs chaos
Conflict made evil legible. There was friction, resistance, scandal.
Baudrillard argues that late-modern systems (liberal democracy, technocracy, media, humanitarianism, optimization culture) increasingly aim to:
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eliminate negativity
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eliminate ambiguity
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eliminate antagonism
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eliminate risk
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eliminate opacity
Everything must be visible, managed, audited, optimized, moralized, therapeutic.
But when a system tries to produce total positivity and total transparency, it loses the ability to recognize its own violence. Power no longer looks like power. Domination no longer looks like domination. Harm no longer looks like harm.
Evil doesn’t disappear — it becomes immanent to the system itself.
Not spectacular. Not exceptional. Ordinary. Procedural. Well-intentioned.
2. Transparency means: nothing is hidden, but nothing is grasped
Transparency usually sounds ethical: openness, accountability, visibility, clarity.
Baudrillard reverses this. Total transparency means:
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everything is exposed,
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everything circulates,
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everything is visible,
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everything is communicable,
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everything is rendered equivalent.
But visibility without depth produces flattening rather than understanding. When everything is immediately present, nothing has symbolic weight, resistance, or alterity.
So evil becomes:
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statistically measurable
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administratively managed
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morally narrated
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endlessly represented
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never structurally confronted
Think of how suffering becomes content, how injustice becomes data, how catastrophe becomes media flow. The system metabolizes its own damage as information.
This aligns strongly with your concern about how witnessing becomes complicity: visibility does not interrupt the machine; it often feeds it.
3. Evil becomes systemic rather than intentional
Baudrillard is not talking primarily about sadism, cruelty, or individual malice.
He means something closer to:
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systemic neutralization of meaning
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erasure of symbolic limits
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liquidation of difference
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saturation of signs
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total operational control
The “evil” is that the world becomes too coherent, too managed, too functional, too smooth — leaving no space for otherness, contradiction, or genuine transformation.
It’s a kind of ontological violence rather than moral crime.
The system does not need villains. It only needs processes that run correctly.
This is why evil becomes transparent: no one is responsible in a way that can be symbolically confronted. Everything is justified by function, efficiency, safety, improvement, care, or inevitability.
4. Simulation replaces transgression
In Baudrillard’s universe:
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Transgression once disrupted the order.
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Now transgression is simulated, packaged, aestheticized, commodified.
Even rebellion, critique, outrage, trauma, and resistance become consumable signs inside the system. Nothing truly breaks circulation.
So evil no longer shocks the symbolic order — because there is no symbolic order left to violate. Everything is already absorbed.
This resonates with your earlier concern about moral alibi in art and spectatorship: identification with “the good” becomes a way of avoiding structural implication.
5. Why he calls this “evil” at all
Baudrillard is deliberately provocative. He does not mean evil in a theological or juridical sense. He means something like:
the loss of alterity, negativity, limit, opacity, and symbolic depth — the collapse of a world capable of genuine difference and resistance.
A perfectly transparent world is, for him, a dead world masquerading as hyper-alive.
It is evil because it abolishes the conditions under which meaning, freedom, responsibility, and even tragedy could exist.
- Evil is transparent because it no longer hides behind ideology — it hides inside visibility itself.
Not repression, but saturation.
Not secrecy, but exposure.
Not prohibition, but endless permission.
7. One sharp formulation (paraphrased)
Baudrillard suggests that modern systems no longer produce evil as deviation — they produce it as excess of the good, excess of rationality, excess of management, excess of communication, excess of control.
The nightmare is not tyranny.
The nightmare is a world that functions perfectly.
If you’d like, we could also place this next to:
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Agamben’s administration of life and abandonment,
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your concern about unmediated systems and elimination,
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Keller’s critique of sovereignty and domination, or
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Butler’s misrecognition as structural rather than correctable.
They each diagnose different faces of the same disappearance of symbolic resistance and ethical traction.
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