| Sumario: | This article revisits a well-known discussion about morality in J.G. Ballard's Crash that surrounded the appearance of Jean Baudrillard's essay of the same name in a special section of SFS (Nov. 1991). In this debate, N. Katherine Hayles and Vivian Sobchack strongly oppose Baudrillard's claim that there "is no affectivity behind [the world that Crash depicts]: no psychology, no ambivalence or desire, no libido or death drive" (314) to Ballard's novel, and, accordingly, no moral point or warning either. In contrast, Hayles and Sobchack argue that the novel warns us about the transformative influence of contemporary technology. I undertake a thorough analysis of Crash's main poetic features: the prevalence of showing over telling, the recurrence of accounts over descriptions, the thoroughly technical vocabulary, allusions to transcendence, and the interpretive anxiety created by a first-person narrator that bears the author's name. I map the contrast between Ballard's disinterested style of writing and the apparent affective charge of his characters while showing how this contrast generates a deep ambivalence that enables both moral and morally indifferent interpretations of the novel. The reader is never told what to think about the obscene events that occur and this provokes her to make difficult moral decisions about the novel.
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