หน้าหลัก The Perfect Crime

The Perfect Crime

The most cogent expression of his mature thought, Baudrillard here turns detective in order to investigate the murder of reality.In this book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, Jean Baudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet be solved: the 'murder' of reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the social and technological processes by which reality has quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media 'real time.'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. However, whether stripping away the layers of hypocrisy which surround our smug perceptions of the former Yugoslavia, or deploring the New European Order characterized by 'white fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination and control', the moraliste is also the deft and disturbing social theorist. 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.
ปี: 1996
ภาษา: english
จำนวนหน้า: 160 / 84
ISBN 10: 1859849199
ISBN 13: 9781859840443
File: PDF, 597 KB
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-- [NA] --

Front Matter
[Title Page and Credits]
The Perfect Crime
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Chris Turner
London - New York
-- [NA] -Published with the financial assistance
of the French Ministry of Culture
First published by Verso 1996
This edition © Verso 1996
Translation © Chris Turner 1996
First published as Le crime parfait
© Éditions Galilée 1995
All rights reserved
The right of Chris Turner to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1V 3HR
USA: 180 Vanck Street, New York NY 10014-4606
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1-85984-919-9
ISBN 1-85984-044-2 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baudrillard, Jean.
[Crime parfait. English] The perfect crime / Jean Baudrillard; translated by Chris Turner
p. cm.
ISBN 1-85984-919-9. -- ISBN 1-85984-044-2 (pbk).
1. Reality. 2. Illusion (Philosophy) 3. Subject (Philosophy) 4. Object (Philosophy) 5. Identity. 6. Ontology. 7. Perfection. I. Title.
B2430.B33973C7315 1996
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Bath Press
-- [NA] -`So, my friend, after the example of the Phoenicians, you charted your course by the stars?'
`No,' said Menippus, `it was among the stars themselves I journeyed.'
-- [NA] --- [NA] --

The Perfect Crime
The Spectre of the Will

-- 16 --

The Radical Illusion
Trompe-l'oeil Genesis
The Automatic Writing of the World 25
The Horizon of Disappearance
The Countdown
The Material Illusion
The Secret Vestiges of Perfection

The Height of Reality
The Irony of Technology
Machinic Snobbery
Objects in This Mirror
The Babel Syndrome
Radical Thought
-- [NA] -The Other Side of the Crime
The World Without Women
The Surgical Removal of Otherness
The `Laying-Off' of Desire
The New Victim Order
Indifference and Hatred
The Revenge of the Mirror People
Translator's Notes


-- [NA] --

Translator's Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marie-Dominique Maison, Leslie Hill, Glynis Powell, Mike Gane, Yasmina Lallemand and the author for their help, both direct and
indirect, with parts of this translation. As ever, of course, I take sole responsibility for its shortcomings. All the notes are my own.
-- [NA] -This is the story of a crime -- of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion -- the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real
does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.
If the crime were perfect, this book would have to be perfect too, since it claims to be the reconstruction of the crime.
Alas, the crime is never perfect. Moreover, in this grim record of the disappearance of the real, it has not been possible to pin down either the motives or
the perpetrators, and the corpse of the real itself has never been found.
And the idea which underlies the book has never been pinned down either. That idea was the murder weapon.
Though the crime is never perfect, perfection, true to its name, is always criminal. In the perfect crime it is the perfection itself which is the crime, just as,
in the transparence of evil, 1 it is the transparence itself that is the evil.
-- [NA] -But perfection is always punished: the punishment for perfection is reproduction.
Are there extenuating circumstances to this crime? Certainly not, since these always have to be sought among the motives or the perpetrators. But the

crime has no motivation and no perpetrator, and therefore remains perfectly inexplicable. This is its true perfection. Though admittedly, from the point of
view of the concept, this is more of an aggravating circumstance.
Though the consequences of the crime are never-ending, there is neither murderer nor victim. If there were either, the secret of the crime would be
unmasked some day, and the inquiry concluded. The secret, in the end, is that the two are merged: `In the last analysis, the victim and the persecutor are
one. We can only grasp the unity of the human race if we can grasp, in all its horror, the truth of this ultimate equivalence' (Eric Gans).
In the last analysis, object and subject are one. We can only grasp the essence of the world if we can grasp, in all its irony, the truth of this radical

-- nts -Note: 1. As ever in my translation of this term, I have retained `transparence' to mark a distinction from `transparency' in its everyday sense. This solution
was arrived at after discussion with the author.

-- 1 --

The Perfect Crime
Were it not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, that is, a crime without a criminal, without a victim and without a motive. And the truth
would forever have withdrawn from it and its secret would never be revealed, for want of any clues [traces] being left behind.
But the fact is that the crime is never perfect, for the world betrays itself by appearances, which are the clues to its non-existence, the traces of the
continuity of the nothing. For the nothing itself -- the continuity of the nothing -- leaves traces. And that is the way the world betrays its secret. That is the
way it allows itself to be sensed, while at the same time hiding away behind appearances.
The artist, too, is always close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But he turns away from it, and his work is the trace of that criminal
imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all his might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces. 1
The perfection of the crime lies in the fact that it has always-already been accomplished -- perfectum. A misappropriation of the world as it is, before it
even shows itself. It will never, therefore, be discovered. There will be no Last Judgement to
-- 2 -punish or pardon it. There will be no end, because things have always-already happened. Neither resolution nor absolution, but inevitable unfolding of the
consequences. Precession of the original crime -- which we might perhaps be said to find in derisory form in the current precession of simulacra. After
that, our destiny is the accomplishment of this crime, its inexorable unfolding, the continuity of the evil, the continuation of the nothing. We shall never
experience the primal scene, but at every moment we experience its prolongation and its expiation. There is no end to this and the consequences are
Just as we cannot plumb the first few seconds of the Big Bang, so we cannot locate those few seconds in which the original crime took place either. It is a
fossilized crime, then, like the `fossilized' background noise scattered about the universe. And it is the energy of that crime, like that of the initial
explosion, which will spread through the world until, perhaps, it exhausts itself.
This is the mythic vision of the original crime, the vision of the alter-ation 2 of the world in the play of seduction and appearances, and of its definitive
This is the form the mystery takes.
The great philosophical question used to be `Why is there something rather than nothing?' Today, the real question is: `Why is there nothing rather than
appearance and is, therefore, never identical with itself, is the material illusion of the world. And, deep down, this remains the great riddle, the enigma
which fills us with dread and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of truth.
On pain of dread, we have to decipher the world and therefore wipe out the initial illusoriness of the world. We can bear neither the void, nor the secret,
nor pure appearance. And why should we decipher it instead of letting its illusion shine out

-- 3 -as such, in all its glory? Well, the fact that we cannot bear its enigmatic character is also an enigma, also part of the enigma. It is part of the world that we
cannot bear either the illusion of the world or pure appearance. We would be no better at coping with radical truth and transparency, if these existed.
Truth wants to give herself naked. She is desperately seeking nudity, like Madonna in the film which brought her fame. That hopeless striptease is the
very striptease of reality, which `disrobes' in the literal sense, 3 offering up to the eyes of gullible voyeurs the appearance of nudity. But the fact is that this
nudity wraps it in a second skin, which no longer has even the erotic charm of the dress. There is no longer any need even of bachelors to strip her bare,
since she has herself given up trompe-l'oeil for striptease.
And, indeed, the main objection to reality is its propensity to submit unconditionally to every hypothesis you can make about it. With this its most abject
conformism, it discourages the liveliest minds. You can subject it -- and its principle (what do they get up to together, by the way, apart from dully
copulating and begetting reams of obviousness?) -- to the most cruel torments, the most obscene provocations, the most paradoxical insinuations. It
submits to everything with unrelenting servility. Reality is a bitch. And that is hardly surprising, since it is the product of stupidity's fornication with the
spirit of calculation -- the dregs of the sacred illusion offered up to the jackals of science.
To recover the trace of the nothing, of the incompleteness, the imperfection of the crime, we have, then, to take something away from the reality of the
world. To recover the constellation of the mystery [secret], 4 we have to take something away from the accumulation of reality and language. We have to
take words from language one by one, take things from reality one by one, wrest the same away from the same. Behind every fragment of reality,
something has to have disappeared in
-- 4 -order to ensure the continuity of the nothing -- without, however, yielding to the temptation of annihilation, for disappearance has to remain a living
disappearance, and the trace of the crime a living trace.
What we have forgotten in modernity, by dint of constantly accumulating, adding, going for more, is that force comes from subtraction, power from
disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images.
swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves, entirely present to themselves in a ruthless transcription, full in the light and in
real time. Instead of being absent from themselves in illusion, they are forced to register on thousands of screens, off whose horizons not only the real has
disappeared, but the image too. The reality has been driven out of reality. Only technology perhaps still binds together the scattered fragments of the real.
But what has become of the constellation of meaning in all this?
The only suspense which remains is that of knowing how far the world can derealize itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely, how far
clutches of total simulation).
Yet it is not certain that the constellation of the mystery is wiped out by the transparency of the virtual universe, nor that the power of illusion is swept
away by the technical operation of the world. Behind all technologies one can sense a kind of absolute affectation and double game, their very exorbitance
turning them into a
-- 5 --

game by which the world shows through, from behind the illusion of its being transformed. Is technology the lethal alternative to the illusion of the world,
or is it merely a gigantic avatar of the same basic illusion, its subtle final twist, the last hypostasis?
rationality, culminating in technical virtuality, might be the last of the ruses of unreason, of that will to illusion of which, as Nietzsche says, the will to
truth is merely a derivative and an avatar.
of the world itself. The iconolaters of Byzantium were subtle folk, who claimed to represent God to his greater glory but who, simulating God in images,
thereby dissimulated the problem of his existence. Behind each of these images, in fact, God had disappeared. He was not dead; he had disappeared. That
is to say, the problem no longer even arose. It was resolved by simulation. This is what we do with the problem of the truth or reality of this world: we
But is it not the strategy of God himself to use images in order to disappear, himself obeying the urge to leave no trace?
Because nothing wants exactly to be looked at any longer, but merely to be visually absorbed and circulate without leaving a trace -- thus outlining, as it
were, the
-- 6 -simplified aesthetic form of impossible exchange -- it is difficult today to recover a grasp on appearances. With the result that the discourse which would
account for them would be a discourse in which there was nothing to say -- the equivalent of a world where there is nothing to see. The equivalent of a
pure object, of an object which is not an object. The harmonious equivalence of nothing to nothing, of Evil to Evil. But the object which is not an object
continues to obsess you by its empty, immaterial presence. The whole problem is: on the outer fringes of the nothing, to materialize that nothing; on the
outer fringes of the void, to trace out the mark of the void; on the outer fringes of indifference, to play by the mysterious rules of indifference.
There is no point identifying the world. Things have to be grasped in their sleep, or in any other circumstance where they are absent from themselves. As
in the House of the Sleeping Beauties, 5 where the old men spend the night beside the women and, though mad with desire, do not touch them, and slip
away before they wake. They too are lying next to an object which is not an object, the total indifference of which heightens the erotic charge. But the
most enigmatic thing is that it is not possible to know whether the women are really asleep or whether they are not maliciously taking pleasure, from the
depths of their sleep, in their seductiveness and their own suspended desire.
incapable of living. Intelligence is precisely this sensing of the universal illusion, even in amorous passion -- though without the natural course of that
passion being impaired. There is something stronger than passion: illusion. There is something stronger than sex or happiness: the passion for illusion.
There is no point identifying the world. We cannot even identify our own faces,

becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires? But it is the same with any object which reaches us only
in a definitively alter-ed state, even when it does so on the screen of science, in the mirrors of information or on the screens of our brains. Thus, all things
offer themselves up without a hope of being anything other than illusions of themselves. And it is right that this should be so.
things. Fortunately, nothing is instantaneous, simultaneous or contemporary. Fortunately, nothing is present or identical to itself. Fortunately, reality does
not take place. Fortunately, the crime is never perfect.

The Perfect Crime
-- nts -Note: 2. Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Belgian-born French poet and painter.
Note: 3. The French verb `altérer' has the sense of making something other than its (perfect?) self and thus of distorting, impairing or even falsifying it. In
parts of this chapter and in other parts of this book, the word has, therefore, been translated by an equivalent English term, such as `impair'. However,
since -- particularly in the early chapters of this work -- Baudrillard's argument depends both on (French) meaning and (shared French and English)
etymology, I have found it necessary to invent an English verbal form `alter-ed' and a related noun `alter-ation', which I must ask the reader to understand
as involving a negative alteration, a change for the worse. I have tried to use this as sparingly as possible, and wherever `altérer' seems to me to be
employed to describe a relatively `neutral' change, I have used the ordinary English `alter'.
Note: 4. There is a play here on the French verb `se dérober', which normally means `to hide or conceal itself'.
Note: 5. Baudrillard's expression `la constellation du secret' refers to a passage in Martin Heidegger's `The Question Concerning Technology', which
William Lovitt renders as `the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery' (The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, Harper Colophon
Books, Harper & Row, New York 1977, p. 33). For this reason, the French word `secret' has been treated here as equivalent to the German Geheimnis and
has, at times, been translated as `mystery' in other related contexts.
Note: 6. By Kawabata Yasunari.

-- 8 --

The Spectre of the Will
The radical illusion is that of the original crime, by which the world is alter-ed from the beginning, and is never identical to itself, never real. The world
exists only through this definitive illusion which is that of the play of appearances -- the very site of the unceasing disappearance of all meaning and all
finality. And this is not merely metaphysical: in the physical order, too, from its origin -- whatever that may be -- the world has been forever appearing
and disappearing.
An alter-ation which tends to diminish with increasing information and which will, in the end, be eliminated by absolute information: the world's
equivalence to the world -- the final illusion, that of a world which is perfect, fully realized, fully effectuated, a world which is consummated and has
attained the height of existence and reality, and also the furthermost extent of its possibilities. It is God (this we cannot hide) who stands at the end of this
process of increasing information and complexification, of verification of the world in real time. It is God who presides over this dissolution of the world
as illusion and its resurrection as simulacrum and virtual reality, at the end of a process of extenuation of all its possibilities by the real. It is God who
presides over the unconditional realization of the world and its final illusion. God is never at the origin, but always at the end. And so we can
-- 9 -say that that end is necessarily an unhappy one, and it is as well to leave it hanging. 1
The fact that the world is illusion follows from its radical imperfection. If everything had been perfect, the world would quite simply not exist and if, by
some misfortune, it were to become so again, it would quite simply not exist any more. This is the essence of crime: if it is perfect, it leaves no clue, no
trace. So what guarantees the world's existence for us is its accidental, criminal, imperfect character. And it follows from this that it can be given to us
only as illusion.
All that is projected beyond this illusion, beyond this accidental manifestness of the world, which forever distances it from its meaning and origin, is
merely a justificatory phantasy. The projecting back of a phantom causality and intelligibility, of an exceptional order which merely confirms the rule of
accidental disorder and is, doubtless, merely one episode in that disorder.
We oscillate between an illusion and a truth which are each equally unbearable. But perhaps truth is even more unbearable, and we ultimately desire the
illusion of the world, even if we take up all the arms of truth, science and metaphysics against it. Our latent truth is that of nihilism, but, as Nietzsche
writes, `truth cannot be regarded as the highest power. The will to semblance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming, to change (to objective deception) is
to be regarded here as deeper, more original, more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality, to being -- the latter is itself merely a form of the will to
[`Aber die Wahrheit gilt nicht als oberste Macht. Der Wille zum Schein, zur Illusion, zur Täuschung, zum Werden, zum Wechseln (zur objektiven
Täuschung) gilt hier als tiefer, ursprünglicher, metaphysischer als der Wille zur Wahrheit, zur Wirklichkeit, zum Sein -- letzterer ist selbst bloss eine
Form des Willens zur Illusion.']
How can we believe in the truth of what has neither principle nor end? All we can
-- 10 -add to it is this little final illusion, together with the causal illusion of a non-accidental effect -- a reparative illusion when set against the devastating

illusion of the world. But this is merely an artificial supplement. Our consciousness, by which we aspire to outdo the world, is merely a secondary excess,
the phantom extremity of a world for which this simulation of consciousness is entirely superfluous. We shall never achieve anything equivalent, by act of
will, to the accidental irruption of the world.
We cannot project more order or disorder into the world than there is. We cannot transform it more than it transforms itself. This is the weakness of our
historical radicality. All the philosophies of change, the revolutionary, nihilistic, futurist utopias, all this poetics of subversion and transgression so
characteristic of modernity, will appear naive when compared with the instability and natural reversibility of the world. Not only transgression, but even
destruction is beyond our reach. We shall never, by an act of destruction, achieve the equivalent of the world's accidental destruction.
What we can add by artificial destruction already falls within the scope of the world's own ceaseless revolution, the ironic trajectory of particles and the
chaotic turbulence of natural systems. And the final accident is no more within our power than the initial accident. Here, once again, we must not delude
ourselves. We shall add nothing to the nothingness of the world, since we are part of it. But we shall add nothing to its meaning either, since it does not
have any.
Excess is the world's excess, not ours. It is the world that is excessive, the world that is sovereign.
This protects us from the illusion of the will, which is also that of faith and desire. The metaphysical illusion of having some effect and frustrating the
continuation of the nothing.
Our will is like a phantom pregnancy or an artificially innervated prosthesis. Or the `virtual' suffering of the phantom limb that follows the amputation of
the real
-- 11 -one (all virtual reality is the product, like this, of a surgical operation on the real world). The will is of this same order. Its extrapolation into the affairs of
the world is merely the extrapolation of desire, or of the suffering of the phantom limb. Dreams, too, give us the illusion that we are in control of them, or
can delay their coming to their term. They even give us the illusion of being aware of dreaming, which is part of their mechanism. This is the clinamen of
the will interfering with the chromosomes of the dream.
As in dreams, the will must espouse this accidental declension of the world -- must inflect, not reflect (on), itself. Must be merely itself an unexpected
continuation which perpetuates the event of the world, and perhaps hastens it on its course. Must be in no way different from desire.
In Nabokov, in the gracious universe of Ada, as in the tragic universe, there are never any decisions. Everything is made up of -- happy or unhappy -accidents. There is neither misdeed nor remorse. Everything is immoral and, as a result, so sensual. Not just bodies, but the will itself becomes sensual
and accidental. The actors do not believe in their own existence, and do not take responsibility for it. They are happy just to obey the successive
promptings of their will and their desire, to respect the enigmatic incidence of these things, while observing certain rules of the game towards existence,
the first of which is not to consent to it.
Existence is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as a consolation prize, and we must not believe in it. The will is something we
must not consent to. It has been given to us as the illusion of an autonomous subject. Now, if there is anything worse than being subject to the law of
others, it is surely being subject to one's own law. The real is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as simulacrum, and the worst
thing is to believe in it for want of anything else. The only thing we should consent to is the rule. But in that case, we are speaking not of the rule of the
subject, but the rule of the way of the world [jeu du monde].
The real, for its part, is merely the natural child of disillusion. Which is itself a

-- 12 -secondary illusion. Faith in reality is, of all the imaginary forms, the basest and most trivial.
Yet determination is extending its grasp, and the field of what is now ours to decide is expanding daily. We are no longer free not to will. We have to will
even where we have no wish to.
And why stop there? We shouldn't just consult the parents on the choice of sex, but the embryos themselves. Then, at least, the absurdity of the situation
would be plain for all to see. The fact is that we are, most often, in a situation of having to decide on matters we know nothing of and have no wish to
know anything of. The power of others to have control of one's life is an abuse. But each person's right and duty to have control of him- or herself is even
more dangerous. This is how voluntary servitude has transformed itself into its opposite -- being commanded to desire, commanded to exercise freedom
and choice -- which is the consummate form of that servitude. The will is entrapped by the limitless freedom it is accorded, and consents to this out of an
illusion of self-determination.
Now, the same order reigns over wills as reigns in biology. The same random and automatic regulation applies to wills in our operational universe as
applies in the distribution of sexes at birth or in the freely expressed opinions of millions of citizens, which produces the same statistical outcome as
would be achieved by consulting monkeys.
Where, then, does this wish to substitute the human will for the random course of things come from? There remains, of course, the glory of artifice and of
frustrating the natural order. We want to will -- that is the secret -- just as we want to believe and want to be able [pouvoir], because the idea of a world
without will, belief and power [pouvoir] is unbearable to us. But most of the time we can will only what has already come to fruition. So the Student of
Prague arrives on the duelling ground and his opponent is already dead -- his double has passed that way. 2 Precession of the
-- 13 -double, of the involuntary operator of desire. Precession of the event, of the effect over the cause -- metalepsis of the will.
The anteriority of the will is always stressed, as is the cause's preceding of the effect. But most often, the will merges with the event as its retrospective
mise en scène, in the same way as a dream sequence gives expression to the physical sensation of the sleeping body. In any case, whatever one wills,
subsequent events will still be of the order of the fateful -- that is, of what happens to you, for good or ill, inadvertently -- though not without some secret
connection between them.
Why, then, should we will? Why should we desire? We cannot do otherwise. We have to contribute by our desires or our wills to the coming to term of a
world in which they have no part. This is our involuntary contribution to our own destinies. According to Nietzsche, this drive is so great in man that for
fear of desiring nothing, he will prefer the desire for the nothing, thus making himself, by the deployment of a will without object, the surest agent of that
continuity of the nothing which is the continuation of the original crime.
`Why is there nothing rather than something?' There is, ultimately, no answer to this, since the nothing originates in myth, in the original crime, whereas
the something originates in what, by convention, we call reality. Now, the real is never sure. The question then becomes, not `Where does illusion come
from?', but `Where does the real come from?' How is it that there even is a reality effect? That is the true enigma. If the world was real, how is it that it
did not become rational long ago? If it is merely illusion, how can a discourse of reality and the rational even arise? But that is the question. Is there
anything but a discourse of the real and the rational? Perhaps there never has been any kind of progress towards more science, consciousness and
objectivity, and all this has merely been talk on the part of intellectuals and ideologues who, for three centuries, have derived considerable advantage from
-- 14 --

The same problem arises in the physical sciences. Bruno Jarrosson writes:
The first reaction of the fathers of quantum physics at the aberrations coming out of their equations (collapse of the universe of reference:
time, space, the principle of identity and of the excluded middle, inseparability, non-locality of particles) was to regard the microscopic
world as radically strange and mysterious. Such an interpretation is not, however, the most logical. For the microscopic world is to be
accepted as it is. If we cannot derive a conception of the macroscopic world from it, then the mystery lies in the macroscopic world. From
that point, we have to think that the strangest thing is not the strangeness of the microscopic world, but the non-strangeness of the
macroscopic. Why are the concepts of identity, excluded middle, time and space operative in the macroscopic world? That is what we have
to explain. (Du micro au macro -- le mystère des évidences)
Since the universe of reference has become unintelligible, reason, being part of that universe, cannot but pose the question of its own existence: how can
measurable time exist, how can elements and bodies exist separately? Given the uncertainty principle, how can there be an object and a subject of
Similarly, the real, having become unintelligible, poses an insoluble question for reason, which is part of it: How is it that the concepts of reality,
objectivity, truth, causality and identity can function? Why does something seem to exist rather than nothing?
But in fact there is nothing.
Why is there will rather than no will?
But there is no will. There is no real. There isn't something. There is nothing. Or, in other words, the perpetual illusion of an ungraspable object and the
subject who believes he grasps it. The illusion of a Thing and a rational causality which is, admittedly, comforting to our intellects, but unimaginable in
any other universe,
-- 15 -including that of particle physics. As Updike says, God is solely responsible for what we can see and hear, but in no way for anything whatever at the
microscopic level.
So no purpose is served by attempting to reconcile the order of the will with that of the world to the philosophical advantage of the latter. There is the
continuity of the world, as it has meaning for us, and the continuity of the world as, in secret, it is nothing and means nothing. This latter does not, strictly
speaking, exist. It cannot be verified, but can only betray itself, only `show through' [transparaître] like evil, squint out through appearances. There is no
dialectic between the two orders. Each is alien to the other.

The Spectre of the Will
-- nts -Note: 7. The French expression here, `rester sur sa fin', is a play on the expression `rester sur sa faim', which literally means to remain hungry, but is used
metaphorically in the sense of being left `up in the air'.
Note: 8. There are, to my knowledge, three films which bear this title, the first dating from 1913. Internal evidence from other texts suggests that the
author is probably referring either to Henrik Galeen's silent version of 1926 or to the German film of 1936 made by the Chicago-born director Arthur


-- 16 --

The Radical Illusion
So the world, then, is a radical illusion. That is, at least, one hypothesis. At all events, it is an unbearable one. And to keep it at bay, we have to realize the
world, give it force of reality, make it exist and signify at all costs, take from it its secret, arbitrary, accidental character, rid it of appearances and extract
its meaning, divert it from all predestination and restore it to its end and its maximum efficacy, wrest it from its form to deliver it up to its formula. This
gigantic enterprise of disillusionment -- of, literally, putting the illusion of the world to death, to leave an absolutely real world in its stead -- is what is
properly meant by simulation.
It is not, then, the real which is the opposite of simulation -- the real is merely a particular case of that simulation -- but illusion. And there is no crisis of
The proliferation of reality, its spreading like an animal species whose natural predators have been eliminated, is our true catastrophe. This is the
inevitable fate of an objective world. We have to restore the potency and the radical meaning of illusion, which is most often reduced to the level of a
chimaera diverting us from what is true: what things deck themselves out in to hide what they are. When, in fact, the illusion of
-- 17 -the world is the way things have of presenting themselves for what they are when they are not actually there at all. In appearance, things are what they
give themselves out to be. They appear and disappear without letting anything at all show through. They unfurl without concern for their being, or even
for their existence. They signal to us, but are not susceptible of decipherment. On the other hand, in simulation, in this giant dispositif of meaning,
calculation and efficiency that encompasses all our technical devices, including current virtual reality, the illusion of the sign is lost, and only its operation
remains. The happy non-distinction between true and false, between real and unreal, gives way to the simulacrum, which consecrates the unhappy nondistinction between true and false, between the real and its signs, the unhappy, necessarily unhappy, destiny of meaning in our culture.
We continue to manufacture meaning, even though we know there is none. It remains to be seen, in fact, whether the illusion of meaning is a vital illusion
or one that is destructive of the world and the subject itself. However this may be, faced with this strategy on the part of the subject, the world develops a
much more subtle and paradoxical one, which is to give itself out for what it is, when it is actually not there. Over against the subject, that indomitable
producer of meaning, stands the world, that inexhaustible producer of illusion, including, no doubt -- with the involuntary complicity of the subject -- the
illusion of meaning.
There will be no end to this frenzied race around the Möbius strip where the surface of meaning perpetually feeds into the surface of illusion, unless the
illusion of meaning were to win out once and for all, which would put an end to the world.
The whole of our history bears witness to this machinery of reason, which is itself now coming apart. Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath the
excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information -the sign and reality sharing a single shroud.
-- 18 -They are trying to persuade us that technology will inevitably produce good, to give a role to the artificial environment as a second nature, to select only
automatic reflexes in line with a kind of mental genetic code. They are trying to wipe out all the supernatural reflexes of thought, of that thought which
reacts instinctively to the illusion of the world, turns appearances back on reality, uses the illusion of the world against the world itself: the Manichaean
understanding of evil, the understanding of the world as machination. It is said that the state of nature is unthinkable, because in that state thought does

not exist. But this is exactly what we are moving towards: a state of pure operational intelligence, and thus of radical disillusioning of thought.
This dream of extirpating all the magic from thought, of eliminating every principle of evil, is as absurd as the dream of eliminating all concupiscence,
even in dreams.
If the heresy of appearances is our original crime, then every rational impulse to eliminate it is the symptom of a fantastic error on the part of the will, the
symptom of an aberration of desire.
At all events, illusion is indestructible. The world as it is -- which is not at all the `real' world -- perpetually eludes the investigation of meaning, thus
causing the present catastrophe of the apparatus of production of the `real' world, so true is it that illusion cannot be combated with truth -- that is merely
to redouble the illusion -- but only by a higher illusion.
The only response to the phantasmagoria of worlds-beyond, the latest and most subtle of which is the artificial synthesis of this world, is the higher
illusion of our world.
Every revolution brings about a general involution in a kind of downward spiral. This negative spiral can be countered only by striking an opposite blow,
by upping the stakes -- outdoing insignificance with the nothing, the visible with appearance, the false with illusion, evil with greater evil.
-- 19 -The radical illusion of the world cannot be dispelled. The illusion of dispelling it is the secondary illusion of the disavowal and transformation of the
world. But perhaps, in going to its extreme, that movement gets caught up in its own game and ends up wiping out its own traces, leaving the field free for
misappropriation, imperfection, the original crime? Perhaps there is a ruse of the world, just as there is a ruse of history, and rationality and perfection in
general might merely be implementing its irrational decree? Sciences and technologies would then merely be an immense, ironic diversion on the horizon
of its disappearance.
What within truth is merely truth falls foul of illusion. What within truth exceeds truth is of the order of a higher illusion. Only what exceeds reality can
go beyond the illusion of reality.

-- 20 --

Trompe-l'oeil Genesis
Bertrand Russell's paradox in The Analysis of Mind, in which the world is supposed to have been created only a few minutes ago but peopled with a
humanity which remembers an illusory past, is well-known.
We might, in this connection, revive the hypothesis of P. H. Gosse, the nineteenth -century English naturalist, in his book Omphalos (which Stephen J.
Gould discusses in The Flamingo's Smile), that all the geological and fossil traces of the origin and evolution of species, including the human species, are
a simulation contemporaneous with the creation of the world by God five thousand years ago, as in the biblical account.
Everything which appears to reach back beyond that point, right down into the depths of time, has, he alleges, merely been got up by God in his infinite
kindness to bestow an origin and a history upon our world, and is intended to create the illusion of elapsed time. God, argues Gosse, gave men a past in
order to soften the unbearable confrontation with the world as it is, the product of an act of force on the part of a higher will. We can no longer even
imagine the brutality of the creative act, but God has perhaps taken this into account and, in compensation, provided us with a simulacrum of history, to
make man's existence bearable to
-- 21 -him. Obviously, we can ask: did God really take pity on the human race, or is this merely a gratuitous joke, to mock man once again by holding out before
him the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of his own origins, whereas this is in fact merely a mirage?
Gosse's suggestion is, at all events, extraordinary: to safeguard biblical revelation, he makes God an evil genius of simulation. Is there not a subtle impiety
in this? God might have contented himself with creating the world, without inventing this trompe-l'oeil anamorphosis. So that could only have been the
product of his malicious pleasure. This immediately makes him quite a likeable character, even if it does so to future archaeologists' cost, doomed as they
will be to live in permanent uncertainty. For Gosse argues: `as thoughts in God's mind, solidified in stone by creation ab nihilo, strata and fossils are just
as true as if they recorded the products of conventional time'. 1 If the unreal past is no less true than our objective reality, then this latter is no more true
than that unreal past. And we can say, with the Ecclesiast, `The simulacrum is not what conceals the truth, it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.' 2
Fortunately, all this is false, dictated by a blind and illogical faith. Yet if we take away the prejudice of faith, and retain only the simulation hypothesis,
Gosse's idea opens on to some surprising horizons and one quite serious possibility. It even assumes a prophetic air. For his hypothesis is indeed coming
true: the whole of our past is indeed sliding into a fossilized simulacrum, but it is man who has inherited the evil genius of artifice which was God's.
Today the virtual reconstruction of the genesis of the species is the work of human beings themselves, and it is becoming the virtual reality of our past
and our future.
Not only are our fossils itemized, inventoried, interpreted and reinterpreted according to changing scientific hypotheses and fashions, but the whole thing
has taken on the air of cinematic work (editing, framing, lighting, sequences,
-- 22 -dissolves) on geological and archaeological material whose objective reality is becoming intangible. It is the same with these relics as it is with those
particles in subatomic physics which have no other existence than the traces they leave on our screens.

The accumulation of traces and contradictory hypotheses leaves the same aftertaste of uncertainty, of relative credibility. The objectivity of these relics is
beyond doubt. The problem is their status as reality and, therefore, as evidence, their status as objects suddenly rendered incredible by the very intensity
of their itemization and the methods of analysis applied to them. These traces pass into hyperreality, as does any `material' pursued down to the tiniest
detail, all `scientific' exploration ending up exterminating its real object.
Clearly, it is no longer God overseeing all this, as in Gosse. It is our own apparatus of knowledge, by which we are currently obliterating the traces of our
existence, spiriting away the evidence for our sensible world. We have supplanted the God of Omphalos in the invention of a definitively fictitious past.
Yet there is a difference in the ways of simulation. For though the illusionist God of Gosse had completely invented the traces of the past of the species,
his creation set in train a real world and a history. Once set in place in that creation, things drift on towards their final destinations unaffected by their
illusory pasts. This special effect of the divine imagination or the Creator's irony has no impact on their present state. We, on the other hand, are no longer
part of reality and simulation. For us, the question of Adam's navel (which had no reason to exist since he was not born of woman, but which had to be
represented in pictures so that the divine arbitrariness of the original act might be erased) no longer even arises: it is the whole of the human race which
will have to be rigged out with a trompe-l'oeil navel, in so far as there is no longer any trace, with us, of any umbilical cord which might connect us to the
real world. We are born of woman still, and shall be for some time to come, but with
-- 23 -the coming of in vitro fertilization we shall shortly return to the `anomphalous' condition of Adam: future `humans' will have no navels.
Metaphorically, we are already in the `umbilical limbo'. Not only have the traces of our past become virtual, but our present itself is given over to
simulation. It is as though Gosse's God, far more cunning and devilish than Gosse himself imagined him to be, had, as part of his inscrutable, humorous
design, extended his divine simulation to the furthermost reaches of the future. Or, alternatively, this simulation of the past might not, after all, be a good
practical joke, but the remorseless consequence of the generalized simulation of our present life, the logical extension of our Virtual Reality.
Beneath all this theological allegory there lie some very burning problems. It is of some consequence whether this simulation is the work of a beneficent
God or the trap set by a malicious one. It is of some consequence whether the virtual illusion upon which we are entering is a beneficent illusion or
whether, by moving further in this direction, we are merely getting more and more caught up in the strategem, as a result of what is, on this occasion, a
deliberate choice on the part of the human race, fascinated by the idea of inventing an artificial destiny for itself. Or is it that humanity simply dreams of
exacting revenge by putting the divine Creation out of joint, debasing it by systematic simulation and turning the universe into a total artefact out of scorn
for the Last Judgement?
By conjuring away the process of evolution, God had protected man from an inescapable end. For, paradoxically, the only insurance against death is to
have been created ex nihilo, which keeps open the possibility of an equally miraculous resurrection, whereas if you are the product of an evolution, the
only thing you can do is disappear when your time is up. The intervention of a superior power in Genesis guarantees a future immortality, whereas the
genealogy of the species condemns it, in time, to disappear. And our whole problem, in our efforts to give birth to a real
-- 24 -world, is fundamentally the same as God's: not to drive the human race to despair by the recognition of its real existence and finitude.
For Gosse, matters are simple: reality exists on God's authority. But what can we do if that same God is capable of simultaneously creating the true and
the false? (This is not even a diabolical manipulation, since the germ of the illusion came from God himself.) In this case, what is there to guarantee that
our world is not as false as the simulacrum of an earlier world? All of reality -- present, past and future -- suddenly comes into doubt. If God is capable of
conjuring up a perfect illusion of the pre-Genesis era, then our current reality is eternally unverifiable. It is not, therefore, a scientific hypothesis.

Trompe-l'œil Genesis
-- nts -Note: 9. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1991, p. 108 (first published 1985).
Note: 10. Those inclined to search for this quotation in Ecclesiastes would be better advised to consult Baudrillard's Fragments. Cool Memories III,
Éditions Galilée, Paris 1995.

-- 25 --

The Automatic Writing of the World
The perfect crime is that of an unconditional realization of the world by the actualization of all data, the transformation of all our acts and all events into
This is precisely the theme of Arthur C. Clarke's short story `The Nine Billion Names of God'. 1 A community of Tibetan monks have for centuries
devoted themselves to transcribing these nine billion names of God, and once they have accomplished this the purpose of the world will be achieved, and
it will come to an end. The task is a tiresome one and the weary monks call in technicians from IBM, whose computers do the job in a few months. In a
sense, the history of the world is completed in real time by the workings of virtual technology. Unfortunately, this also means the disappearance of the
world in real time. For suddenly, the promise of the end is fulfilled and, as they walk back down into the valley, the technicians, who did not really
This is perhaps the fate that awaits us at the end-point of this technical transfiguring of the world: its accelerated end, its immediate resolution -- the final
success of
-- 26 -modern millenarianism, though with no hope of salvation, apocalypse or revelation. Merely hastening the final term, accelerating the movement towards
disappearance pure and simple. And so, quite without knowing it, the human race might, like the IBM technicians, be assigned to this noble task:
triggering the code for the world's automatic disappearance by exhausting all its possibilities.
This is the very essence of the Virtual.
Live your life in real time -- live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time -- your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your
revolution in real time -- not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in real time -- the whole thing on video from start to
finish. Penetrate your body in real time -- endovideoscopy: your own bloodstream, your own viscera as if you were inside them.
exceptional version for the `happy few'. Any of your acts can be instantly broadcast on any station. There was a time when we would have considered this
and the media long since left their media space to invest `real' life from the inside, precisely as a virus does with a normal cell. No need of the headset and
the data suit: it is our will that ends up moving about the world as though inside a computer-generated image. We have all swallowed our receivers, and
this produces intense interference on account of the excessive proximity of life and its double, and the collapsing of time and distance. Whether in this
telepresence, in the live TV psychodrama or in
-- 27 --

the immediacy of information on all screens, what we have here is the same short-circuiting of real life.
Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification. The abstraction of the `spectacle' was
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.
In what was the golden age of joyful disillusionment, we carried out the critique of all illusions -- the metaphysical, the religious and the ideological. Only
one remains: the illusion of criticism itself. The objects we subjected to the full glare of criticism -- sex, dreams, work, history, power -- have taken their
revenge by disappearing, producing, in return, the consoling illusion of truth. Having no more victims to devour, the critical illusion has devoured itself.
Even more than the industrial machines, it is the machinery of thought itself that is laid off. At the extreme end of its journey, critical thought has wound
back on itself. Where once it was future-orientated, it is now umbilical. In surviving its own self, it in fact helps its object to survive. Just as religion has
become definitively realized in other -- irreligious, secular, political and cultural -- forms, where it is impossible to pin it down as religion (including the
current revival, where it assumes the mask of religion), so the critique of virtual technologies masks the fact that their concept is seeping everywhere into
real life in homoeopathic doses. In denouncing the ghostliness of those technologies -- and of the media -- one implies that there is somewhere an original
form of lived existence. Whereas, if the rate of
-- 28 -reality is falling every day, this is because the medium itself has passed into life, has become the ordinary ritual of transparency. All this digital, numeric,
electronic equipment is merely incidental to the deep-seated virtualization of human beings. And if this so grips the collective imagination, that is because
we are already -- not in some other world, but in this life itself -- in a state of socio-, photo- and videosynthesis. The virtual and the media are our
chlorophyllous function. And if we are able today to produce a clone of a particular famous actor which will be made to act in his place, this is because
long ago, without knowing it, he became his own replica or his own clone, before he actually was cloned.
This whole virtual technology media circus, this perpetual `reality show,' 2 has an ancestor: the ready-made. Those who are plucked from their real lives
to come and act out the psychodrama of their AIDS or their marital problems on TV have an ancestor in Duchamp's bottle-rack which that artist similarly
plucked from the real world to confer on it elsewhere -- in a field we still agree to call art -- an undefinable hyperreality. Paradoxical acting-out,
instantaneous short-circuiting. The bottle-rack, exscribed from its context, purpose and function, became more real than reality (hyperreal) and more art
than art (transaesthetics of banality, of insignificance, of nullity, against which the pure and indifferent form of art is verified today).
Any old object, individual or situation is today a virtual ready-made in so far as one can say of anyone or anything what Duchamp was, at bottom, saying
of the bottle-rack: it exists, I've met it. Everyone is invited, in this same way, to present themselves as they are and play out their lives `live' on-screen,
just as the ready-made played out its role exactly as it was, `live' on the gallery screen. And the two are merged in the initiative launched by new
museums where the aim is not now to bring people to stand in front of the pictures -- which can be done successfully, but isn't interactive enough and
smacks too much of the `spectacle' -- but to stand in the
-- 29 -pictures -- in the virtual reality of Déjeuner sur l'herbe, for example -- which they can in this way enjoy in real time, possibly even interacting with the
work and the figures in it.
There is the same problem with the TV `reality shows': the viewer has to be brought not in front of the screen (he has always been there, and that is indeed

his alibi and refuge) but into the screen, taken to the other side of the information set-up. He has to be made to carry out the same conversion as Duchamp
did with his bottle-rack when he transferred it, just as it was, to the other side of art, creating, as he did so, a definitive ambiguity between art and reality.
Art today is simply this paradoxical confusion of the two, and the aesthetic intoxication which ensues. Similarly, information is simply the paradoxical
confusion of the event and the medium, and the political uncertainty which ensues. So, we have all become ready-mades. Hypostatized like the bottlerack, our sterile identities taxidermized, we have become living museum pieces, like those entire populations which are transfigured in situ by aesthetic or
cultural decree, cloned in our own image by High Definition and condemned, by that exact resemblance, to media stupefaction, just as the ready-made is
condemned to aesthetic stupefaction. And just as Duchamp's acting-out opens on to the (generalized) zero degree of aesthetics, where any old item of
rubbish can be taken as a work of art (which also means that any old work of art can be taken for rubbish), so this media acting-out opens on to a
generalized virtuality which puts an end to the real by its promotion of every single instant.
The key concept of this Virtuality is High Definition. That of the image, but also of time (Real Time), of music (High Fidelity), of sex (pornography), of
thought (Artificial Intelligence), of language (digital languages), of the body (the genetic code and the genome). Everywhere, High Definition marks the
transition -- beyond any natural determination -- to an operational formula -- and, precisely, a `definitive' one, the transition to a world where referential
substance is becoming increasingly
-- 30 -rare. The highest definition of the medium corresponds to the lowest definition of the message -- the highest definition of the news item corresponds to
the lowest definition of the event, the highest definition of sex (porn) corresponds to the lowest definition of desire, the highest definition of language (in
digital coding) corresponds to the lowest definition of meaning, the highest definition of the other (in immediate interaction) corresponds to the lowest
definition of otherness and exchange, etc.
The high-definition image. This has nothing to do with representation, and even less to do with aesthetic illusion. The whole generic illusion of the image
is cancelled out by technical perfection. As hologram or virtual reality or three-dimensional picture, the image is merely the emanation of the digital code
which generates it. It is merely the mania for making an image no longer an image or, in other words, it is precisely what removes a dimension from the
real world.
Already, in moving from the silents to the talkies, then to colour and 3-D and the current range of special effects, the cinematographic illusion faded as
the technical prowess increased. No empty space any more, no ellipsis, no silence. The more we move towards that perfect definition, that useless
perfection, the more the power of the illusion is lost. To appreciate the truth of this, one only has to think of the Peking Opera and how, with the mere
movement of their bodies, the old man and the girl brought to life on the stage the sheer size of the river and how, in the duel scene, the two bodies,
skimming each other with their weapons yet not touching, made the darkness in which the duel took place tangible. That was total illusion -- an ecstasy
more physical and material than aesthetic or theatrical, precisely because all realist presence of the night or the river had been excised. Today, they would
pipe tons of water into the studio, and the duel would be shot in darkness with infra-red cameras.
Real Time: instantaneous proximity of the event and its double in information.
-- 31 -Proximity of human beings and their remote action: settle all your business at the other end of the world, via an ectoplasmic intermediary. Like every
detail of the hologram, every instant of real time is microscopically encoded. Every little bit of time packs in the total information relating to the event, as
though it were being mastered in miniature from all sides at once. Now, there is something obscene about the instant replication of an event, act or speech

nor the rhythm (not to mention the pleasure) of exchange, and combines artificial insemination and premature ejaculation in the same operation.
There is a profound incompatibility between real time and the symbolic rule of exchange. What governs the sphere of communication (the interface,
immediacy, the abolition of time and distance) has no meaning in the sphere of exchange, where the rule is that what is given should never be returned
immediately. It has to be returned, but never right away. That is a serious, mortal insult. There must never be immediate interaction. It is, precisely, time
which separates the two symbolic moments and holds their resolution in abeyance. Time with no delay, `live' time, is inexpiable. The whole field of
communications is, thus, of the order of the inexpiable, since everything in that field is interactive, is given and returned without delay, without that
suspense, minute as it may be, which constitutes the temporal rhythm of exchange.
Artificial Intelligence. Thought at last realized, fully materialized by all the virtualities of analysis, synthesis and calculation, just as real time is defined
by the ceaseless interaction of all moments and all participants. A high-definition operation: the information which results is truer than truth -- it is true in
real time. That is why it is fundamentally uncertain. The fact that Artificial Intelligence veers off
-- 32 -into over-high definition, into a crazy sophistication of data and operations, merely confirms that this is indeed the achieved utopia of thought.
And now computers controlled by thought are on the way. There is a danger that this extreme form will produce some strange results. At what threshold
of consciousness or formalization will the machine intervene? There is a danger that, by reflex anticipation, it will log into subconscious -- if not, indeed,
unconscious -- thoughts, into the most primitive phantasies. Like the double of the Student of Prague, who was always there before him, transforming his
obscurest whims into acts. In this way our `thoughts' will be actualized even before they occur, exactly like the event in the information system. If that is
what we must necessarily come to, then the consequence would be that the whole system of thought would soon be aligned to the system of the machine.
Thought would end up thinking only what the machine can take in and process, or would think only when the machine requests it. This is already how
things stand with computers and information technology. In the generalized interface, thought itself will become virtual reality, the equivalent of
computer-generated images or the automatic writing of word-processors.
Artificial Intelligence? There is not a shadow of artifice in it, not the shadow of an idea of illusion, seduction or the play of the world, which is much
more subtle, perverse and arbitrary. Now, thought is neither a mechanics of higher functions nor a range of operational reflexes. It is a rhetoric of forms,
of shifting illusion and appearances -- an anamorphosis of the world, not an analysis. The cerebral, computing machine is not the master of appearances; it
is the master only of calculation, and its task, like that of all cybernetic and virtual machines, is to destroy this essential illusion by counterfeiting the
world in real time.
Just as the illusion of the image disappears into its virtual reality, the illusion of the body into its genetic formulation and the illusion of the world into its
artificial technical form, so also do we see disappear, in Artificial Intelligence, the (super)-natural
-- 33 -understanding of the world as play, as delusion, as machination, as crime -- and not as logical mechanism, or as reflex cybernetic machine which would
have its mirror and model in the human brain.
End of the raw illusion of thought, of the scene, of passion, end of the illusion of the world and its vision (and not its representation), end of the illusion of
the Other, of Good and Evil (particularly of Evil), of true and false, end of the raw illusion of death, or that of existing at any cost: all these things vanish
into telereality, into real time, into the sophisticated technologies which are our initiation into models, into the virtual, into the opposite of illusion -- total
In the realm of shadows, no one any longer has a shadow, and there is no danger of treading on it and ripping it, as Peter Schlemihl did. 3 What can

happen, on the other hand, is for bodies no longer to project their shadows, but shadows to project their bodies, which might then be said to be mere
shadows of shadows. This is already the case with our virtual reality, which is merely the putting back into circulation, sub specie corporis, sub specie
realitatis, of the abstraction and the digital data of life. As in that other fable where the Devil put the shadow of the student who had sold it to him back
into circulation in the living form of the Double, for which the student was then merely the stand-in.
This virtual operation of the world is a paradoxical chimaera. The worldwide listing of all data is the same phantasy as that of the spelling of the names of
God -- a chimaera in which we bury ourselves as though inside a metal sarcophagus, in a state of weightlessness, dreaming of living out all possible
situations by the grace of the Digital. Phantasy of synthesis of all the elements, by which we seek to force the gates of the real world.
With Virtual Reality and all its consequences, we have passed over into the extreme of technology, into technology as an extreme phenomenon. Beyond
the end, there is no longer any reversibility; there are no longer any traces of the
-- 34 -earlier world, nor is there even any nostalgia for it. This hypothesis is much graver than that of technological alienation or Heidegger's Gestell. It is the
hypothesis of a project of irreversible disappearance in the purest logic of the species. The hypothesis of an absolutely real world, where, unlike
Michaux's artist, we would have succumbed to the temptation not to leave traces.
This is what is at stake in Virtuality. And there can be no doubting its absolute ambition. If it were brought to completion, that radical effectuation would
be the equivalent of a perfect crime. Whereas the `original' crime is never perfect and always leaves traces (we ourselves as living, mortal beings are the
trace of that criminal imperfection), future extermination -- that extermination which would be produced by an absolute determination of the world and its
elements -- would leave no trace. We would not even have the time to disappear. We would be disintegrated in Real Time and Virtual Reality long before
the stars went out.
Fortunately, all this is literally impossible. Very High Definition, with its ambition of producing images, sounds, information, bodies in microvision, in
stereoscopy, as you have never seen them before, as you will never see them, is unrealizable. As is the phantasy of Artificial Intelligence: the brain's
becoming a world, the world's becoming a brain, so as to function without bodies, unfailing, autonomized, inhuman. Too intelligent, too super-efficient to
be true.
There is, in fact, no room for both natural and artificial intelligence. There is no room for both the world and its double.

The Automatic Writing of the World
-- nts -Note: 11. In Arthur C. Clarke, Of Time and Stars, Roc (an imprint of Penguin Books) in association with Victor Gollancz, London 1992, pp. 15-23.
Note: 12. `Reality show' is the term that has been imported into French to describe those TV programmes which deal mainly in personal confessions and
`real-life' stories, the most prominent of which has been Mireille Dumas's Bas les Masques on France 2.
Note: 13. Peter Schlemihl is the eponymous hero of Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) by the French-born poet, translator, botanist and
philologist Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Schlemihl's `remarkable story' cornes about in large part as a result of selling his shadow to the devil.

-- 35 --

The Horizon of Disappearance
When the horizon disappears, what then appears is the horizon of disappearance.
Dietmar Kamper
Man is constantly expelling what he is, what he experiences, what he means to himself. Either through language, which has an exorcistic function, or
through all the technical artefacts he has invented and over whose horizon he is currently disappearing in an irreversible process of transference and
substitution. McLuhan saw modern technologies as `extensions of man'. We should see them, rather, as `expulsions of man'.
This kind of energy, which tends to get rid of something -- beginning, no doubt, with itself -- is best encapsulated in the term `acting-out'. Ridding
yourself of your phantasies by having them pass into reality -- and yet, for all that, they do not actually become real: the `acting-out' merely expresses the
impossibility of the phantasy remaining a phantasy. Projecting ourselves into a fictive, random world for which there is no other motive than this violent
abreaction to ourselves. Building ourselves a perfect virtual world so as to be able to opt out of the real one. Or else, in the case of history, ridding itself of
its incoherences and contradictions in a single unpredictable event, in which the actors seem mere extras -- as in the events in Eastern Europe, which have
no meaning in themselves, being merely the liquidation of an impossible situation. The excess of positivity, and of operational stimulation of
-- 36 -current systems, plunges us everywhere into this kind of impossible situation where we are no longer in a position of action but of pure reaction, reflex
operation and automatic response.
We are no longer alienated within a conflictual reality; we are expelled by a definitive, non-contradictory reality. Our desires expropriated from us by
their very fulfilment. Absorbed and introjected and, at the same time, totally ejected. Lévi-Strauss used to distinguish between two types of culture: those
which introject and absorb, which devour -- anthropophagie cultures -- and those which spew out, eject, expel -- anthropo-emic cultures, modern cultures.
But ours -- our contemporary culture -- seems to effect a brilliant synthesis of the two; of the most extreme integration -- of functions, spaces and human
beings -- and the most radical ejection, quasi-biological rejection -- the system expelling us, even as it integrates us, into countless technical prostheses,
right down to the very latest and most admirable stage in the process: the prosthetics of thought in Artificial Intelligence.
The `acting-out' of a whole society caught up in its phantasy of dissipation of itself in pure energy, in pure circulation, without any visible objective other
than this specific feat, than this deliverance into the void, than this mobility at any cost, of which we, the living particles, the living bodies, are now
merely the orbiting refuse.
We are, in this way, moving further and further from our centre of gravity (ours, the world's). And in this way we are becoming like the galactic systems
which are moving apart from each other at velocities proportional to their mass. For it is only inside systems that the law of gravity prevails. Everywhere
else, it is anti-gravity and negative attraction which rule. Where do we get our energy from -- that energy mobilized in networks -- if not from the
demobilization of our own bodies, from the liquidation of the subject and of the material substance of the world?
-- 37 -One day, perhaps, all that substance will be transformed into energy and all that energy into pure information. This will be, in a way, the definitive
`acting-out', the total achievement, 1 the final solution. Everything will be accomplished, realized and, at the same time, ejected into the void. Delivered

from ourselves, we shall enter the spectral, problem-free universe. That is what is meant by the great model of Virtuality.
The question whether the technical project of Virtuality is a step in humanity's upward progression or a moment in its vertiginous disappearance still
remains (the two are not incompatible). Might we not have invented an extremely roundabout means for radicalizing our existence by offering it a chance
of total disappearance?
-- 38 -All other cultures have left traces. Our crime would be perfect, for it would leave no trace, and would be irreversible.
What is the most radical metaphysical desire, the deepest spiritual joy? Not to be there, but to see. Like God. For God, precisely, does not exist, and this
enables him to watch the world in his absence. We too would love, above all, to expunge man from the world in order to see it in its original purity. We
glimpse, in this, an inhuman possibility, which would restore the pluperfect form of the world, without the illusion of the mind or even that of the senses.
An exact and inhuman hyperreality, where we could at last delight in our absence and the dizzying joys of disincarnation. If I can see the world after the
point of my disappearance, that means I am immortal. The Immortals themselves came and involved themselves episodically in the events of the world, to
derive pleasure from passing unrecognized.
This might be taken so far as the staging of some collective disaster or other, merely to see what would happen. But there is nothing of the death instinct
here. It is the ruse of God, eluding the question of his existence by vanishing beneath his images. It is the ruse of the original, vanishing beneath its many
copies. By the very fact of existing, we are from the beginning in an impossible anthropological situation. We can nowhere test out our existence or its
authenticity. Existence, being and the real are, strictly speaking, impossible. The only solution to this situation, apart from the metaphysical recourse to a
higher will (the will of God, but that is obsolete), is crime. Crime stands at the beginning of all cultures, as the supreme form of `acting-out'. And in this
sense, the technological enterprise itself can be seen as criminal projection, sacrificial `acting-out', exorcism -- one of those eccentric forms which defy
the gravity of existence.
Other cultures have been able to manage this metaphysical illusion by having it circulate, each person taking responsibility for the next one's life over the
generations by means of rituals. Whereas we, obsessed by objective reality, unload
-- 39 -our illusion of being on to technology. And doubtless, we play with death in technology as other cultures did in sacrifice. But this sacrifice no longer
evokes the same magic or the same dreams. It is more like an experimental murder in which the murderer and the victim would be mere technical
threat of a definitive reality. So this whole array of technology could be taken to mean that man has ceased to believe in his own existence, and has opted

for a virtual existence, a destiny by proxy. Then all our artefacts become the site of the subject's non-existence, of his desire for non-existence. For a
subject without an existence of his own is at least as vital a hypothesis as that of a subject decked out with such metaphysical responsibility.
Seen from this angle, technology becomes a marvellous adventure, just as marvellous in this case as it seems monstrous in the other. It becomes an art of
disappearance. It might be seen as aiming not so much to transform the world as to create an autonomous world, a fully achieved world, from which we
could at last withdraw. Now, there can be no perfecting of the natural world, and the human being in particular is a dangerous imperfection. If the world is
to be perfect, it will first have to be made. And if the human being wishes to attain this kind of immortality, he must produce himself as artefact also,
expel himself from himself into an artificial orbit in which he will circle forever.
So we dream of a world carried along miraculously, without our intervention, and of autonomous beings which, far from escaping our will, as in the story
of the sorcerer's apprentice, might fulfil the desire we ourselves have of escaping our will.
So we dream of seeing computers reach the stage of intelligent self-programming. And yet, though we concede their becoming more intelligent than us,
we do not
-- 40 -accord them a will of their own. We do not conceive a rival will in any other species and, if we are to give way to superior artificial beings, their very
intelligence has to be the manifestation of our desire. Though God allowed man to pose the question of his own freedom, we cannot contemplate beings
we have engendered doing the same. No freedom, no will, no desire, no sexuality -- it is precisely in these respects that we want them perfect. Above all,
we cannot grant them what God eventually conceded to man: the knowledge of Evil.
It seems, however, that these `intelligent' machines have got wind, if not of crime and sin, then at least of the obscure paths of accident and catastrophe.
That they have equipped themselves with a number of functional gremlins, electronic viruses and other negative side-effects which protect them from
perfection and spare them, in their turn, from pushing to their limits. The perfect crime would have been to invent a faultless world and withdraw from it
without leaving a trace. But we cannot achieve this. We leave traces everywhere -- viruses, lapses, germs and catastrophes -- signs of imperfection which
are, so to speak, man's signature in the heart of the artificial world.
Not only Artificial Intelligence, but all of the advanced technological process points up the fact that behind his doubles and his prostheses, his biological
clones and his virtual images, man takes advantage of these things to disappear. So it is with the answer-phone: `We aren't here. Leave a message....' And
the video plugged into the TV takes over the job of watching the film for you. Had there not been that possibility, you would have felt obliged to watch it,
since you always feel a little responsible for the films you haven't seen, the desires you haven't fulfilled, the people you haven't replied to, the crimes you
haven't committed, the money you haven't spent. This amounts to a whole array of repressed possibilities, and the idea that there is a machine to store
them and filter them, into which they go to die away quietly, is a profoundly reassuring one. All these machines may be termed
-- 41 -virtual, since they are the filter (the philtre) of virtual jouissance, that of the image, which most of the time is enough to keep us happy.
All these machines, which claim to be `live' interactive devices, are in fact deferred-responsibility machines. For of course, I can see this film later if I
want to, but most of the time I won't do anything about it. Besides, am I sure I want to see it? On the other hand, it is certain that the machine must
function. And so the amortizing of the cost of the machine coincides with the amortizing, the deadening, of desire. These machines are all marvellous.
They give man back a kind of liberty; they relieve him of the burden of his own will. They relieve him of the machine itself, as they are often
interconnected and operate in a loop. They relieve him of his own production: what a relief to see twenty pages that had been stored in memory wiped out
at a stroke, at a whim of the computer (or by a slip of the hand, which amounts to the same thing)! They would never have had such value if they hadn't
had the good fortune to disappear. What the computer had given you -- perhaps too easily -- it takes away with the same ease. Everything is in order. A

zero-sum technological equation. We are always talking of unforeseen, negative side-effects; here technology produces a positive (homoeopathic) sideeffect. The integrated circuit loops back on itself, ensuring, as it were, the automatic deletion of the world.
To the tragic illusion of destiny we prefer the metaphysical illusion of subject and object, the true and the false, good and evil, the real and the imaginary;
but, in a final phase, we prefer the virtual illusion even more -- that of the neither true nor false, of the neither good nor evil, of a lack of distinction
between the real and the referential, of an artificial reconstruction of the world where, at the cost of total disenchantment, we would enjoy a total
But why seek to escape destiny, to escape the order of disappearance? Out of an instinct of self-preservation? A feeble motive. Out of a defiance of the
-- 42 -order and for the glory of artifice? To have the illusion of changing the world, or of mastering it? From some phantasy of wiping out origins of any kind,
and substituting a self-generation stretching back to infinity?
Where can it come from, this compulsion to be rid of the world by realizing it, by forcing material objectivity upon it? Whence the idea of inflecting it, by
altering even the genetic code of matter? The absurdity of this enterprise is already evident where the human genome is concerned. Once he has been
deciphered and digitalized, once he has become transparent and operational, what better destiny can we invent for man? What destination can we give the
world in general once we have it at our command? Physically and metaphysically, the universe has no other destiny than to be the universe itself.
In our determination to invent the real world, so as to have it transparent to our science and our consciousness, so that it no longer escapes us, we do not
escape that very transparency -- become now the transparence of evil -- by which destiny, in any case, unfolds, seeping through the very interstices of that
transparency we were trying to set against it. Once again, the crystal takes its revenge.
For a time we kept destiny and death at bay. Today, it is destiny which is surging back towards us through the screens of science. Finally, by an ironic
twist, it will perhaps even be science that has brought things more quickly to a head. But of course, as in the tragic order -- re-emergent at last after we
had believed it lost in the comic illusion of reality -- we shall realize this only at the last moment.
The sad consequence of all this is that we no longer know what to do with the real world. We can no longer see any need whatever for this residue which
has become an encumbrance. A crucial philosophical problem, that of the real which has been `laid off'. And we have the same problem with
unemployment: what is to be done with labour in the computer age? What are we to make of this exponential waste? Dump it back into the dustbins of
history? Put it into orbit, send it into space? It
-- 43 -will be no easier getting rid of the corpse of reality. In desperation, we shall be forced to turn it into a special attraction, a historical tableau, a nature
reserve: `Coming to you live from reality! Visit this strange world! Experience the thrill of the real world!'
which will take on mythic value? Already old objects seem like real ones by contrast with objects from the industrial age, but this is merely a prefiguring
of the days when the tiniest tangible object will be as precious as an Egyptian relic.
We are, even now, working only for those who will discover us one day -- us and our `reality' -- as vestiges of a mysterious or heteroclite age, like the
skull of Piltdown Man which was a mix of the skull of a Neanderthal with the jaw of an Australopithecus. This is what will be found some day by the
archaeologists of a metaphysical age, to whom our problems will have become as unintelligible as the way of life and the thinking of neolithic tribes are

to us. The only problem will be one of dating and classification deep in the `archaeological finds centres', which will have become the excavation sites of
the Digital Era. Thanks to the moribund radioactivity of these few remains, some as yet undreamt-of carbon dating system will make it possible to
reconstruct the genesis of all these concepts -- not to mention their meaning. For in the meantime, another chronology will have been born -- the Year
Zero of Virtual Reality. All that preceded will have become fossilized. Thought itself is already coming to be seen as a fossilized object, an archaeological
relic, itself also to be visited as a special attraction, with some `think-operator' 2 as guide: `Thought in real time! Experience the historical thrill of
Deep down, we are not far removed from Gosse's God who provided men with the ready-made signs of a previous history. For we are currently
manufacturing the prehistory of an age which will not even remember it, to the point where all
-- 44 -these remains will possibly even be suspected (as was the case with cave paintings in the eighteenth century) of having been fabricated at some later date
by twenty-first-century impostors, depicting an obscure and, in the end, useless anthropological prehistory -- that of a native wit happily now supplanted
by Artificial Intelligence.

The Horizon of Disappearance
-- nts -Note: 14. The phrase `total achievement' is in English in the original.
Note: 15. The term `think-operator' is in English in the original.

-- 45 --

The Countdown
Reality and the real world will have lasted only for a certain time, then. Just as long as it took for our species to pass them through the filter of the
material abstraction of the code and calculation. Having been real for a while, the world was not destined to remain so for long. It will have taken only a
few centuries to traverse the orbit of the real, and be very rapidly lost beyond it.
In purely physical terms, we may say that the reality effect exists only in a system of relative speed and continuity. In slower societies -- primitive ones,
for example -- reality does not exist; it does not `crystallize', for want of a sufficient critical mass. There is not enough acceleration for there to be linearity
and, hence, for there to be causes and effects. In societies which are over-rapid, like our own, the reality effect becomes hazy: acceleration brings a
jostling of causes and effects, linearity gets lost in turbulence, and reality, in its relative continuity, no longer has time to happen. Reality exists, then, only
within a certain time-frame at a certain level of acceleration, within a certain window of expanding systems, within a phase of `liberation', a phase in
which our modern societies found themselves until now, but which they are currently leaving behind, with reality being lost once again -- as the same
expanding systems undergo further anamorphosis -- in illusion, though this time in virtual illusion.
-- 46 -Even if it is now merely an endangered masterpiece, threatened by the very advance of the sciences and technologies which ensured its pre-eminence, the
reality of the world is, none the less, a reassuring hypothesis and, as such, still dominates our value system today. The denial of reality is still morally and
politically suspect. The principle of simulation is still the equivalent of the principle of Evil. The real scandal is not offending against public decency but
offending against the reality principle, and we are not far removed here from the medieval trials in which the gravest crime laid at the door of witches was
not that of succumbing to Evil, but that of succumbing to the illusion of Evil and its phantasmagoria.
However, it is not just particle physics and the technologies of the virtual which are on the verge of disavowing reality. We all are, in our most everyday
acts. The concept has taken on a kind of ghostly flimsiness, and there is abroad something of a collective, panic-stricken sense that by wishing the world
ever more real, we are devitalizing it. The real is growing and growing; one day everything will be real; and when the real is universal, that will spell
In one of the Marx Brothers' films, Harpo is leaning against a wall. `What are you doing there?' `Holding up the wall,' he gestures. `Are you kidding? Get
away!' Harpo steps aside, and the wall collapses. Are we not all leaning against that wall, and is it not the wall of Reality? If just one person moved away,
the wall would come down, burying the millions of people squatting this disused barracks. The situation is certainly one of a devastated reality, and there
are already innumerable victims buried alive in the rubble. The point is not, then, to assert that the real does or does not exist -- a ludicrous proposition
which well expresses what that reality means to us: a tautological hallucination (`the real exists, I have met it'). There is merely a movement of the
exacerbation of reality towards paroxysm, where it involutes of its own accord and implodes leaving no trace, not even the sign of its end. For the body of
the real was never recovered. In the shroud of the virtual, the corpse of the real is forever unfindable.
-- 47 -Once, the two terms were linked in the living movement of a history: the actual form emerged from the virtual, like the statue emerging from the block of
marble. Today, they are entwined in the notorious movement of the dead. For the dead man continues to move, and the corpse of the real never stops
growing. The virtual is, in fact, merely the dilatation of the dead body of reality -- the proliferation of an achieved universe, for which there is nothing left
but to go on endlessly hyperrealizing itself.

We are in the speeded-up phase of that movement where all `real' things are in a hurry to live and die. We are in the -- perhaps interminable -- phase of
hysteresis of the real, of remanence of the shreds of reality in the immense virtuality which surrounds them, like the shreds of territory over the expanse of
the map in the Borges story.
We are, in effect, persisting in the increasingly sophisticated deconstruction of a world which can no longer secrete its end. So everything is able to go on
to infinity. We no longer have the means to stop the processes which now run on without us, beyond reality, so to speak, in an endless speculation, an
exponential acceleration. But do so, as a result, in an indifference which is also exponential. `Sans fin' -- without end -- equals `sans faim' -- without
hunger: it is a kind of anorexic history which no longer feeds on real happenings, and wears itself out in counting down. A history without desire, without
passion, without tension, without real events, where the problem is no longer one of changing life, which was the maximal utopia, but of surviving, which
is the minimal utopia.
We live both haunted by the primal scene and with the threat of the terminal phase hanging over us. And this latter is in fact characterized by the
resurrection of all the demons of the primal scene, which no progress or historical revolution has disarmed, just as the germs and viruses which were
thought to be buried revive one by one in the terminal phase of illness.
And AIDS is, indeed, the illustration of this preordained falling-due of death. But
-- 48 -it is merely one particular case of it: in the future we shall all be condemned to know in advance the date and detailed form of our deaths. So we shall all
be in a countdown situation, in a situation of a programmed rundown of time. This stipulation of death within a finite period makes it a kind of timebomb, a terrifying event, because it puts an end even to the prospect of its random occurrence. Hence the vitally urgent need to stay this side of the
running of the programme, to de-programme the end. Now the aim of our system is precisely the opposite: to drive right through to the end, to exhaust all
the possibilities.
The human race has already gone beyond its potential. Excess of potential intelligence, hypertely of intelligence. If the law of natural selection were true,
our brains would have to shrink, for their capacities exceed all natural purposes and endanger the species. This is the same question Darwin and Wallace
debated, the latter resolving it by the intervention of God. God was alone responsible for this supernatural privilege of man. But if God is responsible for
this biological extravagance, then he is in collusion with the spirit of Evil, whose specific peculiarity is to drive the universe to excess. Are there not signs
of the aberrancy of the divine will in the catastrophic success of man?
This disproportion between the human brain and the specific tasks of the species is a glaring one in the immense majority of our activities (gambling on
horses, jogging, TV, not to mention `sleaze' and politics). If 80 per cent of human genes are useless, how do matters stand with the useable power of the
brain? Was it necessary to mobilize such a cortical and cerebrospinal machinery to get to where we are? Who can say why a particular person possesses
an arsenal of a billion neurons? Obviously, this is a stupid question so far as his positioning within the teleonomic mutations of the species is concerned.
And he can flatter himself that he is part of that mysterious proportion of useless beings (like the 80 per cent of the genes -- use-- less for what?) which
doubtless perform a function for the species as a reserve and a backup, by contrast with those hyper-brains glued to their computers which,
-- 49 -though already considerably underused, diminish themselves even more by having a machine function in their stead.
It is the same with Artificial Intelligence and the new technologies. Computer chips have already outstripped any possible use that can be made of them,
and are leading the system into insane applications. The two together -- brains and human technologies -- are colluding in an effort to maximize timecapital, life-capital, in which all margins, all free zones, are being wiped out. There are no longer any reserves of uselessness: these are threatened with
intensive exploitation. Insignificance is under threat from an excess of meaning. Banality is threatened with its hour of glory. The supply of floating

signifiers has fallen to dangerous levels. Death itself is under threat of death. ... Once the dialectical balance is upset, the whole system becomes
terroristic. We ought now to turn those lines of Hölderlin around: `But where there is danger, there grows also what saves' [Da, wo die Gefahr wächst,
wächst das Rettende auch], and say `But where what saves grows, there also grows danger' [Da, wo das Rettende wächst, wächst die Gefahr auch], which
would characterize the much graver threat of disintegration and death represented by our excess of security, prevention, immunity, and the fatal excess of
The clock at the Pompidou Centre, where the countdown to the end of the millennium is shown digitally, in millions of seconds, is a fine illustration of
this virtual exhaustion. As with rocket launches or time-bombs (perhaps the Pompidou Centre is a time-bomb?), time is not counted from an origin, but is
counted down from the end. And that end is no longer the final term of a history, of a progressive unfolding, but the mark of a zero-sum, of the exhaustion
of a time-capital.
Humanity no longer has any finality once the human is set down in a genetic capital and the transcription of the genome. There is no longer, strictly
speaking, any history or time once it becomes part of a counting-down. When you count the
-- 50 -seconds which separate you from the end, then everything is already finished. Perhaps it is the shadow of the year 2000 which hovers over this
descending count and over the enjoyment, whether in delight or in terror, of the span of time left to us.

-- 51 --

The Material Illusion
So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, it has a value precisely equivalent to reality. But once the illusion has been recognized
as such, it is no longer an illusion. It is, therefore, the very concept of illusion, and that concept alone, which is an illusion.
This holds true for the subjective illusion, the illusion of the subject who opts for the wrong reality, who mistakes the unreal for the real or, worse,
mistakes the real for the real (that illusion is quite a hopeless one). Against this subjective and metaphysical illusion: the radical illusion, the objective
illusion of the world. A contradiction in terms -- how can an illusion be objective? But this is precisely the point: it is tempting to take this objectivity
which has for so long been deployed in favour of truth and deploy it in the opposite direction, just as it was tempting, in days gone by, to believe in an
objective reality of Evil. Admittedly this was a spiritual heresy, but it was an enthralling hypothesis. And since, in any case, even our scientific objectivity
is gradually taking on an illusory character these days, there is nothing to stop illusion, for its part, taking an objective turn.
The objective illusion is the physical fact that in this universe no things coexist in real time -- not sexes, stars, this glass, this table, or myself and all that
surrounds me.
-- 52 -By the fact of dispersal and the relative speed of light, all things exist only in a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an
inescapable distance from each other. And so they are never truly present to each other, nor are they, therefore, `real' for each other. The fact of this
irremediable distance and this impossible simultaneity, the fact that when I perceive this star it has perhaps already disappeared -- a relationship which
can be extended, relatively speaking, to any physical object or living being -- this is the ultimate foundation, the material definition, so to speak, of
The illusion of time is of the same order. It is the objective fact that you are never entirely there at the particular moment, and that integral presence is
only ever virtual. If it is true that at any point in time you are in that moment and not elsewhere, you are never at the single point where the whole event
might be said to be su