The Crime is Never Perfect, Jean Baudrillard
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To contemplate our face would be madness, since we would no longer
have a secret for ourselves, and would therefore be wiped out by
transparence.
The mirror does not give me my true appearance. I only know myself
in reflection, such as inside me I will never be. But it is like this for
every object, that only comes to us definitively altered, including upon
the screen of our brain. All things thus offer themselves without hope
of being anything other than the illusion of themselves. And it's good
this way.
Luckily the objects that appear to us have always already
disappeared. Happily nothing appears to us in real time, any more than
the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the
stars in the universe would behere at once -- in real time -- and the
vault of the sky would be of an unbearable incandescence. No more night
-- perpetual day. Happily nothing takes place in real time, otherwise we
would be subjected, through information, to thelight of all events, and
the present would be of an unbearable incandescence. Happily we live in
the mode of a vital illusion, in the mode of an absence, of an irreality,
a non-immediacy of things. Happily all things, the world and others,
come to us definitively altered. Happily nothing is instantaneous,
nor simultaneous, nor contemporaneous. Happily reality doesn't take
place.Thankfully the crime is never perfect.
