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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Words don't count for much, except when they come along like this

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.