In fact, we are the orphans of a reality that came too late and which is only, like truth, an “official report” in “delayed time.” Excerpt, Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard Yesterday, while driving, listening to an interview on NPR, I heard this story. In Kane County where I presently live, the county government has…
For reality is an illusion, and any thought must first try to unmask it. For this purpose, reality itself must remain masked and must shape itself as a decoy, without even thinking or caring about its own truth. Reality must place its pride in never being an instrument of analysis, or a critical instrument,…
…it is the world that must proceed to its own analysis. It is the world, not reality, that must be revealed not as a truth, but as an illusion. We must trap reality, we must go faster than reality. The idea too must go faster than its own shadow. But if the idea goes…
The requirement of this thought is double and contradictory. It does not consist in analyzing the world to extract from it an improbable truth. It does not adapt itself dialectically to the facts and abstract from them some logical construction. It is much more subtle than that, and more perverse as well. This thought…
The two modes of thought present radically opposed projects: one hopes to reveal the objective reality of this world but wants to be a distinct thought; the other seeks to restore an illusion, of which it is an integral part. One seeks a total gravitation, a concentric effect of meaning. The other seeks to…
In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought…
Why wouldn’t there be as many real worlds as there are imaginary ones?Why would there be only one real world?Why such a mode of exception? In reality, the notion of a real world existing among all other possible worlds is unimaginable.It is unthinkable, except perhaps as a dangerous superstition. We must stay away from…
I’ve almost finished watching Endgame by Samuel Beckett. The play is my sole exposure to Beckett. I knew of his reputation as a playwright. I was asked why I chose this play. I wanted to take a “deep dive” into waters which required that I swim or else fail. “Drown” is the term, isn’t…
Say: I am real, this is real, the world is real, and nobody laughs. But say: this is a simulacrum*, you are only a simulacrum, this war is a simulacrum, and everybody bursts out laughing. With a condescending and yellow laughter, or perhaps a convulsive one, as if it was a childish joke or…
It is early. There is no sunrise yet. Wondering what to write. Yesterday I began reading an essay by Jean Baurdrillard. The essay is entitled Radical Thought. Here is a short paragraph: The belief in truth is part of the elementary forms of religious life. It is a weakness of understanding, of common-sense. At…
