"Follow-Up" #5

CRIME
     [from Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996) trans. Chris Turner]

This is the story of a crime--of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion--the virtual illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.
...
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 evil's transparency, it is the transparency itself that is the evil. (-1)

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We artists, too, are always coming close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But we turn away from it, and our work is the trace of that criminal imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all their might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces. (1)

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[Reality] 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, 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. (3)