“Because we are no longer capable today of coping with the
symbolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the
disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images.
Now, the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is
the real. It can no longer dream it, since it is its virtual reality. It is as
though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to
themselves in a ruthless transcription, full in the light and in real time.”
(4)
“Perhaps, through technology, the world is toying with us,
the object is seducing us by giving us the illusion of power over it. A
dizzying hypothesis: rationality, culminating in technical virtuality, might be
the last of the ruses of unreason, of that will to illusion of which … the will
to truth is merely a derivative and an avatar.
On the horizon of simulation, not only has the world
disappeared but the very question of its existence can no longer be posed. But
this is perhaps a ruse of the world itself. The iconlaters 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. …
This is what we do with the problem of the truth or reality of this world: we
have resolved it by technical simulation, and by creating a profusion of images
in which there is nothing to see.” (5)
“The harmonious equivalence of nothing to nothing, of Evil
to Evil. But the object that is not an object continues to obsess us 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 that void; on the outer fringes of indifference, to play
by the mysterious rules of indifference.
There is no point in identifying the world. Things have to
be grasped in their sleep, or in any other circumstance where they are absent
from themselves.
…
Not to be sensitive to this degree of unreality and play,
this degree of malice and ironic wit on the part of language and the world is,
in effect, to be incapable of living.” (6)
“But it is the same with any object that reaches us only in
a definitively altered 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 it should be so.
