JEAN BAUDRILLARD - PAROXYSM: THE

PERFECT CRIME TRANSLATED BY SUTURE-

SELF TRANS-LATER: IAN, MICHEL, SARAH,
WILLIAM. ASSOCIATION FRANAISE
D'ACTION ARTISTIQUE, 1993

If not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, which is to say,
without criminal, without victim, and without motive. Wherein the truth is
forever withdrawn, and where the secret is never exposed, for want of traces.
But, precisely, the crime is never perfect, because the world gives itself away
through appearances, which are the traces of its inexistence, traces of the
continuity of nothingness. For nothingness itself, the continuity of the link,
leaves traces. It is by this that the world betrays its secret. It is by this that it
lets itself be felt, all the while concealing itself behind appearances.
The artist is also always close to the perfect crime, which is: to say nothing.
But he runs away from it, and his work is the trace of this criminal imperfection.
The artist is, according to Michaux, the one who resists with all his might the
fundamental urge to not leave traces.
As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, no story
better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, a happy
and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had never
uttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "I
would like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, you speak!
Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now, everything
was perfect."
The perfection of the crime resides in the fact that it is always already
accomplished -- per fectum. A sidetracking, even before it produces itself, of
the world as it is. It will therefore never be discovered. There will be no final
judgment to punish or absolve it. There will be no end, because things have
always already taken place. Neither resolution nor absolution, but ineluctable
unfolding of consequences.
Declination of the original crime (wherein one might perhaps discover its
derisory form in the current declination of simulacra?). Our destiny, then, is
the perpetration of this crime, its implacable unfolding, the continuity of evil,
the continuation of nothingness. We will never live its "primal scene," but at
every moment we live its prosecution and atonement. There is no end to this,
and the consequences are incalculable.
Just as the first few seconds of the Big Bang are unfathomable, the few
seconds of the original crime are indeterminable. Fossil crime, then; like the
fossilized sounds scattered throughout the universe. And it is the energy of
this crime, like the initial explosion, that will spread throughout the world, until
its eventual exhaustion.
Such is the mythic vision of the original crime, that distortion of the world in
the game of seduction and appearances, and of its definitive illusion. Such is
the form of the secret.
So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, its value is exactly
equivalent to that of reality. But once the illusion is recognized as such, it no

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longer is one. It is therefore the concept of illusion itself, and this alone, that is
the illusion.
The big philosophical question was: "Why is there something rather than
nothing?" Today, the real question is: "Why is there nothing rather than
something?"
The absence of things to themselves, the fact that they don't take place while
seeming to, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearance and
can therefore never be identical to itself -- all this is the material illusion of the
world. And this remains at bottom the great enigma, which plunges us into
terror, and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of truth.
Under penalty of terror, we must decipher the world, and thus wipe out
material illusion. We will tolerate neither the vacuum, nor the secret, nor sheer
appearance. And why must we decipher it, instead of letting the illusion shine
as it is, in all its brilliance? Ah, well -- this is also an enigma; it belongs to the
enigma of why we cannot bear the enigmatic. It is of a piece with the world
that we could not bear within it either illusion or pure appearance. We wouldn't
tolerate any better -- if it had to exist -- radical truth and transparence.
Truth wants to present itself naked; to reveal its nudity. It desperately seeks
nudity, like Madonna in the film that made her famous. Moreover, Madonnais
the best example of this truth-compulsion. Evocative case of someone who
absolutely wants to be naked, to show herself naked, and who never quite
manages. She is perpetually bridled -- if not with leather or metal, then with
the vulgar will to be nude, the artificial mannerism of exhibitionism. Inhibition
suddenly becomes total and, on the part of the spectator, radical frigidity.
This hopeless strip-tease is that of reality itself, which literally" out-strips" itself
[se <<drobe>>], offering to the credulous eyes of voyeurs the appearance of
nudity. But actually, this nudity envelops it in a second skin, which no longer
has even the erotic charm of dress[la robe].
A prostitution of reality, which voluntarily abandons itself to hyper-realistdetail
-- there isn't even a need anymore for bachelors to strip it bare --, andwhich
has voluntarily renounced the optical illusion in favor of thestrip-tease.
My principal objection to reality is, moreover, its character ofunconditional
surrender to any hypothesis that one can make about it. That itthus
discourages the most active minds through its deplorable conformism.
Youcan subject it, with its principle --(besides, what are they doing together,
ifnot limply copulating and engendering countless evidence?)--, to the
harshestcruelties, to the most obscene provocations, to the most
paradoxicalinsinuations: it bends over backwards for everything with an
inevitableservility. Reality is a bitch. Nothing shocking there, anyway, since it
was bornfrom the fornication of stupidity with a mathematical mind -- ort of
sacredillusion thrown to the jackals of science?
To rediscover the trace of nothing, of the perfect crime, it is necessary totake
from the reality of the world. To rediscover the configuration of thesecret it is
necessary to take away from the accumulation of reality. Subtract,subtract.
The same must not be added to the same, and so on, ad nauseam. The same
mustbe ripped out from the same. Each image must take from the reality of
the world;there must be, behind each image, behind each fragment of reality,
somethingthat has disappeared, to assure the continuity of nothing --
without,however, succumbing to the temptation of annihilation because this
disappearancemust remain living, the trace of the crime must stay alive.

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It is always by adding to the real, by adding the real to the real with
theobjective of a perfect illusion (that of the hyper-real stereotype) that
onestabs at the heart of the illusion. Porno, by adding a dimension to the
image ofsex removes one from desire and disqualifies all seductive illusion. At
theopposite end of the spectrum, the trompe-l'oeil, in stripping a dimension
awayfrom real objects, adds to their magic presence, to their illusory
exactitude.Trompe-l'oeil is the ecstasy of the real object, the living illusion
ofevidence, that which adds to the formal charm of painting the spiritual charm
ofdeception, the mystification of the senses. For the sublime is not enough:
thesubtle is also necessary, the nuance which consists in diverting the real
whiletaking it literally.
Subtract, subtract, take away, nuance. What we have unlearned from
modernityis that subtraction gives force; from absence power is born. We
never cease toaccumulate, to add, to make a higher bid. And if we no longer
are capable offacing the symbolic mastery of absence, it is because today we
are immersed inthe inverse illusion, the disenchanted illusion of profusion, the
modernillusion of the proliferation of screens and images.
It is all the rage to make an image that is no longer an image, in otherwords,
exactly that which strips a dimension from the real world and inauguratesthe
power of illusion. Today, with all the forms of the reality show and virtualreality,
they want us to enter the image, the screen, the three dimensionalartifact --
real-life good to go --, thus destroying any generic illusion of theimage. The
temporal equivalent is that of real-time, that purports at the speedof light --
which is that of information -- to install us in an absolutepresent, abolishing all
illusion of past and future.
The virtual illusion is contrary to that of appearances. Nothing hides itselfthere,
no secret, no absence. Its aim is the cloning of reality, the cloning ofthe real
by the hyper-real, and the extermination of the real by its double.
The disappearance of cinematographic illusion. From silent film to talkies,from
talkies to color, through to the modern gamut of special effects, theillusion has
gone the way of performance. No more void, no more ellipse, no moresilence
-- no more image. We are going more and more toward high-definition,toward
the useless perfection of the image, which in effect no longer is one bydint of
being saturated with technical artifice. The closer one approaches
thedefinitive definition, the operational perfection of the image, the more
itloses its power of illusion.
Consider the Beijing Opera. How, with the simple movement of their
bodies,the old man and the young girl brought to life the expanse of the river;
how, inthe duel scene, two bodies moving close to each other but never
touchingrendered physically palpable the darkness in which the combat took
place. Here,the illusion was total and intense, more of a physical than an
aestheticecstasy, precisely because all realistic presence of night or river was
removed,and the theatrical illusion depended on bodies alone. Today one
would bring tonsof water onto the set, and they would shoot the night duel in
infrared.
The image can no longer imagine the real since it is the real. It canno longer
dream reality since it is virtual reality. From screen to screen, theimage has no
other destiny but the image. It is as if things had swallowed theirmirror, and
had become transparent to themselves, entirely present tothemselves, in
broad daylight, in real-time, through an unmercifultranscription. Instead of

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being absent from themselves in the illusion and thesecret, they no longer
register except on thousands of screens at the horizon ofwhich the real, but
also the image properly speaking, have disappeared. Realityhas been driven
out of reality, and has left us in a hyper-reality empty ofmeaning. Perhaps only
technology still relays the scattered fragments of thereal? Where has the
order of meaning gone?
The only suspense left is that of knowing how far the world can de-
realizebefore succumbing to its reality deficit, or how far it can hyper-realize
beforesuccumbing to its reality surplus (that is, when the world, having
become morereal than the real, will fall under the blow of total simulation).
However -- and this is a foolish hypothesis, fundamentally the same as thatof
the transparence of evil --, it is not certain that the constellation of thesecret is
eclipsed by the transparence of the virtual universe, nor that theoriginal power
of illusion, its symbolic operation, is swept away by thetechnological operation
of the world -- by its technological inspection, asHeidegger would say. One
can detect behind all technologies (especially the mostadvanced: electronic,
computer, virtual, those of image and screen) a sort ofabsolute affectation and
double-gaming -- that exorbitant character oftechnicity that makes the world a
play of appearances, a chiaroscuro of anunsolvable world, behind the
objective, realistic illusion of transforming it.Is technicity finally the murderous
alternative to the illusion of the world, oris it only a gigantic avatar of the same
fundamental illusion, its ultimate andsubtle twist, the last hypostasis? Through
technicity, perhaps the world ishaving us on, that object that seduces us
through the illusion of power thatwe have over it. A vertiginous hypothesis that
would add up to rationality,culminating in virtual technicity, the last of the
ruses of illogic -- acorrelate, in the inwardness of man, of this desire for
illusion of which thedesire for truth is, according to Nietzsche, nothing but a
detour and an avatar.
The Japanese intuit a deity within every industrial object. For us, thissacred
presence is reduced to a faint ironic glimmer, to a nuance of play
andremoteness, but which is no less a spiritual form, behind which the Evil
Genieof Technicity is silhouetted, himself ensuring that the world's secret
remainswell-kept. The Mischievous Spirit watches and waits behind all
artifacts, and ofall our artificial products we could say what Canetti said of
animals: "Behindeach of them, one has the impression that someone human
is hidden, sniggering atus." This echoes Heidegger's phrase: "If we really look
at the ambiguous essenceof technicity, we perceive the constellation, the
stellar movement of thesecret."
It seems, through a paradoxical effect, that if the illusion of the world
isstripped away, irony passes into things. It seems that technicity has taken
onall the illusion that it bereft us of, and that the counterpart to this loss
ofillusion is the apparition of this world's objective irony. Irony as
universalform of disillusion, but also of the stratagem by which the world
withdrawsbehind the radical illusion of technicity, as does the secret --(that of
thecontinuation of Nothingness)-- behind the banality of our technologies
andimages.
Irony is the only spiritual form of the modern world. It is the solerepository of
the secret. But we no longer are privy to it. The ironic functionof the object has
supplanted the critical function of the subject. From themoment they pass
through medium or image, through the trace of the sign or themarket, objects

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exert an artificial and ironic function by their very existence.No need any
longer for a critical conscience holding up to the world the mirrorof its double:
our modern world has swallowed its double at the same time as ithas lost its
shadow, and the irony of this incorporated double erupts at everyinstant from
every fragment of our signs, of our objects, in the absurdity oftheir function --
as the Surrealists showed: things take it upon themselves toironically explain
themselves. They disabuse themselves effortlessly of theirmeaning -- all of
this is part of their visible sequencing, all too visible, asuperfluity which in itself
creates a parody-effect.
The aura of our world is no longer sacred -- no longer the numinous horizonof
appearances -- but one of absolute merchandise. Its essence isadvertising. At
the heart of our universe of signs is a mischievous ad-man genieof publicity, a
trickster, who has integrated the buffoonery of merchandisingwith its staging.
A brilliant scenographer (capital?) has lured the world into aphantasmagoria
of which we are all the fascinated victims.
All metaphysics is swept away by this reversal of situation in which thesubject
is no longer master of the representation (I'll be your mirror!), butmerely a
function of the world's objective irony. In all our technologies, it isthe object
that refracts the subject and imposes its presence and its aleatoryform. It is
the power of the object that beats a path through the play ofsimulacra and
simulation, through that very artifice that we have imposed uponit. In this there
is a kind of ironic reversal: the object becomes a strangeattractor. Stripped of
all illusion by technicity itself, stripped of allconnotation of meaning and value,
ejected -- i.e., disengaged from the orbit ofthe subject, it thus becomes pure
object, a superconductor of illusion andnonsense.
At the horizon of simulation, not only has the world disappeared, but
thequestion of its existence can no longer be asked. But this is perhaps a ruse
ofthe world itself.
Iconoclasm in Byzantium encountered the same problem. The iconoclasts
weresubtle people who aspired to represent God for his greater glory, but in
showingGod's image, they thereby concealed the problem of his existence.
Each image wasa pretext for not facing the problem of God's existence.
Behind each one, infact, God had disappeared. He wasn't dead, he had
disappeared; that is, theproblem no longer presented itself. The problem of
the existence or inexistenceof God had been resolved through simulation.
Just as we have done with theproblem of truth or with the fundamental illusion
of the world: we have resolvedit through technical simulation, and through the
profusion of images in whichthere is nothing to see.
But one might think that it's the strategy of God himself to disappear,
andprecisely behind images. God takes advantage of the images in order
todisappear, himself obeying the impulse to not leave traces. And so the
prophecyis realized: we live in a world where the highest function of the sign
is tomake reality disappear, and to mask at the same time this disappearance.
Artdoes none other than this. The media today do none other than this. This is
whythey are consigned to the same destiny.
Because nothing, not even painting, wants anymore exactly to be looked
at,but only to be visually absorbed and circulated without leaving traces --
tracing in a way, under cover of the colors of simulation, the
simplifiedaesthetic form of impossible exchange --, it is difficult today to
recaptureappearances. Such that the language that would best account for

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this would be alanguage in which there is nothing to say, which would be the
equivalent of apainting in which there is nothing to see. The equivalent of pure
object, of anobject that is not an object.
But an object that is not an object is precisely not nothing. It's an objectthat
doesn't let up obsessing you with its immanence, its empty and
immaterialpresence. The whole problem is, at the confines of nothingness, to
materializethis nothingness -- at the confines of emptiness, to trace the after-
image ofemptiness -- at the confines of indifference, to play according to
themysterious rules of indifference.
The world is like a book. The secret of a book is always inscribed on asingle
page. The rest is nothing but gloss and repetition. The ultimate finesseis to
make this page disappear once the book is complete. Hence no one willguess
what it is about (always the perfect crime). Yet this page remainsdispersed
within the book, between the lines; the body remains dispersedthroughout its
scattered limbs, and one ought to be able to reconstitute itwithout the secret
being lifted. This anagrammatic dispersion of things isessential to their
symbolic absence, to the force of their illusion.
Identification of the world is futile. One must seize upon things in theirsleep, or
in a totally other contingency where they are absent from themselves.Like in
Kawabata's The Sleeping Beauties, where the old men spend thenight beside
the sleeping bodies of these women, mad with desire, but withouttouching
them, and depart before they awake. They too are stretched out next toan
object that is not one, and whose total indifference, in sleep, sharpens
theerotic sense. But most enigmatic in Kawabata's story, and which creates
thismarvelous irony, is that nothing finally, right through to the end of the
tale,allows one to know whether the women are really sleeping or whether
they aren'tslyly getting off, from the depths of their simulated sleep, from
theirseduction and from their own deferred desire.
Those not sensitized to the illusion of amorous feeling, to the degree ofirreality
and play, of malice and ironic spirituality in the language of love,are not in
effect even capable of loving. True intelligence is none other thanthis intuition
of the universal illusion, even in the passion of love -- aboveall in the passion
of love --, without this passion, however, being distorted inits natural
movement.
Even our face we are incapable of identifying, since its symmetry isdistorted
by the mirror.
What significance do we give to the fact that the Creator fashioned men
suchthat they cannot contemplate their own face? Upon seeing it, would we
go mad?Has man evolved into a form in which his face remains invisible?
Perhaps thedragonfly or the praying mantis recognize the appearance of their
head? Is theirface so symmetrical that the mirror inversion is without
importance, or are theothers of their species so identical that the problem of
singularity of featuresnever presents itself?
Meanwhile for us, our face, that which is our most personal, exists only
forothers. We do not exist but for others. We-ourselves are definitively
hiddenfrom we-ourselves, unidentifiable, not only in the secret of our heart,
but inthe secret of our face. In return, we know the true face of the other,
wepossess the secret of the other. The Other is the one whose secret we
possess,and who possesses our secret.
To contemplate our face would be madness, since we would no longer have

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asecret for ourselves, and would therefore be wiped out by transparence.
The mirror does not give me my true appearance. I only know myself
inreflection, such as inside me I will never be. But it is like this for everyobject,
that only comes to us definitively altered, including upon the screen ofour
brain. All things thus offer themselves without hope of being anything
otherthan 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 nightsky. 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 anunbearable incandescence. No more night -- perpetual day. Happily
nothing takesplace 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, ofan irreality, a non-immediacy of things. Happily all
things, the world andothers, come to us definitively altered. Happily nothing is
instantaneous, norsimultaneous, nor contemporaneous. Happily reality
doesn't take place.Thankfully the crime is never perfect.
Jean Baudrillard
This text was first published in the context of the "Study for the
Secret"meetings, June 9-11, 1993 at the Venice Biennale and appears in
AFAA(Association Franaise d'Action Artistique) 1993, pp. 5-12.
Translated by Suture-Self Trans-Later: Ian, Michel, Sarah, William,April 1995.
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Perfect Crime." "Study for the Secret" meetings, June
9-11, 1993 at the Venice Biennale and appears in AFAA (Association
Franaise d'Action Artistique) 1993, pp. 5-12. Available:
http://www.simulation.dk/articles/perfect_crime.htm