Theory Underground · SAARUTU — internal production standard. Not for third-party distribution.
The book is not built as a treatise but as a forensic conceit sustained across twenty-two short chapters: reality has been murdered, and the book is the report of an investigation into a crime that can never be solved because it has no perpetrator, no victim, and no motive. The thesis is announced on the unpaginated epigraph leaf and then never abandoned; every chapter is a re-description of the same event from a fresh angle (physics, photography, AIDS, Warhol, Sarajevo, sexual difference), which is why the argument is rebuildable from any one chapter but completes itself only as accumulation. The single inversion underneath the whole is that illusion is primary and reality is the late arrival — so the “crime” is not that illusion killed the real but that the real (and its technical perfection) is exterminating illusion.
The book opens by stating its own genre and its own impossibility in the same breath. The whole epigraph is load-bearing and recurs as the book's refrain, so it is carried in full.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
This is the story of a crime — of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion — the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
If the crime were perfect, this book would have to be perfect too, since it claims to be the reconstruction of the crime.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
Alas, the crime is never perfect. Moreover, in this grim record of the disappearance of the real, it has not been possible to pin down either the motives or the perpetrators, and the corpse of the real itself has never been found. And the idea which underlies the book has never been pinned down either. That idea was the murder weapon.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
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 the transparence of evil, it is the transparence itself that is the evil. But perfection is always punished: the punishment for perfection is reproduction.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
Are there extenuating circumstances to this crime? Certainly not, since these always have to be sought among the motives or the perpetrators. But the crime has no motivation and no perpetrator, and therefore remains perfectly inexplicable. This is its true perfection.
The opening chapter establishes the crime's structure: no murderer, no victim, because the two are merged. The Eric Gans citation is doing the establishing work and is followed immediately by Baudrillard's own mirroring of it (subject/object for victim/persecutor), so both loci are carried.
Perfect Crime, p. 0
Though the consequences of the crime are never-ending, there is neither murderer nor victim. If there were either, the secret of the crime would be unmasked some day, and the inquiry concluded. The secret, in the end, is that the two are merged: ‘In the last analysis, the victim and the persecutor are one. We can only grasp the unity of the human race if we can grasp, in all its horror, the truth of this ultimate equivalence’ (Eric Gans).
Perfect Crime, p. 0
In the last analysis, object and subject are one. We can only grasp the essence of the world if we can grasp, in all its irony, the truth of this radical equivalence.
The crime is defined by tracelessness; its imperfection is that appearances are the clues. Both halves of the figure are carried, since the trace/tracelessness opposition is the book's constant.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
Were it not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, that is, a crime without a criminal, without a victim and without a motive. And the truth would forever have withdrawn from it and its secret would never be revealed, for want of any clues [traces] being left behind.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
But the fact is that the crime is never perfect, for the world betrays itself by appearances, which are the clues to its non-existence, the traces of the continuity of the nothing. For the nothing itself — the continuity of the nothing — leaves traces. And that is the way the world betrays its secret. That is the way it allows itself to be sensed, while at the same time hiding away behind appearances.
The artist is introduced not as an object of exposition but as the figure who keeps the crime imperfect (Michaux); the complete contiguous passage is carried so the figure arrives through the move.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
The artist, too, is always close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But he turns away from it, and his work is the trace of that criminal imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all his might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
The perfection of the crime lies in the fact that it has always-already been accomplished — perfectum. A misappropriation of the world as it is, before it even shows itself. It will never, therefore, be discovered. There will be no Last Judgement to punish or pardon it. There will be no end, because things have always-already happened. Neither resolution nor absolution, but inevitable unfolding of the consequences.
The question-reversal that the book treats as its axis, with the definition of the “material illusion” that follows it:
Perfect Crime, p. 2
The great philosophical question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’
Perfect Crime, p. 2
The absence of things from themselves, the fact that they do not take place though they appear to do so, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearance and is, therefore, never identical with itself, is the material illusion of the world.
The chapter's register turns deliberately obscene where it could be sober. The Truth/Madonna figure and the “reality is a bitch” passage are each pulled whole, the latter including the parenthetical that the v1.0 clip had skipped.
Perfect Crime, p. 3
Truth wants to give herself naked. She is desperately seeking nudity, like Madonna in the film which brought her fame. That hopeless striptease is the very striptease of reality, which ‘disrobes’ in the literal sense, offering up to the eyes of gullible voyeurs the appearance of nudity.
Perfect Crime, p. 3
And, indeed, the main objection to reality is its propensity to submit unconditionally to every hypothesis you can make about it. With this its most abject conformism, it discourages the liveliest minds. You can subject it — and its principle (what do they get up to together, by the way, apart from dully copulating and begetting reams of obviousness?) — to the most cruel torments, the most obscene provocations, the most paradoxical insinuations. It 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.
The positive program first appears as a counsel of subtraction. Both the “take something away” passage (p. 3) and the “force comes from subtraction” passage (p. 4) are carried, as this is the first locus of a formulation that recurs in the “Radical Thought” chapter.
Perfect Crime, p. 3
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 [secret], 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.
Perfect Crime, p. 4
What we have forgotten in modernity, by dint of constantly accumulating, adding, going for more, is that force comes from subtraction, power from absence. 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.
Perfect Crime, p. 4
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.
The Byzantine iconolaters supply the structural model that returns throughout (the image that dissimulates the question of God's existence), and the “highest function of the sign” sentence is the formulation that travels furthest.
Perfect Crime, p. 5
The iconolaters 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. Behind each of these images, in fact, God had disappeared. He was not dead; he had disappeared. That is to say, the problem no longer even arose. It was resolved by simulation.
Perfect Crime, p. 5
So the prophecy has been fulfilled: we live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear and, at the same time, to mask that disappearance. Art today does the same. The media today do the same. That is why they are doomed to the same fate.
The House of the Sleeping Beauties (Kawabata) carries the chapter's account of grasping things “absent from themselves,” and the passion-for-illusion formula is one of the book's most portable lines.
Perfect Crime, p. 6
There is no point identifying the world. Things have to be grasped in their sleep, or in any other circumstance where they are absent from themselves.
Perfect Crime, p. 6
There is something stronger than passion: illusion. There is something stronger than sex or happiness: the passion for illusion.
The chapter closes on the first of the book's recurring litanies — stacked anaphora doing argumentative work by accumulation. Re-pulled whole (the v1.0 clip had reduced it to its last two lines).
Perfect Crime, p. 7
Fortunately, the objects which appear to us have always-already disappeared. Fortunately, nothing appears to us in real time, any more than do the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars would be there simultaneously and the celestial vault would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, nothing takes place in real time. Otherwise, we would be subjected, where information is concerned, to the light of all events, and the present would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, we live on the basis of a vital illusion, on the basis of an absence, an unreality, a non-immediacy of things. Fortunately, nothing is instantaneous, simultaneous or contemporary. Fortunately, nothing is present or identical to itself. Fortunately, reality does not take place. Fortunately, the crime is never perfect.
The argument turns from the world to the subject's will, claimed to be a phantom organ. The Nietzschean anchor is laid down here; the English rendering Baudrillard quotes is carried whole (the German that follows it is OCR-garbled in the source and is not reproduced — see Apparatus).
Perfect Crime, p. 10
Our latent truth is that of nihilism, but, as Nietzsche writes, ‘truth cannot be regarded as the highest power. The will to semblance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming, to change (to objective deception) is to be regarded here as deeper, more original, more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality, to being — the latter is itself merely a form of the will to illusion.’
The will as prosthesis, and the Student of Prague as the figure of the will arriving after the deed is done:
Perfect Crime, p. 11
Our will is like a phantom pregnancy or an artificially innervated prosthesis. Or the ‘virtual’ suffering of the phantom limb that follows the amputation of the real one (all virtual reality is the product, like this, of a surgical operation on the real world).
The chapter's hardest political turn: existence, will, and the real as things one must not consent to, with the line on subjection to one's own law that recurs across the book.
Perfect Crime, p. 12
Existence is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as a consolation prize, and we must not believe in it. The will is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as the illusion of an autonomous subject. Now, if there is anything worse than being subject to the law of others, it is surely being subject to one's own law. The real is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as simulacrum, and the worst thing is to believe in it for want of anything else.
Perfect Crime, pp. 12–13
We are no longer free not to will. We have to will even where we have no wish to. And why stop there? We shouldn't just consult the parents on the choice of sex, but the embryos themselves. Then, at least, the absurdity of the situation would be plain for all to see. The fact is that we are, most often, in a situation of having to decide on matters we know nothing of and have no wish to know anything of. The power of others to have control of one's life is an abuse. But each person's right and duty to have control of him- or herself is even more dangerous. This is how voluntary servitude has transformed itself into its opposite — being commanded to desire, commanded to exercise freedom and choice — which is the consummate form of that servitude. The will is entrapped by the limitless freedom it is accorded, and consents to this out of an illusion of self-determination.
Physics is brought in as a parallel proof, via the Jarrosson block quotation, re-pulled whole (the v1.0 quote had clipped to its last two sentences).
Bruno Jarrosson, Invitation à une philosophie de la science physique, quoted in Perfect Crime, p. 15
The first reaction of the fathers of quantum physics at the aberrations coming out of their equations (collapse of the universe of reference: time, space, the principle of identity and of the excluded middle, inseparability, non-locality of particles) was to regard the microscopic world as radically strange and mysterious. Such an interpretation is not, however, the most logical. For the microscopic world is to be accepted as it is. If we cannot derive a conception of the macroscopic world from it, then the mystery lies in the macroscopic world. From that point, we have to think that the strangest thing is not the strangeness of the microscopic world, but the non-strangeness of the macroscopic. Why are the concepts of identity, excluded middle, time and space operative in the macroscopic world? That is what we have to explain.
Updike supplies a single line; the chapter ends on the descending series that states the ontological claim most nakedly.
Perfect Crime, p. 15
As Updike says, God is solely responsible for what we can see and hear, but in no way for anything whatever at the microscopic level.
Perfect Crime, p. 16
But in fact there is nothing.
Why is there will rather than no will?
But there is no will. There is no real. There isn't something. There is nothing. Or, in other words, the perpetual illusion of an ungraspable object and the subject who believes he grasps it.
Here the definition of simulation is given, and the move that distinguishes Baudrillard's position from a “we have lost the real” lament: simulation's opposite is not the real but illusion. The two passages sit on facing pages and are carried each to its own page.
Perfect Crime, p. 17
So the world, then, is a radical illusion. That is, at least, one hypothesis. At all events, it is an unbearable one. And to keep it at bay, we have to realize the world, give it force of reality, make it exist and signify at all costs, take from it its secret, arbitrary, accidental character, rid it of appearances and extract its meaning, divert it from all predestination and restore it to its end and its maximum efficacy, wrest it from its form to deliver it up to its formula. This gigantic enterprise of disillusionment — of, literally, putting the illusion of the world to death, to leave an absolutely real world in its stead — is what is properly meant by simulation.
Perfect Crime, p. 17
It is not, then, the real which is the opposite of simulation — the real is merely a particular case of that simulation — but illusion. And there is no crisis of reality. Far from it. There will always be more reality, because it is produced and reproduced by simulation, and is itself merely a model of simulation. The proliferation of reality, its spreading like an animal species whose natural predators have been eliminated, is our true catastrophe. This is the inevitable fate of an objective world.
The method the “Radical Thought” chapter will formalize is stated in seed form, and the catastrophe is named as excess rather than lack.
Perfect Crime, p. 19
The radical illusion of the world cannot be dispelled. The illusion of dispelling it is the secondary illusion of the disavowal and transformation of the world.
Perfect Crime, p. 19
The only response to the phantasmagoria of worlds-beyond, the latest and most subtle of which is the artificial synthesis of this world, is the higher illusion of our world.
Perfect Crime, p. 18
Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath the excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information — the sign and reality sharing a single shroud.
This chapter is built almost entirely on one sustained source: P.H. Gosse's Omphalos (reached through Stephen Jay Gould's The Flamingo's Smile). Bertrand Russell's paradox from The Analysis of Mind opens it; Gosse carries it. The verbatim Gosse is preserved because the wording is the hinge, and the “simulacrum is true” maxim (misattributed in the body; see Apparatus) is one of the book's most-quoted formulations.
Perfect Crime, p. 22
For Gosse argues: ‘as thoughts in God's mind, solidified in stone by creation ab nihilo, strata and fossils are just as true as if they recorded the products of conventional time’. If the unreal past is no less true than our objective reality, then this latter is no more true than that unreal past. And we can say, with the Ecclesiast, ‘The simulacrum is not what conceals the truth, it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’
Perfect Crime, p. 22
Gosse's suggestion is, at all events, extraordinary: to safeguard biblical revelation, he makes God an evil genius of simulation.
The contemporary twist: the human race has inherited God's evil genius of artifice, and the chapter's most-cited image (in vitro fertilization and the loss of the navel).
Perfect Crime, p. 22
Today the virtual reconstruction of the genesis of the species is the work of human beings themselves, and it is becoming the virtual reality of our past and our future.
Perfect Crime, p. 23
We are born of woman still, and shall be for some time to come, but with the coming of in vitro fertilization we shall shortly return to the ‘anomphalous’ condition of Adam: future ‘humans’ will have no navels.
Perfect Crime, p. 25
If God is capable of conjuring up a perfect illusion of the pre-Genesis era, then our current reality is eternally unverifiable. It is not, therefore, a scientific hypothesis.
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