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SAARUTU Source Brief · v2.0

Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

Trans. Chris Turner · Verso (Radical Thinkers), 2008 · Le crime parfait, Éditions Galilée, 1995 · 22 short chapters + Translator's Notes · ~150 pp.

v2.0 update: evidence layer upgraded to the full-quote standard — load-bearing formulations re-pulled verbatim from the source as complete block quotes, page-anchored; within-page ellipsis-clips re-pulled whole; recurring concepts captured at every locus. Move-structure, section order, and apparatus preserved from v1.0. Page citations are short-form to the single edition below: (Perfect Crime, p. N).

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.

I. The conceit and the governing inversion

Epigraph (unpaginated front leaf)

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 Perfect Crime (pp. 0–7)

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.

II. Will, illusion, simulation (chs. 2–4)

The Spectre of the Will (pp. 9–16)

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.

The Radical Illusion (pp. 17–20)

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.

III. Genesis, simulation, the disappearance of the real (chs. 4–7)

Trompe-l'œil Genesis (pp. 21–25)

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.

The Automatic Writing of the World (pp. 27–36)

The longest and most concept-dense chapter. It opens by defining the perfect crime as total realization, then gives Arthur C. Clarke's story as its figure. The opening definition is a primary locus of the “final solution” formulation.

Perfect Crime, p. 27

The perfect crime is that of an unconditional realization of the world by the actualization of all data, the transformation of all our acts and all events into pure information: in short, the final solution, the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning of reality and the extermination of the real by its double.

Perfect Crime, p. 27

This is precisely the theme of Arthur C. Clarke's short story ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. A community of Tibetan monks have for centuries devoted themselves to transcribing these nine billion names of God, and once they have accomplished this the purpose of the world will be achieved, and it will come to an end. The task is a tiresome one and the weary monks call in technicians from IBM, whose computers do the job in a few months. In a sense, the history of the world is completed in real time by the workings of virtual technology. Unfortunately, this also means the disappearance of the world in real time. For suddenly, the promise of the end is fulfilled and, as they walk back down into the valley, the technicians, who did not really believe in the prophecy, are aghast to see the stars going out one by one.

The “real time” litany (a recurrence of the anaphora device) and the diagnosis of the virtual as having invaded life from the inside:

Perfect Crime, p. 28

Live your life in real time — live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time — your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your revolution in real time — not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in real time — the whole thing on video from start to finish. Penetrate your body in real time — endovideoscopy: your own bloodstream, your own viscera as if you were inside them.

Perfect Crime, p. 28

The TV and the media long since left their media space to invest ‘real’ life from the inside, precisely as a virus does with a normal cell. No need of the headset and the data suit: it is our will that ends up moving about the world as though inside a computer-generated image. We have all swallowed our receivers.

The distinction from the Situationist “spectacle” is one of the chapter's load-bearing moves and is carried whole:

Perfect Crime, p. 29

Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification. The abstraction of the ‘spectacle’ was never irrevocable, even for the Situationists. Whereas unconditional realization is irrevocable, since we are no longer either alienated or dispossessed: we are in possession of all the information. We are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are, in fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with which the horrors of alienation were very small beer.

Critical thought is diagnosed as having consumed itself:

Perfect Crime, p. 30

Having no more victims to devour, the critical illusion has devoured itself. Even more than the industrial machines, it is the machinery of thought itself that is laid off. At the extreme end of its journey, critical thought has wound back on itself. Where once it was future-orientated, it is now umbilical.

Duchamp's bottle-rack and the ready-made are the chapter's pivot from art to media; the TV “reality show” performs the same operation as the ready-made.

Perfect Crime, p. 30

Those who are plucked from their real lives to come and act out the psychodrama of their AIDS or their marital problems on TV have an ancestor in Duchamp's bottle-rack which that artist similarly plucked from the real world to confer on it elsewhere — in a field we still agree to call art — an undefinable hyperreality.

Perfect Crime, p. 31

So, we have all become ready-mades. Hypostatized like the bottle-rack, our sterile identities taxidermized, we have become living museum pieces, cloned in our own image by High Definition and condemned, by that exact resemblance, to media stupefaction, just as the ready-made is condemned to aesthetic stupefaction.

The book's master matrix — High Definition as an inverse proportion across every domain — is carried as the single contiguous passage it forms, including the list the v1.0 version had clipped with an ellipsis.

Perfect Crime, pp. 31–32

The key concept of this Virtuality is High Definition. That of the image, but also of time (Real Time), of music (High Fidelity), of sex (pornography), of thought (Artificial Intelligence), of language (digital languages), of the body (the genetic code and the genome). Everywhere, High Definition marks the transition — beyond any natural determination — to an operational formula — and, precisely, a ‘definitive’ one, the transition to a world where referential substance is becoming increasingly rare. The highest definition of the medium corresponds to the lowest definition of the message — the highest definition of the news item corresponds to the lowest definition of the event, the highest definition of sex (porn) corresponds to the lowest definition of desire, the highest definition of language (in digital coding) corresponds to the lowest definition of meaning, the highest definition of the other (in immediate interaction) corresponds to the lowest definition of otherness and exchange, etc.

The Peking Opera counter-example, proving illusion fades as technical perfection increases:

Perfect Crime, p. 32

To appreciate the truth of this, one only has to think of the Peking Opera and how, with the mere movement of their bodies, the old man and the girl brought to life on the stage the sheer size of the river and how, in the duel scene, the two bodies, skimming each other with their weapons yet not touching, made the darkness in which the duel took place tangible. That was total illusion — an ecstasy more physical and material than aesthetic or theatrical, precisely because all realist presence of the night or the river had been excised. Today, they would pipe tons of water into the studio, and the duel would be shot in darkness with infra-red cameras.

Real Time against the symbolic rule of exchange — the obscene definition and the incompatibility:

Perfect Crime, p. 33

The immediate totting up, itemizing and storing of all these exchanges, precisely as occurs with writing on word-processors, bespeaks an interactive compulsion which respects neither the timing nor the rhythm (not to mention the pleasure) of exchange, and combines artificial insemination and premature ejaculation in the same operation.

Perfect Crime, p. 33

There is a profound incompatibility between real time and the symbolic rule of exchange. What governs the sphere of communication (the interface, immediacy, the abolition of time and distance) has no meaning in the sphere of exchange, where the rule is that what is given should never be returned immediately. It has to be returned, but never right away. That is a serious, mortal insult. There must never be immediate interaction.

Artificial Intelligence as the realized utopia of thought, “truer than truth,” and the consequence that thought aligns to the machine:

Perfect Crime, p. 33

A high-definition operation: the information which results is truer than truth — it is true in real time. That is why it is fundamentally uncertain.

Perfect Crime, p. 34

Thought would end up thinking only what the machine can take in and process, or would think only when the machine requests it. This is already how things stand with computers and information technology. In the generalized interface, thought itself will become virtual reality, the equivalent of computer-generated images or the automatic writing of word-processors.

The chapter explicitly raises and then surpasses Heidegger — the first of three Heidegger loci, all carried (see also pp. 63 and 74–75) — and closes on the “no room for both” formula.

Perfect Crime, p. 35

With Virtual Reality and all its consequences, we have passed over into the extreme of technology, into technology as an extreme phenomenon. This hypothesis is much graver than that of technological alienation or Heidegger's Gestell. It is the hypothesis of a project of irreversible disappearance in the purest logic of the species.

Perfect Crime, p. 36

There is, in fact, no room for both natural and artificial intelligence. There is no room for both the world and its double.

The Horizon of Disappearance (pp. 37–46)

The chapter's epigraph and its signature reversal of McLuhan, both carried whole.

Dietmar Kamper, epigraph to ch. “The Horizon of Disappearance,” Perfect Crime, p. 37

When the horizon disappears, what then appears is the horizon of disappearance.

Perfect Crime, p. 37

McLuhan saw modern technologies as ‘extensions of man’. We should see them, rather, as ‘expulsions of man’.

Lévi-Strauss is brought for a single distinction, with the claim that contemporary culture does both at once:

Perfect Crime, p. 38

Lévi-Strauss used to distinguish between two types of culture: those which introject and absorb, which devour — anthropophagic cultures — and those which spew out, eject, expel — anthropo-emic cultures, modern cultures. But ours — our contemporary culture — seems to effect a brilliant synthesis of the two; of the most extreme integration — of functions, spaces and human beings — and the most radical ejection, quasi-biological rejection — the system expelling us, even as it integrates us, into countless technical prostheses, right down to the very latest and most admirable stage in the process: the prosthetics of thought in Artificial Intelligence.

The interactive machine redescribed as a “deferred-responsibility machine” effecting “the automatic deletion of the world,” and the problem of the “laid off” real:

Perfect Crime, p. 43

All these machines, which claim to be ‘live’ interactive devices, are in fact deferred-responsibility machines.

Perfect Crime, p. 43

The integrated circuit loops back on itself, ensuring, as it were, the automatic deletion of the world.

Perfect Crime, pp. 44–45

The sad consequence of all this is that we no longer know what to do with the real world. We can no longer see any need whatever for this residue which has become an encumbrance. A crucial philosophical problem, that of the real which has been ‘laid off’. And we have the same problem with unemployment: what is to be done with labour in the computer age?

Perfect Crime, p. 45

In desperation, we shall be forced to turn it into a special attraction, a historical tableau, a nature reserve: ‘Coming to you live from reality! Visit this strange world! Experience the thrill of the real world!’

The Countdown (pp. 47–52)

Reality is historicized as a temporary effect of a certain speed; in slow societies it does not crystallize.

Perfect Crime, pp. 47–48

In slower societies — primitive ones, for example — reality does not exist; it does not ‘crystallize’, for want of a sufficient critical mass. There is not enough acceleration for there to be linearity and, hence, for there to be causes and effects.

The Marx Brothers / Harpo image carrying the chapter (Reality as the wall held up by everyone), pulled whole:

Perfect Crime, p. 48

In one of the Marx Brothers' films, Harpo is leaning against a wall. ‘What are you doing there?’ ‘Holding up the wall,’ he gestures. ‘Are you kidding? Get away!’ Harpo steps aside, and the wall collapses. Are we not all leaning against that wall, and is it not the wall of Reality? If just one person moved away, the wall would come down, burying the millions of people squatting this disused barracks.

The Borges map/territory and the “anorexic history” wordplay (load-bearing because the pun is the argument):

Perfect Crime, p. 49

We are in the — perhaps interminable — phase of hysteresis of the real, of remanence of the shreds of reality in the immense virtuality which surrounds them, like the shreds of territory over the expanse of the map in the Borges story.

Perfect Crime, p. 49

‘Sans fin’ — without end — equals ‘sans faim’ — without hunger: it is a kind of anorexic history which no longer feeds on real happenings, and wears itself out in counting down. A history without desire, without passion, without tension, without real events, where the problem is no longer one of changing life, which was the maximal utopia, but of surviving, which is the minimal utopia.

AIDS as the model of the programmed countdown of death:

Perfect Crime, p. 50

And AIDS is, indeed, the illustration of this preordained falling-due of death. But it is merely one particular case of it: in the future we shall all be condemned to know in advance the date and detailed form of our deaths. So we shall all be in a countdown situation, in a situation of a programmed rundown of time.

The Darwin–Wallace debate and the deliberately provocative genetics statistic, carried verbatim:

Perfect Crime, p. 50

This is the same question Darwin and Wallace debated, the latter resolving it by the intervention of God. God was alone responsible for this supernatural privilege of man. But if God is responsible for this biological extravagance, then he is in collusion with the spirit of Evil, whose specific peculiarity is to drive the universe to excess.

Perfect Crime, p. 50

If 80 per cent of human genes are useless, how do matters stand with the useable power of the brain? Was it necessary to mobilize such a cortical and cerebrospinal machinery to get to where we are?

Hölderlin quoted in order to be inverted — one of the book's clearest tells. The whole inversion is carried.

Perfect Crime, p. 51

We ought now to turn those lines of Hölderlin around: ‘But where there is danger, there grows also what saves’, and say ‘But where what saves grows, there also grows danger’, which would characterize the much graver threat of disintegration and death represented by our excess of security, prevention, immunity, and the fatal excess of positivity.

Perfect Crime, p. 51

The clock at the Pompidou Centre, where the countdown to the end of the millennium is shown digitally, in millions of seconds, is a fine illustration of this virtual exhaustion. As with rocket launches or time-bombs (perhaps the Pompidou Centre is a time-bomb?), time is not counted from an origin, but is counted down from the end.

IV. Physics, the void, the height of reality (chs. 8–10)

The Material Illusion (pp. 53–60)

The chapter turns the concept of illusion on itself, then grounds the “objective illusion” in the finite speed of light.

Perfect Crime, p. 53

So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, it has a value precisely equivalent to reality. But once the illusion has been recognized as such, it is no longer an illusion. It is, therefore, the very concept of illusion, and that concept alone, which is an illusion.

Perfect Crime, pp. 53–54

The objective illusion is the physical fact that in this universe no things coexist in real time — not sexes, stars, this glass, this table, or myself and all that surrounds me. By the fact of dispersal and the relative speed of light, all things exist only in a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an inescapable distance from each other. And so they are never truly present to each other, nor are they, therefore, ‘real’ for each other.

Perfect Crime, p. 55

It's a good thing we ourselves do not live in real time! What would we be in ‘real’ time? We would be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. A torment equivalent to that of eternal daylight — a kind of epilepsy of presence, epilepsy of identity. Autism, madness. No more absence from oneself, no more distance from others.

The book's central reversal of the subject–object relation, here in its first full statement (it recurs in “The Irony of Technology,” p. 73, and closes the book at pp. 149–150). Carried whole, including the “mirror peoples” phrase that titles the last chapter.

Perfect Crime, p. 57

The main focus of interest has always been on the conditions in which the subject discovers the object, but those in which the object discovers the subject have not been explored at all. We flatter ourselves that we discover the object and conceive it as waiting there meekly to be discovered. But perhaps the cleverer party here is not the one we think. What if it were the object which discovered us in all this? What if it were the object which invented us? This would give us not merely an uncertainty principle, which can be mastered by equations, but a principle of reversibility which is much more radical and more aggressive. (Similarly, didn't viruses discover us at least as much as we discovered them, with all the consequences that follow? And didn't the American Indians themselves discover us in the end? This is the eternal revenge of the mirror peoples.)

The “at a stroke” hypothesis, with the Lévi-Strauss logomass:

Perfect Crime, p. 59

Exactly like language in Lévi-Strauss: the logomass, the mass of signifier, emerges at a stroke, in its entirety. Nothing further will be added in terms of information. There is even too much — an excess of signifier, which will never be reduced. Once it has appeared, it is, like the biomass, indestructible.

Perfect Crime, p. 59

Astromass, biomass, logomass, sociomass — all of these are doubtless destined to come to an end, though not gradually but, rather, by a breakdown which is, like their appearance, sudden. Cultures also invent themselves at a stroke — their emergence is inexplicable in evolutionistic terms.

The Secret Vestiges of Perfection (pp. 61–64)

A short physics-of-origins chapter resting on a Michel Cassé block quotation on symmetry-breaking, with the claim that the human is the trace of imperfection. The Cassé quote is carried whole.

Michel Cassé, Du Vide et de la Création, quoted in Perfect Crime, p. 61

One abstracts, first of all, from the clumsy appearances of reality, to render it consonant with the canon of classical beauty, then one breaks, one by one, the symmetries of absolute beauty in order to make the model resemble the sensible appearance.

Perfect Crime, pp. 62–63

The original void is amorphous, sterile, homogeneous, symmetrical. It is perfect. No reality can emerge there. It is absolute illusion. This symmetry has to be broken if a law-governed materiality is to establish itself — an imperfection, in which real bodies emerge. Of that imperfection, we — human beings — are the trace, since perfection is of the order of the inhuman.

Heidegger returns, this time invoked sympathetically as a possible exit (second of three loci):

Perfect Crime, p. 63

Unless, perhaps, we rediscover — coming to a deeper understanding of the essence of technology, as Heidegger conceives it — ‘the stellar course of the mystery’. Unless, perhaps, indestructible illusion awaits us at the end of the process.

The Height of Reality (pp. 65–72)

The chapter's thesis is stated against the common diagnosis, with the demand for a new object of thought and the homeopathic method.

Perfect Crime, p. 65

We labour under the illusion that it is the real we lack the most, but actually, reality is at its height. By our technical exploits, we have reached such a degree of reality and objectivity that we might even speak of an excess of reality, which leaves us far more anxious and disconcerted than the lack of it.

Perfect Crime, p. 66

What we lack most is a conceptualization of the completion of reality. This paradoxical configuration of an achieved universe imposes another mode of thinking than the critical. A thinking that goes beyond the end, a thinking of extreme phenomena.

Perfect Crime, pp. 66–67

To think extreme phenomena, thought must itself become an extreme phenomenon; it must abandon any critical pretensions, any dialectical illusions, any rational hope, and move, like the world, into a paradoxical phase, an ironic and paroxystic phase. It has to be more hyperreal than the real, more virtual than virtual reality. The simulacrum of thought has to move more quickly than the others. Since we can no longer multiply the negative by the negative, we have to multiply the positive by the positive.

The phrase the book is sometimes remembered by, and its gloss on the asymmetry of Good and Evil:

Perfect Crime, p. 68

And so the transparence of Evil is merely the transpiration of the worst through the best. Nothing is more entertaining than the fact that Evil comes out of Good. But isn't there an equal irony in the fact that Good comes out of Evil? We have, in fact, to look at things differently. Good is when Good comes out of Good, or Evil out of Evil. That is when there is order. Evil is when Evil comes out of Good, or Good out of Evil. That is when things are all wrong.

Brecht's Flüchtlingsgespräche is the chapter's load-bearing source, supplying the “dialectics of nullity”; both the beer-and-cigar exchange and the order/disorder formula are carried, each cited to its page.

Perfect Crime, pp. 68–69

In his Flüchtlingsgespräche, Brecht has two refugees in transit talking over a beer in a station buffet. Ziffer says: ‘This beer isn't a beer. But the fact that this cigar isn't a cigar either makes up for that. If the beer weren't a beer, but the cigar were a cigar, then things would be all wrong.’ So order is established out of the harmonious compensating effect of several disorders.

Perfect Crime, p. 70

In the same dialogue, Brecht writes: ‘When, in the wrong place, there is something, that's disorder. When, in the right place, there is nothing, that's order.’ So the dialectic follows its course — not towards an ideal solution, but towards a null order, and the self-evidence of the world as the self-evidence of a zero-sum equation.

The Gulf War named as the model of the non-event, and the passport that survives the man:

Perfect Crime, pp. 69–70

But is there not equal disorder if, where something should have happened (on the screens during the Gulf War), nothing happens? No pictures and, strictly speaking, no war. But the non-happening of the pictures was secretly in tune with the non-happening of the war.

Perfect Crime, p. 70

The man is without identity, but the passport which identifies him is identical to itself. Now, the passport is also the mark of exile, and so the only thing which identifies him simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the man has become foreign to himself.

Pataphysics (Jarry) closes the chapter:

Perfect Crime, p. 71

Pataphysics is the imaginary science of our world, the imaginary science of excess, of excessive, parodic, paroxystic effects — particularly the excess of emptiness and insignificance.

V. Irony, Warhol, photography (chs. 11–13)

The Irony of Technology (pp. 73–77)

The subject–object reversal is made explicit and named, with the “objective irony” that replaces both subjective mastery and critical alienation.

Perfect Crime, p. 73

At the peak of our technological performance, the irresistible impression remains that something eludes us — not because we seem to have lost it (the real?), but because we are no longer in a position to see it: that, in effect, it is not we who are winning out over the world, but the world which is winning out over us. It is no longer we who think the object, but the object which thinks us.

Perfect Crime, p. 73

All our technologies might, therefore, be said to be the instrument of a world which we believe we rule, whereas in fact the world is using this machinery to impose itself, and we are merely the operators.

The chapter's clearest filing of the book's claim against Heidegger (third locus), while quoting him — both the framing and the Heidegger sentence carried.

Perfect Crime, p. 74

A proposition which would deliver us from the Heideggerian vision of technology as the final phase of metaphysics, from the retrospective nostalgia for being and from all unhappy critique in terms of alienation and disenchantment. And would put in its place a conception of the gigantic objective irony of this whole process, which would not be far from radical snobbery, from the post-historical snobbery Kojève spoke of.

Perfect Crime, p. 74

Heidegger: ‘When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.’

The chapter's culminating formula, and the two undecidable hypotheses closed with Wittgenstein:

Perfect Crime, p. 76

The critical function of the subject has given way to the ironic function of the object. Once they have passed through the medium or through the image, through the spectrum of the sign and the commodity, objects, by their very existence, perform an artificial and ironic function.

Perfect Crime, p. 76

As Wittgenstein says: ‘The world is everything which is the case’.

Machinic Snobbery (pp. 77–86)

A sustained single-figure chapter on Warhol, the longest engagement with any contemporary in the book.

Perfect Crime, p. 77

There is nothing to say about Warhol, and Warhol has said just this in all his interviews and in his Journal, without rhetoric, without irony, without commentary — he alone being able to refract the insignificance of his images and his doings into the insignificance of his discourse.

Perfect Crime, p. 77

Warhol was the first to bring us modern fetishism, transaesthetic fetishism — that of an image without quality, a presence without desire.

The distinction from Duchamp and Picabia is the chapter's pivot:

Perfect Crime, p. 79

In Picabia and Duchamp, the machine is still present as surrealist mechanicity, not as machinality — not, in other words, as the automatic reality of the modern world. Whereas Warhol identifies purely and simply with the machinic, which is what gives his images their contagious power.

Perfect Crime, pp. 79–80

One should read Warhol's Journal — the whole of it — as the finest account of this transparency, this meticulous expressionlessness, this will to insignificance which is doubtless our contemporary version of the will to power.

The passage Baudrillard takes from Warhol (the source's own ellipses are retained as printed):

quoted in Perfect Crime, p. 80

… it's all there. The affectless gaze. The diffracted grace. . . The bored languor, the wasted pallor . . . The chic freakiness, the basically passive astonishment, the enthralling secret knowledge . . . The childlike, gum-chewing naiveté, the glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones.

Valerie Solanas and the hologram, with Warhol's own line:

Perfect Crime, p. 80

Valerie Solanas was even to try to shatter that lens by shooting at it, to pass through the hologram to establish that blood could still flow from it. So we can agree with Warhol: ‘You can't get more superficial than me and live’. And he nearly didn't come out of it alive.

Perfect Crime, p. 81

And the famous fifteen minutes of fame he spoke of was only ever the ability to accede to that extreme insignificance — that insignificance which generates a vacuum all around it, and towards which all desires are thus irresistibly drawn. It is not so easy, that insignificance. In the empty space of desire, the seats don't come cheap.

The Cathar “theory of the Perfect” making illusion the egalitarian principle, and the “democracy of extras” (Marilyn Monroe):

Perfect Crime, p. 84

Illusion is, in effect, the most egalitarian, the most democratic principle there is: everyone is equal before the world as illusion, whereas we are not at all equal before the world as Truth and Reality, where all inequalities are engendered.

Perfect Crime, p. 85

Marilyn Monroe is a walk-on actor: she is a star only because she has entered pure walk-on. When she fires at Warhol, Valerie Solanas is merely one extra shooting at another. This is the universal democracy of extras.

Perfect Crime, p. 85

A machine should be unhappy, because it is perfectly alienated. But Warhol is not: he has invented the joy of the machine, the joy of making the world even more illusory than it was before.

Objects in This Mirror (pp. 87–91)

A chapter on photography, opening with the formula that returns as the book's last line (first locus; the inversion closes the book at p. 150).

Perfect Crime, p. 87

‘I'll be your mirror’: this is the formula of the subject. ‘We shall be your favourite disappearing act!’: this is the slogan of the object. Yet that disappearance also has to be the ‘appearing act’ of the Other. For that is the only way for him to exist.

Perfect Crime, p. 87

Every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else. From the summit of this object exceptionally absent from the rest of the world, you have an unbeatable view on the world.

The claim against the photographer's self-image and the value of the negative's time-lag:

Perfect Crime, p. 89

Where does the objective magic of photography come from? The answer is that it is the object which does all the work. Photographers will never admit it, and always argue that all the originality lies in their vision of the world.

Perfect Crime, pp. 88–89

The photo is not an image in real time. It retains the moment of the negative, the suspense of the negative, that slight time-lag which allows the image to exist before the world — or the object — disappears into the image, which they could not do in the computer-generated image, where the real has already disappeared.

The chapter ends on the Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu dialogue, carried as the full block quotation because the joke is the argument about knowing the other from within.

Chuang Tzu, quoted in Perfect Crime, p. 90

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, ‘See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes.’ ‘You not being a fish yourself,’ said Hui Tzu, ‘how can you possibly know in what consists the pleasure of fishes?’ ‘And you not being I,’ retorted Chuang Tzu, ‘how can you know that I do not know?’ ‘If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,’ urged Hui Tzu, ‘it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know in what consists the pleasure of fishes.’ ‘Let us go back’, said Chuang Tzu, ‘to your original question. You asked me how I knew in what consists the pleasure of fishes. Your very question shows that you knew I knew. For you asked me how I knew. I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.’

VI. Language, gaming, and the method of radical thought (chs. 14–15)

The Babel Syndrome (pp. 91–95)

The dispersion of languages reread as a blessing against meaning, with the load-bearing distinction between “different” and “other.”

Perfect Crime, p. 91

We came very close to the perfect crime with the Tower of Babel. Fortunately, God stepped in to scatter the languages of the world and sow confusion among men. For the dispersion of languages is a disaster only from the point of view of meaning and communication. From the point of view of language itself, the richness and uniqueness of language, it is a blessing from heaven.

Perfect Crime, p. 92

As though languages could be reconciled! The very hypothesis is absurd. They could be if they were — merely — different. But languages are not different, they are other. They are not plural, they are singular. And, like all that is singular, they are irreconcilable. We must prefer the singular to the plural.

Borges's “The Babylon Lottery” as the chapter's sustained source, and the thesis on gaming as the only democratic principle.

Perfect Crime, pp. 92–93

Now, the objective arbitrariness of chance — open indeterminacy — is preferable to the masked illusion of free will. Everyone ends up preferring to be ‘just anyone’, at the Lottery's whim; ends up preferring to have an accidental destiny rather than a personal existence.

Perfect Crime, p. 94

No one is equal before the law, whereas all are equal before the rule, since it is arbitrary. The only democracy, therefore, is that of gaming. That is why the popular classes indulge in it with fervour.

Radical Thought (pp. 95–107)

The methodological core of the book and the chapter to return to for the operating instructions. The Stevenson epigraph is carried, then converted.

R.L. Stevenson, epigraph to ch. “Radical Thought,” Perfect Crime, p. 95

The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, but by its immeasurable difference from life.

Perfect Crime, p. 95

So, too, the value of thought lies not so much in its inevitable convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it from truth.

Radical thought as a wager on illusion, and the central anxiety of the chapter: the death of theory by verification.

Perfect Crime, pp. 98–99

Unlike the discourse of the real, which gambles on the fact of there being something rather than nothing, and aspires to being founded on the guarantee of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought, for its part, wagers on the illusion of the world.

Perfect Crime, p. 102

And, in so doing, they mystify us, for a theory which is verified is no longer a theory. It's terrifying to see the idea coincide with the reality. These are the death-throes of the concept. The epiphany of the real is the twilight of its concept.

Reality's submission to every hypothesis as its weapon, and Popper turned against itself:

Perfect Crime, p. 100

For reality asks nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses. And it confirms them all. That, indeed, is its ruse and its vengeance.

Perfect Crime, p. 102

So, for example, you put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it (the guarantee of scientificity for Popper). Alas, only the fanatical supporters of reality react; reality, for its part, does not seem to wish to prove you wrong. Quite to the contrary, every kind of simulacrum parades around in it.

Adorno and Hopper each supply a single line supporting the chapter's aesthetic ethics:

Perfect Crime, p. 103

You can see why, as Adorno says, concepts prefer to scupper themselves rather than reach that point.

quoted in Perfect Crime, p. 104

‘I do not paint sadness and loneliness,’ says Hopper. ‘What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’

Perfect Crime, p. 104

At any rate, better a despairing analysis in felicitous language than an optimistic analysis in an infelicitous language that is maddeningly tedious and demoralizingly platitudinous, as is most often the case.

The chapter ends in the imperatives that function as the book's method-statement, carried whole; the “leave no trace” formula recurs here as the definition of writing (a locus of the trace motif from p. 1).

Perfect Crime, p. 105

Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion — in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real.

Perfect Crime, pp. 106–107

An idea is never destined to burst upon the world, but to be extinguished into it, into its showing-through in the world, the world's showing-through in it. A book ends only with the disappearance of its object. Its substance must leave no trace. This is the equivalent of a perfect crime.

Perfect Crime, p. 106

The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us — unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

VII. The Other Side of the Crime: extermination of the Other (chs. 16–22)

The part-divider “The Other Side of the Crime” (pp. 107–110) marks the book's second movement, where the murder of reality is recast as the murder of the Other. The threshold statements and the litany are carried; the litany runs continuously across the pp. 109–110 page-turn and is cited to its span.

Perfect Crime, p. 109

With the Virtual, we enter not only upon the era of the liquidation of the Real and the Referential, but that of the extermination of the Other. It is the equivalent of an ethnic cleansing which would not just affect particular populations but unrelentingly pursue all forms of otherness.

Perfect Crime, p. 109

If information is the site of the perfect crime against reality, communication is the site of the perfect crime against otherness.

Perfect Crime, pp. 109–110

No more other: communication. No more enemy: negotiation. No more predators: conviviality. No more negativity: absolute positivity. No more death: the immortality of the clone. No more otherness: identity and difference. No more seduction: sexual in-difference. No more illusion: hyperreality, Virtual Reality. No more secret: transparency. No more destiny. The perfect crime.

The World Without Women (pp. 111–115)

Built on Virgilio Martini's novel Il Mondo senza Donne, read as an allegory of the extermination of otherness.

Perfect Crime, p. 111

The World Without Women (Il Mondo senza Donne, 1935) by Virgilio Martini describes the ravages of a mysterious illness (eventually named ‘fallopitis’) which decimates all childbearing women between puberty and the menopause. The symptoms of the illness irresistibly evoke those of AIDS some fifty years later. By an amazing coincidence, it begins in Haiti and spreads throughout the world and, by another paradoxical coincidence, it is eventually discovered that this illness, which science is powerless to control (exactly as with AIDS), originated in a plot hatched by homosexuals to exterminate the female of the species!

Perfect Crime, p. 111

But the central idea is that of an extermination of femaleness — a terrifying allegory of the extermination of all otherness, for which the feminine is the metaphor and, perhaps, more than the metaphor.

Perfect Crime, pp. 111–112

For to be deprived of the other is to be deprived of sex, and to be deprived of sex is to be deprived of symbolic belonging to any species whatsoever.

The German distinction carried verbatim because it is the chapter's hinge, and the master/slave figure:

Perfect Crime, p. 112

In German, there are two apparently synonymous terms with a very significant distinction between them. ‘Verfremdung’ means becoming other, becoming estranged from oneself — alienation in the literal sense. ‘Entfremdung’, by contrast, means to be dispossessed of the other, to lose all otherness. Now, it is much more serious to be dispossessed of the other than of oneself.

Perfect Crime, pp. 113–114

What becomes of a master without a slave? He ends up terrorizing himself. And of a slave without a master? He ends up exploiting himself. The two are conjoined today in the modern form of voluntary servitude: enslavement to data systems and calculation systems — total efficiency, total performance.

The Surgical Removal of Otherness (pp. 115–124)

Modernity defined as the age of the production of the other, with von Braun supporting the male-hysteria genealogy of the modern image of woman.

Perfect Crime, p. 115

With modernity, we enter the age of the production of the other. The aim is no longer to kill the other, devour it, seduce it, vie with it, love it or hate it, but, first, to produce it. It is no longer an object of passion, it is an object of production.

Perfect Crime, p. 116

It was to some extent the femininity of man which was projected into woman, shaping her as ideal figure in his likeness.

The chapter's most-cited formulation on woman as other (not merely different):

Perfect Crime, pp. 118–119

In any case, in this whole business about difference, there is always one term more different than the other. Woman is, in fact, more different than man. And not only more different than him, but more than different. Man is only different, but woman is other: strange, absent, enigmatic, antagonistic.

Sexual harassment read as the deadlock of difference, with the reductio carried verbatim and the Bellocchio film as the single illustration:

Perfect Crime, p. 121

If we are to take this attitude, we should put the sperm on the blacklist too, since its effort to penetrate the ovum is surely the prototype of sexual harassment (though perhaps there is inducement on the part of the ovary?).

Perfect Crime, pp. 121–122

So, in Bellochio's film The Sentence [La Condanna], the question is whether the man really raped the woman, since she had an orgasm. The prosecution claims that he did, while the defence's plea is that, in the end, the victim consented.

The definitional payoff on otherness as the incomparable, and the imperative that follows:

Perfect Crime, pp. 122–123

What defines otherness is not that the two terms are not identifiable, but that they are not opposable. Otherness is of the order of the incomparable. It is not exchangeable in terms of a general equivalence; it is not negotiable; and yet it circulates in the mode of complicity and the dual relation, both in seduction and in war.

Perfect Crime, p. 123

This reconciliation of all antagonistic forms in the name of consensus and conviviality is the worst thing we can do. We must reconcile nothing. We must keep open the otherness of forms, the disparity between terms; we must keep alive the forms of the irreducible.

The 'Laying-Off' of Desire (pp. 125–131)

The body as fetish to be perfected, with the white-magic/black-magic distinction and the operations-on-the-self series (Madonna):

Perfect Crime, p. 125

And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and ‘white’ seduction — in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness.

Perfect Crime, p. 125

This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!).

Marc Guillaume's spectrality and the data suit; pornography as transparency; la Cicciolina:

Perfect Crime, pp. 127–128

The other is merely a transitional object. The secondary gain from the loss of the other is an ability to transform oneself into anyone at all — through role-playing, virtual and computer games, through that new spectrality Marc Guillaume speaks of, with the age of Virtual Reality still to come, when we shall don otherness like a data suit.

Perfect Crime, p. 128

It is in this transparency, this charnel house of signs of the body disincarnate, that pornographic images move (it is, indeed, transparency itself that is pornographic, not the lascivious obscenity of the body).

Perfect Crime, p. 129

Thus, if it was possible for la Cicciolina to be elected a member of the Italian Parliament, this is because the political and the sexual, having become transpolitical and transsexual, meet in the same ironic indifference.

The chapter ends on the litany of reconciliations refused (recurrence of the anaphora device):

Perfect Crime, p. 130

We can only remember that seduction resides in the safeguarding of alienness, in non-reconciliation. One should not be reconciled with one's body, nor with oneself, one should not be reconciled with the other, one should not be reconciled with nature, one should not reconcile male and female, nor good and evil. Therein lies the secret of a strange attraction.

The New Victim Order (pp. 131–142)

The argument that an indifferent society ends in victimhood and hatred, with racism as the lead example and the counter-intuitive empirical claim stated as a paradox.

Perfect Crime, pp. 131–132

Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference.

Perfect Crime, p. 132

Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.

The Sarajevo polemic (Susan Sontag, the Arte link-up), with the Bosnians' contempt read as sovereignty and the Western theatre of solidarity:

Perfect Crime, p. 133

‘I spit on Europe,’ said one of them. Nothing offers greater freedom, in fact, or greater sovereignty, than justified contempt — and not even towards the enemy, but towards those basking with their good consciences in the warm sun of solidarity.

Perfect Crime, pp. 133–134

Actors have even come from New York to put on Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo. Why not Bouvard et Pécuchet in Somalia or Afghanistan? Yet the worst part of it isn't the surfeit of cultural fine feeling, but the condescension and the error of judgement. It is they who are the strong ones and we who are weak, going over there looking for the means to make up for our weakness and loss of reality.

Perfect Crime, p. 134

Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbé Pierre offering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathos-laden language and sociological metalanguage of wretchedness.

The chapter's hardest thesis — ethnic cleansing as constitutive of a “white Europe” — with the Le Pen claim, carried whole.

Perfect Crime, pp. 135–136

The real story is that the Serbs, as the vehicles of ethnic cleansing, are at the forefront of the construction of Europe. For it is being constructed, the real Europe, the white Europe, a Europe whitewashed, integrated and purified, morally as much as economically or ethnically. It is being victoriously constructed at Sarajevo.

Perfect Crime, p. 136

Why do you think Le Pen has largely disappeared from the political stage? Because the substance of his ideas has everywhere filtered into the political class. No need for Le Pen any more, since he has won, not politically, but virally — in mentalities.

The victim-society thesis, Foucault's single reversal, and the critique of “politically correct” euphemism with its examples verbatim:

Perfect Crime, p. 137

The new identity is the victim's identity. Everything is organized around the deprived, frustrated, handicapped subject, and the victim strategy is that of his acknowledgement as such. Every difference is asserted in the victimal mode of recrimination (of the reparation of a crime); others are called on only for purposes of recognition. This is the social sphere as human rights therapy, as surgery for the mending of identities.

Perfect Crime, p. 138

Foucault argued that a whole culture was at one time engaged in the confession of sex. It has now gone over to the confession of wretchedness.

Perfect Crime, p. 139

It is the ‘politically correct’ in all its effects — an enterprise of laundering and mental prophylaxis, beginning with the prophylactic treatment of language. Black people, the handicapped, the blind and prostitutes become ‘people of colour’, ‘the disabled’, ‘the visually impaired’, and ‘sex workers’: they have to be laundered like dirty money. Every negative destiny has to be cleaned up by a doctoring even more obscene than what it is trying to hide.

The chapter ends on the humanitarian profession of faith, read as the proposition of nihilism:

Perfect Crime, p. 141

This statement, which actually seeks to show the greatest respect for life, attests only to a contempt and an indifference for ideas and for life. Worse than the desire to destroy life is this refusal to risk it — nothing being worth the trouble of being sacrificed. This is truly the worst offence, the worst affront possible. It is the fundamental proposition of nihilism.

Indifference and Hatred (pp. 143–148)

The disappearance of “objects not to believe in,” the shift from anomie to anomaly, and the claim that universal systems secrete virulence.

Perfect Crime, p. 143

In the past, we had objects to believe in — objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, but objects none the less. Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared.

Perfect Crime, p. 147

If this is not the end of History, it is certainly the end of the social. We are no longer in anomie, but in anomaly. Anomaly is what escapes not only the law but the rule.

Perfect Crime, p. 147

When a system becomes universal (the media, networks, the financial markets, human rights), it automatically becomes anomalous and secretes virulences of all kinds: financial crashes, AIDS, computer viruses, deregulation, disinformation. Hatred itself is a virus of this kind.

Hatred as the objectless terminus, with Paulin as the chapter's single case study and the closing verdict:

Perfect Crime, p. 146

All these indifferent passions, or passions born of indifference, all these negative passions, culminate in hatred. A strange expression: ‘I've got the hate’ [J'ai la haine]. No object.

Perfect Crime, pp. 147–148

Take Paulin, the man from Guadeloupe who went around murdering old ladies a few years ago. A monstrous individual, but cool, and with no apparent hatred in him. He had no identity, and was of indeterminate sex and mixed race. He committed his murders without violence or bloodshed. And he recounted them with an odd detachment. Being indifferent to himself, he was eliminating people who were themselves indifferent.

Perfect Crime, p. 148

In this sense, hatred, a viral passion, is also a vital passion. Against the perfection of the system, hatred is a last vital reaction.

The Revenge of the Mirror People (pp. 149–151; coda p. 152)

The closing chapter returns to the subject–object reversal of “The Material Illusion” and gives it Borges's legend as its full statement. The Borges epigraph is carried whole.

J.L. Borges, epigraph to ch. “The Revenge of the Mirror People,” Perfect Crime, p. 149

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated.

Perfect Crime, p. 150

Such is the allegory of otherness vanquished and condemned to the servile fate of resemblance. Our image in the mirror is not innocent, then. Behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed. The Other vanquished, and condemned merely to be the Same.

Perfect Crime, p. 150

So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less.

I'll not be your mirror!

The unnumbered coda restates the book as itself a move in the crime it describes:

Perfect Crime, p. 152

To sum up, we find ourselves faced with a dual project: a bid to complete the world, to achieve an integral reality — and a bid to continue the Nothing (of which the book is a part). Both are doomed to fail. But, whereas the failure of an attempt at completion is, necessarily, negative, the failure of an attempt at annihilation is, necessarily, vital and positive. It is for this reason that thought, which knows it will fail in any case, is duty-bound to set itself criminal objectives.

Perfect Crime, p. 152

If the system fails to be everything, nothing will remain of it. If thought fails to be nothing, something will remain of it.

VIII. Recurrences and operative categories

A handful of formulations return across the chapters and mark Baudrillard's operative grammar. This is a navigational index: each pointer leads to the full quote now living in the chapter body above.

• “Always-already” / perfectum / “leave no trace.” The crime complete before it shows itself (p. 1); the perfect crime would leave no trace (p. 36); writing's substance must leave no trace (pp. 106–107). The trace/tracelessness opposition is the book's constant.
• “The continuity of the nothing.” The name for what appearances betray and what radical thought serves (epigraph; pp. 1, 105).
• The inverse-proportion matrix. Fully stated as High Definition (pp. 31–32); underwrites every later chapter (more reality / less illusion; more communication / less other).
• The stacked litany. A formal device, not decoration: the “Fortunately” series (p. 7), the “Live your life in real time” series (p. 28), the “No more X: Y” series (pp. 109–110), the reconciliations-refused series (p. 130).
• The object's revenge / objective irony. First stated at p. 57 (“the object which discovered us”), restated at p. 73 (“the object which thinks us”) and p. 76 (“the ironic function of the object”), and closed by the mirror people at pp. 149–150. The same move opens and closes the book.
• “The final solution” / “ethnic cleansing.” Applied to the realization of the world (p. 27), to the extermination of the Other (p. 109), and to nihilism (p. 141). Holocaust vocabulary applied to metaphysics and media as a sustained provocation.
• The reversal of named authorities. Hölderlin inverted (p. 51), McLuhan inverted (p. 37), the Velvet Underground formula inverted across the book (pp. 87, 150). Inversion of a quotation is a characteristic rhetorical unit.
• Subjection to one's own law / voluntary servitude. Stated at pp. 12–13 and recurring at pp. 113–114 (master and slave conjoined in “total efficiency, total performance”).

IX. Register of figures (how each is used)

Sustained, doing philosophical work across many pages

Nietzsche (will to illusion / will to power, pp. 10, 80); Heidegger (three loci: the Gestell “graver” than, p. 35; “the stellar course of the mystery” as exit, pp. 63, 74; the Heideggerian vision of technology as the foil “objective irony” replaces, p. 74); Borges (map/territory p. 49; the Babylon Lottery pp. 92–94; the mirror-people legend p. 149); Warhol (the whole of “Machinic Snobbery,” pp. 77–86); Brecht's Flüchtlingsgespräche (pp. 68–71); P.H. Gosse via Gould (pp. 21–25).

Single-move pivots, deployed once and dropped

McLuhan (p. 37); Lévi-Strauss (pp. 38, 59); Kojève (p. 74); Wittgenstein (p. 76); Adorno (p. 103); Hopper (p. 104); Popper (p. 102); Foucault (p. 138); Updike (p. 15); Bourdieu, with the Abbé Pierre (p. 134).

Illustrative sources carrying a single chapter or image

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God” (p. 27); Duchamp's bottle-rack (pp. 30, 79); Peking Opera (p. 32); the Marx Brothers / Harpo (p. 48); Bruno Jarrosson and Michel Cassé (the physics block quotations, pp. 15, 61); Chuang Tzu / Hui Tzu (p. 90); Virgilio Martini, Il Mondo senza Donne (pp. 111–112); Christina von Braun (p. 116); Bellocchio, La Condanna (pp. 121–122); Marc Guillaume and la Cicciolina (pp. 127–129); R.L. Stevenson and Dietmar Kamper (epigraphs, pp. 95, 37); the Student of Prague (pp. 11, 35).