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Integral Reality, by Jean Baudrillard

Tags: reality

Text of: The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
(Fragment)



Integral Reality

What I call Integral Reality is the perpetrating on the world of an unlimited operational project whereby everything becomes real, everything becomes visible and transparent, everything is 'liberated', everything comes to fruition and has a meaning (whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it).

Whereby there is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say.

The disappearance of God has left us facing reality and the ideal prospect of transfonning this real world. And we have found ourselves confronted with the undertaking of realizing the world, of making it become technically, integrally real.

Now, the world, even freed from all illusion, does not lend itself at all to reality. The more we advance in this undertaking, the more ambiguous it becomes, the more it loses sight of itself. Reality has barely had time to exist and already it is disappearing...


The reality that has invented itself over recent centuries and which we have elevated into a principle is now dying out. To wish to revive it at all costs as a reference or a moral value is a mistake, since the principle is dead. What we see now, behind the eclipse ofthe 'objective' real, is the rise ofIntegral Reality, of a Virtual Reality that rests on the deregulation of the very reality principle.


We shall never get back beyond that blind spot, that unlocatable point where the real ceased to be real.

That which is real exists; that is all we can say (but existence isn't everything - it is, even, the least of things).

Let us be clear about this: when we say reality has disappeared, the point is not that it has disappeared physically, but that it has disappeared metaphysically. Reality continues to exist; it is its principle that is dead.

Now, reality without its principle is no longer the same at all. If, for many different reasons, the principle of representation, which alone gives it a meaning, falters, then the whole of the real falters. Or, rather, it exceeds its own principle and enters upon an unrestrained expansion no longer governed by any rule.


Objective reality-reality related to meaning and representation - gives way to 'Integral Reality', a reality without limits in which everything is realized and technically materialized without reference to any principle or final purpose [destination] whatever.

'Integral Reality' involves, then, the murder of the real, the loss of any imagination of the real. The imaginary, which we happily associated with the real as its friendly shadow, vanishes in this same process. 'Integral Reality' has no imaginary.

Just as liberation no longer has anything to do with the play of freedom - the freedom of a subject wrestling with himself, which implies, among other things, that one remains free to be free (which is not the case in the present circumstances of unconditional liberation); just as verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli), so we have moved from reality as principle and as concept to the technical realization of the real and its performance.

And yet there are no proofs of this reality'S existence - and there never will be - any more than there are proofs of the existence of God. It is, like God, a matter of faith.

And when you begin to believe in it, this is because it is already disappearing. It is when one is no longer sure of the existence of God, or when one has lost the naive faith in a self-evident reality, that it becomes absolutely necessary to believe in it. We invested reality with the whole of our imaginary, but it is this imaginary that is vanishing, since we no longer have the energy to believe in it. Even the will has gone out of it. The passion for reality and the passion for truth have gone. All that remains is a duty of reality, a duty of truth.

Henceforth we must believe in it. As doubt sets in everywhere, as a product of the failure of the systems of representation, reality becomes an absolute imperative; it becomes the foundation of a moral order. But neither things nor people obey a reality principle or a moral imperative.


It is the excess of reality that makes us stop believing in it.

The saturation of the world, the technical saturation of life, the excess of possibilities, of actualization of needs and desires. How are we to believe in reality once its production has become automatic?

The real is suffocated by its own accumulation. There is no way now for the dream to be an expression of a desire since its virtual accomplishment is already present.

Deprivation of dreams, deprivation of desire. And we know what mental disorder sleep deprivation induces.

Deep down, the problem is the same as with the 'accursed share': the problem of the surplus - not the lack, but the excess of reality - of which we no longer know how to rid ourselves. There is no longer any symbolic resolution, by sacrifice, of the surplus, except in accidents or by the irruption of an anomic violence which, whatever its social or political determinations, is always a challenge to this irresistible objective constraint of a normalized world.


Effectuating, materializing, realizing, producing - it seems to be the ideal destination of everything to pass from the stage of possibility to that of reality in a movement of simultaneous progress and internal necessity.

 All needs, all desires, all potentialities, tcnd towards this objective sanction, this litmus test. It is the same path that seems to doom appearances and illusion to vanish in the face of the truth. Perhaps this reality is a dream; in that case, the real is part of our imaginary. And realizing everything is akin to a universal fulfilment of desire...


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Integral Reality, by Jean Baudrillard

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