The disappearance of illusion due to an excess of reality.

Reading note

Pataphysics is the Art of Seeing

by Jean Baudrillard — read in September 2025

With this book I understand why philosophers are accused of saying a lot without making anything clear. The language is intentionally obscure, with lexical constructions at the edge of comprehension. Nevertheless the core theme is interesting. The disappearance of illusion due to an excess of reality. The immediacy of live transmission, the subjective nature of images, the personalization of distant vision, all this leads to the death of illusion. Today we see everything through a screen that amplifies and filters, through the technique of the microscope or reportage, there's no more room for dreams, illusion is here the awareness that reality is nothing but a recent construction, the world forced to be real loses its illusory part. But under the veil of truth, the veil of maya torn apart, there's nothing, only another veil infinitely. It's like an orgy where the question "what do you do after the orgy", which implies the will to go do something interesting after fulfilling the basic function of mechanical pleasure, no longer makes sense because there's no after. The process of mechanical happiness replicates infinitely, emptying itself of meaning. It made me want to reread Il Supermaschio di Jarry.