In the performative “act of thinking” (ibid.: 115), reality is not so much depicted but challenged. The purpose of theory for Baudrillard is the exact opposite of what we normally would expect: It should not recognize and analyze reality, instead it must deny and contradict its hegemony. It has to create illusion and establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the path of reality. The “value of thought”, claims Baudrillard (1995: 94), “lies not so much in its inevitable convergences with truth as in the immeasurable divergences which separate it from truth.” Only in awareness of those abstract ’Pataphysics can we distill any sense out of some of the oddest remarks in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, for example his “delirious self-criticism” from Cool Memories where he accuses himself of “having surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality” and of “having systematically opposed the most obvious and well-founded notions” (Baudrillard 1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and reading them in a “realist version”: “Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst:
