all is sign, signs have abolished reality, etc.” (Ibid.: 227). Instead of this “realist version”, Baudrillard suggests that even his most prominent terms can be regarded as pataphysical attempts to seduce his readers through fictitious ideas, for example when he admits to having “put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it” (Baudrillard 1995: 101). Apparently he understands his thinking to be something like a playful simulacrum itself, for also theory can precede—and thereby seduce—reality: “The theoretical ideal would be to set in place propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality, in such a way that reality could only oppose them violently, and thereby unmask itself. For reality is an illusion, and all thought must seek first of all to unmask it. To do that, it must itself advance behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth. [...] Reality must be caught in the trap, we must move quicker than reality” (ibid.: 99). In this sense,
