Truth wants to present itself naked; to reveal its nudity. It desperately seeks nudity, like Madonna in the film that made her famous. Moreover, Madonna is the best example of this truth-compulsion. Evocative case of someone who absolutely wants to be naked, to show herself naked, and who never quite manages. She is perpetually bridled - if not with leather and metal, then with the vulgar will to be nude, the artificial mannerism of exhibitionism. Inhibition suddenly becomes total and, on the part of the spectator, radical frigidity.
This hopeless strip-tease is that of reality itself, which literally “out-strips� itself (derobe), offering to the credulous eyes of voyeurs the appearance of nudity. But actually, this nudity envelops it in a second skin, which no longer has even the erotic charm of dress (la robe).
A prostitution of reality, which voluntarily abandons itself to hyper-realist detail and which has voluntarily renounced the optical illusion in favour of the strip-tease.
My principal objection to reality is, moreover, its character of unconditional surrender to any hypothesis that one can make about it. That it thus discourages the most active minds through its deplorable conformism. You can subject it, with its principle, to the harshest cruelties, to the most obscene provocations, to the most paradoxical insinuations: it bends over backwards for everything with an inevitable servility. Reality is a bitch. Nothing shocking there, anyway, since it was born from the fornication of stupidity with a mathematical mind - sort of sacred illusion thrown to the jackals of science?
Extract from The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard.
