Negativity used to correspond to plain positivity, or critical reality, that had not yet crossed over to the other side of the mirror. When positivity turns out to be absolute, denial becomes radical. Every option of dialectical negativity has been absorbed and liquidated. The limiting case of that ultimate reaction to the fundamentalism of reality is absolute denial (i.e. négationnisme, as we speak of “denying” the Holocaust). Think about it: it is the virtual itself that is négationniste. It is the virtual that takes away the substance of the real, setting it off balance. We are living in a society of négationnisme by virtue of its virtuality. Disbelief reigns everywhere. No event is perceived as “real” anymore. Criminal attempts, trials, wars, corruption, opinion polls: all of that is either falsified or undecidable. State power and its institutions are the first victims of the disgrace of the principle of reality. Hence the moral urgency, in the face of rampant négationnisme, of recovering the “citizen’s viewpoint,” taking one’s stand for reality, against the frailty of all information. The mirror of information has been broken. The mirror of historical time has been broken. This is why it has become possible to negate the existence of the Shoah, together with the rest (the Pentagon crash, man landing on the moon). The reign of the virtual is also the reign of the principle of uncertainty. It is the inevitable counterpart of a reality turned unreal by excess of positivity.

Will this last forever? Are we doomed to remain captives of this transfer of the real into total positivity, and of its no less ponderous counter-transfer shift toward pure and simple negativity?

Against total absorption, against extinction of the sign and its representation, we have said it was imperative to save difference, all differences. In particular, to save the distinction between the world-as-is and the real world. Whereas everything pushes us toward the virtual realization of the world, we need instead to wrench the real out of its reality principle. In fact, it is this very confusion that prevents us from seeing the world-as-is. In the words of Italo Svevo: “the search for causes is an immense misunderstanding, a clinging superstition, preventing things and events from coming into being as they are”. Namely: in their singularity. The real world belongs to the order of generality, the world-as-is to singularity. To repeat: not only is it a world of difference, it is one of absolute, radical difference, more different than difference, at the remotest distance from that sort of fusion /confusion.

Toward literalness.

Consider the literalness of the image.