Anatomy of a Dress

All “transparency” immediately raises the question of its opposite, secrecy. This is an alternative that is in no way of the order of morality, of good and evil: there is what is secret and what is generally known, which is a different sort of distinction. Certain things will never be put on open view; they are shared in secrecy as part of a type of exchange that is different from the one that involves visibility. When everything tends towards the visible, as is the case in our world, what becomes of the things that were once kept secret? They become occult, clandestine, maleficent: what was merely secret — or, in other words, given to be exchanged in secrecy — becomes evil and must be abolished, exterminated. But these things cannot be destroyed: in a certain sense, secrecy is indestructible. It will then be diabolized, and come out through the very instruments used to eliminate it. Its energy is full of evil, the energy that comes from the non-unification of things — good being defined as the unification of things in a totalized world.

Jean Baudrillard