cool memories text by JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE “There is perhaps in all systems and all individuals a secret impulse to rid themselves of their own idea, their own essence, so as to be able to proliferate every which way, extrapolate themselves in every direction. But the consequences of this dissociation are necessarily fatal. Anything that loses its idea is like a man who has lost his shadow: it falls into delirium and loses itself.” So wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1990 in The Transparency of Evil. The origins of this meditation stretch back to 1981 and his book Simulacra and Simulation, in which Baudrillard began to conceive of the simulacrum as a copy detached and freed from its original. Thenceforth, like a pyrotechnician, he would never stop sweeping for mines in the artifacts of his time. The simulacrum was the apogee of a certain falsification of the real: what Guy…