The simulacrum still presents itself in its sparkling freshness, without resorting to the enigma of signs. There, phantasms are the welcome of appearance in the light of origin. But this origin is one that by its own movement recedes into an inaccessible remoteness. Diana at her bath, the goddess stealing away into the water at the moment in which she offers herself to the gaze, is not only the turning away of the Greek gods; it is the moment in which the intact unity of the divine “reflects its divinity in a virgin body,” and thereby doubles into a demon who makes her, at a distance from herself, appear chaste and at the same time offers her to the violence of the Goat.
– Michel Foucault, “The Prose of Actæon,” pp. xxi-xxxviii, in Pierre Klossowski’s The Baphomet, (dedicated by the author to Michel Foucault,) Eridanos Press, New York, 1988, p. xxxv
in a single layer of language there opens up that inner distance of identity that enables the work to exist in the very presence of the work and enables the work to slip away inside this commentary, which is nevertheless its only form of existence: the mystery of real presence and the enigma of the Same.
– Ibid. p. xxxvi
