The Vital Illusion Author:Jean Baudrillard, Julia Witwer Baudrillard considers how human cloning -- as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities -- heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones ... more »in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace.« less