The lecture is devoted to non-existing objects and mythical figures that have resulted from a mistake or a coincidence.
A scribe’s mistake during the rule of Pavel I led to the emergence of a lieutenant named Kizh. The emperor liked him so much that every day he promoted him to a higher rank, until the baffled court had to tell him that Kizh had died. Similarly, in the 1990s, an incorrect translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus led to the emergence of a previously unknown philosopher named Yukst. Unlike Kizh, Yukst did not die, but turned into a virtual demon of a new reality, a creator of simulation flows that produced semiotic systems and hybrid phenomena—an irrational pseudo subject of perception, who possessed universal knowledge.
‘What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects certainly, and sacrileges, much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real. This is perhaps why twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.’ (Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation)