"Yet what replaced the idols were still a simulacra: rather than statues with eyes and ears, the gods became concepts or 'idealities' marked by lists of various attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, goodness). The 'problem of evil' became a problem of predication: how can the attributes 'all-powerful' and 'all-good' be simultaneously ascribed to the creator of an evil world? Yet sculpting a material statue and creating an ideal concept are both acts of fabrication. Even the notion that the gods were
not created is itself a simulacrum that has been
created by us, just as Plato created the concept of the Idea as a form anterior to all creation. The
object that one fabricates and
the idea that one believes are both simulacra, produced from obsessive phantasms. Yet there is obviously a difference between a material statue and an ideal concept: it was in one and the same movement that the gods were made
transcendent to the world and the proposition (or concept) was separated from the world in order to
denote or 'correspond' to everything in it (the relation of 'truth'), to the point where 'God' and 'Truth' were made into identical idealities."
Daniel W Smith Introduction
to Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski (1970 trans 2017) p.12
