The shadow, like the mirror image, carries away all reality from the body.

Evidence

Since the shadow, like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague), is a remainder par excellence, something that can “fall” from the body, just like hair, excrement, or nail clippings to which it “is” compared in all archaic magic. But they are also, one knows, “metaphors” of the soul, of breath, of Being, of essence, of what profoundly gives meaning to the subject. Without an image or without a shadow, the body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder. It is the diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. There is no more reality: it is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague, the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero - classic sequence of fantastic tales - see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 489

Categorization

• XREF: Baudrillard’s shadow as remainder prefigures his larger thesis: the simulacrum (image) that precedes and replaces the real, making the real itself a leftover. This is the core hyperreality mechanism. — connects to: The paranoiac reduces all reality to his own fixed self-image; An essence is radically severed from the single appearance that manifests it; Every echo implies a ghostly alter-ego hidden behind the reflecting surface — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 717 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘remainder’ concept — the discarded fragment (shadow, image, even ‘objet petit a’) that paradoxically constitutes meaning.

Broader Connections

• An essence is radically severed from the single appearance that manifests it #corroborates (0.85)
• Every echo implies a ghostly alter-ego hidden behind the reflecting surface #expands (0.80) — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 717
• Cloning abolishes the mirror stage by eliminating all mediation and image #contradicts (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 328
• Psychic states are grasped only as shadows projected by reflected-on consciousness #corroborates (0.78)
• Reflective consciousness alone can dissociate itself from what it posits #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 330