Useful passage that gets to the heart of Baudrillard's 'fatal strategies'

Objects and images are traps which reality is kind enough to walk into, playing an intelligent extra's role, but the traps never close on it, nor it on them. If illusions are always illusions of a reality, reality, for its part, is never the reality of anything but an illusion. Or rather, illusion does not stand opposed to reality, whether we are speaking of the illusions of childhood, war or love: it is a more subtle reality, which envelops primary reality in the sign of its disappearance.

[. . .]

The whole world is merely an illusion of the senses and the sensory trace of that disappearance. It is in the sense that objects deceive us by the space, the distance from their own sources – but in the end, we become the object of the objects which deceive us, and we fall under the spell of that distance.

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, trans. Emily Agar, London: Verso, 1`997, p. 116.