The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays by Jean Baudrillard (translated by Chris Turner).

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays.
Author: Jean Baudrillard (translated by Chris Turner).
Genre: Non-fiction, essays, 9/11, politics, sociology, philosophy.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: A collection of 4 essays. In The Spirit of Terrorism, the author argues how 9/11 represented a foundational terroristic reaction to US-led modernity and globalization, and the advantages the terrorists have in their symbolic war against the West's "no-death" policy. Requiem for the Twin Towers speaks of the symbolism of the Twin Towers, tied into theie architectural structure, and the symbolism of them coming down as related to the reality of the spectacle. In Hypotheses on Terrorism, the author looks on the West's victim mentality, and develops the theory of terrorism as an accident of the Good, as a reaction to oppression, what he deems the "sovereign hypothesis." The Violence of the Global is an expansive view on the effects of thought patterns, dogmatisms, and to a lesser extent, arrogance on a worldwide scale, and what makes the West's culture so susceptible to terrorism.

My rating: 8/10
My review:


♥ All that has been said and written is evidence of a gigantic abreaction to the event itself, and the fascination it exerts. The moral condemnation and the holy alliance against terrorism are on the same scale as the prodigious jubilation at seeing this global superpower destroyed - better, at seeing it, in a sense, destroying itself, committing suicide in a blaze of glory. For it is that superpower which, by it unbearable power, has fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world, and hence that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwells in all of us.

The fact that we have dreamt of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it - because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree - is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. Yet it is a fact, and one which can indeed bye measured by the emotive violence of all that has been said and written in the effort to dispel it.

At a pinch, we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. If this is not taken into account, the event loses any symbolic dimension. It becomes a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, and all that would then remain would be to eliminate them. Now, we know very well that this is not how it is. Which explains all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity.

This goes far beyond hatred for the dominant world power among the disinherited and the exploited, among those who have ended up on the wrong side of the global order. Even those who share in the advantages of that order have this malicious desire in their hearts. Allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is - happily - universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were perfect embodiments, in their very twinness, of that definitive order.

No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically - and inexorably - the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that "Even God cannot declare war on Himself." Well, He can. The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.

♥ When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer? It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules. And the new rules are fierce ones, because the stakes are fierce. To a system whose very excess of power poses an insoluble challenge, the terrorists respond with a definitive act which is also not susceptible of exchange. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchanghe. All the singularities (species, individuals and cultures) that have paid with their deaths for the installation of a global circulation governed by a single power are taking their revenge today through this terroristic situational transfer.

This is terror against terror - there is no longer any ideology behind it. We are far beyond ideology and politics now. No ideology, no cause - not even the Islamic cause - can account for the energy which fuels terror. The aim is no longer even to transform the world, but (as the heresies did in their day) to radicalize the world by sacrifice. Whereas the system aims to realize it by force.

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere.

♥ This is not, then, a clash of civilizations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based on force. There is, indeed, a fundamental antagonism here, but one which points past the spectre of America (which is, perhaps, the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalization) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either), to triumphant globalization battling against itself. In this sense, we can indeed speak of a world war - not the Third World War, but the Fourth and the only really global one, since what is at stake is globalization itself. The first two world wars corresponded to the classical image of war. The first ended the supremacy of Europe and the colonial era. The second put an end to Nazism. The third, which has indeed taken place, in the form of cold war and deterrence, put an end to Communism. With each succeeding war, we have moved further towards a single world order. Today that order, which has virtually reached its culmination, finds itself grappling with the antagonistic forces scattered throughout the very heartlands of the global, in all the current convulsions. A fractal war of all cells, all singularities, revolting in the form of antibodies. A confrontation so impossible to pin down that the idea of war has to be rescued from time to time by spectacular set-pieces, such as the Gulf War is elsewhere. It is what haunts every world order, all hegemonic domination - if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would rise against Islam, for it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization.

♥ This is precisely where the crucial point lies - in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other - far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but the axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory, Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence.

♥ Relatively speaking, this is more or less what has happened in the political order with the eclipse of Communism and the global triumph of liberal power: it was at that point that a ghostly enemy emerged, infiltrating itself throughout the whole planet, slipping in everywhere like a virus, welling up from all the interstices of power: Islam. But Islam was merely the moving front along which the antagonism crystallized. The antagonism is everywhere, and in every one of us. So, it is terror against terror. But asymmetric terror. And it is this asymmetry which leaves global omnipotence entirely disarmed. At odds with itself, it can only plunge further into its own logic of relations of force, but it cannot operate on the terrain of the symbolic challenge and death - a thing of which it no longer has any idea, since it has erased it from its own culture.

Up to the present, this integrative power has largely succeeded in absorbing and resolving any crisis, any negativity, creating, as it did so, a situation of the deepest despair (not only for the disinherited, but for the pampered and privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental change now is that the terrorists have ceased to commit suicide for no return; they are now bringing their own deaths to bear in an effective, offensive manner, in the service of an intuitive strategic insight which is quite simply a sense of the immense fragility of the opponent - a sense that a system which has arrived at its quasi-perfection can, by that very token, be ignited by the slightest spark. They have succeeded in turning their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that operates on the basis of the exclusion of death, a system whose ideal is an ideal of zero deaths. Every zero-death system is a zero-sum-game system. And all the means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon. "What does the American bombing matter? Our men are as eager to die as the Americans are to live!" Hence the nonequivalence of the four thousand deaths inflicted a stroke on a zero-death system.

♥ Never attack the system in terms of relations of force. That is the (revolutionary) imagination the system itself forces upon you - the system which survives only by constantly drawing those attacking it into fighting on the ground of reality, which is always its own. But shift the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where the rule is that of challenge, reversion and outbidding. So that death can be met only by equal or greater death. Defy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its own collapse.

♥ We have to face facts, and accept that a new terrorism has come into being, a new form of action which plays the game, and lays hold of the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it. Not only do these people not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play - to which there is no possible response ("they bare cowards") - but they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology and aeronautics, spectacle and the media networks - they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power.

They have even - and this is the height of cunning - used the banality of American everyday life as cover and camouflage. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying with their families, before activating themselves suddenly like time bombs. The faultless mastery of this clandestine style of operation is almost as terroristic as the spectacular act of September 11, since it casts suspicion on any and every individual. Might not any inoffensive person be a potential terrorist? If they could pass unnoticed, then each of us is a criminal going unnoticed (every plane also becomes suspect), and in the end, this is no doubt true. This may very well correspond to an unconscious form of potential, veiled, carefully repressed criminality, which is always capable, if not of resurfacing, at least of thrilling secretly to the spectacle of Evil. So the event ramifies down to the smallest detail - the source of an even more subtle mental terrorism.

The radical difference is that the terrorists, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system's own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths. If they were content just to right the system with its own weapons, they would immediately be eliminated. If they merely used their own deaths to combat it, they would disappear just as quickly in a useless sacrifice - as terrorism has almost always done up to now (an example being the Palestinian suicide attacks), for which reason it has been doomed to failure.

As soon as they combine all the modern resources available to them with this highly symbolic weapon, everything changes. The destructive potential is multiplied to infinity. It is this multiplication of factors (which seem irreconcilable to us) that gives them such superiority. The "zero-death" strategy, by contrast, the strategy of the "clean" technological war, precisely fails to match up to this transfiguration of "real" power by symbolic power.

♥ Suicidal terrorism was a terrorism of the poor. This is a terrorism of the rich. This is what particularly frightens us: the fact that they have become rich (they have all the necessary resources) without ceasing to wish to destroy us. Admittedly, in terms of our system of values, they are cheating. It is not playing fair to throw one's own death into the game. But this does not trouble them, and the new rules are not ours to determine.

So any argument is used to discredit their acts. For example, calling them "suicidal" and "martyrs" - and adding immediately that martyrdom proves nothing, that it has nothing to do with truth, that it is even (to quote Nietzsche) the enemy number one of that. Admittedly, their deaths prove nothing, but in a system where truth itself is elusive (or do we claim to possess it?), there is nothing to prove. Moreover, this highly moral argument can be turned around. If the voluntary martyrdom of the suicide bombers proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims of the attack proves nothing either, and there is something unseemly and obscene in making a moral argument out of it (this is in no way to deny their suffering and death).

♥ But does reality actually outstrip fiction? If it seems to do so, this is because it has absorbed fiction's energy, and has itself become fiction. We might almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image.... It is a kind of duel between them, a contest to see which can be the most unimaginable.

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event. An excess of violence is not enough to open on to reality. For reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost. Reality and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination with the attack is primarily a fascination with the image (both its exultatory and its catastrophic consequences are themselves largely imaginary).

In this case, then, the real is superadded to the image like a bonus of terror, like an additional frisson: not only is it terrifying, but, what is more, it is real. Rather than the violence of the real being there first, and the frisson of the real is added. Something like an additional fiction, a fiction surpassing fiction. Ballard (after Borges) talked like this of reinventing the real as the ultimate and most redoubtable fiction.

The terrorist violence here is not, then, a blowback of reality, any more than it is a blowback of history. It is not "real". In a sense, it is worse: it is symbolic. Violence in itself may be perfectly banal and inoffensive. Only symbolic violence is generative of singularity. And in this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster movie, the twentieth century's two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism; the white light of the image and the black light of terrorism.

♥ We would forgive them any massacre if it had a meaning, if it could be interpreted as historical violence - this is the moral axiom of good violence. We would pardon them any violence if it were not given media exposure ("terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But this is all illusion. There is no "good" use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.

The repression of terrorism spirals around as unpredictably as the terrorist act itself. No one knows where it will stop, or what turnabouts there may yet be. There is no possible distinction, at the level of images and information, between the spectacular and the symbolic, no possible distinction between the "crime" and the crackdown. And it is this uncontrollable unleashing of reversibility that is terrorism's true victory. A victory that is visible in the subterranean ramifications and infiltrations of the event - not just in the direct economic, political, financial slump in the whole of the system - and the resulting moral and psychological downturn - but in the slump in the value-system, in the whole ideology of freedom, of free circulation, and so on, on which the Western world prided itself, and on which it drew to exert its hold over the rest of the world.

♥ There is no remedy for this extreme situation, and war is certainly not a solution, since it merely offers a rehash of the past, with the same deluge of military forces, bogus information, senseless bombardment, emotive and deceitful language, technological deployment and brainwashing. Like the Gulf War: a non-event, an event that does not really take place.

..War as continuation of the absence of politics by other means.

~~The Spirit of Terrorism.

♥ First of all, why the Twin Towers? Why two towers at the World Trade Center?

All Manhattan's tall buildings had been content to confront each other in a competitive verticality, and the product of this was an architectural panorama reflecting the capitalist system itself - a pyramidal jungle, whose famous image stretched out before you as you arrived from the sea. That image changed after 1973, with the building of the World Trade Center. The effigy of the system was no longer the obelisk and the pyramid, but the punch card and the statistical graph. This architectural graphism is the embodiment of a system that is no longer competitive, but digital and countable, and from which competition has disappeared in favour of networks and monopoly.

Perfect parallelepipeds, standing over 1,300 feet tall, on a square base. Perfectly balanced, blind communicating vessels (they say terrorism is "blind", but the towers were blind too - monoliths no longer opening on to the outside world, but subject to artificial conditioning). The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any original reference. If there had been only one, monopoly would not have been perfectly embodied. Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates.

There is a particular fascination in this reduplication. However tall they may have been, the two towers signified, none the less, a halt to verticality. They were not of the same breed as the other buildings. They culminated in the exact reflection of each other. The glass and steel façades of the Rockefeller Center buildings still mirrored each other in an endless specularity. But the Twin Towers no longer had any façades, any faces. With the rhetoric of verticality disappears also the rhetoric of the mirror. There remains only a kind of black box, a series closed on the figure two, as though architecture, like the system, was now merely a product of cloning, and of a changeless genetic code.

New York is the only city in the world that has, throughout its history, tracked the present form of the system and all its many developments with such prodigious fidelity. We must, then, assume that the collapse of the towers - itself a unique event in the history of modern cities - prefigures a kind of dramatic ending and, all in all, disappearance both of this form of architecture and of the world system it embodies. Shaped in the pure computer image of banking and finance, (ac)countable and digital, they were in a sense its brain, and in striking there the terrorists have struck at the brain, at the nerve-center of the system.

The violence of globalization also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them - the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.

♥ The collapse of the towers is the major symbolic event. Imagine they had not collapsed, or only one had collapsed: the effect would not have been the same at all. The fragility of global power would not have been so strikingly proven. The towers, which were the emblem of that power, still embody it in their dramatic end, which resembles a suicide. Seeing them collapse themselves, as if by implosion, one had the impression that they were committing suicide in response to the suicide of the suicide planes.

Were the Twin Towers destroyed, or did they collapse? Let us be clear about this: the two towers are both a physical, architectural objects and a symbolic object (symbolic of financial power and global economic liberalism). The architectural object was destroyed, but it was the symbolic object which was targeted and which it was intended to demolish. One might think the physical destruction brought about the symbolic collapse. But in fact no one, not even the terrorists, had reckoned on the total destruction of the towers. It was, in fact, their symbolic collapse that brought about their physical collapse, not the other way around.

As if the power bearing these towers suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power suddenly gave way under the pressure of too intense an effort: the effort always to be the unique world model.

So the towers, tired of being a symbol which was too heavy a burden to bear, collapsed, this time physically, in their totality. Their nerves of steel cracked. They collapsed vertically, drained of their strength, with the whole world looking on in astonishment.

The symbolic collapse came about, then, by a kind of unpredictable complicity - as though the entire system, by its internal fragility, joined in the game of its own liquidation, and hence joined in the game of terrorism. Very logically, and inexorably, the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it. But there is more: somewhere, it was party to its own destruction. The countless disaster movies bear witness to this fantasy, which they attempt to exorcize with images and special effects. But the fascination they exert is a sign that acting-out is never very far away - the rejection of any system, including internal rejection, growing all the stronger as it approaches perfection or omnipotence. It has been said that "Even God cannot declare war on Himself." Well, He can. The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.

Even in their failure, the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest hopes: in bungling their attack on the White House (while succeeding far beyond their objectives on the towers), they demonstrated unintentionally that that was not the essential target, that political power no longer means much, and real power lies elsewhere. As for what should be built in place of the towers, the problem is insoluble. Quite simply because one can imagine nothing equivalent that would be worth destroying - that would be worthy of being destroyed. The Twin Towers were worth destroying. One cannot say the same of many architectural works. Most things are not even worth destroying or sacrificing. Only works of prestige deserve that fate, for it is an honour. This proposition is not as paradoxical as it sounds, and it raises a basic issue for architecture: one should build only those things which, by their excellence, are worthy of being destroyed. Take a look around with this radical proposition in mind, and you will see what a pass we have come to. Not much would withstand this extreme hypothesis.

This brings us back to what should be the basic question for architecture, which architects never formulate: is it normal to build and construct? In fact it is not, and we should preserve the absolutely problematical character of the undertaking. Undoubtedly, the fact of architecture - of good architecture - is to efface itself, to disappear as such. The towers, for their part, have disappeared. But they have left us the symbol of their disappearance, their disappearance as symbol. They, which were the symbol of omnipotence, have become, by their absence, the symbol of the possible disappearance of that omnipotence - which is perhaps an even more potent symbol.

♥ Moreover, although the two towers have disappeared, they have not been annihilated. Even in their pulverized state, they have left behind an intense awareness of their presence. No one who knew them can cease imagining them and the imprint they made on the skyline from all points of the city. Their end in material space has borne them off into a definitive imaginary space. By the grace of terrorism, the World Trade Center has become the world's most beautiful building - the eight wonder of the world!*

*After delivering a slightly modified version of this last paragraph in New York, Baudrillard closed with the comment: "So I set out to produce a Requiem, but it was also, in a way, a Te Deum.

~~Requiem for the Twin Towers.

♥ Another hypothesis: it was an act of suicidal madmen, psychopaths, fanatics of a perverted cause, themselves manipulated by some evil power, which is merely exploiting the resentment and hatred of oppressed peoples to sate its destructive rage. The same hypothesis - but more favourably put, and attempting to lend terrorism a kind of historical rationale - is the one that sees it as the real expression of the despair of oppressed peoples. But this argument is itself suspect, since it condemns terrorism to represent global misery only in a definitive gesture of impotence. And even if it is granted that terrorism is a specific form of political contestation of the global order, this is generally done only to denounce its failure and, at the same time, its unintended effect, which is involuntarily to consolidate that order. This is the version advanced by Arundhati Roy who, while denouncing hegemonic power, denounces terrorism as its twin - the diabolical twin of the system. A small step, then, to imagine that if terrorism did not exist, the system would have invented it. And why not, then, see the September 11 attacks as a CIA stunt?

♥ We should go even further: rather than the hypothesis of an "objective" complicity between terrorism and the world order, we should advance the exactly opposite hypothesis of a deep internal complicity between that power and the power ranged against it from the outside; of an internal instability and weakness which, in a sense, meet the violent destabilization of the terrorist act halfway. Without the hypothesis of this secret coalition, this collusive predisposition, one can understand nothing of terrorism and the impossibility of overcoming it.

If the aim of terrorism is to destabilize the global order merely by its own strength, in a head-on clash, then it is absurd: the relation of forces is so unequal and, in any case, that global order is already the site of such disorder and deregulation that there is no point whatever in adding to it. One even runs the risk, by this additional disorder, of reinforcing the police and security control systems, as we see on all sides today.

But perhaps that is the terrorists' dream: the dream of an immortal enemy. For, if the enemy no long exists, it becomes difficult to destroy it. A tautology, admittedly, but terrorism is tautological, and its conclusion is a paradoxical syllogism: if the State really existed, it would give a political meaning to terrorism. Since terrorism manifestly has none (though it has other meanings), this is proof that the State does not exist, and that its power is derisory.

What, then, is the terrorists' secret message? In a Nasreddin story, we see him crossing the frontier each day with mules laden with sacks. Each time, the sacks are searched, but nothing is found. And Nasreddin continues to cross the frontier with his mules. Long afterwards, they ask him what in fact it was he was smuggling. And Nasreddin replies: "I was smuggling mules."

In this same way, we may wonder what it is that is really being smuggled here, behind all the apparent motives for the terrorist act - religion, martyrdom, vengeance or strategy? It is quite simply, through what seems to us like a suicide, the impossible exchange of death, the challenge to the system by the symbolic gift of death, which becomes an absolute weapon (the Towers seem to have understood this, since they responded with their own collapse).

♥ Terrorism invents nothing, inaugurates nothing. It simply carries things to the extreme, to the point of paroxysm. It exacerbates a certain state of things, a certain logic of violence and uncertainty. The system itself, by the speculative extension of all exchange, the random and virtual form it imposes everywhere - lean production, floating capital, forced mobility and acceleration - causes a general principle of uncertainty to prevail, which terrorism simply translates into total insecurity. Terrorism is unreal and unrealistic? But our virtual reality, our systems of information and communication, have themselves too, and for a long time, been beyond the reality principle. As for terror, we know it is already present everywhere, in institutional violence, both mental and physical, in homeopathic doses. Terrorism merely crystallizes all the ingredients in suspension. It puts the finishing touches to the orgy of power, liberation, flows and calculation which the Twin Towers embodied, while being the violent deconstruction of that extreme form of efficiency and hegemony.

So, at Ground Zero, in the rubble of global power, we can only, despairingly, find our own image.

There isn't, in fact, anything else to see at Ground Zero - not even a sign of hostility towards an invisible enemy. What prevails there is merely the American people's immense compassion for itself - with star-spangled banners, commemorative messages, the cult of victims and of those postmodern heroes, the firefighters and the police. Compassion as the national passion of a people that wants to be alone with God, and prefers to see itself struck down by God than by some evil power. "God bless America" has become: "At last, God has struck us." Consternation, but ultimately eternal gratitude for this divine solicitude that has made us victims.

The reasoning of moral consciousness is as follows: wince we are the Good, it can only be Evil that has struck us. But if, for those who see themselves as the incarnation of Good, Evil is unimaginable, it can only be God who strikes them. And to punish them for what, ultimately, if not for an excess of Virtue and Power, for the excess signified by the non-division of Good and Power? A punishment for having gone too far in the Good and the incarnation of the Good. Which does not displease them, and will not prevent them from continuing to do Good without the slightest misgivings. And hence finding themselves even more alone with God. And hence being even more profoundly unaware of the existence of Evil.

The twin sister of compassion (as much a twin as the two towers) is arrogance. You weep over your own misfortune, and at the same time you are the best. And what gives us the right to be the best is that from now on, we are victims. This is the perfect alibi; it is the whole mental hygiene of the victim, through which all guilt is resolved, and which allows one to use misfortune as though it were, so to speak, a credit card.

♥ It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impoissiblity of conceiving of the Other - friend or enemy - in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. That is the America that takes itself for America and which, bereft of otherness, eyes itself with the wildest compassion.

Let us be clear: America id here merely the allegory or universal figure of any power incapable of bearing the spectre of opposition. How can the Other, unless he is an idiot, a psychopath or a crank, want to be different, irremediably different, without even a desire to sign up to our universal gospel?

Such is the arrogance of Empire - as in Borges's allegory (the mirror people*), where the defeated peoples are exiled into the mirrors, from where they are condemned to reflect the image of the conquerors. (But one day they begin to look less and less like their conquerors, and in the end they smash the mirrors and attack the Empire once again).

* In "Fauna of Mirrors," The Book of Imaginary Beings.

♥ A statement of the abject nature of our dying culture, but also a statement of the failure of any violence antagonistic to it, or believing itself to be so. Poor rebels, poor innocents! "We shall defeat you because we are deader than you!" But it is not the same death that is at issue. When Western culture sees all its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation; it is not a symbolic stake. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, it dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time - we might say that the terrorist acts literally "suicided" the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. "We have already devastated our world, what more do your want?" says Muray. But precisely, we have merely devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.

♥ There is the same inability to contemplate for one moment that these "fanatics" might commit themselves entirely "freely", without in any way being blind, mad or manipulated. For we have the monopoly of the evaluation of Good and Evil, the implication being that the only "free and responsible" choice cannot but be in keeping with our mortal law. Which means imputing any resistance to, any violation of, our values to a blinding of consciousness (but where does this blinding come from?). That the "free and enlightened" man should necessarily choose Good is our universal prejudice - and a paradoxical one it is too, since then man who has this "rational" choice allotted to him is no longer, ultimately, free to decide (psychoanalysis, too, has specialized in the interpretation of these "resistances").

On this point, Lichtenberg tells us something stranger and more original - namely, that the proper use of freedom is to abuse it, and make excessive use of it. And this includes taking responsibility for one's own death and that of others. Hence the absurdity of the epithet "cowardly" that is applied to the terrorists: cowardly for having chosen suicide, cowardly for having sacrificed the innocent (when we don't accuse them of taking advantage of this to reach paradise.)

All the same, we should try to get beyond the moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life, and conceive that one might respect, both in the other and in oneself, something other than, and more than, life (existence isn't everything, it is even the least of things): a destiny, a cause, a form of pride or of sacrifice. There are symbolic stakes which far exceed existence and freedom - which we find it unbearable to lose, because we have made them the fetishistic values of a universal humanist order. So we cannot imagine a terrorist act committed with entire autonomy and "freedom of conscience".

♥ What terrorism revives is something that cannot be traded in a system of differences and generalized exchange. Difference and indifference can perfectly well be traded for one another. What constitutes an event is that for which there is no equivalent. And there is no equivalent for the terrorist act in some transcendent truth.

When Caroline Heinrich counterposes graffiti to terrorism, as the only rigorous symbolic act, in so far as graffiti signifies nothing and makes use of empty signs to reduce them to absurdity, she does not realize how right she is. Graffiti is indeed a terrorist act (itself also with New York as its place of origin), not by its identity claim - "I am so-and-so, I exist, I live in New York" - but by its disinscription of the walls and architecture of the city, by the violent deconstruction of the signifier itself (the graffiti-tattooed subway trains plunged right into the heart of New York in exactly the same way as the terrorists hurtled their Boeings into the Twin Towers).

♥ The most recent of the versions of September 11, and the most eccentric, is that it was all the product of an internal terrorist plot (CIA, fundamentalist extreme right, etc.). A thesis that appeared when doubt was cast on the air attack on the Pentagon and, by extension, the attack on the Twin Towers (in Thierry Meyssan's 9/11: The Big Lie).

And what if it was all untrue? If it was all faked up? A thesis so unreal that it deserves to be taken into account, just as every exceptional event deserves to be doubted: we always have in us a demand both for a radical event and for a total deception. A phantasy of foul machination which does indeed, quite often, turn out to be true: we have lost count of the murderous acts of provocation, the attacks and "accidents" staged by all kinds of secret groups and services.

Above and beyond the truth of the matter, of which we shall perhaps never have any knowledge, what remains of this thesis is, once again, that the dominant power is the instigator of everything, including effects of subversion and violence, which are of the order of trompe-l'œil. The worst of this is that it is again we who perpetrated it. This, admittedly, brings no great glory on our democratic values, but it is still better than conceding to obscure jihadists to inflict such a defeat on us. Already with the Lockerbie Boeing crash, the theory of technical failure was for a long time preferred to that of a terrorist act. Even if it is a serious matter to admit one's own shortcomings, it is still preferable to admitting the other party's power (which does not exclude the paranoid denunciation of the axis of Evil).

If it were to turn out that such a mystification were possible, if the event were entirely faked up, then clearly it would no longer have any symbolic significance (if the Two Towers were blown up from the inside - the crash not being sufficient to make them collapse - it would be very difficult to say they had committed suicide!). This would merely be a political conspiracy. And yet... Even if all this were the doing of some clique of extremists of military men, it would still be the sign (as in the Oklahoma bombing) of a self-destructive internal violence, of a society's obscure predisposition to contribute to its own doom - as illustrated by the high-level dissensions between the CIA and FBI which, by reciprocally neutralizing information, gave the terrorists the unprecedented chance to succeed.

~~Hypotheses of Terrorism.

♥ Between the terms "global" and "universal" there is a deceptive similarity. Universality is the universality of human rights, freedoms, culture and democracy. Globalization is the globalization of technologies, the market, tourism and information. Globalization seems irreversible, whereas the universal would seem, rather, to be on the way out. At least as it has constituted itself as a system of values on the scale of Western modernity, which has no equivalent in any other culture.

Any culture that universalizes loses its singularity and dies. This is how it is with all those we have destroyed by forcibly assimilating them, but it is also the case with out own culture in its pretension to universality. The difference is that the other cultures died of their singularity, which is a fine death, whereas we are dying of the loss of all singularity, of the extermination of all our values, which is an ignoble death.

We think the ideal destination of any value is its elevation to the universal, without gauging the lethal danger that promotion represents: much rather than an elevation, it is a dilution towards the zero degree of value. In the Enlightenment, universalization occurred by excess, in an ascending course of progress. Today it occurs by default, by a flight into the lowest common denominator. This is how it is with human rights, democracy and freedom: their expansion corresponds to their weakest definition.

♥ The universal itself is globalized; democracy and human rights circulate just like any other global product - like oil or capital.

What comes with the transition from the universal to the global is both a homogenization and a fragmentation to infinity. The central gives way not to the local, but to the dislocated. The concentric gives way not to the decentred, but to the eccentric. And discrimination and exclusion are not accidental consequences; they are part of the very logic of globalization.

♥ Is there some inevitability to globalization? All cultures but our own escaped, one way or another, the fated outcome of abstract exchange. Where is the critical threshold of transition to the universal, and then to the global? What is this dizzying whirl that drives the world to the abstraction of the Idea, and that other which drives it to the unconditional realization of the Idea?

For the universal was an Idea. When it realizes itself in the global, it commits suicide as Idea, as ideal end. Having become the sole reference - and a humanity immanent in itself having occupied the empty place of the dead God - the human now reigns alone, but it no longer has any ultimate rationale. No longer having any enemy, it generates one from within, and secretes all kinds of inhuman metastases.

Hence this violence of the global. The violence of a system that hounds out any form of negativity or singularity, including that ultimate form of singularity that is death itself. The violence of a society in which conflict is virtually banned and death forbidden. A violence which, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and works to set in place a world freed from any natural order, whether it be that of the body, sex, birth or death. More than violence, indeed, we should speak of virulence. This violence is viral: it operates by contagion, by chain reaction, and it gradually destroys all our immunities and our power to resist.

However, matters are not cut and dried, and globalization has not won the battle before it begins. In the face of this homogenizing, dissolving power, we see heterogeneous forces rising up everywhere - not merely different, but antagonistic. Behind the increasingly sharp resistance to globalization, social and political resistance, we should see more than mere archaic rejection: a kind of painful revisionism regarding the achievements of modernity and "progress", a rejection not only of the global technostructure, but of the mental structure of equivalence of all cultures. This resurgence can assume aspects which, from the standpoint of enlightened thinking, seem violent, anomalous, irrational - ethnic, religious and linguistic collective forms, but also emotionally disturbed or neurotic individual forms. It would be a mistake to condemn these upsurges as populist, archaic, or even terroristic. Everything that constitutes an event today does so against this abstract universality - including Islam's antagonism to Western values (it is because it is the most vehement constestation of those values that it is enemy number one today).

♥ It is not a question, then, of a "clash of civilizations", but of an - almost anthropological - confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything which, in any field whatever, retains something of an irreducible alterity.

For global power, which is every bit as integrist as religious orthodoxy, all different, singular forms are heresies. On this account, they are doomed either to re-enter the global order, like it or not, or to disappear. The mission of the West (or, rather, of the former West, since for a long time now it has had no values of its own) is to subject the many different cultures, by any means available, to the unforgiving law of equivalence. A culture that has lost its values can only take its revenge on the values of others. Even wars - for example, the war in Afghanistan - aim initially, above and beyond political or economic strategies, to normalize savagery, to knock all territories into alignment. The objective is to quell any refractory zone, to colonize and tame all the wild spaces, whether in geographical space or in the realm of the mind.

♥ For such a system, any refractory form is virtually terroristic.*

*It may even be argued that natural catastrophes are a form of terrorism. Large-scale technical accidents, such as the one at Chernobyl, have something of both the terrorist act and the natural catastrophe about them. The poisoning by toxic gas in Bhopal in India - a technical accident - could have been a terrorist act. Any accidental air crash can be claimed by a terrorist group. The characteristic of irrational events is that they can be imputed to anyone or anything. At a pinch, anything can seem to the imagination to be of criminal origin: even a cold snap or an earthquake. And this is not new: during the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, thousands of Koreans, held responsible for the disaster, were massacred. In a system as integrated as our own, everything has the same destabilizing effect. Everything conspires towards the failure of a system that sees itself as infallible. And, in view of what we are already subjected to, within the framework of the system's rational, programmatic hold, we may wonder whether the worst catastrophe would not be the infallibility of the system itself.

♥ This confrontation can be understood only in the light of symbolic obligation. To understand the rest of the world's hatred of the West, we have to overturn all our usual ways of seeing. It is not the hatred of those from whom we have taken everything and given nothing back; it is the hatred of those to whom we have given everything without their being able to give it back. It is not, then, the hatred bred of deprivation and exploitation, but of humiliation. And it is to humiliation that the terrorism of September 11 was a response: one humiliation for another.

The worst thing for global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to be humiliated. And it was humiliated by September 11 because the terrorists inflicted something on it then that it cannot return. All the reprisals have merely been a system of physical retaliation, whereas that global power was defeated symbolically. War is a response to the aggression, but not to the challenge. The challenge can be take up only by humiliating the other in return (but certainly not by bombing him to smithereens, or locking him up like a dog at Guantánamo).

The basis of all domination is the absence of reciprocation - we are still speaking there in terms of the fundamental rule. The unilateral gift is an act of power. And the Empire of Good, the violence of Good, lies precisely in giving without any possible reciprocation. This is to occupy the position of God. Or of the Master, who allows the slave to live in exchange for his labour (but labour is not a symbolic reciprocation, hence the only response is ultimately revolt and death). Even God left room for sacrifice. In the traditional order, there is still the possibility of giving something back to God, to nature, or to whatever it might be, in the form of sacrifice. This is what ensures the symbolic equilibrium between living beings and things. Today we no longer have anyone to whom we may give back, to whom we may repay the symbolic debt - and that is the curse of our culture. It is not that giving is impossible in this culture, but that the counter-gift is impossible, since all the paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and defused (there remains only a parody of sacrifice that can be seen in all the current forms of victimhood).

We are, as a result, in the relentless situation of receiving, always receiving. Not now from God or nature, but through a technical system of generalized exchange and general gratification. Everything is potentially given to us, and we are entitled to everything, like it or not. We are in the situation of slaves who have been allowed to live, and are bound by a debt that cannot be repaid. All this can function for a long time thanks to our insertion into relations of trade and the economic order but, at some point, the fundamental rule wins out. Then to this positive transference there inevitably comes a response in the form of a negative countertransference, a violent abreaction to this captive life, to this protected existence, to this saturation of existence. This reversion takes the form either of open violence (terrorism is part of this) or of the impotent denial characteristic of our modernity, of self-hatred and remorse - all negative passions that are the debased form of the impossible counter-gift.

What we detest in ourselves, the obscure object of our resentment, is this excess of reality, this excess of power and comfort, this universal availability, this definitive fulfilment - ultimately the fate the Grand Inquisitor reserves for the domesticated masses in Dostoevsky. Now this is exactly what the terrorists condemn in our culture - hence the echo terrorism finds among us and the fascination it exerts.

As much as terrorism rests, then, on the despair of the humiliated and insulted, it rests also on the invisible despair of the privileged beneficiaries of globalization, on our own submission to an integral technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to the grip of networks and programmes, which perhaps represents the involutive profile of the entire species, of the human race become "global" (doesn't the human race's supremacy over the rest of the planet resemble the West's supremacy over the rest of the world?). And this invisible despair - our despair - is terminal, since it arises out of the fulfilment of all desires.

If terrorism arises, in this way, out of this excess of reality and its impossible exchange, out of this profusion for which nothing is given in return and this forced resolution of conflicts, then the idea of extirpating it as an objective evil is a total illusion since, such as it is - in its absurdity and its meaninglessness - it is the verdict this society passes on itself, its self-condemnation.

~~The Violence of the Global.