Two articles from Le Monde:
By Jean Baudrilliard
Translated by Douglas
French original: "L'esprit du terrorisme"
(Jean Baudrilliard, Le Monde, 2001/11/02)
By Alain Minc
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Le terrorisme de l'esprit"
(Alain Minc, Le Monde, 2001/11/06)
By Jean Baudrilliard
Translated by Douglas
French original: "L'esprit du terrorisme"
(Jean Baudrilliard, Le Monde, 2001/11/02)Global events, we've had a few, from the death of Diana to the World Cup - or violent and real events, from wars to genocides. But symbolic events on a global scale, that is to say, not only of worldwide repute but enough to checkmate globalization itself? None. Throughout the stagnation of the 1990s, it was the "event strike" (as the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernandez put it). Well, the strike is over. Events have stopped striking. In the attacks on New York and the World Trade Center, we have even seen the "mother" of events, the pure event that unites in itself all the events that never occurred.
The whole game of history and power is undone by it but so are the conditions for analysis. One must take one's time. For events were so much in stagnation that one had to anticipate and outpace them. When they accelerate to this point, one has to go more slowly - without, however, letting oneself get buried beneath the hotchpotch of discourse and the cloud of war, all while keeping the unforgettable lightning flash of images intact.
All the speeches and commentaries betray an gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination it holds. Moral condemnation, sacred union against terrorism are of the same size as the prodigious jubilation of seeing this global superpower destroyed, better still, of seeing it destroy itself and, in a way, commit suicide in beauty. For this is the one which, in its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence that is innate the world over, and therefore (unwittingly) this terrorist imagination that inhabits us all.
That we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamed of it, because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any given power that has become hegemonic to such a point, is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience but it is still a fact which is measured precisely by all the pathetic violence of all the words that would erase it.
Ultimately, they did it but we asked for it. If one ignores this, the event loses all symbolic dimension. It is a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics that need only be fought off. Now, we know well that this is not the case, whence all the counter-phobic deliria of exorcizing Evil: because it is there, everywhere, such an obscure object of desire. Without this profound complicity, the event wouldn't have had the resonance that it did have, and in their symbolic strategy, of course the terrorists know that they can count on this inadmissible complicity.
This goes much further than the hatred of dominant global power among the disinherited and the exploited, among those who have fallen on the wrong side of the world order. This sly desire is at the very heart of those who share in its benefits. The allergy to any definite order, to any definite power is happily universal and the two towers of the World Trade Center perfectly incarnated, precisely by their geminate nature, this definitive order.
No need for a death drive or destruction drive, or even a perverse effect. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the rise of a power arouses the will to destroy. A power is itself an accomplice in its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one had the impression they were answering the suicide of the suicide planes with their own suicide. Some have said: "Even God cannot declare war on himself." Ah but, yes he can. The West, in the role of God (almighty, divine and absolute moral legitimacy) is becoming suicidal and declaring war on itself.
The innumerable disaster movies testify to this fantasy, which they obviously conjure up in imagery by drowning it all in special effects. But the universal attraction they hold, on a par with pornography, shows that passing to actions is never far off - the vague impulse to negate any system being all the stronger because this system is nearing perfection or total power.
At any rate, it seems true that the terrorists (no more than the experts!) had not foreseen the Twin Towers' collapse, which was, much more than the Pentagon, the strongest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of an entire system was done with an unforeseeable complicity, as if, in collapsing by themselves, in committing suicide, the towers had entered into the game to complete the event.
In one sense, it is the entire system that, for its internal fragility, has come to the assistance of the initial action. The more the system is globally centered, ultimately constituting only a single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already, a single, little Philipino hacker had succeeded, with his laptop computer, in launching the I love you virus, which circled the globe, devastating entire networks). Here, it was 18 kamikazes [sic] who, thanks to the absolute weapon of death, multiplied by technological efficiency, have started a catastrophic global process.
When the situation is monopolized in this way by the global power, when one is opposite this formidable condensation of all the functions of technocratic machinery and pure thought, what path is there other than a terrorist situational transfer? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. In picking up all the cards for itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system of which the excess of power itself poses an insoluble challenge, the terrorists respond with definite act in which an exchange is also impossible. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of the system of generalized exchange. All singularities (the species, individuals, cultures) that with their deaths have paved the way for the establishment of a global circulation regimented by a single power are to-day taking revenge in this terrorist situational transfer.
Terror against terror - there is no more ideology behind all this. Now, we are far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause (not even the Islamic once) can account for the energy which feeds terror. It does not even seek to transform the world. It aims (like the heresies in their times), it aims to radicalize it through sacrifice while the system seeks to create the world through force.
Like viruses, terrorism is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which is like the shadow cast by any system of domination, everywhere ready to reveal itself as a double agent. There is no longer any line of demarcation that allows one to define it. It is at the very heart of this culture which is fighting it, and the visible gulf (and hatred) that in the global scheme opposes the exploited and underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly meeting with the internal fracture within the dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But the other, viral structure - as if any apparatus of domination secretly kept its anti-system, its own ferment for disappearance - against this form of almost automatic reversion of its own power, the system is powerless. And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent reversion.
So it's neither a clash of civilizations, nor one of religions, and it's far bigger than Islam and America, on which we try to focalize the conflict in order to maintain the illusion that it is visible and can have a solution by force. This is a fundamental antagonism, but one which, through the specter of America (which may be the epicenter but is not at all the incarnation of globalization) and through the specter of Islam (which neither is the incarnation of terrorism), traces the contours of triumphant globalization at war with itself. In this way, one can truly begin to talk of world war, not the Third, but the Fourth and sole truly global one, since at stake is globalization itself. The two first world wars fit the classical image of war. The first brought Europe's supremacy and the colonial era to an end. The second put an end to Nazism. The third, which did indeed take place, in the form of the Cold War and deterrence, put an end to Communism. From one to the other, we came closer each time to a single world order. Today this order, which has come to a virtual end, finds itself at war with the antagonistic forces that are everywhere innate within the very heart of the global, in all the current convulsions. A fractal war of all the cells and singularities that are rebelling in the form of anti-matter. Such an incomprehensible conflict that from time to time it is necessary to save the idea of war with spectacular dramatizations, such as the Gulf War or today the one in Afghanistan. But the Fourth World War is elsewhere. It is what haunts any global order, any hegemonic domination - if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would arise against Islam. For it is the world itself that resists globalization.
Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, the symbolic challenge, is immoral and it responds to a globalization that it is itself immoral. So let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something of this, let us go look a bit beyond Good and Evil. For now that we have an event that defies not only morality but any form of interpretation, let us have the intelligence of Evil. For the crucial point is indeed there: in the total erroneousness of Western philosophy, that of the Enlightenment as it relates to Good and Evil. Naively, we believe that the progress of Good, its powerful rise in all areas (sciences, technologies, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil grow more powerful at the same time, following the same curve. The triumph of one does not mean the disappearance of the other, quite to the contrary. Metaphysically, we consider Evil to be an incidental foul-up but this axiom, whence flow all other Manichean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor does it do the inverse: both are at once irreducible and their relation is inextricable. At bottom, Good could only defeat Evil by renouncing being good, since, in appropriating the global monopoly on power, by this very deed it causes a return of the flame of proportional violence.
In the traditional universe, there was still a balance between Good and Evil, according to a relation dialectic that assured, come what may, the tension and balance of the moral universe - somewhat similarly to the Cold War, where the face-off of the two powers assured the balance of terror. Therefore, no supremacy of once over the other. This balance is broken from the moment of the total extrapolation of Good (positive hegemony over any form of negativity, exclusion of death, of any adverse force - total triumph of the values of Good). Starting then, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil then regained an invisible autonomy, developing from then on in an exponential manner.
Keeping all proportions, this is more or less what occurred in the political order with the disappearance of Communism and the global triumph of liberal power: it is then that a ghostly enemy arises, spreading itself over the whole planet, infiltrating every place like a virus, arising at all the interstices of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front where this antagonism crystallizes. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Therefore, terror against terror. But terror is asymmetrical. And it is this asymmetry that leaves the global all-powerful completely defenseless. At war with itself, it can only sink further into is own logic of violent interactions, without being able to play on the field of symbolic challenge and of death, of which it no longer has any notion for it has erased it from its own culture.
Up to this point, this fundamental power has largely succeeded in absorbing and reabsorbing any crisis, any negativity, creating by itself a fundamentally desperate situation (not only for the wretched of the earth, but also for the well-to-do and privileged as well, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that the terrorists have stopped killing themselves to no avail. It is that they are now playing on their own deaths in an offensive and efficient manner, following a strategic intuition that is quite simply that of the immense fragility of the adversary, that of a system that has achieved quasi-perfection and, as a result, vulnerable to the smallest spark. They have succeeded in making their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that aims to exclude death, of which the ideal is zero deaths. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of deterrence and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death an offensive weapon. "What matter the American bombings! Our men seek as much to die as the Americans do to live!" Whence the nonequivalence of the 7,000 dead taken in one blow from a system of zero dead.
So therefore, here, everything plays on death, no only through the brutal irruption of death broadcast live, in real time, but also the irruption of a death that is much more than real: symbolic and sacrificial - that is to say the event that is absolute and beyond appeal.
Such is the mind of terrorism.
Never attacking the system in terms of force. This is the (revolutionary) imagination that the system itself imposes, which only survives by endlessly leading those who attack it to the battlefield of reality, which is forever its own. But putting the struggle into the symbolic context, where the rule is one of challenge, of reversal, of one-upmanship. So much so that, in death, it can not be answered with an equal or superior death. Defying the system with a gift which it cannot answer save by its own death and its own collapse.
The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself commits suicide in answer to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. For neither the system nor the power themselves can avoid their symbolic obligations - and it is in this trap that the only chance for their catastrophe resides. In this vertiginous cycle of impossible exchange in death, that of the terrorist is an infinitesimal point, but one that provides an aspiration, a void, a gigantic convection. Over this miniscule point, the whole system, that of the real and of the power, grows dense, tetanizes, piles on and crashes in its own hyper-efficiency.
The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under this excess of reality. All the derision of the situation at the same time as the violence activated by the power, turn against it, for terrorist acts are at once the exorbitant mirror of the system's own violence and the model for a symbolic violence that is forbidden to it, of the sole violence it cannot exercise: that of its own death.
This is why all the visible power can do nothing against the infinitesimal, but symbolic, death of a few individuals.
One must surrender to the obvious fact that a new terrorism is born, a new form of action that plays the game and makes its own rules the better to disrupt it. Not only are these people not fighting with equal weapons, since they are putting their own deaths at stake, to which there is no possible answer ("they are cowards"), but they have appropriated all the weapons of dominant power. Money and stocks, digital and aeronautical technologies, spectacular scale and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and the global without changing their goal which is to destroy it.
Ruse of ruses, they have even used the banality of American daily life as a mask and cover. Sleeping in suburbs, reading and studying as a family, before waking from one morning to the next like time bombs. The faultless mastery of this clandestinity is almost as terroristic as the spectacular act of 11 September. For it casts suspicion on any individual: isn't any inoffensive being a powerful terrorist? If they were able to get by unnoticed, then each of us an unnoticed criminal (every plane therefore becomes suspect), and, at bottom, this is perhaps true. Perhaps this really corresponds to an unconscious form of potential criminality, hidden, painstakingly repressed, but always ready, if not to emerge, then to vibrate secretly to the hum of the spectacle of Evil. Thus the ramifications of the event even come down to details - the source of an even more subtle form of mental terrorism.
The radical difference is that the terrorists, all while using the weaponry that belongs to the system, have an ever more lethal weapon: their own death. If they were content to fight the system with its own weapons, they would be immediately eliminated. If they only offered their own deaths in opposition, they would disappear just as quickly in a pointless sacrifice - as terrorism has almost always done until now (such as the Palestinian suicide attacks) and why it was destined to fail.
Everything changes once they organize all the modern means at their disposal with this highly symbolic weapon. This multiplies destructive potential infinitely. It is this multiplication of factors (that to us seem irreconcilable) that gives them their superiority. The strategy of zero death, by contrast, that of the "clean," technological war, goes hand in hand with this transfiguration of "real" power by symbolic power.
The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to understand something of it, we must rid ourselves of our Western point of view to see what goes on in their organization and the heads of the terrorists. For us, such an effectiveness would imply a maximum of calculation, of reason, which we have trouble in imagining among others. And even in this case, there would always have been, as with any rational organization or secret service, leaks and foul-ups.
Therefore, the secret of such a success is elsewhere. The difference is that, with them, this is not done through a labor contact but with a pact of sacrificial obligations. Such obligations are spared any defects and corruptions. The miracle is in having adapted to the global network, to the technical protocol, without losing any of this life and death complicity. By contrast with the contract, the pact does not bind the individuals - even their suicide is not individual heroism. It is a collective sacrificial act scealed with an idyllic obligation. And it is the interconnection of two systems, that of an operational structure and of a symbolic pact, which has made such a disproportionate act possible.
We no longer have any idea of what a symbolic calculation is, as in poker or potlatch: minimal stakes, maximal result. Exactly what the terrorists achieved with the attack on Manhattan, that chaos theory illustrated rather well: in initial contact provoking incalculable consequences, when the gigantic American deployment ("Desert Storm") has only risible effects - the hurricane, so to speak, starting with the flapping of a butterfly's wings.
Suicidal terrorism was the poor man's terrorism. This one is the terrorism of the rich. And that is what makes us particularly afraid: because they got rich (they all have the means) while still seeking our downfall. Surely, in our value system, they are cheating: there is no sport in wagering one's own life. But they couldn't care less and the new rules of the game are not our own.
All is fair in disparaging their acts. Whence labeling them "suicidal" and "martyrs" only to add that martyrdom proves nothing, that it has no relation to the truth, that it is even (as Nietzsche said) the number one enemy of the truth. Surely, their deaths prove nothing, but there is nothing to prove in a system where the truth itself is beyond grasp - or perhaps. From another vantage point, this highly moral argument reverses itsef. If the willing martyrdom of the kamikaze's proves nothing then the unwilling martyrdom of the victims of the attack proves nothing either, and there is something undignified and obscene in making a moral argument in this (this in no way prejudices their suffering and deaths).
Another argument in bad faith: the terrorists trade their deaths for places in heaven. Their act was not gratuitous and therefore it was inauthentic. It could only have been gratuitous if they believed in God, if death were without hope, as it is for us (however, the Christian martyrs did count this sublime equivalency). And so, there again, there are not fighting with equal weapons, because they have the right to salvation, for which we can no longer maintain hope. Thus we mourn our own deaths while they can make them into clearly defined stakes.
In sum, all of this, the cause, the proof, the truth, the recompense, the ends and the means, are a typically Western form of calculus. We even evaluate death in interest rates, in terms of a quality/price ratio. An economic calculation that is the calculation of the poor do not even have the courage to put a price on it.
What can happen - with the exception of war, which is itself only a conventional screen for protection? Some talk of bio-terrorism, of germ warfare or nuclear terrorism. But none of that is on the order of a symbolic challenge - it is only annihilation, without articulation, without glory, without risk, on the order of the final solution.
Therefore it is nonsense to see in the terrorist action a purely destructive logic. It seems to me that their own deaths were inseparable from their act (which is precisely what makes it a symbolic act) and not the impersonal elimination of others. All is in the challenge and in the duel, i.e. still in a dual personal relation with the adverse power. It was the power that humiliated you. It was the power that must be humiliated and not simply exterminated. One must make it lose face and this is never obtained by pure force and by the annihilation of others. They must be targeted and bruised in the midst of adversity. Outside the pact that binds the terrorists together, there is a dual pact with the adversary. It is therefore exactly the opposite of the cowardice of which we accuse them and it is exactly the opposite, for example, of what the Americans do in the Gulf war (and what they are in the process of repeating in Afghanistan): invisible targets, operational liquidation.
From all these peripatetics we retain above all the sight of images. And we must keep this pregnancy of images, their fascination, for, like it or not, they are our primitive scene. And, at the same time as they have radicalized the global situation, radicalized, the events of New York shall have radicalized relationship between image and reality. Whereas before we had an uninterrupted profusion of banal imagery and a stream of garbage events, the terrorist act of New York at once revives the image and the event.
Among the other weapons of the system that they turned against it, the terrorists exploited the real time of images, their instantaneous global broadcast. They appropriated it by the same token as they did stock market speculation, electronic news and air travel. The role of the image is highly ambiguous. For at the same time as it exalts the event it takes it hostage. It plays at once the role of an infinite multiplier and of diversion and neutralization (this as already the case for the events of 1968). Which we still forget when we speak of the "danger" of the media. The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and serves it for consumption. Of course, they also give it an effect hitherto unknown, but as an image-event.
Then what remains of the real event, if not its image everywhere, fiction, the virtual pervading reality? In the present case, we believed (perhaps with a certain relief) we were seeing the reemergence of the real of the violence of the reel in a supposedly virtual universe. "There's the end of all your virtual business - that was real!" At the same time, some were able to see in this a resurrection of history beyond its announced end. But does reality really outstrip fiction? If it seems to, it's because it has absorbed its energy and because it has itself become fiction. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, when the real is jealous of the image... It is a kind of duel between them to see who can be the most unimaginable.
The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable but this does not suffice to make it a real event. A surfeit of violence is not sufficient to emerge into reality. For reality is a principle, and this principle is lost. The real and fiction are inextricable and the fascination that the attack holds is above all that of the image (the at once jubilatory and catastrophic consequences are themselves largely imaginary).
Therefore in this case, the real can be added to the image as a premium of terror, as an additional fright. Not only is this terrifying but it is also real. Rather than that the violence of the reel should exist first and that the fright of the image should be added to it, the fright of the reel is added. Something of an additional fiction, a fiction that outstrips fiction. Ballard (after Borges) thus spoke of reinventing the real as the ultimate and most frightening fiction.
This terrorist violence is therefore no more a return to the flame of reality than to that of history. This terrorist violence is not "real." In a sense, it is worse: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and inoffensive. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster movie, the two 20th century elements of mass fascination are intertwined to the greatest degree: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism. The white light of the image and the black light of terrorism.
After the fact, one seeks to assign any given meaning to it, to find any interpretation for it. But there is none and that is the radicalism of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that alone is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism necessarily brings with it the terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it triggers a universal moral reaction) the political order is powerless against it. It is our own theater of cruelty, the only one we have left - extraordinary in that it unites the highest point of the spectacular and the highest point of challenge - a sacrificial model that pits the purest symbolic form of challenge against the historical and political order.
Any slaughter would have been forgiven them if it had had a meaning, if it could have been interpreted as a historical violence - such is the moral axiom of good violence. Any violence would be forgiven them, if it were not carried by the media ("terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But all that is illusory. There is no good use for the media. The media are part of the event, part of the terror and they play in one direction or the other.
The repressive act follows the same unforeseeable spiral as the terrorist act, no one knows where it and the reactions that follow will end. No possible distinction, at the level imagery and news, between the spectacular and the symbolic. No possible distinction between the "crime" and the repression. And it is this incontrollable unleashing of reversibility that is the true victory of terrorism. A victory that is visible in its subterranean ramifications and infiltrations of the event - not just in the direct economic, political and financial recession of the the system as a whole, and the moral and psychological recession that results from it but also in the recession of the value system, of any and all ideological freedom, of free circulation, etc., which was the pride of the Western world and on which it bases its grasp on the rest of the world.
Things are at such a point that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already on the way to disappearing from customs and consciences and that liberal globalization is in the process of being realized in a totally inverted form: that of a police globalization, of a total control and security terror. Deregulation is ending up with a maximum of constraints and restrictions, equal to those of a fundamentalist society.
The slump in production, consumption, speculation and growth (but certainly not in corruption!): all is happening as though the global system were operating a strategic twist, a torturing revision of its values - as a defensive reaction, it would seem, to the impact of terrorism but, at bottom, in response to its secret injunctions - forced regulation out of the absolute disorder, but it forces on itself, somewhat internalizing its own defeat.
Another aspect of the terrorists' victory is that all the other forms of violence and destabilization of the order play in its favor: digital terrorism, biological terrorism, anthrax terrorism and terrorism by rumor, all is imputed to bin Laden. He could even take responsibility for natural disasters. All the forms of disorganization and perverted circulation benefit him. The very structure of generalized global exchange works to the benefit of the impossible exchange. It's like an automatic writing for terrorism, fed again by the involuntary terrorism of the news media. With all the consequences and panics that result from it: if, in all this anthrax business, intoxication plays on itself through instantaneous crystallization, like a chemical solution at the simple contact with a molecule, it is that the whole system has reached a critical mass that makes it vulnerable to any aggression.
There is no solution to this extreme situation, above all not war, which offers only déjà-vu, with the same deluge of military forces, phantom information, pointless bludgeoning, deceitful and pathetic speech-making, technological deployment and intoxication. In sum, like the Gulf War, a non-event, an event that never really took place.
Besides, that is its reason for existing: to substitute a repetitive and already seen pseudo-event for a real, unique, unforeseeable and formidable event. The terrorist attack corresponded to an advance in events on all interpretative fronts, while this idiotically military and technological war inversely corresponds to an advance of the interpretative model over the event, and therefore to factitious stakes and to a non-place. War as prolongation of the absence of politics through other means.
Jean Baudrillard is a philosopher.
By Alain Minc
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Le terrorisme de l'esprit"
(Alain Minc, Le Monde, 2001/11/06)In the name of the principle of equivalence, which currently seems to be acting as a springboard for his thought, Jean Beaudrillard, while believing he is defining the mind of terrorism, is only practicing terrorism of the mind. Of a great mind, it seems. However, this is less an excuse than an aggravating circumstance.
From the holder of a "Masters in Variations," one might have expected another analysis on the geminate nature of the real and virtual, of the image and of substance, of the media and reality. The collapse of the Twin Towers could only signal, in his eyes, the definite triumph of the virtual, the moment when he deafeningly snatches up the real, which in sum is a demonstration of how correct more classical Baudrillardian thinking was.
In stead of that old song, however familiar it is, our philosopher decided to assume the pose, which is so traditional in France, of the grand intellectual prophet of the event, guarantor of its legitimacy and, naturally, of the current revolution. After Michel Foucault, the advocate for Iranian Khomeinism in 1979, who was therefore theoretically in solidarity with its exactions, now there is Baudrillard, philosopher of the "terrorist model" (sic).
To every lord, his due honors; the guilty ones are - surprise - globalization and its corollary, American hyper-power. "Liberal globalization is in the process of realizing itself in a totally inverse form: that of police globalization, complete control, security terror. Deregulation is ending up with a maximum of constraints and restrictions, the equivalents of those of a fundamentalist society."
One terror can therefore only answer another, one fundamentalism to another fundamentalism: news flash... Is it not the "system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal reversal? By collecting all the cards for itself, it has forced the Other to change the rules of the game": another news flash: who is this other so worthy as to require an capital 'O'?
"It is the globe itself that is resisting globalization." The three-card trick becomes even more audacious: terrorism is thus the incarnation of "the world." It is, of course, "immoral," what a concession from Baudrillard! - but it is only responds "to a globalization that is itself immoral." Here is the principle of equivalence operating at full steam: the globe answers globalization, one terror answers another, one Evil answers another.
Since Baudrillard can already feel an objection coming about the distinction between Good and Evil, he defuses it in advance: "For now that we have an event that defies not only morality but any form of interpretation, let us have the intelligence of Evil. For the crucial point is indeed there: in the total erroneousness of Western philosophy, that of the Enlightenment as it relates to Good and Evil." Our perverted conjurer is at zenith of his talents: where you believe you see goodness, there is its double; news flash, again.
Following his desire to dodge these topics, he makes the debate over Islam disappear in another magic trick: "Islam is only the moving front where this antagonism crystallizes." Neither promise of heaven, nor Fatwa, nor excommunication but a crystallization - by using Stendhal's word for love: it is a rather cursive synthesis for Islam.
Finally, in order to spice up the piece, he's only missing a morbid fascination with terrorists. Baudrillard gives into this, using words that are more than ambiguous. "Sacrificial obligation... without losing any of this life-and-death complicity... All is fair in disparaging their acts... Surely, their deaths prove nothing, but there is nothing to prove in a system where the truth itself is beyond grasp..." One final dart of indifference: "the at once jubilatory [jubilatory! you read it right] and catastrophic consequences are themselves largely imaginary."
Must we allow this apology even the slightest importance, as an explanation of terrorism? Yes, unfortunately. It comes from a majestic intellectual, one of those thinkers whose name the media classes utter only with respect, one of those characters welcome to support all the conflicts, the best along with the worst. These apologetics betray the very traditional incapacity of the French intelligentsia to recognize that there exists a hierarchy of values and that referring to morality is not indecent.
We had already seen the "anti-humanism" bandied about for decades but we thought it had been gobbled up with communism. Error: it is there, very much present, and Baudrillard practices it solemnly: nothing is worth anything; the individuals rights are an illusion; terrorist violence is the corollary to institutional totalitarianism.
This demonstration brings the anti-American urges, the third-world-ist reflexes and the leftist reactions that pervade French opinion to the point of incandescence. It is not an isolated point of view that Baudrillard is arguing: thanks to the conceptual apparatus of the philosopher, he is only unveiling what goes unsaid and what is an after thought among so many others. An exceptional circumstance is all that is necessary to see the old demons of intellectual totalitarianism reborn.
Why is the other side silent? Why are so few thinkers or philosophers reminding us a few obvious truths? The first among them: there is an absolute superiority of democracy - an assertion that has no relation to the ineptitudes of Berlusconi on the superiority of Western values. Some Muslim countries have indeed tried to practice democracy and the electoral game, demonstrating a collective courage which is more impressive than dropping one's ballot in the box in Luxembourg or Brussels. Democracy, this supreme value, is not a unique preserve of the West.
Second, more iconoclastic truth: America rhymes with democracy. How does Baudriallard explain the patriotic reflex since 11 September from all minorities, including Muslims, from one end to the other of the American land? Will he resort to the old insinuation of Marxist alienation to arrive at this?
Third truth, doubtless too infantile in the eyes of our better minds: morality is not an null set, as the mathematicians say, and the democratic regime allows its expression better than any other.
Fourth truth, still more banal: how can we deny democratic countries the right to defend themselves? Should it have been necessary, in the name of respect for civilian populations, for the English not to bomb Dresden, nor the Americans Hiroshima, though it meant letting the Second World War continue?
Fifth and final truth: it is at the very heart of the Western system, that is to say of the indissociable dyad of markets and democracy, that the best counterweights, the countervailing powers and antidotes to the very excesses of liberalism are developed. All the alternative regimes have sinned: Islamic fundamentalism is not, from this point of view, more attractive than fascism or communism.
This moderated vade-mecum is obviously less intoxicating to behold for a "great mind" than the globalizing and totalitarian phantasms. It seems Baudrillard derives the most pleasure from the terrorism of the mind, but doesn't he realize that, beyond this playful dimension, his posture is pitiful?
Alain Minc is president of AM Conseil.
[Posted 2003/01/09]
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