Limited edition

A few months ago I read The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard for the purposes of the thesis I was writting. I found Baudrillard very refreshing. I hope you do as well.

Extracts.

“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 this 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…

Terrorists…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 means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon…

This is the spirit of terrorism.

Never attack the system in terms of relations of force…But shift the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where the rule is that of challenge, reversion and outbidding…Defy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its own collapse.

The terrorists hypothesis is that the system itself will commit suicide in response to the multiple challenges posed by deaths and suicides…

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…

…-they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power.
They have even -…- used the banality of American everyday life as cover and camouflage…

The collapse of the World Trade Centre towers is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it real. An excess of violence is not enough to open on 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…

The terrorist violence here is not…a blowback of reality…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…the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism…

We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it…But there is none…The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us…

We would forgive them any massacre if it had a meaning…We would pardon them any violence if it were not given media exposure…But this is an 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…

…terrorism’s true victory…

…that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from minds and mores, and liberal globalization is coming about in precisely the opposite form- a police-state globalization, a total control, a terror based on ‘law-and-order’ measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society…

Another aspect of the terrorists’ victory is that all other forms of violence and the destabilization of order work in its favour. Internet terrorism, biological…anthrax and rumour- all are ascribed to Bin Laden…It is like an ‘automatic writing’ of terrorism, constantly refuelled by the involuntary terrorism of news and information…

There is no remedy for this extreme situation, since it merely offers a rehash of the past…Like the Gulf War: a non-event, an event that does not really take place…

And this indeed is its raison d’être: to substitute, for a real and formidable, unique and unforseeable event, a repetitive, and rehashed pseudo-event…

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

The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard, Verso 2003.