Deep Thoughts: Baudrillard on terrorism

Terror is distilled everywhere. The system ends up terrorizing itself under the aegis of security. This is the very point at which the victory of terrorism manifests itself. And if the virtual war is already won on the ground by the world power, it is rather terrorism that has won the symbolic victory through the instauration of a general worldwide disorder. It is, in fact, the attacks of September 11 that have completed the process of globalization -- not the globalization of the market, of the flows of capital, but of a symbolic system that is much more fundamental for world domination -- by causing a coalition of all the powers, democratic, liberal, fascistic or totalitarian, spontaneously made to be complicit and solidly in defense of the world order. All powers are geared against a single "alien." And all the rationalizations are raging against the advent of "Evil." Still, it is against this world power that everyone rises, and it is against it that the eruption of the symbolic system of terrorism finds its counter-force. Terrorism will have burst the arrogance and the disproportional power that holds the whole world with respect to the imminence of an incomprehensible war.

This preventive terror, in total contempt for its own principles (humanistic and democratic), reached a dramatic extreme in the Moscow theatre incident where everything happened exactly as in the "Mad Cow" affair: one butchers the whole herd out of precaution. God will then recognize his own. Hostages and terrorists are confused in the massacre and thus virtually become accomplices. The terrorist principle is extrapolated to the whole population. It is the implicit assumption of power: populations themselves are a terrorist threat for it. Terrorism, in its action, seeks this solidarity with the people but without finding it. But here it is power itself that carries out this involuntary complicity in a brutal fashion.

We are power's virtual hostages, and we are dealing with a coalition of all the powers against all the populations. This is completely visible today with the proximity of the war that will take place in any case in total contempt for world opinion.

This global situation gives credence to Virilio when he speaks about a planetary civil war. The most dramatic political consequence of these events is the collapse of any concept of international community and, more generally, of any system of representation and legitimacy. And the recent world mass demonstrations against the war where, one believes, a rising countervailing power is emerging, are themselves only a worrying symptom of this hiatus, of this fracture of representation. Nobody wants the war, and yet it will take place no matter what, with the more or less camouflaged approval of all powers.

One deals from now on with an exercise of power in a pure state, a power without sovereignty. As long as power draws its sovereignty from the concept of representation, as long as it has a political reason, its exercise can find a balance; in any case, it can be fought and disputed. But the obliteration of this form of sovereignty leaves an unrestrained power, without an opposite number, in a state of nature (with no longer a natural brutality, but a technological one). And this power that does not have a legitimate reference any longer or even one true enemy (since it transforms it into some kind of criminal ghost) turns without compunction against its own populations.

But the integral reality of power is also its end. An integral power that is no longer one of prevention, dissuasion, security and control is a power that is symbolically vulnerable. It can no longer be brought into play and, finally, it turns on itself. It is this weakness, this internal failure of world power, which terrorism in its own way reveals, just like an unconscious angst is betrayed by a failed act. This is properly speaking "the hell of power." September 11 thus appears from the point of view of power like a gigantic challenge in which world power lost face. And this war, far from taking up the challenge, will not erase the humiliation of September 11. There is something terrifying in the fact that this virtual world order can make its entry into "reality" with such facility.

The terrorist event was strange. It was an unbearable strangeness. As for the non-war, it inaugurates the worrying familiarity of terror.

(First published in Rebonds, Libération on March 10, 2003. Translated by Alex Barder. Jean Baudrillard is an internationally acclaimed theorist whose writings trace the rise and fall of symbollic exchange in the contemporary century. In addition to a wide range of highly influential books from Seduction to Symbollic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard's most recent publications include: The Vital Illusion, The Spirit of Terrorism, The Singular Objects of Architecture, Passwords, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Texts, Interviews (September 2005) and The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (November 2005). He is a member of the editorial board of CTheory.)