We may dismiss from the outset the hypothesis that September 11 constituted merely an accident or incident on the path to irreversible globalization. An ultimately despairing hypothesis, since something very extraordinary occurred there, and to deny it is to admit that henceforth nothing can ever constitute an event, that we are doomed to play out the flawless logic of a global power capable of absorbing any resistance, any antagonism, and even strengthening itself by so doing – the terrorist act merely hastening the planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking.
Counterposed to this zero hypothesis is the maximal one, the maximal gamble on the character of September 11 as event – event being defined here as that which, in a system of generalized exchange, suddenly creates a zone of impossible exchange: the impossible exchange of death at the heart of the event itself, and the impossible exchange of that event for any discourse whatever. Hence its symbolic potency, and it is this symbolic potency which struck us all in the Manhattan events.
According to the zero hypothesis, the terrorist event is insignificant. It ought not to have existed and, basically, it does not exist. This is to see things in terms of the idea that Evil is mere illusion or an accidental vicissitude in the trajectory of Good – in this case, the trajectory of the World Order and a happy Globalization. Theology has always based itself on this unreality of Evil as such.
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?
Here again, this is to suppose that all oppositional violence is ultimately complicit with the existing order. It is to disqualify the intentions of the actors, and the very stakes of their action. It is to reduce that action to its ‘objective’ consequences (the geopolitical consequences of September 11), and never to see it in terms of its own potency. And, anyway, who is manipulating whom? Who is playing the other’s game? In this case, it is just as much the terrorists who profit by the advance of the system, in order themselves to gain power, in a race along parallel tracks in which the two opponents, contrary to what happened in class conflict and historical warfare, never actually meet.
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 longer 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).
This is the sovereign hypothesis: terrorism ultimately has no meaning, no objective, and cannot be measured by its ‘real’ political and historical consequences. And it is, paradoxically, because it has no meaning that it constitutes an event in a world increasingly saturated with meaning and efficacy.
The sovereign hypothesis is the one that conceives of terrorism, beyond its spectacular violence, beyond Islam and America, as the emergence of a radical antagonism at the very heart of the process of globalization, of a force irreducible to this integral technical and mental realization of the world, irreducible to this inexorable movement towards a completed global order.
A vital counterforce grappling with the death force of the system. A force of defiance to a globality totally soluble in circulation or exchange. A force of an irreducible singularity, the more violent as the system extends its hegemony – up to a ruptural event like that of September 11, which does not resolve this antagonism, but lends it, at a stroke, a symbolic dimension.
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: since 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.
The Americans lacked such a wound (at Pearl Harbor they suffered an act of war, not a symbolic attack). An ideal reverse of fortune for a nation at last wounded at its heart and free, having atoned for it, to exert its power in all good conscience. A situation science fiction dreamed of from the beginning: that of some obscure force that would wipe them out and which, until that point, merely existed in their unconscious (or some other recess of their minds). And all of a sudden, it materializes through the good grace of terrorism! The axis of Evil takes hold of America’s unconscious, and realizes by violence what was merely a fantasy and a dream thought!
It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility 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 is 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 people1), 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.)
There is this same exile into the mirror of resemblance in Philippe Muray’s address to the Dear Jihadists:2 ‘We produced you, jihadists and terrorists, and you will end up prisoners of resemblance. Your radicalism is something we passed on to you. We can do this because we are indifferent to everything, including our own values. You cannot kill us because we are already dead. You think you are fighting us, but you are unconsciously on our side. You are already assimilated.’ Or, elsewhere: ‘You have worked well, but you have merely killed yourselves off as a singular force.… By your very act, you have re-entered the global game you execrate.’
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 you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have merely devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.
Even in vengeance and warfare, we can see the same lack of imagination – the same inability to regard the other as a fully fledged adversary, the same magical solution, which is to exterminate him and obliterate him unceremoniously.
To make Islam the embodiment of Evil would be to do it honour (and to do oneself honour in the process). But we don’t see things that way: when it is said that Islam is Evil, the implication is that it is not well, that it is sick, and that it is violent because it is sick, because it sees itself as a humiliated victim, and is nursing its resentment instead of taking its place joyously in the New World Order. Islam is regressive and fundamentalist out of despair. But if it becomes offensive, then it must be reduced to impotence. In a word, Islam is not what it ought to be. And what, then, of the West?
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 moral 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 the 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’. Now, choice in terms of symbolic obligations is sometimes profoundly mysterious – as in the case of Romand, the man with the double life, who murdered his whole family, not for fear of being unmasked, but for fear of inflicting on them the profound disappointment of discovering his deception.3 Committing suicide would not have expunged the crime from the record; he would merely have passed the shame off on to the others. Where is the courage, where the cowardice? The question of freedom, one’s own or that of others, no longer poses itself in terms of moral consciousness, and a higher freedom must allow us to dispose of it to the point of abusing or sacrificing it. Omar Khayyam: ‘Rather one freeman bind with chains of love than set a thousand prisoned captives free.’
Seen in that light, this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the master–slave relationship. In the past, the master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it. The slave was the one deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labour. How do things stand today? We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.
Another serious objection – no longer this time with regard to motives, but to the symbolic tenor of the terrorist act. Are we dealing, in the September 11 attack – in this violent challenge to the triumphant logic of globalization – with a symbolic act in the strong sense (that is to say, implying a turnaround and transmutation of values)? According to Caroline Heinrich, for example, the terrorists, in attacking a logic of simulation and indifference in the name of a system of values and higher reality, can be said merely to have revived a new identitary logic. ‘Against the logic of indifference,’ she says, ‘the terrorists are trying to restore a meaning to something that no longer has any.’ The Real for us being what it is – that is to say, a referential illusion – the terrorists could merely be said to be substituting for it new stakes and new values dredged up from the ancient past.
Something for which Philippe Muray also criticizes them: ‘We had liquidated all our values; that was indeed the sense of our whole history, and you bring us back your phantom values, your phantom identity, your “integrity”, which you set against a disintegrated world.’ The terrorists are taking ‘simulation’ referents (the towers, the market, the Western mega-culture) for real ones. Against the inhumanity of integral exchange, they are once again inaugurating a metaphysics of truth (following Caroline Heinrich here still). Now, the point is not to take it out on simulation, but to take it out on the truth itself. There is no point attacking simulacra, if it means falling back into truth. There is no point attacking the virtual, if it means falling back into reality.
All the more so, according to Caroline Heinrich, as the terrorists are themselves in out-and-out simulation: the terrorist act is generated by models. It is, even, a remarkable example of the precedence of models over the Real (Hollywood directors have been called in as consultants by antiterrorist strategists). Moreover, their action is modelled in every respect on the technological devices of the system. How can one, then, by playing the same game as the system, claim to overturn its goals?
The objection is a strong one, but reductive in so far as it confines itself to the religious and fundamentalist discourse of the terrorists, by which they claim effectively to contest the global system in the name of a higher truth. Yet it is not in discourse, but in the act itself that the ‘minimal irruption of reversibility’ which makes it a symbolic act resides. The terrorists are making an attack upon a system of integral reality by an act which has, in the very moment of its perpetration, neither true meaning nor reference in another world. The aim is simply to wreck the system – itself indifferent to its own values – by means of its own weapons. Even more than the system’s technological weapons, the key arm they appropriate, and turn to decisive effect, is the non-meaning and indifference which are at the heart of the system.
A strategy of turning around and overturning power, not in the name of a moral or religious confrontation, nor some ‘clash of civilizations’, but as a result of the pure and simple unacceptability of that global power.
There is, moreover, no need to be an Islamist, or to appeal to a higher truth, to find this global order unacceptable. Islamist or not, we share this fundamental rejection, and there are many signs of fracture and disarray – of fragility – at the heart of this power itself. This is the ‘truth’ of the terrorist act. There is no other, and certainly not the truth of a fundamentalism to which it is referred, merely the better to disqualify it.
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 question is that of the Real. According to Žižek, the passion of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the eschatological passion for the Real, the nostalgic passion for that lost or disappearing object.4 And the terrorists might be said, ultimately, merely to be responding to this pathetic demand for reality.
For Philippe Muray, too, the jihadists’ terrorism is merely the last stirring of a dying reality – the aftermath of a dramatic history that is now coming to an end, and is paralysed precisely because it is moribund. But this calling to order of the Real and History is itself a thing of pathos, as it corresponds to an earlier phase, and not to the present integral-reality phase which is that of globalization. At this stage, no negativity whatever can provide a response. To this ‘integrist’ offensive of the global system, the only response can come through the irruption of a singularity, which, for its part, has nothing to do with the Real.
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 the power 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 Twin 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 or 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.
September 11 will have raised with some violence the question of reality, of which the fanciful conspiracy theory is the imaginary by-product. Hence, perhaps, the vehemence with which this theory has been rejected on all sides. Is it because it may be seen as anti-American, and absolves the terrorists from blame? (But to absolve them from blame is to relieve them of responsibility for the event, which comes back round again to the contemptuous view that the Islamists would never have been capable of such a feat.) No, it is, rather, the ‘denial’ aspect of this theory that explains the violence of the reaction. The denial of reality is terroristic in itself. Anything is better than to contest reality as such. What has to be saved is, above all, the reality principle. ‘Negationism’ is public enemy number one.5
Now, in fact, we already live largely in a negationist society. No event is ‘real’ any longer. Terror attacks, trials, wars, corruption, opinion polls – there’s nothing now that isn’t rigged or undecidable. Government, the authorities and institutions are the first victims of this fall from grace of the principles of truth and reality. Incredulity rages. The conspiracy theory merely adds a somewhat burlesque episode to this situation of mental destabilization. Hence the urgent need to combat this creeping negationism and, at all costs, safeguard a reality that is now kept alive on a drip. For though we can range a great machinery of repression and deterrence against physical insecurity and terrorism, nothing will protect us from this mental insecurity.
Moreover, all the security strategies are merely extensions of terror. And it is the real victory of terrorism that it has plunged the whole of the West into the obsession with security – that is to say, into a veiled form of perpetual terror.
The spectre of terrorism is forcing the West to terrorize itself – the planetary police network being the equivalent of the tension of a universal Cold War, of a fourth world war imprinting itself upon bodies and mores.
Thus, for example, the world’s leaders met recently in Rome to sign a treaty which, they all proclaim, puts a final end to the Cold War. But they didn’t even leave the airport. They stayed on the tarmac, surrounded by armoured cars, barbed wire and helicopters – that is to say, by all the symbols of the new Cold War, the war of armed security, of the perpetual deterrence of an invisible enemy.
Neither politically nor economically did the abolition of the Twin Towers put the global system in check. Something else is at issue here: the stunning impact of the attack, the insolence of its success and, as a result, the loss of credibility, the collapse of image. For the system can function only if it can exchange itself for its own image, reflect itself like the towers in their twinness, find its equivalent in an ideal reference. It is this that makes it invulnerable – and it is this equivalence that has been smashed. It is in this sense that, while it is every bit as elusive as terrorism, it has none the less been struck in the heart.
1 In ‘Fauna of Mirrors’, The Book of Imaginary Beings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 67–8 [Trans.].
2 Philippe Muray, Chers djihadistes (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002) [Trans.].
3 See Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary: A True Story of Murder and Deception, trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Bloomsbury, 2001) [Trans.].
4 See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 5. (Though it should be pointed out that Baudrillard had not seen this work at the time of writing, but had had access only to a much shorter conference paper by Žižek.) The phrase ‘the passion for the Real’ in Žižek’s text is taken, with acknowledgement, from an as yet unpublished work by Alain Badiou, entitled Le Siècle [Trans.].
5 The French term ‘négationnisme’ usually designates what in English is called ‘Holocaust denial’, though clearly a wider sense is intended here [Trans.].