Current terrorism is not the descendant of a traditional history of anarchy, nihilism and fanaticism. It is contemporaneous with globalization and, in order to grasp its features, we should briefly go over a genealogy of that globalization, in its relation to the universal and the singular.
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 our 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.
In fact, the universal comes to grief in globalization. The globalization of trade puts an end to the universality of values. It is the triumph of single-track thinking over universal thought. What globalizes first is the market, the profusion of exchanges and of all products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally, it is the promiscuity of all signs and all values or, in other words, pornography. For the global diffusion of anything and everything over the networks is pornography: no need for sexual obscenity, this interactive copulation is enough. At the end of this process, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. 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.
We may wonder, then, whether the universal has not already succumbed to its own critical mass, and whether it and modernity have ever existed anywhere other than in discourse and official moralities. For us, at any rate, the mirror of the universal is shattered. But this is perhaps an opportunity, for in the fragments of this shattered mirror, all the singularities are resurfacing: those we believe to be threatened are surviving, while those we thought to be extinct are reviving.
The situation is becoming radicalized as universal values lose their authority and legitimacy. So long as they could assert themselves as mediating values, they succeeded, more or less well, in integrating singularities, as differences, into a universal culture of difference. But they can no longer do this now, as triumphant globalization has swept away all differences and all values, bringing into being an entirely indifferent culture (or lack of it). Once the universal has disappeared, all that remains is the all-powerful global technostructure, set over against singularities that are now returned to the wild and left to themselves.
The universal has had its historical chance, but today, confronted on the one hand with a global order to which there is no alternative and, on the other, with singularities drifting off on their own or rising up against the system, the concepts of freedom, democracy and human rights cut a very pale figure, being merely the ghosts of a vanished universal.
The universal was a culture of transcendence, of the subject and the concept, of the Real and representation. The virtual space of the global is the space of the screen and the network, of immanence and the digital, of a dimensionless space–time. In the universal, there was still a natural reference to the world, to the body and to memory. A kind of dialectical tension and critical movement which found their form in historical and revolutionary violence. It is the expulsion of this critical negativity which opens on to another kind of violence, the violence of the global: the supremacy of positivity alone and of technical efficiency, total organization, integral circulation, the equivalence of all exchanges. Hence the end of the role of the intellectual, bound up with the Enlightenment and the universal – and also the end of the activist, who was linked to contradictions and historical violence.
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 contestation of those values that it is enemy number one today).
Who can thwart the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement, whose only objective is to curb deregulation. Its political impact may be considerable, but its symbolic impact is zero. That violence is still a kind of internal vicissitude which the system can surmount while retaining the upper hand.
What can thwart the system is not positive alternatives, but singularities. But these are neither positive nor negative. They are not an alternative; they are of another order. They do not conform to any value judgement, or obey any political reality principle. They can, as a consequence, be the best or the worst. They cannot be united in a general historical action. They thwart any dominant, single-track thinking, but they are not a single-track counter-thinking: they invent their own game and their own rules.
Singularities are not necessarily violent, and there are some subtle ones, such as those of language, art, the body or culture. But there are some violent ones, and terrorism is one of these. It is the one that avenges all the singular cultures that have paid with their disappearance for the establishment of this single global power.
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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.
The establishment of the global system is the product of a fierce jealousy: the jealous feelings of an indifferent, low-definition culture towards highdefinition cultures; of disenchanted, disintensified systems towards the cultures of high intensity; of desacralized societies towards sacrificial cultures or forms.
For such a system, any refractory form is virtually terroristic.1 This is the case, again, with Afghanistan. That, on a particular territory, all ‘democratic’ freedoms and licence (music, television – even women’s faces) can be prohibited, and that a country can stand out totally against what we call civilization (whatever the religious principle invoked) – these things are unbearable to the rest of the ‘free’ world. It is unacceptable for modernity to be rejected in its universal pretensions. That it should not appear as obvious Good, and the natural ideal of the human race; that the universality of our mores and values should be cast into doubt, if only in certain minds that are immediately characterized as fanatical – this is criminal so far as the consensual horizon and single-track thinking of the West are concerned.
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 taken 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 here 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 counter-transference, 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.
1 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.