Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui? by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida (review)

On 19 February 2003, four days after an international day of protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, René Major and the Institut des hautes études en psychanalyse organized a public debate in Paris between Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard: ‘Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui?’ In the twelve years between the debate and its publication in book form, the ‘war on terror’ has escalated in an often unpredictable manner. However, the discussion between Derrida and Baudrillard has proven to be prescient, and their analyses remain useful for thinking the contemporary geopolitical moment. For Baudrillard, the reality of the Iraq War is embedded in a virtual horizon because the pursuit of the war is primarily based on its symbolic importance: as a compensatory substitution for the events of September 11. Baudrillard argues that the war is characterized by a deficit of concrete geopolitical goals. Its principally symbolic dimension, he suggests, means that this war is already interminable, even before it has begun, and this part of his analysis certainly resonates with the expansion of the war on terror beyond any clear geographical or temporal limits. The Iraq War intensifies a relatively new phenomenon in contemporary warfare: the destruction of the concept of the enemy as such. ‘Il n’est plus reconnu comme ennemi, il est simplement exterminé comme une vermine’, says Baudrillard, and in reference to the earlier Gulf War, ‘ce n’est pas tellement l’ennemi qui est détruit que le concept même de l’ennemi’ (p. 28; original emphasis). Contemporary warfare aims to eradicate the potential of an enemy before one can even assume such a position. This logic has become much more evident in the aftermath of the Iraq War. The endless expansions of kill-lists and drone targets since the war reflects the ongoing rise of this disturbing logic in which a potential enemy is eliminated before it even becomes an enemy as such. However, while Baudrillard provides some usefully provocative and perceptive commentary, his refusal to consider the political and economic rationality informing the war weakens his analysis. Here, Derrida’s interventions offer crucial reminders of the massive responsibility of the West for much of the contemporary situation in the Middle East. In contrast to Baudrillard’s emphasis on the virtual, Derrida insists, without being simplistic, on the very material roots of the war and its historical context. He believes that ‘même sans Ben Laden, il y aurait un problème irakien aujourd’hui, lié au pétrole, lié à l’ordre politique du Moyen-Orient, lié à la question israélo-palestinienne bien entendu’ (p. 62). Baudrillard interjects: ‘Là je ne suis vraiment pas d’accord avec cette tentative de faire l’économie de la guerre’ (p. 63). Baudrillard is often taken as a nihilist thinker, but here he reveals himself to be a moralist. He even accuses Derrida of minimizing the significance of September 11. Baudrillard wants to insist on its absolute exceptionality as an event while Derrida is attempting to situate the event(s) within a materialist logic. We can insist on the exceptionality of historical events, but Derrida reminds us that even irruptions of the apparently irrational have a disturbing internal rationality of their own.