The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil

Abstract

This essay compares Jean Baudrillard's notion of theoretical terrorism, based on his theory of symbolic exchange, to his remarks about real terrorism before and after 9/11. Symbolic exchange plays on the principle of "ineluctable demand," which Baudrillard derives mainly from Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift in "primitive" societies. The symbolic value of the gift is not its reducibility to another value, but the singular challenge it poses, which Baudrillard says still haunts the order of capital. In his recent "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," Baudrillard claims that we were all complicit in the spectacle of 9/11 and in the terrorists' resentment towards the U.S. as the world's only superpower. Counting also on our fascination with spectacles, they were able to enlist "the system" against itself by placing upon the media the demand that it report and thereby spread their gift of death. But death is not valued symbolically in the U.S., not in Baudrillard's terms, and so the violence of the spectacle in the end only quickens the numbness and indifference of the masses. The terrorists' hope, nevertheless, was that the U.S. would lose face in its retaliation in a way that the rest of the world would recognize. I argue that Nietzsche's conception of "mercy" is the only ethical response to the challenge of 9/11, if we recognize our symbolic standing in the world. The U.S. can only win its present war of Good vs. Evil by going beyond it, by forgiving debt, thus giving a gift of life in excess of what the terrorists gave in their gift of death. --bb

In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.

Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.

The globe itself is resistant to globalization.

—Jean Baudrillard¹

From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern media spectacle, the hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes, dead celebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard’s work on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in his post-9/11 “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” he has taken it upon himself to decipher terrorism’s symbolic message. He does so in the wake of such scathing critiques as Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard’s theory as “an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world to become as theory wants it to be, to follow the scenario scripted in the theory” (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being—is he terrorism’s theoretical guru?—or did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event’s profound seductiveness?

To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernity is a political as well as an intellectual failure:

Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe. Imploding into entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity.

(180)

To be sure, Baudrillard’s scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global capitalist system. But while Baudrillard’s tone at the end of “L’Esprit du Terrorisme” can certainly be called apathetic—“there is no solution to this extreme situation—certainly not war”—he does not suggest that there are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18).

As in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard again suggests that terrorism is one such force, and that it functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange. Terrorism can be carried out in theoretical/aesthetic terms, the terms Baudrillard would obviously prefer, or in real terms, that...