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).

Embedded in Jean Baudrillard's almost incomprehensible prose is the shocking assertion that terrorism is justifiable, that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade Center attack. (Kelly et al. 4)

Average Harper's readers may be spared blame for not comprehending Baudrillard's theoretical prose, but the point of "L'Esprit" is not that 9/11 was justifiable in any moral sense, but that, as Nietzsche held, true justice must end in its "self-overcoming" (Genealogy 73). Baudrillard explicitly states that "if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil" ("L'Esprit" 15). In light of his past writings, I suggest that his unspoken stand on the issue of justice concerning 9/11 would have to be what Nietzsche's would have been: that there is no justice, only forgiveness, and only the strong can forgive. But Baudrillard does not explicitly state this claim, which I see as an implicit conclusion to his thought. Instead he plays the provocateur by laying claim to the terrorists' logic, which was their greatest weapon. If, as Kellner would have it, Baudrillard wants to seduce us into following his script, we must be sure to understand the script well so we can decide how to act on it. The fact that 9/11 was arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ has inspired Baudrillard to dress up his old ideas about the symbolic and symbolic exchange. To understand what he means by "symbolic dimension" and "strategic symbolism" in the quotation from "L'Esprit" above, let us consult the origins and uses of the concept of the symbolic in his earlier work.

Baudrillard's Symbolic and Death

1. it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (Simulacra 6)

Marx, Freud and Saussure were stuck in the second order, where the critique of appearances was thought to yield a glimpse of a deeper reality. We have since turned from the critique of appearances to the critique of meaning and of reality itself (the third order), and from here can only enter into the fourth order, the hyperreal. This is because we live in profoundly mediated environments, wherein coded images are produced and exchanged far more than material goods, and the more these codes are exchanged throughout the culture, the more erratically their values fluctuate, until at last they can no longer be traced to their origins. Hyperreality thus describes the extreme limit of fetishization, wherein re-presentation eclipses reality. Here the spectacle continues to fascinate, but indifference is the attitude du jour (indifference having long been associated with the postmodern). But Baudrillard's history, it seems, has one more step to take before it completes its circle. Baudrillard imagines that from within the fourth order, where all metaphysical distinctions of value have disappeared, there will emerge a type of postmodern primitivism (I propose to call it), which he outlines in his conceptions of the symbolic and symbolic exchange.

The symbolic is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a "structure," but an act of exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary. (133)

When we enter the Baudrillardian symbolic dimension, the biased distinctions of Western metaphysics--Cause/Effect, Being/Nothingness, Real/Imaginary, Normal/Abnormal, Good/Evil--are to be considered deconstructed, over-come in the French Nietzschean tradition of the aesthetic turn. The symbolic is Baudrillard's trope for the revaluation of all values, jenseits von Gut und Bose, a revolutionary theory for the age of digital reproduction and the generalized aesthetic sphere. In the Baudrillardian symbolic, one hears the echo of Nietzsche's merriment at the end of metaphysics: "pandemonium of all free spirits" (Portable 486). The "death drive" in Baudrillard is therefore not a matter of a repressed instinct (Freud), nor even yet of a universal force within language (Lacan), but of an incipient implosion of "the code," which stands for all terms and forces valued in opposition within the system. In the wake of his implosionary vision Baudrillard hopes will arise, at least in theory, a liberated and continuously creative new set of relations, governed not by semiotic or economic codes, but by the principle of symbolic exchange.

the gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging and the unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary [in that it matters little what object is involved], and yet absolutely singular.

As distinct from language, whose material can be disassociated from the subjects speaking it, the material of symbolic exchange, the objects given, are not autonomous, hence not codifiable as signs. (Critique 64-65)

The symbolic value of a gift or of any gesture depends upon the involuntary consciousness of the fact that the consciousness of the other poses a singular challenge to our own. And we cannot not respond to this challenge, once we have received it, because even ignoring someone or something is a way of responding. The gift represents a qualitative measurement of honor or disgrace between two parties and in that sense is symbolic, but it is also symbolic in Baudrillard's other sense, that is, as standing only for itself, as a unique and ineluctable challenge to counter give. It takes a certain amount of Orwellian doublethink to ignore the challenge represented by the other once we have grasped the reciprocal nature of our fates. For Baudrillard's and Mauss's "primitives," events such as the Potlatch involve conspicuous consumption and expenditure, a sumptuous wasting of goods that turns out in the end to be essentially usurious and sumptuary (see Critique 30, Mauss 6).

Behind all the superstructures of purchase, market, and private property, there is always the mechanism of social prestation which must be recognized in our choice, our accumulation, our manipulation and our consumption of objects. This mechanism of discrimination and prestige is at the very basis of the system of values and of integration into the hierarchical order of society. The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle. (30)

The symbolic value of commodities--the connotations of wearing a certain brand of basketball shoe or driving a certain car--are seen here as barbaric in the social relations they imply. And so Baudrillard warns in an interview:

If we take to dreaming once more--particularly today--of a world where signs are certain, of a strong "symbolic order," let's be under no illusions. For this order has existed, and it was a brutal hierarchy, since the sign's transparency is indissociably also its cruelty. (Baudrillard Live 50)

One nevertheless senses in this disavowal of the primitive symbolic order, where signs were singular and binding, a hint of admiration, echoing Nietzsche's musings on the cruel but proud days when power was signified outright, and not behind the guises of morality.[4]

At the very core of the "rationality" of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death. (Symbolic 126)

According to Baudrillard, the dead in primitive societies played integral roles in the lives of the living by serving as partners in symbolic exchange. A gift to the dead was believed to yield a return, and by exchanging with the dead through ritual sacrifices, celebrations and feasts, they managed to absorb the rupturing energy of death back into the group. But

there is an irreversible evolution from savage societies to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group's symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange....Today it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. . . . Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. (126)

Modern Western cultures have largely ceased to exchange with the dead collectively, partly because we no longer believe in their continued existence, and partly because we no longer value that which cannot be accumulated or consumed. The dead have no value by our measurements. We give them nothing and expect nothing from them in return, and yet they remain with us, in our memories, obligating our recognition and response. How do we respond to the symbolic challenge of death and the dead, the challenge they pose to our conscious experience? This is the question of 9/11.

We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are all dreaming, instead of dying stupidly working oneself to the ground, of receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the "natural" order of capital. (166)

Violent, artificial death is a symbolic event witnessed collectively. "Technical, non natural and therefore willed (ultimately by the victim him- or herself), death becomes interesting once again since willed death has a meaning" (165). Was 9/11 willed by the victims? Obviously not, and yet, Baudrillard would suggest, in our identification with both the killers and those who died, we ourselves are not so innocent.

Nihilism and Terrorism

Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia.

--Baudrillard (Simulacra 161)

1. it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)

The first wave of nihilism occurs in the second order of simulation, and corresponds with the Enlightenment and Romantic revolutions against the order of appearances, "the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history" (Simulacra 160). Nihilism is thus first and foremost, for Baudrillard, the signature of the post-metaphysical philosopher. He thus places Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead" at the center of all modernity, but adds that once the critique of metaphysics has run its course, a new type of nihilism is ushered in. "When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so," i.e., after God there is Nietzsche, after Nietzsche, only simulation (159). "God is not dead, he has become hyperreal."

postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. (161)

After discovering the absence of a profound meaning behind the world of appearances, those who seek the true meaning of things end up impaled on the truth that there is no true meaning to be had. Nietzsche's dilemma. And so Baudrillard boldly declares: "I am a nihilist," and swears himself to the destruction of both appearance and meaning, the first two waves, but also to the destruction of the appearance/meaning dichotomy altogether, the postmodern phase of the second wave. If western culture can now be characterized by Baudrillard's notion of a fourth order simulation society, where simulacra dominate our lives and the faith in a "profound reality" has turned radically agnostic, it is here that one must plant one's (post-) philosophical flag. Rather than take the reactionary approach of a return to metaphysics, Baudrillard affects a nihilistic version of Nietzschean amor fati, accepting the system's melancholy and pushing to its limit the "mode of disappearance" it effects in everything it touches (162). The melancholy in Adorno and Benjamin, holds Baudrillard, already stems from this recognition that dis-enchantment, dis-appearance, the critique of reason itself are all inherent to the system's functionality. But their "dialectic" was already "nostalgic," their melancholy the last healthy pulse of "ressentiment" against the systemization of death, a third order phenomenon. Melancholia today, says Baudrillard, is no longer a matter of disenchantment and demystification: "It is simply disappearance." No longer an affect one can deploy in a critique of the system, it is now the affect of "the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems."

is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

This is of course what happened on 9/11, as Baudrillard has since pointed out, but Kellner would also likely point out that Baudrillard, having himself wished for 9/11, begins "L'Esprit" by projecting this wish onto the rest of us (180). Our collective complicity in the wish is of course impossible to gauge, but in "On Nihilism" Baudrillard had already confessed his own complicity with nihilistic terrorism in the most carefully calibrated terms:

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only recourse left us.

But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality--as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

Baudrillard gives up on the idea of a radicality in theory, a position of negativity relative to the system, Adorno's position. But he is at his negative dialectical best in this passage, which is a statement of complicity with the utopianism of the terrorist's challenge, as well as a statement of the utmost pessimism regarding the subject's ability to effect a change in the system, which in the end neutralizes every event, no matter how deadly:

The dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing. Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. (Simulacra 163-164)

Did death have a stage on September 11th? Have the dead since been annulled by indifference, caught up in the media's mode of disappearance? Despite the terrorists' successful attempt to put death back on stage in a symbolic exchange with "the system," the majority of Americans have by now assimilated its violence into the broader narrative of a war against terrorism and Evil, one of the many things on TV.

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

This is where seduction begins. (163-164)

Rather than respond with apathy and indifference to the disappearance of meaning now under way, Baudrillard resurrects the once banished realm of appearances, the aesthetic, in a move beyond the nihilism of meaning/nihilism of non-meaning dichotomy. As Kellner writes: "Like Nietzsche, he wants to derive value from the order of appearances without appeal to a supernatural world, a hinterwelt or a deep reality" (120). Kellner, who apparently thinks a more Nietzschean joyfulness, as opposed to Baudrillard's melancholy, is still preferable at the end of the twentieth century, nevertheless holds to the metaphysics of morality against the aestheticism of the French Nietzscheans. For those who no longer acknowledge a "hinterwelt," however, the idea that we exist in a world of appearances which are irreducible to true essences (like Good and Evil), is not so far fetched. One thus takes the Nietzschean turn, toward the aesthetic, and this, Baudrillard tells us, "is where seduction begins." His later work on this concept in On Seduction need not be elaborated here, but we should note that Rex Butler has shown the concept of seduction in Baudrillard to be an elaboration on the concept of symbolic exchange (71-118). "Symbolic exchange," according to Butler,

is not simply the negation of economic value but rather its limit. It is the thinking of that loss, that relationship to the other, which at once allows exchange, opens it up, and means that it is never complete, never able to account for itself. (81-82)

If seduction is what rules the chasm left by a symbolic exchange between the challenger and the system, what was the direction of the seduction created by 9/11? Were we seduced? Was Baudrillard? Are we being seduced by Baudrillard? Having revisited his perspective on terrorism prior to 9/11--terrorism as the ultimate metaphor, but naïve in its utopianism---let us consider his perspective après le spectacle.

9/11: Morning of the Living Dead

The spectacle of terrorism forces upon us the terrorism of the spectacle.

-- Jean Baudrillard ("L'Esprit" 15)

It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited--those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order--feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides in the hearts of even those who have shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their identicality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order. ("L'Esprit" 13)

The twin towers, like the twin political parties in the U.S., represent a balance of power, two forces locked in opposition. But like the Democrats and the Republicans, both towers are virtually identical, and their dualistic logic leaves no room for remainders. People rebel, either secretly or openly, against an airtight system, two towers of power representing the same people in charge, the illusion of difference. Finally someone throws a monkey wrench into the works in the form of four jet airplanes, aimed not only at the symbols of American power, but at the American mass media, which serve to broadcast the terror and violence worldwide. By way of our simulation technologies, the terrorists were able to issue a singular challenge to each American, and it is in this way that the event is properly symbolic in the Baudrillardian sense, as a gift demanding return. This is a common motif in Baudrillard, this moment where simulation society is somehow reversed or revolutionized by the symbolic. By insisting on our unconfessable complicity, the assumption that we all have a soft spot for the underdog and a sore spot for the overdog, especially when the latter is on the brink of dominating the global playpen, Baudrillard further challenges us to answer the challenge of 9/11, to enter the debate at the level of a singular exchange. As individuals, our ability to influence what is done in the name of the U.S. is limited, but as intellectuals, we must ask ourselves: what is the symbolic meaning and effect of the event? An essay exam for the whole nation. The twin towers symbolize corporate globalization, the Pentagon the American military, and both together stand for what Baudrillard calls "the system." The numbers 9-1-1 signal Emergency, and the date marks a number of historical events: the 1989 massacre in Haiti which ousted Aristide; the 1973 overthrow of Allende in Chile; and the 1683 battle of Vienna, where Islam was ultimately defeated by Poland, the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.[5] But for Baudrillard the symbolic meaning of the event lies not only in its reducibility to such referents, but in its irreducible, singular, and irrevocable challenge to each and every imagination. Doubtless most Americans would deny any complicity with the terrorists on 9/11, but few would deny that it was the most fascinating day of the century, and this fascination, the product of the system, was what the terrorists counted on.

Never attack the system in terms of the balance of power. The balance of power is an imaginary (revolutionary) construct imposed by the system itself, a construct that exists in order to force those who attack it to fight on the battlefield of reality, the system's own terrain. Instead, move the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where defiance, reversion, and one-upmanship are the rule, so that the only way to respond to death is with an equivalent or even greater death. Defy the system with a gift to which it cannot reply except with its own death and its own downfall. . . .

You have to make the enemy lose face. And you'll never achieve that through brute force, by merely eliminating the Other. (16)

Certainly the terrorists' attack on the battlefield of reality was devastating on its own, but their attack on the symbolic battlefield, Baudrillard maintains, was far more devastating in terms of achieving their global aspirations. According to the system's logic, the Other loses when they only kill one of your soldiers and you kill all of theirs, but according to the symbolic logic of the terrorists, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the symbolic honor. "In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game," and under the new rules, the strongest power in the world violently decimating one of the weakest powers at the cost of a single life is not honorable, it is only efficient (14). Baudrillard, scandalous as ever, hands the symbolic victory of the war on terror to the terrorists, all but crediting them with recent economic, political, and psychological "recessions" in the West, and with the fact that "deregulation has ended in maximum security, in a level of restriction and constraint equivalent to that found in fundamentalist societies" (18).

at the level of images and information, it is impossible to distinguish between the spectacular and the symbolic, impossible to distinguish between crime and repression. And it is this uncontrollable outburst of reversibility that is the veritable victory of terrorism. (18)

What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our Nation (the Islamic world) has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no one hears and no one heeds. Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins. . . . To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad peace be upon him. (Andreas 29)

The challenge represented in the gift is clear: "you will not know peace until your military leaves us in peace." This implies a direct question: why is the U.S. military in Arab countries? The answer, of course, is that the U.S. military is there to protect U.S. economic interests, in accordance with its long-held notions of manifest destiny. But U.S. officials do not respond to this implicit question, their response is no response, which of course is a response in itself in symbolic terms. The terrorists count on the likelihood that the U.S. will make a move the world will view as symbolically dishonorable and aesthetically ugly, in relation to their act of defiance, that the harder it strikes back, the worse it will look, and the greater the global resistance. The U.S. can only win on the aesthetico-symbolic plane, where prestation rules, by staying its hand, for there is no courage or beauty in brute force.[7]

response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. . . . In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence. (Simulacra 15)

The U.S., if it wishes to be Good, can only win, in symbolic terms, by refusing to play, by refusing to be Good. Baudrillard certainly does not proffer war, which he concludes is simply "a continuation of the absence of politics by other means" (18). What he recommends, without naming it, is the forgiveness of debt, the redemption of "Evil."

It is not unthinkable that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it--letting those who harm it go unpunished. "What are my parasites to me?:" it might say. "May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!"

The justice which began with, "everything is dischargeable, everything must be discharged," ends by winking and letting those incapable of discharging their debt go free: it ends, as does every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or better, his--beyond the law. (Genealogy 72-73)

The triumph of justice, according to Nietzsche, is its self-overcoming; the most moral is the extra-moral, beyond the war of Good and Evil. If the U.S. had gone with its first name for its new war effort--"Operation Infinite Justice"--would Americans have become more readily aware of the ironic fact that their country had in many ways served injustice in the Middle East for a great many years? Would some have been quicker to see that "infinite justice" can only amount to infinite forgiveness? In this passage, Nietzsche taunts America's wealth and dignity, seducing us with an image of ourselves more befitting our vanity than the image of a vengeful America. Vengeance, ressentiment, always claims morality as its cause, but forgiveness does not have to, because it is a washing away of guilt/debt, because it is a gift. Rather than make claims, it gives them away, which nevertheless poses a challenge to the other to counter-give with a symbolic response. This is for Nietzsche, as for Baudrillard, one would gather, the most beautiful aesthetic/symbolic gesture, an extra-moral gesture, beyond Good and Evil. It is also the only means to peace short of the total annihilation of a virtually invisible enemy. Would a Nietzschean-style forgiveness of debt not entail gestures like the removal of U.S. military bases from the Middle East, the nationalization of Arab oil assets, the discontinuation of all support for dictatorships in the area and around the world, and the promotion of a Palestinian nation? And if such tokens of "forgiveness" were offered, does anyone doubt that a more livable peace would soon be at hand, and that the U.S. would incur its greatest possible symbolic honor?

In the terrorist attack the event eclipsed all of our interpretive models, whereas in this mindlessly military and technological war we see the opposite: the interpretive model eclipsing the event. (18)

Death itself demands to be experienced immediately, in total blindness and total ambivalence. But is it revolutionary? If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy. (86-87)

For the system is master: like God it can bind or unbind energies; what it is incapable of (and what it can no longer avoid) is reversibility. Reversibility alone therefore, rather than unbinding or drifting, is fatal to it. This is exactly what the term symbolic "exchange" means.

Baudrillard contends that the system cannot reverse itself, but that one might cause it to enact "death" as the form of an exchange in which its values no longer apply, in which its determinations become indeterminate. One does this by giving it a gift it cannot respond to without killing itself in this way, without undermining its own authority. This can be done effectively with words and/or pictures:

Figure 1: The Selling of Joy[9] © Thomas Antel Used with permission of photographer

Figure 2