This is a short book, a glorified pamphlet, if you will, of four essays: The Spirit of Terrorism, Requiem for the Twin Towers, Hypotheses on Terrorism and The Violence of the Global. I will look briefly at what he says, will take part of my analysis from a professor of mine (who probably wouldn’t want to be named) and then make a brief conclusion.
Baudrillard looks at 9/11 as an event; as something that is meaningless and shatters the globalizing, totalizing violence of our current international system. 9/11 partially becomes an event because it does rupture the homogenizing violence of globalization.
“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 even constitute an event, that we are doomed to play out the flawless logic of 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” (51).
It is also an event because it invokes the spirit of terrorism. The “Spirit of Terrorism” is “a death which is symbolic and sacrificial—that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event” (17). The terrorist, “have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. They have even—and this is the height of cunning—used the banality of American every day life as cover and camouflage” (19).
He then looks at how this event ruptured our construction of images. “The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage” (27). The image was ruptured, partially because the material was brought back to the image. The video of people jumping from buildings, the smoke billowing down the streets channeled by buildings, these made a Manhattan Horror Film real.
Since the modern image was ruptured and brought to face reality, the question of how to respond to such an event becomes problematic. How can you have a meaningful response when the very idea of meaning is problematized? For Baudrillard, it seems as if 9/11 brought about a sense of relief that the singular event could still rupture the ever-growing influence of hegemonic cultural ideals.
Another interesting note is a quote that allows Baudrillard to be snarlingly reviewed by the NY Times. The review says this (on the back of the book):
“First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard… It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.”
The quote that they are referring to is this:
“The violence of globalization also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel” (41)
No one would discount the coldbloodedness of this statement, though the NY Times may have taken it out of context. Baudrillard is pointing to the violence of the global, specifically through looking at how that violence can be portrayed in architecture. He certainly does not feel like the WTC was destroyed, in fact, he believes that, since it has moved from material space to the ideation space, it has transformed. “By the grace of terrorism, the World Trace Center has become the world’s most beautiful building—the eighth wonder of the world!” (48).
