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Translated by Chris Turner
“In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious.“
We have seen many world events, and recent years have been filled with any number of violent ones, from wars to genocides. But until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. With the terrorist attacks we are confronted, says Baudrillard, with the pure event that concentrates in itself all the events which have never taken place. And we had all dreamt of this event because it was impossible not to dream of the destruction of American monopolistic power.
Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.
“There is,” writes Baudrillard, “no solution to this extreme situation.” As a response to it, conventional warfare is a nonstarter, a non-event. It is merely “the continuation of an absence of politics by other means.“
“… philosophical perfection. Each book [in the Verso series of 9-11] offers powerful and highly readable commentary that whirlwinds around the specter of the towers, and together the texts raise an indelibly valuable dialogue where many are still afraid to step. Unbreakable, these volumes are filled with extraordinary ideas and ideals that slowly piece together from one poetic line to the next.” — XLR8R Magazine
“First prize for cerebral cold-bloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.” — New York Times
Jean Baudrillard is the author of, among other works, America, The System of Objects, Impossible Exchange, Screened Out, and The Perfect Crime, all from Verso.
Publication
Sept. 2002
2d edn
Oct. 2003
120 pages
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 448 9
£8.99 / US$13.99 / CAN$20.99
