Deferring ethics unto other actors is a unique form of absolution which entrenches nihilism and causes serial policy failure.

In the primordial scene, which Girard (1986) has described, the society is constituted on the basis of the lynching mob, whose mimetic desire, whose envy and egoism, culminates in sacrificing the scapegoat. With terror, though, we confront the opposite situation in which the mimetic desire does not establish but rather destroys the ‘society.’ Here everybody, and not only the scapegoat, is threatened with destruction. This paradoxical subject is Nietzsche’s radical (or ‘suicidal’) nihilist. Hence Nietzsche’s definition: ‘a nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be’. If the supreme values cannot find a place in this world one can just as well destroy it. Thus, the radical nihilist wills the total collapse of the socio-symbolic order. However, the point is that spite or ‘radical nihilism’ has a shared genealogy with other forms of nihilism. Hence Nietzsche’s full definition of a nihilist reads like this: ‘A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist’ (Nietzsche 1967: 318). If supreme values are themselves devalued while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter the situation described by the second part of the definition: passive nihilism, or, a ‘world without values’ (Deleuze 1983: 148). If, on the other hand, one, despite realizing that one’s values are not realizable, still desperately clings to them, we confront the situation of the radical nihilist: values without a world. Thought in this way, the relationship between radical nihilism and passive nihilism constitutes a disjunctive synthesis. And today this ‘synthesis’ repeats itself in the tension, or rather false antagonism, between post-politics and terrorism. The passive nihilism of post- politics expresses itself as an inability to think of the antagonistic element in politics; hence the emptying out of its constitutive dimension, ‘the political.’ However, this blindness is itself constitutive; it is what constitutes post-politics as a form of politics, a politics in which already recognized groups negotiate interests without challenging the existing hegemonic relations. Politics as game playing without the possibility of changing the game, as a form of hyper-politics. Passive nihilism of post-politics consists in an impossibility of putting a distance to the actual reality, in the impossibility of sublimation in the sense of sustaining the gap between the actual and the virtual, reality and the Real, by maintaining a space for objects considered ‘impossible,’ by giving ‘value to what the reality principle does not value’ (Zupančič 2003: 78). And when the virtual collapses into the actual, politics disappears, the radical questioning of the social becomes impossible. Insofar as politics involves ‘the ongoing critique of reality’ (Bauman 2002: 56), post-politics signifies the foreclosure of politics. In this sense, post-politics brings with it an internal perversion of democracy, a ‘post-democratic’ politics that eliminates real dispute by assuming that everyone is already included in politics and that remaining problems can be dealt with through expert systems (Rancière 1999: 116). Despite its hegemony, however, the lack, or rather the suppression, of antagonism does not make post-politics a peaceful order. Post- politics brings with it a paradoxical violence, the violence of a society bent on neutralizing dissent, rooting out all radicalism, negativity and singularity, a violence that puts an end to the idea of violence as such and therefore can only be met by hatred (Baudrillard 2002: 92- 3). a violence cut off from its object and turning back against that object itself – against the political and the social. It’s no longer anarchistic or revolutionary... It’s not interested in the system’s internal contradictions; it targets the very principal of the social and the political. [...] It answers the systemic exclusion our society practices by even more exclusion, cutting itself off from the social world by indifference or hatred. (Baudrillard 1998: 66) Just as previous forms of violence mirrored the level of conflict, hatred mirrors the level of post-political consensus (Baudrillard 2002: 92). As if the culture of passive nihilism, its zeal for security, leads to the loss of immunity; like redundant ‘anti-bodies’ that turn against the organism in which they live, hatred ‘has something of self-aggression and auto-immune pathology about it’ (Ibid. 93.). Hatred is today’s radical nihilist ‘fatal strategy’ against passive nihilism. So, the lack of antagonism in post-politics is countered with an excess of antagonism, a (self)destructive will to nothingness. Thus, today’s ideological arena looks like a battle ground between un-antagonistic politics and ultra-antagonistic fundamentalism: terrorism. As if when politics is depoliticized, spite is politicized. So, it seems, ours is a ‘one-dimensional society’ in which the distinctions have disappeared, the opposites are united in a nihilistic disjunctive ‘synthesis.’ The threat is, therefore, Janus-faced. Contemporary terror and the war against terror both are part and parcel of the movement from politics to post-politics. And it is in this movement, which is also the movement of nihilism, that distinctions such as reality/representation, biology/politics, terror/war against terror tend to disappear today. After all, the ‘cancelling out of differences’ is a nihilistic principle par excellence (Deleuze 1983: 46). The power of nihilism is a power that pours everything into indifference (see Baudrillard 1994: 159, 163). Bin Laden’s terrorism has so far forced the Western democracy to ‘betray itself’ but this did not, as Ulrike Meinhof envisaged, ‘make the masses rise’ and ‘allow contradictions to escalate’ (Meinhof p. 279). Why? The answer is post-politics, which cancels out differences, upon which politics is based: an obscene system in which dialectical polarity no longer exists, a simulacrum, where acts disappear without consequences in indifferent ‘zero-sum signs’ (Baudrillard 1994: 16, 32). Contemporary terror is post-political in the sense that it is a product of indifferent forces rather than political antagonisms. It is ‘viral’: it emanates in the form of metastasis, bringing with it transparency (disappearance), a flattening process characterized by the exacerbation of indifference and the indefinite mutation of social domains (Baudrillard 1990: 7, 50). Hence the obscene indistinction between terror and the war against terror, which, for all their enmity against each other, resemble twins: they share the same logic on the basis of contradiction and disparity, simultaneously expressing convergence and divergence, similarity and difference, without, of course, perfect identity. Both depict a world of either/or and world politics as a clash between McWorld and Jihad. Both speak in absolutes. Both fetishize their own ‘way of life’ (religious orthodoxy, and security as a new religion). And finally, both have their own priests. Which is why Baudrillard had asked years ago: ‘Why does the World Trade Center have two towers’ (1988a: 143)? Like the twin towers of the WTC, terror and the war against terror mirror each other, confirming the irrelevance of distinction and opposition in a postmodern world. The obscenity of terror is the obscenity of post-politics itself. Terror exists in order to hide that post-politics itself is terroristic in spirit. The apocalypse that was unimaginable to Dürer is a world in which McDonald’s can campaign against obesity, the politics of security can fight against terror, the war against terror can claim to bring democracy to the people it tramples, the ‘victim’ goes berserk and kills even more people than terrorists, and so on.