Symbolic terrorism isn’t literal terrorism—embracing biological death fails and is less ethical

So does Baudrillard really support terrorism? Do we? Once again playing the devil's hand, he seduces us to play the avenging angel by taking a moral stand. But suppose we take the Nietzschean turn, with Baudrillard, and view the issue in aesthetic terms: can moral goodness not still succeed in being beautiful if it avoids making metaphysical claims? When morality is conceived in aesthetic terms, it loses its guarantee of universality, but not its symbolic force. And yet by forcing Good on the world, the U.S. only forces Evil to gain strength. "Terrorism," Baudrillard tells us, "is immoral," but it is a

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."

Compare this, then, to Nietzsche's advice, which might have been directed at a future world power such as the U.S.:

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?

If we assume, with Baudrillard, that there is a rule of reciprocity between conscious beings, wherein their symbolic standing vis à vis one another depends on what they give in exchange, and if we assume that the recognition of this rule of value runs deeper in humans everywhere than does the recognition of the rule of value imposed by capitalism, and if we assume that the terrorists have appealed to this rule before the world, do we choose to play by the rule, or to ignore it? So far the U.S. has ignored it by refusing to answer the implicit questions: Why do they hate us? Why is our military there? By what right do we exploit their resources, overthrow their elected leaders, and drop bombs on their people? But no response is still a response, symbolically speaking, and the world is listening. What the system did in response to 9/11, or instead of responding to it, was to re-absorb its symbolic violence back into the never ending flow of anesthetized simulation, i.e., it has attempted "to replace a truly formidable event, unique and unforseen, with a pseudo-event that is as repetitive as it is familiar" (Harper's 18). This is exactly what Baudrillard predicted would happen in "On Nihilism," this neutralizing of the terrorist event by the system. In "L'Esprit," he notes that:

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)

Baudrillard would have us recognize that the attack on 9/11 succeeded in poking a hole in the U.S.'s mighty shield, thus opening a space "where seduction begins," and in provoking a murderous response. The terrorists therefore succeeded (are succeeding) in making the U.S. look bad on the symbolic battlefield, and in pushing the system further toward its limit and its implosion, a goal Baudrillard expressly favors. It seems most reasonable to conclude, however, that such violent, physical provocations serve no one, not even Baudrillard, and need not be equated with the kind of theoretical terrorism and aesthetic violence advocated by him (though one can always accuse him of being the first to blur the lines between the real and the imaginary). Given his cynicism about the system's ability to neutralize every opposition, however, Baudrillard sees such dramatic gestures (as 9/11) as naïve in their utopianism. And yet he too has his utopianism, which can be found in the silent evocation of the only decent, beautiful solution to the challenge of 9/11. Unlike naïve terrorists and secondary critics, however, Baudrillard will not speak his utopia,[8] which in this case is the possibility of forgiveness as a world-historical symbolic event. This utopian moment in Baudrillard, this idea that the U.S. might forgive its debtors, is obviously unrealistic as yet, but every challenge opens up a new space in the universe. This is where seduction begins.

Forget waiting for it, let’s have another spectacle; let’s demand death now! Is Baudrillard being sinister when he tempts us with our desire for more death? Is he death’s seducer? Not if we allow for his caveat about the term “death” found in the book’s second footnote: “death ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body, but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost” (5, n. 2). Baudrillard uses the term death to signify “the real event” throughout Symbolic Exchange and Death, and only sometimes uses it as a conceptual figure like this, but if he is not talking here about real death, where some subject and some value are certainly lost, what is he talking about? Death, in Baudrillard’s specialized sense, signifies the end of “bound energies in stable oppositions,” but since the system itself is also capable of imposing such deaths, he clarifies that the death of the system can only be achieved by way of its strategic reversal:

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.