Thursday, March 8, 2007

Baudrillard and 9/11

I don't know much about Baudrillard, beyond the barest outline of his thought, and would love to learn more. Josh's post was a nice, pithy refresher course and memory aid.

Josh, one of your readers alludes to that famous/notorious essay he wrote after the September 11 attacks, and the reader suggests that Americans have been misled about its contents by "liberal war hawks and the U.S. media."

Are there any good online essays that would put Baudrillard's interpretation of 9/11 into what you would consider the proper context?

For readers who don't know about the controversy, the following attack on the French thinker by the American intellectual historian Richard Wolin,* is the sort of thing the reader is alluding to (the New Republic article is for subscribers only):

For Baudrillard, the attacks represented a glorious, long-awaited instance of wish-fulfillment: the Al Qaeda terrorists may have perpetrated the deed, but the act itself was something the entire world had long dreamed of and desired. For the postmodernist sage, criticism of the attacks cannot mask

"the prodigious jubilation of seeing this world superpower meet with destruction.... For it is [the United States] that, by its unbearable power, fomented all the violence infused throughout the world, and thus the terrorist imagination that dwells in all of us. Haven't we dreamt of this event, hasn't the entire world, without exception, dreamt of it; no one could not dream of the destruction of a power that had become hegemonic to such a point.... In essence, it was [the terrorists] who committed the deed, but it is we who wished for it."

With the publication of such texts, postmodernism's trademark cynicism about morality and democracy has reached (I hope) its nadir. In late 2001, following the Afghanistan war, Baudrillard granted an interview to Der Spiegel. When questioned whether the removal of the Taliban from power was not in fact an emancipatory political development, he emphatically disagreed: any expression of American power was a priori condemnable. When interrogated further about whether the spread of human rights and democracy to the Middle East and the Third World was desirable, the postmodernist philosopher again replied in the negative. Human rights, he claimed, are merely a cover for superpower global hegemony: "I believe that human rights have already been subsumed by the process of globalization and function as an alibi. They belong to the juridical and moral superstructure--in sum, they are advertising."

*I have no idea of Wolin's position on the Iraq war, lest I appear to be accepting the reader's characterization of Baudrillard's misreaders. The New Republic, however, would certainly count as a "liberal hawk" bastion, at least at the time Wolin was writing (Feb. 2004).

UPDATE
More from Brainiac: R.I.P., Baudrillard | Baudrillard and 'The Matrix' | Baudrillard obit and mailbag | More Baudrillard obits | Baudrillard and 9/11 | Re: Baudrillard and 9/11 |

Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:20 AM

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