Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Ardevan Yaghoubi looks at two articles by Jean Baudrillard: "The Spirit of Terrorism," from Telos121 (Fall 2001), and "Divine Europe," from Telos131 (Summer 2005).

In his book The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard wrote: "As for ideas, everyone has them...What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas." Across two essays published in Telos before his passing in 2007, Baudrillard embodied this aphorism with extended ruminations on hegemony, terror, and globalization, written in his characteristically engaging manner. "The Spirit of Terrorism" and "Divine Europe" brilliantly transition from individual political eventsthe terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the referendum on the European Union's constitution, respectivelyto their wider significance in Bataille's alternative economic categories of energy, flow, and gift.

Written after the event of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Baudrillard's "The Spirit of Terrorism" urges us to "take time to reflect." September 11, explains Baudrillard, demonstrates how "any system of domination fosters its own anti-system, its own disintegration." Focusing on the individual motivations of the perpetrators misses the point: terrorism operates like a virus by requiring a host cell (in the case of 9/11, this took the literal form of the airplanes), while the virus itself is an empty shell, neither living nor dead. The real significance of 9/11 is that it reproduces the very structure of globalization itself, terrorism as part-and-parcel of technologized hypermodernity:

So the conflict is neither a clash of civilizations nor of religions. It goes far beyond Islam and America, over which the conflict is focused in order to give the illusion of a visible confrontation and of a solution through force. It is really a fundamental antagonism, but one which designates, through the specter of America (which might be the epicenter, but not the only embodiment of globalization) and the specter of Islam (which is also not the embodiment of terrorism), triumphant globalization struggling against itself. In this sense, one can actually talk about a world war, not the third, but the fourth, and the only one really global, because what is at stake is globalization itself.

Baudrillard's distinctive take on the political sphere is shown again in "Divine Europe," where he pinpoints the vacuity of the "yes" or "no" choice to the constitutional referendum: "It is clear that if this time the vote is against, they will make us vote and revote until it is approved, as was the case in Denmark and Ireland (so, we should vote "yes" right off the bat...)." Drawing parallels to the 2002 Iraq War, where public will was severed from political reality, the "yes" or "no" vote on the future of Europe is similarly banal, since the question posed is really a "Yes to the yes." But the state of affairs in post-millennial Europe speaks to a wider inertia in politics:

All this goes well beyond the question of the referendum. It means the failure of the very principle of representation, to the extent where representative institutions no longer function in the "democratic" sense, i.e., from the people and the citizens to the power, but exactly in the opposite direction, from the top to the bottom, passing through the trap of consultation and of a circular game of questions and answers, in which the question responds to itself.

Both articles display the unique mind that was Jean Baudrillard.

Read the full versions of Jean Baudrillard's "The Spirit of Terrorism" and "Divine Europe" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.