A Taste for the Extreme: a Critical Analysis of Baudrillard and Derrida on Terror and Terrorism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2012.046.08Keywords:
Terror, terrorism, Mauss, gift, death, autoimmunity, Abraham, ethics, res-ponsibilityAbstract
For Baudrillard, the «new terrorism» should be understood as a symbolic exchange of gift and counter-gift: the terrorist’s death is an unanswerable counter-gift that disrupts the coercing circle of social relationships «imposed» by the global system. In turn, Derrida’s conception has two dimensions, explicative and normative. First, Derrida considers 11/9 as a multi-faceted symptom of an autoimmunitary crisis that has political, religious and technological-capitalist aspects. Second, Derrida argues that there is an Abrahamic «moment» of terror, violence and sacrifice that is constitutive to ethical decisions and responsibility. On the critical side, I will argue that Baudrillard’s view is premised on an extreme and partisan notion of a system interpreted as a totalitarian ruler writ large. In turn, Derrida unnecessarily turns the common observation that human actions can have perverse consequences into a law of autoimmunity inspired by biology. By seeing terror as constitutive even to the most common ethical relationships, Derrida also runs the risk of turning an extreme phenomenon into a catch-all concept, and of losing touch with the day-to-day ethical practice. I will conclude that Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s conceptions of terror and terrorism partake in a «taste for the extreme» that makes them ultimately unconvincing.
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