Jim writes: "Le Monde has published Jean Baudrillard's essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism" Here are some excerpts, translated courtesy of Brian Holmes:

"...All the discourses and commentaries betray a gigantic suturing of the
event itself, and of the fascination it commands. The moral condemnation,
the holy alliance against terrorism are on the scale of the prodigious
jubilation at seeing this world superpower destroyed, or better, seeing it
somehow destroy itself, in a beautiful suicide. Because with its
unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along
with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our
knowing.

That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of
it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power
become so hegemonic - that is unacceptable for the Western moral
conscience. And yet it's a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic
violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up.

jim writes: "Writing some twenty years ago on the theme of “simulation of opposition” in too-late capitalism, and the “law of equivalence” in the “advanced democratic” political systems, radical French theorist Jean Baudrillard picked Manhattan’s World Trade Towers to illustrate his point.

An excerpt from Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phil Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983):

“Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center? All of Manhattan’s great buildings were always happy enough to confront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: as pyramidal jungle, all of the buildings attacking each other. The system profiled itself in a celebrated image that you had of New York when you arrived there by boat. This image has completely changed in the last few years. The effigy of the capitalist system has passed from the pyramid to the perforated card. Buildings are no longer suspicious one of the other, like columns in a statistical graph. This new architecture incarnates a system that is no longer competitive, but compatible, and where competition has disappeared for the benefit of the correlations. (New York is the world’s only city therefore that retraces all along it’s history, and with a prodigious fidelity and in all its scope, the actual form of the capitalistic system—it changes instantly in function of the latter. No European city does so.) This architectural graphism is that of the monopoly; the two W.T.C. towers, perfect parallelepideds a quarter-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. Paradoxically, if there were only one, the monopoly would not be incarnated because we have seen how it stabilizes on a dual form. For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign that destroys its meaning. This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas of Marilyn’s face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation. The two towers of the W.T.C.are the visible sign of the closure of the system in a vertigo of duplication while the other skyscrapers are each of the them the original moment of a system constantly transcending itself in a perpetual crisis and self-challenge.