Jean Baudrillard was interviewed today in the NYTimes Magazine. I found it quite humorous...
NYT: Isn't that kind of simplistic reasoning why people get so tired of French intellectuals?
JB: There are no more French intellectuals. What you call French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.
NYT: Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.
JB: That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.
***
Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay in "Le Monde" in November 2001 after the World Trade Centre attack. It is one of the best I have read on Terrorism. Here is an excerpt.
Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of proportional violence.
The Spirit of Terrorism "Le Monde", November 2001. English translation
by Dr Rachel Bloul.
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