Saturday 24 July 2010

Saturday 17 July 2010

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were it’s shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and the underdeveloped globally against the Western world secretly connects with the fracture internal to the dominant system. That system can face down any visible antagonism. But against the other kind, which is viral in structure – as though every machinery of domination secreted its own counterapparatus, the agent of its own disappearance – against the form of almost automatic reversion of its own power, the system can do nothing. And terrorism is the shock wave of this silent reversion. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, 2002.