1NC Shell

The affirmatives reconciliation terrorism is a move to

incorporate it into the growing orgy of Otherness. This
suspends the defining characteristic of the Otherterror.
It reduces the Other to a knowable entity and strips
terrorism of its symbolic power.
Baudrillard 06 (Jean, 2006, The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the
Colonized), translated by James Benedict, rmf) *edited for gendered language
We are engaged in an orgy of discovery, exploration and invention of the Other. An
orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity.
Once we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage that was the joy of
our childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum in fashion, in mores, in
culture. Crude otherness, hard otherness the otherness of race, of madness, of
poverty are done with. Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under
the law of the market , the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item
hence its immensely high value on the psychological stock exchange, on the structural
stock exchange. Hence too the intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is
particularly striking in science fiction, where the chief question is always What is the
Other? Where is the Other? Of course science fiction is merely a reflection of our
everyday universe , which is in thrall to a wild speculation on almost
a black market in otherness and difference. A veritable obsession with
ecology extends from Indian reservations to household pets (otherness degree zero!)
not to mention the other of the other scene, or the other of the unconscious (our last
symbolic capital, and one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless).
Our sources of otherness are indeed running out; we have exhausted the Other
as raw material . (According to Claude Gilbert, we are so desperate that we go
digging through the rubble of earthquakes and catastrophes.) Consequently the other is
all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but
instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of
[Hum]an, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in
the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of
political and psychological comprehension of the other even to the
point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found.
Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there
is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the
drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living
the psychodrama of sociality, the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the
body and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses.
Otherness has become socio-dramatic, semio-dramatic, melodramatic. All we do in
psychodrama the psychodrama of contacts, of psychological tests, of interfacing is

acrobatically simulate and dramatize the absence of the other . Not only is
otherness absent everywhere in this artificial dramaturgy, but the subject has also quietly
become indifferent to his [or her] own subjectivity, to his [or her] own alienation, just as
the modern political animal has become indifferent to his [or her] own political opinions.
This subject becomes transparent, spectral (to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) and
hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he
is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified alive but without his double,
without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the subject becomes a
candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections. The interactive
being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through the
disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness . This
being is the other after the death of the Other not the same other at all: the other
that results from the denial of the Other. The only interaction involved, in
reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical
automata still played on the difference between [hu]man and machine, and on the charm
of this difference something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are
no longer concerned. [Hum]an and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to
each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the
computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us from the other always. That is why
computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are
autistic minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are
endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the
power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the
power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any
otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord
joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all
otherness has been confiscated by the machine.

We control the direction of case solvency. The

fundamental tenets of universality have been overtaken
and undone by globalization. The violence of the global
persists in its place, reduces the role of the intellectual to
nothing, and promotes exclusion. It has emptied rights,
democracy, and freedom of meaning. This will continue
absent the singularity of resistance that is terrorism.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, The Violence of the Global, translated by Franois
Debrix, rmf)
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or
fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main
features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its
relationship to the singular and the universal. The analogy between the terms "global" [2]
and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty,

culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market,

tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas
universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a
value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched
by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies.
That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them.
But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only
difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful
death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our
values. And this is a much more ugly death. We believe that the ideal purpose of any
value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a
quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward
a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as
unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by
default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally
common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy,
and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest
expression. Universalization is vanishing because of globalization .
The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization
of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought [3] over a universal one. What
is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts
of products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a
promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact. Indeed, the global
spread of everything and nothing through networks is pornographic. No need for sexual
obscenity anymore. All you have is a global interactive copulation. And, as a result of all
this, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The
universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly
like any other global product (oil or capital for example). The passage
from the universal to the global has given rise to a constant homogenization, but also to
an endless fragmentation. Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization.
Excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where concentration once stood.
Similarly, discrimination and exclusion are not just accidental
consequences of globalization, but rather globalization's own logical
outcomes. In fact, the presence of globalization makes us wonder whether
universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes
us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official
discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our
modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an
opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of
singularities reappear . Those singularities we thought were endangered are
surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived. As universal values lose their
authority and legitimacy, things become more radical. When universal beliefs were

introduced as the only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for such
beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation in a universal culture that
claimed to champion difference. But they cannot do it anymore because the triumphant
spread of globalization has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal
values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization has given
rise to a perfectly indifferent culture . From the moment when the universal
disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure has been left alone to dominate. But
this techno-structure now has to confront new singularities that,
without the presence of universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and
savagely expand. History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced
with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting
insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy,
and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of
universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by
the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and
representation. By contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal
concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum
without any depth. [4] In the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the
world, the body, or the past. There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement
that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion
of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of
violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the
supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation,
and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global
puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the
Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist
whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and
historical violence.

The affirmatives attempt to embrace terrorism

reinscribes the epistemic logic that the terrorist can be
domesticated which nullifies the radical alterity of the
terrorist and upholds the same logic of domination they
criticize. Vote negative to affirm the spirit of terrorism.
Baudrillard 1
/Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/thespirit-of-terrorism/

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction , not even for
perverse effects . It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a
will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one
could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare
war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes
suicidal, and declares war on itself.
Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge
under special effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's)
realization is always close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to
perfection or absolute supremacy.
It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far
more than (the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to
an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete the
event.

In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action. The
more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the
more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his
laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes,
through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process.

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this
formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute
ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal
of the situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the system
itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it
forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes
are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge,
terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of
the exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible
singularity in a generalized exchange system . Any singularity (whether
species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global
circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer.
No
ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds
terror. It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims
Terror against terror -- there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics.

(as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while

the system aims to realize (the world) through force .
Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like the shadow of any
system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double agent. There is no
boundary to define it; it is in the very core of this culture that fights it - and the visible schism
(and hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly
linked to the internal fracture of the

dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism.

But with terrorism -- and its viral structure --, as if every domination apparatus were
creating its own antibody, the chemistry of its own disappearance; against this almost
automatic reversal of its own puissance, the system is powerless . And terrorism is the
shockwave of this silent reversal.

Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to

It certainly is a
fundamental antagonism, but one which shows, through the spectrum of America (which
maybe by itself the epicentre but not the embodiment of globalization) and through the spectrum of Islam
(which is conversely not the embodiment of terrorism), triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this
focus the conflict to give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution (through force).

way it is indeed a World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it has as stakes globalization
itself. The first two World Wars were classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The second
ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other,
one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by
antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which all cells, all
singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of
war through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is
elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; - if

Islam dominated the

world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists domination.
Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a

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.
globalization that is immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something,

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.
In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil, according to a dialectical relation that more or less
insured tension and equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the face-to-face of the two powers
insured an equilibrium of terror. Thus, there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as soon as
there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death,
of any potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the Good). From there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if
Evil regained an invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential fashion.

Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the political order
with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of liberal power: a fantastical
enemy appeared, diffused over the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus,
surging from every interstice of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of the crystallization of
this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against
terror... But asymmetrical terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower
totally disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power
relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic
challenge and death, as it has eliminated the latter from its own
culture .
Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply
hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort).
The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive
and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this
system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They

succeeded in making their

own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death,

whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system . And
all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against
an enemy who has already made his death a counter-offensive .

"What

of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000
deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.
Therefore, here, death

is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct,
in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial
death - the absolute, no appeal event.
This is the spirit of terrorism.
Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the
revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those
who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the
symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus,
death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the
system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own
death and its own collapse.
The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple
challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape
symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In
this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an
infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute
point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and
sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an
excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight
of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it,
for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the
model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that
of its own death.
This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a
few individuals.

2NC/1NR Material

2NC Link
Terror exists in the absence of globalization. The
affirmatives absorption of radical Otherness banishes it
to symbolic limbo where its potential is annihilated.
Baudrillard 06 (Jean, 2006, The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the
Colonized), translated by James Benedict, rmf)
Differences mean regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into
exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the
contract, or in the structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the
impossibility of exchange? Wherever exchange is impossible, what we
encounter is terror . Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicenter of a terror:
the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world.
And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in
order to annihilate it . Over recent centuries all forms of violent
otherness have been incorporated , willingly or under threat of force, into a
discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and
exclusion, recognition and discrimination. Childhood, lunacy, death,
primitive societies all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a
universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was
caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were
recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries kept at such
a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no
sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.

2NC Impact
In the ashes of universalization we find terrorism, a
heterogeneous force, a singularity with no match that
actively resists the Wests mission of colonial erasure and
cultural reductionism.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, The Violence of the Global, translated by Franois
Debrix, rmf)
But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a
dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different
but clearly antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly
strong reactions to globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to the
global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of negation. We find instead a
crushing revisionism vis--vis modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global
techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization, which assumes a
principle of equivalence between all cultures. This kind of reaction can take some
violent, abnormal, and irrational aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent,
abnormal, and irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways of
thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and linguistic forms. But it can
also take the form of individual emotional outbursts or neuroses even. In any case, it
would be a mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or even
terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days is engaged against the
abstract universality of the global, [5] and this also includes Islam's own opposition to
Western values (it is because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that
it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy). Who can defeat the global
system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow
down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But
its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an
internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive
alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive
nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic
order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best
or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. [6]
They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a
unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose
their own rules. Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal,
or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The
singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures
that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with
their own extinction. We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here,
but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated
universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of

irreducible alterity . From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its
beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy.
Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or
perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own
values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every
culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture
has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their
political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at
normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any
reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and
resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

2NC Alt
Terrorism is our sentence, our punishment for
globalization. Its symbolic power will win the War on
Globalization, but it cannot be reduced if it is to complete
its mission.
Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, The Violence of the Global, translated by Franois
Debrix, rmf)
The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to
suffer a humiliation. Global power was humiliated on September 11
because the terrorists inflicted something the global system cannot
give back . Military reprisals were only means of physical response. But, on
September 11, global power was symbolically defeated . War is a
response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is
accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when
the other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo). The fundamental
rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the total
absence of any counterpart, of any return. [8] The unilateral gift is an act of
power . And the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able
to give without any possible return. This is what it means to be in God's position. Or to
be in the position of the Master who allows the slave to live in exchange for work (but
work is not a symbolic counterpart, and the slave's only response is eventually to either
rebel or die). God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was
always possible to give back to God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of
sacrifice. That's what ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But
today we no longer have anybody to give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is
the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is impossible, but rather that the counter-gift
is. All sacrificial forms have been neutralized and removed (what's left instead is a
parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary instances of victimization).
We are thus in the irremediable situation of having to receive, always to receive, no
longer from God or nature, but by means of a technological mechanism of generalized
exchange and common gratification. Everything is virtually given to us, and, like it or not,
we have gained a right to everything. We are similar to the slave whose life has been
spared but who nonetheless is bound by a non-repayable debt. This situation can last for
a while because it is the very basis of exchange in this economic order. Still, there
always comes a time when the fundamental rule resurfaces and a
negative return inevitably responds to the positive transfer, when a
violent abreaction to such a captive life, such a protected existence, and such a
saturation of being takes place. This reversion can take the shape of an open act of
violence (such as terrorism), but also of an impotent surrender (that is more
characteristic of our modernity), of a self-hatred, and of remorse, in other words, of all

those negative passions that are degraded forms of the impossible counter-gift. What we
hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality,
power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of
destiny that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses.
And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find repulsive (which also
explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert).
Terrorism's support is not only based on the despair of those who have been
humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those
whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an
omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of
networks and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the
regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone "global."
(After all, isn't the supremacy of the human species over the rest of life on earth the
mirror image of the domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This invisible
despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since it is the result of the realization of all our
desires. Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and
from this reality's impossible exchange, if it is the product of a
profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it
emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting
rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete . [9] For, in its
absurdity and non-sense, terrorism is our society's own judgment
and penalty.