The Spirit of Terrorism

Baudrillard sees the power of terrorism as lying in the symbolism of slaughter-- not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges a whole system. Where the revolutionary of the past sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. The new edition is updated with the recent essays 'Hypotheses on Terrorism' and 'Violence of the Global.'