The terrorist Earth? Some thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard

Geological models of revolutionary terror

‘Terror’ was famously made ‘the order of the day’ in early September 1793 by the radical Montagnard faction of the National Convention (Doyle, 2001: 55). ‘Terror’ remained the watchword of the governmental committees, effectively headed by Robespierre from January 1794, until their bloody fall from power in July of the same year. Yet ‘terrorism’ was coined only in November 1794 by the moderate bourgeois Thermidorian government to qualify the systematic excesses of the earlier regime. Hence it is a retrospective label applied to history’s vanquished; it also fails to acknowledge that the so-called ‘terrorists’ were responding in turn to horrific acts of counter-revolutionary violence in the Vendée and the Midi, and more specifically in Paris, to the cold-blooded assassination of their charismatic spokesman, Jean-Paul Marat, in July 1793 – an act that today we would define precisely as ‘terrorist’.

Yet, if we accept the label with these provisos, what then constitutes this original eighteenth-century form of state ‘terrorism’? Sophie Wahnich suggests that it is built upon the founding violence inevitably associated with any appropriation of political sovereignty; that it is a complex process of ‘terrorisation’ comprising three principal moments, each of which represents the suspension of the existing rule of law. These are: the institution of the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1793, the Law of Suspects of September 1793 and the Laws of 22 Prairial of June 1794 (2003: 57–9). In each case sovereign power constitutes itself as a law outside the law, a law that founds all laws, but which is also beyond their jurisdiction. It is, as Carl Schmitt claims, the right not just to found all other rights but also to suspend them indefinitely (1985: 7). (The vivid image of this is the constitution of Year II voted in the summer of 1793 which was literally hung from the ceiling of the Convention for the duration of the Terror – at once declaring its rights and suspending them indefinitely.)

As the founding violence necessary to exercise political power, terrorism is in a sense the key to the Revolution – the revolutionary principle or essence within the Revolution. And it is as such that revolutionary terrorism invokes the natural models of geological revolution: specifically the volcano and the earthquake. Revolution itself is no longer to be conceived of in astronomical terms (as cyclical) or yet in liberal, progressive terms (as linear), but as cataclysmic change (as catastrophist). Revolution is thus a moment of fundamental rupture with what went before (here crystallised and rejected as the ancien régime). Its obvious equivalents in the physical world are the volcano and the earthquake, both of which constitute a break in the order of nature while being thoroughly and inherently natural phenomena. They suspend the natural order by an excess of natural force, just as the Terror suspended the political order by an excess of political force: that is, by laying claim to sovereign power.

The volcanic archetype of the terrorist appropriation of power is exemplified in Sylvain Maréchal’s play, Le Jugement dernier des rois, first performed in October 1793. (Its premiere took place the day after Marie-Antoinette’s execution – a sequence of events not lost on its revolutionary audience.) Maréchal’s infamous plot involves all the crowned heads of Europe, including the Pope, being deported to a deserted volcanic island by republican sans-culottes. Here they are abandoned, and in the pyrotechnical finale of the play, they are engulfed by the volcano’s erupting lavas. Nature, in the form of the volcano, usurps the sovereign power that was once the sole prerogative of the marooned monarchs, and turns it violently against them. The ‘terrorist’ volcano thus ratifies and universalises the founding violence of the terrorist government in its earlier execution of Louis XVI (recalled, if not quite repeated, in that of his widow the day before the play’s premiere). The play, as a form of theatrical representation, cleverly sidesteps the issues of political representation that dogged the revolutionary regime during the trial of the king and thereafter. For Le Jugement dernier des rois never enacts more than the moment of founding violence of the universal republic: its final scene is the volcanic death of all kings, wherein ‘nature’ consecrates the republican usurpation of all monarchical power. Its theatrical representation is thus one of the very suspension of all representation, staging anew with each performance the arrogation of sovereignty – that exceptional moment when the laying down of the law is still outside the law – while never going beyond it to explore the conserving violence needed to consolidate and perpetuate power.

As for the geological model of the earthquake, its ‘terrorism’ is realised in the pervasive figure of fear as physical trembling – both cause and effect of a ‘tremblement de terre’. Indeed, the self-consciously classical revolutionaries might even have been aware of the deep etymology of the term ‘terror’, which beyond its Latin forms of ‘terror’ and ‘terrere’ (to frighten), is variously derived from the Greek ‘tremein’ or the Sanskrit ‘tras’, both of which mean ‘to tremble’. ² In other words, terror is fundamentally about fear manifest as trembling; one might say it is semantically seismic. Hence the trembling, which was once only felt before one’s God or king – think of the Jansenist convulsionaries of the 1720s and of the ‘quaking’ of eighteenth-century Quakers – was now done before one’s revolutionary neighbours or in the shadow of the guillotine. The Terror inspired this trembling indifferently, in both its advocates and its adversaries. Recalling the mass paranoia characterising the period, one of its victims described ‘cette hiérarchie terrible’ in which ‘chacun faisait trembler en tremblant’ (Peltier, 1797: 166). This generalised quaking in fear was the result of believing oneself to be in the presence of something monstrous, something inhuman (the ‘monstrous’ and ‘inhuman’ are widespread tropes of Thermidorian literature and, of course, fuel the fashion for the Gothic at this time). Yet, as Sophie Wahnich has argued, the inhumanity of the terrorist is not to be construed as a rejection of natural humanity born of the innate pity we cannot help but feel for another’s suffering, as Rousseau had suggested. Rather, it is a political humanity that exercises a necessary pitilessness towards its enemies as the only means of preserving the conditions of its own humanitarian mission towards its people (2003: 53–4). This is the terror as the force and shield of republican virtue of which Robespierre speaks, whose paradoxical ‘clémence’ is thus the ‘prompte, sévère, inflexible’ punishment meted out to all those designated as ‘les oppresseurs de l’humanité’, i.e. its enemies (Robespierre, 1967: 357–9). Over and above the figure of trembling and making tremble, the terrorist ideology recognises in the earthquake a similar intolerance of ‘natural’ humanity. The non-humanity of the earthquake, its indifference to human life, finds an echo in the alleged inhumanity of the revolutionary terrorist. Each stands as a distinct but complementary form of terrible otherness to the Enlightenment ideal of a tolerant, rational, moderate, inclusive humankind. ³

The sublime and terror

In the eighteenth century there was a moral and aesthetic appreciation of such an encounter with terrible otherness, specifically with terrible otherness in the form of overwhelming natural force. Its name was the sublime. The most influential theorists of the eighteenth-century sublime were Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, both of whom turned to the subject in the wake of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful first appeared in 1757 and was republished two years later. Kant, who wrote an involved treatise on the Lisbon earthquake in 1756, published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764, with a much more sustained and mature account of sublimity appearing in his Critique of Judgement of 1790. The lesson of this last text is that the sublime (unlike the beautiful) is not to be found in external objects but in ourselves, ‘only in our own ideas’ (1952: 97). In our confrontation with the incommensurable otherness of the vast expanse of the desert or a star-lit sky, or the unimaginable power of a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, the imagination is overwhelmed, causing a sensation of intensely alienating displeasure. However, this displeasure is immediately countered by reason which intervenes to intuit in the very experience of our imaginative excess the existence of concepts such as Freedom, the Infinite and the Divine. In Kantian terms, the ‘phenomenal’ magnitude or might of nature affords us a glimpse of the ‘noumenal’ world of ideas; or in eighteenth-century terms, the ‘sensible’ in its most extreme manifestations allows us an intimation of the ‘supersensible’, an exalted moral realm beyond the physical world (Madelein and Pieters, 2005: 3). And with this apprehension of the supersensible, extreme displeasure metamorphoses into extreme pleasure, which is nothing other than our sense of the sublime. Full of enlightened idealism, Kant deduces from the random, particular experiences of nature’s astonishing power or vastness the universal activity of transcendental reason, and its ability to free us from local, sense-bound empiricism. From the subjective thrill of the sublime comes the possibility of a collective ‘emancipation from superstition’, the communal exercise of reason that is also ‘called enlightenment’ (1952: 152).

Burke makes no such grandiose claims for the sublime. He does not stray so far from the alienating terror of the initial encounter with excessive natural violence or vastness. He concentrates on the more troubling physiological and psychological impact of sublimity, developing what Kant dismisses as his ‘empirical anthropology’ (1952: 131) of the sublime. Hence, in Burke’s reading, there is no inevitable transcendental moment to the sublime, only the profound ‘negative pleasure’ derived from the absence or removal of intense pain or immediate danger (1958: 36–9). Put crudely, if for Kant the sublime is ultimately a moral experience, for Burke it remains fundamentally a political one: that is, a negotiation with brute power. And while the original models of this power may well be natural forces – the cataract, the earthquake, the volcano – ‘the power which arises from institution in kings and commanders has the same connection with terror’ (1958: 67). In this sense, Burke’s sublime is perhaps the more prescient for our present consideration of how natural disasters might serve as a model for terrorist action, since even the most natural manifestations of the sublime in his Enquiry are little other than metaphors for political power. His raging storms and volcanic eruptions are literally geopolitical (as terrorist action almost always is).

To prove the point, Burke’s very first illustration of the sublime is not earthquakes or hurricanes but the horrific public dismemberment of the failed French regicide, Robert-François Damiens (Burke, 1958: 39). Far from pointing to moral transcendence, the sublime is scored in the flesh, it imprints itself on bodies, if not as real pain then as vividly imagined pain, as the terrible spectacle of others’ suffering. In affording us an intuition of the Infinite and the Eternal, Kant’s sublime celebrates our shared reason and offers us an intimation of immortality beyond the terrible event. In contrast, Burke’s sublime visits on us in the most relentless fashion the irrationality of death and the realisation of our mortality as the very essence of the terrible event. Thus for Burke the power behind sublimity is ultimately none other than that of death itself.

This distinction is crystallised in the writers’ opposing visions of the French Revolution: Kant greeted it with unalloyed enthusiasm, as the reign of that supersensible Freedom which had hitherto only been glimpsed through encounters with overwhelming natural phenomena; Burke denounced it as the unleashing of the terrible, dark, irrational forces of nature incarnate in the Parisian mob, forces he describes precisely as the ‘earthquake of popular commotion’ and ‘a volcanic revolution’ (1999: 112, 62–3). Ultimately, then, Burke’s political sublime is conservative; born of the fear of death, it advocates submission to those greater powers which decide over life and death (Krul, 2005: 35). Hence its complicity with authority and tradition, and its preference for inert forms of sublimity – vast expanses, wastes, privations, silence, darkness. It identifies at the heart of the Revolution a ‘pure event’, very much in the same way that the Lisbon earthquake was experienced across Europe as a monstrous singularity (‘un événement monstre’) ⁴ or that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be construed by Jean Baudrillard as ‘l’événement absolu, la « mère » des événements’, as an exemplary global event (2002a: 9–10). The purity, singularity or exemplarity of these events seem to derive from their distilling, as much as is possible, the presence of death in the absence of reason. In earthquake, revolution and terror attack, death might then be defined as the eventuality of all events, their fundamental essence, apprehended, however fleetingly, in each of these terrible acts.

Baudrillard and 9/11

In the early 1990s the likes of Jean-François Lyotard (1991) revived an interest in the concept of the sublime and made it a key figure of postmodern critical theory; in doing so they drew heavily on Kant. In contrast, Baudrillard seems to have a much greater affinity with Burke’s vision of the mortal and mortifying political sublime – one which is synonymous with encountering terrible, irreducible otherness. In fact, Baudrillard states in La Transparence du mal that the eighteenth century was precisely the moment when such terrible otherness erupted into European consciousness as a ‘sublime’ phenomenon (1990: 154). This otherness – which is always ultimately that of death – is revealed indiscriminately for Baudrillard in natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and constitutes their common sublimity. He writes: ‘on sait que n’importe quel accident ou catastrophe naturelle peut être revendiqué comme acte terroriste, ou inversement’ (1990: 49). In the post-9/11 text, L’Esprit du terrorisme, he is yet more specific, asserting that all forms of global violence and destabilisation are henceforth attributable to the figure of the terrorist: ‘tout est imputé à Ben Laden. Il pourrait même revendiquer à son actif les catastrophes naturelles’ (2002a: 44). Developing his point further in the essay ‘La Violence du mondial’, he postulates a shared irrationality between terrorist actions and natural catastrophes as a sort of invitation or challenge to link the two together: ‘À la limite, tout pour l’imagination peut être d’origine criminelle, même une vague de froid ou un tremblement de terre’ (2002b: 77). The Tokyo earthquake of 1923 was, after all, he notes, blamed on the Koreans, thousands of whom were massacred in its wake. In other words, we all think like Sade now: his criminal imagination, capable of conjuring up evil conspiracies between libertines and volcanoes, has become our banal reflex in the face of any deadly disaster, be it natural or social.

Yet, according to its eighteenth-century theorists, the terrible event only becomes sublime when the beholder is at a safe aestheticising remove from it. Kant claims that ‘astonishment amounting almost to terror’ is experienced as sublime only when ‘we are assured of our own safety’ (1952: 120–1); while Burke insists on the ‘distance’ necessary for terror to excite delight, an interceding space ensuring that its terrible object ‘does not press too close’ (1958: 40). Nonetheless, what seems to trouble Burke much more than Kant in this regard – again anticipating Baudrillard’s thought on this point – is that the interval between observer and event is never fixed or certain. In other words, the ‘safe’ distance that transforms a terrible event into a sublime spectacle is never ‘secure’. It can invert or collapse in a second, refined delight reverting to raw fear without warning. Burke was haunted by this deeply unpredictable switchback between the terrible and the sublime and located it most fearfully in the ‘shouting of multitudes’ (1958: 82), a dreadful anticipation of what he would project onto the murderous Parisian crowds of the Revolution. Baudrillard, for his part, identifies the same ever-present reversibility of terror/sublime in our ambivalent reactions to the constantly replayed images of 9/11. They are at once sublime and terrible: sublime because experienced with televisual distance, mediated by the media, radiating an amoral beauty in their fall (like that of volcanic ejecta); terrible because their perpetrators passed among us, were us, and so implicate us in their violence – ‘n’importe quel être inoffensif n’est-il pas un terroriste en puissance? Si ceux-là ont pu passer inaperçus, alors chacun de nous est un criminel inaperçu (chaque avion devient lui aussi suspect)’ (Baudrillard, 2002a: 28). Terrorist acts like natural disasters are experienced at once today as always remote (happening to others) and always ‘pressing too close’ (happening to family or neighbours, if not ourselves).

One of the more worrying results of this insistent reversibility of terror/sublime is a significant confusion in early twenty-first-century public policy in relation to both natural disasters and terrorist attacks. This confusion specifically concerns the notions of the ‘safe’ and the ‘secure’. Put simply, the earthquake is defined as fundamentally unsafe and, according to received wisdom, demands above all a rational preparedness in the general population. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a security threat, and requires first and foremost prevention strategies to be put in place, usually by elite military or police units. Yet in the wake of 9/11 the unsafe earthquake and security-threat terrorism were treated together as though interchangeable phenomena. For instance, Donald Kennedy writing in Science in 2002 claims that both terrorism and natural disaster might strike indifferently at the ‘nodes’ of population density, wealth concentration and communication centres, partly because of the way these have historically developed along the geological fault-lines of the Pacific Rim. Hence science most effectively counters both ‘if we consider our vulnerability to terror attacks and to natural disasters jointly rather than separately’ (Kennedy, 2002: 405, my italics). The same confusion reigns in the treatment of victims of the earthquake and the bomb blast. Thus the American Board on Neuroscience and Behavioral Health’s ‘Public Health Strategy’ for 2003 maintained that the response and treatment to psychological damage resulting from natural disasters and terrorist attacks should be exactly the same (Stith Butler et al., 2003: 7).

This confusion between safety measures (appropriate for natural disaster) and security responses (appropriate for terrorist incidents) is cited by Naomi Zack as one of the aggravating factors in the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe of 2005 (2009: 91). Obsessed with anti-terrorist security, the authorities had failed to put in place the appropriate preparations maximising safety for the general population in what is a well-established hurricane corridor, having concentrated resources instead on preventing high-tech terrorism elsewhere. This very confusion ironically allowed nature (the female terrorist known as Katrina) to terrorise and devastate New Orleans and the surrounding area with impunity.

However, what supposedly differentiates natural-disaster safety from anti-terrorist security is the presence in the latter of malevolent human agency, of ‘human ill will’ (Zack, 2009: 91). In other words, earthquakes are random occurrences; terrorist attacks are premeditated – that is the major difference between them. Yet, as was the case with fanatical Catholic interpretations of the Lisbon disaster in the eighteenth century, natural catastrophes have not infrequently also been ascribed a force of will, most often that of a wrathful divinity bent on punishing the sinfulness of the local population (Dynes, 2005: 42). Nor was it only hellfire-and-brimstone Jesuits who saw in earthquakes and violent storms the realisation of God’s will on Earth. Free-thinking providentialists, such as Alexander Pope or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also believed that nature in all its manifestations was a direct expression of the deity’s persistent involvement in earthly matters. The difference was that their God was unerringly benign: if earthquakes occurred it was still ‘for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, a necessary lesser evil; or more positively a short-term ill with long-term benefits, as one article in the Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie describes volcanic eruptions and their rejuvenating effects on the soil (Jaucourt, 1765: 443). Strangely enough, what has allowed the late twentieth-century conflation of natural disasters and terror attacks is precisely a modern ‘take’ on this Rousseauist sacralisation of nature – namely, the ecology movement. Incessantly presenting the Earth as a self-contained ecosystem, as an auto-regulating organism, environmentalists have unwittingly portrayed the Earth as animate, sentient, if not exactly voluntarist. It thus ‘expresses itself’ via earthquakes, tidal waves and hurricanes just as the terrorist expresses herself via bombings, hijackings and kidnappings. The more extreme eco-warriors do not shy from explicitly endowing the planet with a will, as in James Lovelock’s doom-mongering The Revenge of Gaia (2006). ⁵ This environmentalist school would certainly concur with Baudrillard when he writes: ‘On peut même avancer que les catastrophes naturelles sont une forme de terrorisme’ (2002b: 77): telluric weapons of mass destruction deployed by a humiliated and scarred planet.

Fault-lines and fallibility

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to read Baudrillard as a deep ecologist here. Instead, his preoccupation is with the highly tuned man-made systems of globalised exchange and commodification. These systems are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms of prediction and prevention against both terrorism and natural catastrophe. Yet the very level of technological integration of these mechanisms paradoxically means that the smallest incident has a potentially destabilising effect on the whole system. Extreme vulnerability and technological hubris go hand in hand, creating a situation in which the slightest thing ‘concourt à la défaillance d’un système qui se voudrait infaillible’ (2002b: 77).

Again a geological reading of this situation is possible: to be ‘infallible’ is to believe that we have eradicated all flaws or failings in the system, terms that derive from the low Latin ‘fallere’ (to deceive), sharing this etymological root with geological ‘faults’. This is made all the clearer in the French where ‘faille’ is precisely the common term for both fault-lines in the Earth’s crust and failings within artificial systems. It is as though the globalised technological system of power was claiming to have gone one better than the global geological system of power (plate tectonics) by having erased all its own fault-lines. Yet what the geological system might teach the man-made one is that the global and globalised systems of power are necessarily composed of fault-lines; that the tectonic and the technological are both structured by their faults and work because, not in spite of, them. The whole point of the plate-tectonic system is that it is integrated by its fault-lines – they are precisely what make it work as a system. As Kennedy (2002) noted after 9/11, the West has built itself on a series of its own fault-lines but has failed to see them as such – until they reveal their integrity to the system, their intrinsic necessity in all major spheres of activity. This is best summed up in the instances of defaulting ⁶ that periodically beset both global financial institutions and national governments. They default on their debts and on their constitutional duties in a dual display of economic and moral bankruptcy, not despite their best efforts but because defaulting is integral to their systems of governance.

What then have terrorists to do with all of this? They are precisely the ones who see the fault-lines for what they are, who show the system to be necessarily fallible. They are Sade’s libertines planting their little bombs around Etna, not making but exacerbating and exploiting fault-lines (‘failles’) that already exist, indeed that are integral to the system they challenge. They are the 9/11 bombers turning the system’s symbols of omnipotence against it – its high-tech planes, gleaming architecture, stock-market speculation, media networks, etc. (Baudrillard, 2002a: 27–8). And as is the case with their geological models of earthquake, volcano or tsunami, the question is never really if the bombing or the attack will happen but when.

This brings us to the final point of convergence between terrorism and natural disaster: their overlapping discursive orders – future-oriented and prophetic. These are less the discourses of earthquake and terrorist themselves, but of their adversaries, the seismologist and the counter-terrorism expert, extreme examples of a globalised culture of prediction and pre-emption, of weather forecasts, election polls, economic prognoses, climate-change models, etc. In fact, the terrorist works best when she acts most like the earthquake and says nothing, proclaims nothing in advance of the attack. Their terrible latency is their strength – that of the sleeper cell and dormant volcano: a latency that often leads forecasters to doubt the possibility of their ever happening. Hence what natural disaster and terrorist act share is a paradoxical entry into reality, the almost unimaginable nature of their ‘becoming possible’ (Dupuy, 2008: 486). The Lisbon disaster and the 9/11 terrorist attacks appeared impossible before they came to be. Yet the very fact that they happened meant that they were possible; but their being possible also meant that they might not have happened. Their very singularity (real) combined with their potentiality (possible) means that terrorist acts and terrible acts of nature realise two temporalities simultaneously: they constitute at once the actual and the possible, oscillating mesmerically between the poles of being and coming to be.

In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot had already remarked on this particularity of terrible events when contemplating the sublime tableaux of natural catastrophes. He writes that the human figures in these paintings alone inhabit two timeframes simultaneously, living at once their everyday routine and the singularity of the terrible event that befalls them (Diderot, 1984: 386). Henri Bergson in turn attributed the dual temporality of the terrible event not to its imagined victims but to its imaginative creators. It is the artist, he writes, who ‘crée du possible en même temps que du réel quand il exécute son œuvre’ (1934: 130–1). It is a small step from there to Baudrillard’s assertion that artists are thus terrorists and vice versa, since both conspire in the creation of singularities – that which erupts as event, and which resists any of the ruling system’s various devices of assimilation, be they universalist (Enlightenment rights) or globalising (generalised exchange and commodification) (Baudrillard, 2002b: 74–5). ⁷ The true artist, just like the true terrorist, refuses to enter into systems of exchange. As a result, it is the fate of both terrorist and writer to fail. But they dare to fail, as Beckett said of the modernist artist, ‘as no other dare fail, that failure is [their] world’ (1965: 125). For failure, like geological fault-lines, is the unavowed structuring principle of the globalised world – although no one thanks the artist or the terrorist for revealing this to us any more than we thank the earthquake for reminding us of plate tectonics.