THEN AND NOW

The death of the controversial philosopher Jean Baudrillard was announced this week. Last year (on April 28), Alex Danchev reviewed Baudrillard's The Intelligence of Evil, together with City of Panic by Paul Virilio.

Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, the Abbott and Costello of the postmodern post-mortem, are at it again, panning the horizon for specks of moral life. As to that, the outlook is bleak. God is dead, you recall; the real world is abolished; not even the sign remains. Integral Reality rules; a global state of exception prevails; surfing and surfeiting are the order of the day. Catastrophe terrorizes; banality tranquillizes. From now on Elsewhere Begins Here.

That is the message of these works. More Vladimir and Estragon than Abbott and Costello, perhaps: what is it all about? (Marshal Foch's perennial question.) Baudrillard and Virilio are no longer young. There is no sense of senescence in the writing - quite the reverse -but there is much talk of the shadow-line, twilight, darkness and death. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts these pages, barely acknowledged, with his voracious irony and his hallucinatory proleptic power. Virilio quotes him on the life of modern man, "an inconceivable life of stress, of power, of endeavour, of unbelief -the strong life of white men, which rolls on irresistible and hard on the edge of outer darkness". Baudrillard for his part arrays Nietzsche, Musil and Lichtenberg; and, with some relish, Stanislaw Lec. "Death resists us, but it gives in in the end." Could this be -forgive the solecism -a sign? There is nothing so unbecoming to the freethinker as a final statement, nothing so suffocating as a summing up, but there is some indication in both books of the corralling of concerns, the setting out of wares, the end-of-season sale. Baudrillard and Virilio are nothing if not merchants of ideas.

According to Baudrillard -or, rather, to his devoted translator Chris Turner - The Intelligence of Evil (first published in France as Le Pacte de lucidite ou L'Intelligence du mal in 2004) is the closing text in a cycle of "theory fictions" begun some twenty years ago with Les Strategies fatales (1983). "Simply put", offers Turner optimistically, "these works are philosophical analyses of present events and (in best Deleuzian fashion) creations and elaborations of concepts with which to 'theorize' them". Not so fast, mon brave. Even if we skip the parentheses, the inverted commas wink like a warning sign of the hazards ahead.

Each of these terms is problematic, it transpires, and the relationship between them a matter for conjecture. Notoriously, Baudrillard does not do events: he does non-events. ("The Gulf War did not take place.") By "non-event" he means something along a spectrum of simulation and dissimulation, embracing delusion, illusion, virtualization, banalization, totalization. One might say that he disinvents events. Even among the converted, this is sometimes found to be unhelpful -the statement about the Gulf War has been criticized by Virilio as "negational" -and beyond that coterie merely obtuse. In this latest book, however, Baudrillard has some penetrating things to say about events and non-events alike, in their political and psychological aspects -the latter too little explored in more conventional treatments. "There is in us an immense desire for events", he notes, "and we also desire just as passionately that nothing should happen, that things should be in order and remain so." He arrives at a characteristic reflection: "We live in terror both of the excess of meaning and of total meaninglessness". From this perspective, he provides a compelling analysis of what Washington has been pleased to call the global war on terror:

This strategy is directed not only at the future, but also at past events -for example, at that of 11 September, where it attempts, by war in Afghanistan and Iraq, to erase the humiliation. This is why this war is at bottom a delusion, a virtual event, a "non-event". Bereft of any objective or finality of its own, it merely takes the form of an incantation, an exorcism. This is also why it is interminable, for there will never be any end to conjuring away such an event. It is said to be preventive, but it is in fact retrospective, its aim being to defuse the terrorist event of 11 September, the shadow of which hovers over the whole strategy of planetary control.

For all that he is labelled a theorist, Baudrillard does not exactly do theory either. He does metaphors, concepts, paradoxes and pronouncements. These slip and slide and collide, within the text and within the oeuvre as a whole. According to Baudrillard, they challenge each other symbolically. That is how he likes it. The signature collisions and elisions pander to the temptation of the fragment, the aphorism, which may be Baudrillard's ideal form and also his besetting weakness. It makes for work that sometimes seems to be practising for effect; that is maddeningly (apparently wilfully) opaque, excessive, repetitive and oracular, but also provocative, generative and - stripped of the fancy rhetoric and bedazzling figuration -surprisingly traditional in its fundamental tenets. "The violence you mete out is always the mirror of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence you mete out. This is the intelligence of evil." This is Baudrillard. On the web (where else?) there is the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, "a non-profit, transdisciplinary publication dedicated to engaging the thought and writing of Jean Baudrillard". In a wonderful demonstration of his favourite trope of the duality or reversibility of things, Jean Baudrillard, University of Paris (retired), is a member of the editorial board.

The tailpiece to The Intelligence of Evil is a kind of manifesto: "The more daily life is eroded, routinized and interactivized, the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatory sets of rules . . . . A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must: be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into play and produce vertigo". If this is addressed in the first instance to his comrades in arms - Chris Turner remarks on "the small number of others he (Baudrillard) considers significant today (the list contains the names Zizek, Agamben, Sloterdijk and Virilio, but not perhaps too many more)" -then it appears tailor-made for the self-styled urbanist, former director of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, and mastermind of the first Museum of the Accident, Paul Virilio.

Vertigo is Virilio's stock-in-trade. In this respect, City of Panic does not disappoint. The narrative is a speed-driven stream of consciousness centring on the city-world, the metropolitics of globalization, telesurveillance, bunkerization (walled cities, gated communities), temporal compression, hyperterrorism, hyperproximity, hyperfragility. The text itself is feverish and over-excited, prone to outbreaks of capital letters ("THE GREAT HEMMING IN") and rashes of italics ("the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century has been the city").

Virilio in this mode (hypervirilio) comes perilously close to self-parody ("The desert is subsistence. The desert is coincidence between the beginning and the end") or perhaps to "the digested read", condensed in the style of the original ("FORECLOSURE, EXCLUSION . . . . Megalopolitan hyperconcentration is now topped not only with mass hyperterrorism, but also a panicky delinquency that is dragging the human race back to the original dance of death"). There is also a faint suspicion that, like Baudrillard, he is not always best served by his translator, in this case Julie Rose. "On this subject, let's hear it from Ernst Junger . . .", for instance, is irresistibly reminiscent of the compere's "let's hear it for . . .".

On visible and invisible cities, and the twilight of empire, Virilio follows in the wake of the great Italo Calvino (nowhere mentioned). He scores on the occasional brilliance -"the sudden telepresence of terror" -and on the patina of premonition that coats his work. Here he calls attention to the sending of the Florida National Guard to re-establish order in Baghdad after the official end of hostilities in 2003:

Specialized in combating the aftermath of natural disasters, this unit . . . seems just as much at ease in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital as in the slums of America . . . . Natural disasters such as earthquakes or bushfires . . . or "artificial" disasters such as an out-of-control preventive war: everything is now joining forces, it would seem, to jumble order and disorder, reality and fiction, since "civil peace" is no more guaranteed now by the law than the state of peace between nations is guaranteed by international organizations . . . . In this sense, mass terrorism is a powerful revealer of the sudden globalization of chaos.

The Intelligence of Evil and City of Panic are worth raiding. They are grab bags of books, gobbets of good ideas, written out like a screed, too fast, and, perhaps, for all the panoramic pyrotechnics, too inward-looking. On this subject, let's hear it from Conrad and Calvino..