The terrorist Earth? Some thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard

Abstract

This article starts from a fictional terrorist act in the marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, which harnesses the power of an earthquake in its execution. It raises the question of whether ‘terrible’ large-scale geological phenomena might offer a plausible model for modern terrorism. Eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime afford strong conceptual links which support this premise. They also help to explain Jean Baudrillard’s repeated assertion that terror attack and natural disaster might now be indifferently substituted for one other. His analyses point to a confusion in ‘safety’ and ‘security’ responses in the wake of 9/11, but also to an original conception of the globalised system of power as one which, like its geological counterpart (plate tectonics), is structured by its fault-lines and works because – not in spite of – them. It is these fault-lines that both the Sadean and the modern terrorist exploit.