Weasel philosophy, the sequel.

The Spirit of Terrorism first came out a year ago as part of a Verso series in which a bunch of postmodern theorists each wrote a little something about 9/11. Depending upon where you read about it, Baudrillard's essay was either considered a brilliant and radical critique of globalization or (as the Times called it) "cold-blooded and demonic."

His basic premise is simple. Whenever a force in the world becomes too powerful and all-encompassing, the other swings around and kicks it in the ass. Or, if that doesn't happen, the powerful one turns on itself. That's what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, according to Baudrillard. It wasn't an issue of Islamic terrorists hijacking some planes and slamming them into a couple buildings full of people?it was globalization?ever-expanding Western power?committing suicide.

What's more, he argued that deep in all our hearts, we were aching for something like this to happen. We love disaster movies, don't we? And now here was the real thing, in real time, right there on the television. What could be better? The 90s, after all, had been so frightfully boring.

Even though he's dealing in the broadest of abstractions ("Good," "Evil," "the West"), it begins after a while to feel more like conspiracy theory than critical theory.

You can see how that sort of talk might piss off certain sections of the population?especially when it's coming from a Frenchman.

It didn't bother me all that much, to be honest. I'm not one of those types who gets all hepped up and frothy about "globalization," but quite a bit of what he said seemed to make sense. He completely ignores the 3000 individuals who died, of course, but philosophical arguments tend to ignore little things like that.

This new edition contains the original essays ("The Spirit of Terrorism," and "Requiem for the Twin Towers") along with two new related pieces: "Hypothesis on Terrorism" and "Violence of the Global."

These two new essays develop and expand the ideas he laid out earlier, essentially turning the book into one long essay in four chapters. In these later essays, however, things get more complicated, and the inescapable jargon begins to creep back in to his aphoristic prose. In "Hypothesis on Terrorism," for instance, he defines his subject matter this way:

"A vital counterforce grappling with the death force of the system. A force of defiance to a globality totally soluble in circulation or exchange. A force of an irreducible singularity, the more violent as the system extends its hegemony?up to a ruptural event like that of September 11, which does not resolve this antagonism, but lends it, at a stroke, a symbolic dimension."

So the attacks weren't just a stumbling block on the way to America's complete dominance over the world. They marked the beginning of the end of Western civilization. All we're going to do from this point onward is fight terrorism and lose.

To explain why this is, he retraces Nietzsche's "master/slave morality" argument from the Genealogy of Morals?but with a twist.

It seems "we" (that is, the West) created those pesky, resentful little terrorists within our own subconscious. Being wholly incapable of feeling sympathy for anything but America, being unable to imagine what "the Other" is even like, and not understanding how anyone wouldn't want to be just like us, we invented these terrorists, who were different and frightening and Evil and wanted to do bad things to us. We needed them. We were, after all, praying for some sort of punishment for having too much power.

In short, he's telling us what some on the left have been saying for a long time?but with a fancier vocabulary.