![]() The events of 9/11 are in this way placed and investigated within a globalized context. Changez moves from Pakistan (his home country) to the United States (home to his employer) and, on off-shore assignments, to the Philipines and Chile (home to the ‘first’ 9/11). ![]() By following the narrator’s life story, 9/11 is placed in a transnational setting. The story of the ‘reluctant fundamentalis’ is the storyteller’s (Changez) monologue directed at an unknown American who has just arrived in Lahore. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist “What he calls the 'spirit of terrorism' is the waking nightmare of fantasy become reality, which means that in the West, we are all, whether of the right or left, now engaged in a murderous game, the rules of which are constantly being changed, not according to the globalized strategies of the western powers, but according to the inscrutable, ultimately unknowable, demands of 'the enemy',” a reviewer wrote in the New Statesman on The Spirit of Terrorism. According to Baudrillard, the tremendous ‘power’ of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 lies not merely in the physical violence, but in the symbolism of slaughter. From that interest he also commented on 9/11. His preoccupation with media representation led him to analyze global ‘events’ such as princess Diana’s death, the world championship of football, but also wars and genocides. ![]() He achieved fame with his argument that reality has been ‘murdered’: by now media representation is ‘more real’ than reality itself. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) has been preoccupied his entire life with the relationship between media representation of reality and reality itself. Jean Baudrillard, L’Esprit du terrorisme / The Spirit of Terrorism
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