SOURCE: Hussey, Andrew. “The Game of War.” New Statesman 131, no. 4604 (9 September 2002): 50-1.

In the following review, Hussey discusses books by three different cultural theorists examining the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States—Žižek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Paul Virillio's Ground Zero, and Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers Hussey concludes that all three works lack a sense of compassion for the victims of the attacks.

The tradition of French apologists for terror is as long as it is undistinguished. From the fall of the Girondins in 1793 to Michel Foucault's impassioned defence of the Iranian revolution of 1979, French intellectual life has been shaped by revolutionary violence; indeed, it is one of the founding myths of French political thought. The publication, then, of these essays by two leading French thinkers and a fellow-traveller [Žižek's Welcome to the Desert...