There comes a time, after certain catastrophes, when the mind begins to work again. Not because the pain has receded, much less because it has become understandable, but because man cannot remain indefinitely in a state of shock.

After the images, after the waiting, after those thirty-six hours when uncertainty had reduced all theory to almost nothing, the question I had always asked myself in the face of systems inevitably returned: what really just happened? Not only where, not only how, not only who had struck whom, but what world order had just been disrupted.

It was at this point that Baudrillard and Fukuyama entered the field for me, not as two masters to be followed, much less as two authorities capable of closing the event with a definitive explanation, but as two intellectual constructs that had to be confronted with reality.

This distinction is crucial. I have always read authors as I read markets, religions, conflicts, institutions or civilizations: not to side with them, but to observe how far their system holds up when it encounters what it had not foreseen.

An idea is never a refuge for me. It is a hypothesis subject to History.

This is precisely the method we identified very early on in our discussions: an idea, then reality, then confrontation; historical facts on one side, the thought of Baudrillard, that of Fukuyama, and my own reading on the other, without ever confusing them.

9/11 demanded this discipline with particular intensity, because the event was already saturated with commentary even before its dust had settled.

Images spread faster than analysis. Political categories were taking shape. The vocabulary of terrorism, war, civilization, security, good and evil began to structure the global narrative.

In this uproar, Baudrillard interested me precisely because he did not simply add another geopolitical explanation. With The Spirit of Terrorism, published in Le Monde on November 3, 2001, he approached the event through its symbolic power, through the vertiginous relationship between the act and its representation, through the way in which a global system could be struck not only in its infrastructures but in its own imaginary.

I obviously didn't take his text as revealed truth. It interested me because it shifted the focus. The towers weren't just destroyed buildings. They were also symbols. Their destruction wasn't merely physical. It immediately became a global image, repeated to the point of obsession, capable of being inscribed in the collective memory with a force that the military event itself couldn't fully explain.

And this directly echoed what I had felt from the very first hours: we were not simply witnessing an attack, but a collision between reality and its representation.

I had long known Baudrillard as a thinker of simulacra, hyperreality, and the progressive disappearance of the boundary between the event and its image. 9/11 gave this issue an almost unbearable violence.

For the first time on this scale, humanity watched an event on a loop, the representation of which seemed to develop simultaneously with it. The image no longer came after. It participated in its historical power.

This obviously did not mean that the image replaced the dead, the wounded, or the destruction. Such a conflation would have been morally and intellectually untenable. On the contrary, the whole problem lay in holding together the two levels: the absolute materiality of the catastrophe and its global symbolic proliferation. The concrete was truly collapsing. People were truly dying. And yet, at the same time, another catastrophe was unfolding in the realm of representation.

It was this second level that Baudrillard compelled us to consider. I was less interested in his formulas than in the methodological gap he opened: a system cannot be understood solely through its infrastructures; one must also understand the signs by which it thinks of itself.

This idea resonated deeply with The Abode of Chaos. From its inception, I had never separated matter and semiotics. The wall was not merely a wall. Rust was not simply a chemical alteration. A crack was not simply a crack. Everything became language from the moment the relationship between form, sign, history, and the viewer was organized. Apparent Chaos was therefore never an absence of order; on the contrary, it was a rigorously composed semantic architecture.

9/11 brutally revealed that the geopolitical world also obeyed this dual nature. There were the material forces — states, armies, capital, networks, borders — and there were the systems of representation without which these forces could neither legitimize themselves, nor tell their own story, nor sometimes even understand what was happening to them.

This is where my interest in Baudrillard had to remain rigorous. I could recognize the fruitfulness of his analysis without confusing it with the historical fact itself. This separation had been explicitly established in our working materials: what belongs to Baudrillard, what belongs to Fukuyama, what belongs to the facts, and what belongs to my interpretation must always remain distinct.

This rigor is not an academic precaution. It corresponds exactly to my way of working. I don't believe in a single source. When I analyze a market, I compare. When I look at a crisis, I compare. When I read a news item, I look for discrepancies between Reuters, Bloomberg, and American, Russian, Asian, and African news agencies.

It is not just the information that interests me; it is the differences between them, their silences, their angles, their vocabulary choices, what they make visible and what they leave out of frame.

In our discussions, this method was precisely defined not as the abstract search for a single truth, but as the confrontation of truths. Baudrillard was therefore one reading among others, but a valuable one because it revealed a dimension that immediately military or diplomatic commentary risked overlooking.

Then came Fukuyama. And with him, the question changed scale. I couldn't watch the towers fall without thinking back to that phrase that had marked the post-Cold War era: The End of History.

Francis Fukuyama's thesis was obviously more complex than the slogan to which it has often been reduced. He wasn't saying that nothing more would happen, that conflicts would cease, or that humanity would enter a kind of peaceful slumber. He conceived of the ideological horizon of liberal democracy as a political form likely to encounter no competing model with comparable universal legitimacy. But the expression had circulated so widely that it became one of the intellectual emblems of the 1990s: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the bipolar world order, the West could believe itself to have reached a point of historical stabilization.

It was precisely this representation that 9/11 shattered in my eyes. Again, I'm speaking from my own perspective. I'm not claiming that the event mechanically refutes Fukuyama as a laboratory experiment would invalidate a formula. I'm saying that, for me, it revealed something much deeper: History had never disappeared. We had only been able, in certain parts of the world, to momentarily lose our perception of its violence.

That is why I speak of the great return of History. Not because it has returned from nothingness, but because it has become impossible to ignore again.

Conflict, religion, identity, memory, humiliation, empires, power imbalances, transnational networks, borders, resources, imaginaries of civilization: everything that some narratives of globalization tended to present as archaic remnants was reappearing in the foreground.

The world had not become flat. It was not homogeneous. It had not escaped tragedy. It had remained a field of forces.

Perhaps this is where my own way of thinking appears most clearly. I have never viewed the world as a succession of independent events. I view it as a field of forces where temporalities interlock: historical time, religious time, economic time, technological time, biological time, geological time, the time of civilizations.

This characteristic had been identified very early in our interviews: my fundamental discipline was perhaps not geopolitics itself, but time, because I always introduce duration into what I observe.

But 9/11 was precisely a nexus of temporalities. For those who viewed it solely as an act committed on a Tuesday morning in Manhattan, it was incomprehensible.

We had to go back up.

It was necessary to consider several layers simultaneously: the history of Western interventions, the transformations of the Arab and Muslim world, the Cold War, Afghanistan, financial networks, ideologies, colonial memories, and the fractures in the Near and Middle East. Added to this were the rise of global communications, satellite television, the Internet, financialization, and American hyperpower.

None of these factors, taken in isolation, explained everything. But together they formed a field. That's how I work: I don't look for the single factor, I look for the geometry of the interactions.

In this sense, 9/11 was not merely a rupture. It was also a revelation. It suddenly brought to light lines of tension that already existed. That is why the phrase I used in our conversations, "9/11 didn't just happen in New York," obviously did not deny the actual location of the attack. It meant that the shock affected far more than one city or one country. It fractured a Western representation of the world.

This distinction is explicitly stated in our working documents: it is a shift in representation, a historical and philosophical interpretation that must be presented as such. That is exactly what I felt. The geographical location was Manhattan, Washington, Pennsylvania. But the symbolic rupture spanned the globe. It reached political systems, markets, military doctrines, international relations, law, surveillance technologies, religious representations, and even the idea that the major Western powers could maintain stable control over their environment.

The asymmetry appeared in all its brutality: a non-state organization could inflict a gigantic wound on the world's leading power by using the very instruments of modern globalization – civil aviation, financial networks, global media – against the system that had developed them.

I recognized a law I knew from other fields: the power of a system always produces blind spots specific to its power. The more complex a structure becomes, the more interdependencies it creates; the more these interdependencies increase, the more certain vulnerabilities become non-linear.

That's why I couldn't reduce what had just happened to the word "barbarity," even though the violence of the act was undeniable. The word "moral" wasn't enough for the analysis. Understanding is not excusing. It was precisely because the event was morally untenable that it was necessary to intellectually resist overly simplistic explanations.

Who's knocking?

For what?

What kind of imagination?

What genealogy?

What recruitment system?

What financial flows?

What perception of the West?

What function does the image play?

What role does the response of the affected state play?

How does a power react when the conflict is moved outside the conventional military arena?

All these questions were beginning to emerge. They would shape the following decades and gradually enter the Abode of Chaos. The reader will later understand why Madrid, London, Paris, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Hormuz, and asymmetric warfare are not, in this work, a disparate collection of geopolitical subjects. They belong to the same genealogy: that of a world whose deep fractures were laid bare by 9/11.

But in 2001, none of this had yet stabilized. It was precisely the moment when it was necessary to learn to look without the comfort of hindsight.

This is what paradoxically brought me closer to both Baudrillard and Fukuyama, while simultaneously preventing me from fully subscribing to either. Baudrillard reminded me that signs are forces. Fukuyama provided me with a system whose limits were being tested by History. I, for my part, was searching for what happened in the interim.

I wasn't interested in the pleasure of declaring one author right and the other wrong. That intellectual game always seemed secondary to me. What interested me was understanding why their thoughts, placed side by side and confronted with the event, produced a fruitful divergence. One focused on the symbolic power of the act. The other had considered the ideological horizon of the post-Cold War era.

9/11 introduced a question between them that the Abode of Chaos would now physically carry: what becomes of a world order when it discovers that its representation of itself is no longer sufficient to understand the forces that run through it?

This is where thought met matter. While intellectuals were writing, while states were beginning to formulate their responses, while television stations were repeating the same sequences, I already knew that it would not be enough for me to simply add text to text.

I am a sculptor. At a certain point, an idea must encounter material resistance. It must confront weight, cutting, welding, concrete, heat, danger, scale. Otherwise, it remains in the realm of commentary. But I specifically didn't want Ground Zero to become a commentary on 9/11. I wanted the Abode of Chaos to retain the fracture of that event.

The problem then became almost impossible:

How to build before the event is fixed in its interpretation, without falling into spectacular haste?

How to work under pressure without sacrificing rigor?

How can we inscribe an ongoing catastrophe into matter without claiming to already possess its meaning?

It was these questions, more than any theory, that would lead us to the construction site. Baudrillard and Fukuyama had helped me see the intellectual dimensions of the shift. But no amount of reading could now replace what I knew I had to do: put down the books, leave the screen, join my companions, and start building while the shock was still fresh. History had returned. It had to be given substance before commentary dulled its impact.