In traditional terms, and for reasons that have to do with its sheer brutality, terrorist violence has been approached exclusively via its undeniable physicality. The present paper seeks out to depart from this point of view and to explore terrorist violence as part of a larger and more complicated process of communicating a message and generating an intended result. In order to achieve this overall objective, the focus is first laid on the idea of terrorist violence as a communicative practice (implying the sending of a message from a sender to a receiver, often wider than the immediate victim). Next, the paper investigates the manner in which this practice is decoded in the cultural discourse of postmodernity, with special reference to the 9/11 terrorist event and its interpretation by such famous academics as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.
