In a controversial article titled An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy published in the The Chronicle of Higher Education of January 23, American literary critic Carlin Romano praises Pierre Hadot and lambasts European philosophers for their views on 9/11:

“In the infancy of the 21st century, Eurotrash philosophers give European philosophy a bad name. Like Eurotrashers at trendy clubs, the philosophical species lives for the moment, spouts from the top of its careerist head, and makes little sense.

…We think of Jean Baudrillard, the Eurotrash patron saint, a man whose mastery of argument falls somewhere between that of Kim Jong Il and the Raelians, and his ugly, exploitative little 9/11 “book,” The Spirit of Terrorism (Verso Books, 2002).

…We think of the laughable French “urbanologist” Paul Virilio, whose works read as if a nasty wind blew his notes in the air, then haphazardly bound them into a book. (Ground Zero, Verso Books, 2002).

…Of course, you don’t have to be French to be a Eurotrash philosopher. Consider Slovene Slavoj Zizek, the Roberto Benigni of corrupt intellectual discourse, a tiresome court jester always happy to walk across the chairs of any American university willing to meet his salary demands. To this often English-challenged jet-setter, in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso Books, 2002), the collapse of the WTC towers was “the climactic conclusion of 20th-century art’s ‘passion for the Real,'” and “the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.” —Carlin Romano, An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy, The Chronicle, January 2003