Session 2: Terrorism 1: Whose Terrorism Is It?

Session 2: Terrorism 1: Whose Terrorism Is It?
Chair: Graeme Goldsworthy

Terrorism – Theirs and Ours
Predrag Cicovacki
Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, USA

Cicovacki’s presentation will contrast extreme militant Islamist terrorism with state-sponsored terrorism, which has two main forms: terror of its own population, and terrorist activities against the population of other countries. Following Derek Leebaert’s book The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2002), the presentation will first focus on several examples of state-sponsored terrorism, and then clarify some conceptual similarities and differences between state-sponsored terrorism and the extremist terrorist organizations. Finally, the question of whether both types of terrorism are equally evil will be raised.

In the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Michel Foucault wrote:
“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
The proposed paper will address the question not only of the fascist, but of the terrorist within each of us. After the events of the last four years, we should no longer speak of terrorism without recognizing that the key to combating this global pandemic is the recognition that it is, in fact, an auto-immune disease. Following Badiou and Baudrillard, I propose that we must look beyond the traditional polarities of Good/Evil and Other/Same; instead, we must look at terrorism through the looking-glass. “Philosophy,” says Badiou, “is always the breaking of a mirror.” For “terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system’s violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.” (Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Le Monde, Nov. 2, 2001.) If we survive terrorism, it will be because we free ourselves from the delusion that terror lies somewhere ‘out there’, and realize instead that we must take a much more radical approach to the problem, by understanding and coming to terms with our own deep-seated propensities for terrorism. The paper will include a call to a radical form of hope which will attempt to begin a rapprochement between the philosophies of Badiou and Levinas on the subject of evil.

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In 1794 Robespierre, on behalf of the French Revolutionary government, famously characterized terror as “nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.” But as it gradually lost its legitimizing links with the state, ‘terrorism’ became a term of condemnation for any political challenges to state order that ignore the rules of war and are thus, by definition, criminal.
Nevertheless, Robespierre’s original linkage of terror with virtue and equality remains intriguing, for it suggests that modern terrorism and the rise of the modern, individual democratic subject are chiasmatic phenomena. The author will argue that the historicity of terrorism is inseparable from the rise of modern subjectivity and its now globalizing regimes.
In this light, the paper will consider implications of the attack now mythologized as ‘9/11’ for understanding both the nature of evil and new possibilities for subjectivity. Did the event of September 11, 2001, really mark a radical turn in history? Was it, as Alain Badiou has argued, a strike at otherness, erasing distinctions between innocence and guilt, civilian and combatant? As such it would seem to qualify as a form of evil, a “desire for ‘Everything-to-be-said’” (Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy [Continuum, 2004]). Or was it instead, as Baudrillard contends, “an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system?” (Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Le Monde, Nov. 2, 2001). If, as the author suggests, Baudrillard is more plausible in this respect, does following him here mean one must follow him into a Manichean metaphysics of Good and Evil as irreducible, inextricable, and ineluctable?

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