The terrorist subject: terrorism studies and the absent subjectivity

Abstract

Keywords:

• terrorism literature
• subjectivity
• discourse
• detective fiction
• desire
• purpose
• suicide
• critical terrorism studies

Notes

1. Richardson (2006) seems a good example of a well-informed study that in the end aims at further reconstituting the field in its narrow sense on the grounds that: ‘A terrorist is a terrorist, no matter whether or not you like the goal s/he is trying to achieve, no matter whether or not you like the government s/he is trying to change (p. 10).

2. The authors borrow the expression ‘playing terrorist’ from Begona Aretxaga, an activity she attributed to young Basque street saboteurs as well as to the Spanish state. Aretxaga's ethnographic analysis underscores the ways in which terrorist violence and state violence produce each other phantasmatically, ‘a structure and modus operandi which produce both the state and terrorism as fetishes of each other, constructing reality as an endless play of mirror images. This play of terrorism is what makes the State (with a capital S) and Terrorism (with a capital T) so real, organizing political life as a phantasmatic universe where the ‘really real’ is always somewhere else, always eluding us’ (Aretxaga 2005, p. 229).

3. In a seminal paper that preceded the development of cybernetics, Rosenblueth et al. (1943, p. 19) stated that: ‘Purposefulness … is quite independent of causality, initial or final’, and that they considered it ‘a concept necessary for the understanding of certain modes of behavior’.

4. Jacques Derrida has described these relations through the law of ‘autoimmunitary process’, which he describes as ‘that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’, a modern disorder that in his view threatens the life of participatory democracy and the legal system (interview with Jacques Derrida, cited in Borradori 2003, p. 94).