AT the risk of causing some outrage, one might propose that what is commonly called terrorism today seems chiefly an aesthetic affair. An act considered terrorist appears a case of, what the philosopher Catherine Malabou calls, ‘destructive plasticity’. The success of a terrorist act is judged not only by the magnitude of destruction but also by its form. Its nature lies not only in the extent of deflagration caused but also in the fact that its drastic ‘plasticity’, its plastiquage, which in French simply means ‘bombing’, includes itself.¹

The nihilism alleged of the contemporary figure of the terrorist is not of the old sort – the traditional figure of the anarchist revolutionary, who in the very act of destruction, renews in part the world he assaults. The present-day image contains the power of an annihilation whose message seems to be that nothing in the world annihilated – not people, not things, not ideas, not values, are worth renewing. Moreover, the nihilist spectacle of the contemporary suicide bomber is absolute by virtue of carrying out the aesthetic destruction of all forms of the world, including the very form of the terrorist. Insofar as the terrorist lives in this world, he would rather not live; his suicidal plasticity is equally an aesthetic demonstration of the utter uselessness of the extant forms of the world as it exists.

Yet, the facts don’t quite fit the above picture. After all, it is not the suicide bomber alone who makes an aesthetic conflagration of the world and himself. It isn’t just the terrorist whose appearance is simultaneously the unleashing of a destructive plasticity to the point of total disappearance of the identity and personality of the world as we know it.

When a teenage boy opens fire on his classmates in an American school randomly killing a dozen of them before shooting himself, the same result obtains: the world as a stable form of existence starts to break up before our eyes. When in a Japanese town, a man goes around strangling mentally challenged people in a disability centre, and subsequently declares that the world should be rid of the disabled, the same destructive plasticity is at work. When during an unending season of drought in an economy summarily turned away from those who are too poor to capitalize their debt, the debtor-farmer serves himself – and sometimes his loved ones as well – with insecticide, the spectacle is nihilist enough for one to conclude that no amount of talk about the sanctity of life holds up against the slightest brush with lived reality.

 

The point is that while each of these alternative scenarios constitute aesthetic anathemas, being nothing short of thorns in our gaze, they still don’t carry the weight of ‘terrorist’ action. Rather, that weight comes from the designation of terror as an idea. This can be correlated with another designation: of all aesthetic destructions of the world, terrorism is the worst. The correlation presents a paradox that the phenomenon with a supposed intellectual content, a thinkable essence distinguishes itself from all those episodes which are merely random and superficial if rabid as ‘worse’ than them. While the other figures – the school kid with a blazing gun, the strangler at the disability centre, the farmer with insecticide – are only cases of individual and social derangement, of pure plastiquage, the terrorist is designated as the one who acts out his ‘ideas’.

Thus the global puzzlement: how is it that young boys – also girls but somehow the archetypal object of puzzled enquiry remains ‘the young boy’ – who are ‘educated’, ‘doing well in life’, in other words, who are supposed to belong to a rationality of the world as we know it, decide to exit the latter? What leads them to join such organizations as the Islamic State (IS)?

 

At this point, the puzzled enquiry starts to tie itself up in knots. It began with the premise that these ‘young boys’ were different from the run-of-the-mill social-psychological types who are prone to pathological behaviour – the poor, the hungry, the unemployed, the mentally deficient and so on. Here are subjects whose consciousness is to be compared with our own – the ones who know what they are doing and why. In other words, subjects capable of rational choice.

Exactly at this point, desperate bewilderment leads to the frantic query, ‘Who inspired them, who gave them those ideas?’ Clearly, with this question, the game is up. Because the whole point was to sustain the difficult research as to why are people doing what they are doing, when they know what they are doing. Since the issue is supposed to be ‘radicalization’, the research is also challenged to radicalize its rigour. Either the ‘young boy’ is a dull automaton launched by televised preaching and operational logistics, or he is a real devil hooked to video images of ritual executions, wishing for a bit of the blade himself – or he is thinking of something, whose pre-existent clothing – wahabi-salafi ideologies, promise of jannat and so on – might not completely cover its nude desire: the desire to live for an idea.

It seems to me that one should not be in too much of a hurry to name the so-called idea of terror in theological terms. Though, such naming is to be expected. After all the reason to grant ‘terror’ its special privilege of the ‘idea’ is to provide an alibi for committing the global brutality of stamping the blazon – ‘Islamic Terror’. However, if one restrains from parroting the theological content of the Islamic idea/terror and holds back citing its alleged premium on martyrdom, one might actually take the hypothesis of the ‘idea’ seriously and analyse its contemporary articulation as a desire. That is to say, the question of the idea must be disassembled into that part which carries a force to break away from the world as we know it, to ‘disaffect’ itself from the world, and that part, which leads to the experience of a new force of ‘affection’ – or affect, if you will – in relation to the task of living in this world. In this see-saw of disaffection and affection, of sedition and belonging, whether and how the emotion of terror enters the picture might be an interesting investigation to conduct.

 

The genealogy of terror has at least four crucial moments worth recalling, all of which bring up singular variants of the question of desire. Let’s schematize them: (a) In his Poetics, Aristotle prescribes that the ideal tragedy will provide therapeutic relief – the Greek word is katharsis – from two pathological emotions that the play itself activates – terror and pity. The tragic hero – and heroine – have done unspeakable things – patricide, incest but also anti-state activities including sedition against the government of the day – which make us shudder that such acts are possible. But they also make us feel unspeakable pity for the actors even while shuddering in terror at their acts whose origin, structure and idea remain opaque to our world. Thus terror and pity are pathological ‘affections’ that reflect a disaffected sickened world.

This, however, leads Aristotle to insist that in the end, drama must become a space of recognition of our errant relation to our personal as well as political destinies. Thus the pathologies of terror and pity are put at the service of what I will call the desire for recognition, which includes the hero’s or heroine’s, the reader’s, the audience’s recognition of their radical non-knowledge before the action of the ‘idea’.

(b) Between the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern state became thinkable as the monopolist of violence institutionalizing the same in its myriad instruments and apparatuses. Logically then, thought of the state became a thought of terror; the more legitimate its status, the more widespread its terror. Conversely, the more manifest and virulent state terror the more claim to the state’s legitimacy. You don’t have to read Thomas Hobbes to understand this.

Reading the daily news on Kashmir makes the lockjaw rationality of the modern state evident: for India, the terror of the state – military presence backed by laws like the AFSPA – is a matter of not losing but claiming legitimacy in Kashmir; after all it is in exceptional circumstances that the theory of the modern state as the legitimate monopolist of violence must be decisively demonstrated by violence. For Kashmir, by converse reasoning, the real terror is not only in the physical presence of the military; it is in the implacable theoretical legitimacy of India as a modern nation state. The terrifying thought for Kashmir is not that India is illegitimately holding on to it; it is the thought ‘the legitimacy of India will never let us go!’

 

However, the 17-18th centuries in European history had an associated political lesson: apart from learning to be terrified by the state, one must also learn to love it. Terror and love – these were the leading political emotions of the age of raison d’etat, the reason of state. It is not that love would be aroused for the liberal side of the modern state as opposed to terror arising from its police side. Rather, one must learn to love the police in the sense of that agency which ‘polices’, which read carefully means ‘cares’. We love those who care for us – and who leave us awestruck with their brutal splendour when they protect us from ourselves, particularly in times of crisis and conflict, of civil war and what since that age, we know as the coup d’etat.²

 

Terror and love are the absolute emotions of the regime of an absolute state, which includes dictatorships and democracies, and which logically means that in the modern era neither terror nor love can be engendered outside the regime of the state. The notion of a ‘non-state actor’ is an anachronism if not a pure lie. At the best of times there is ‘good government’ which inspires love; at the worst, there is civil war, which externalizes terror that is the internal assumption of the normal state. The radical consequence of this absolutism is that even the state is the subject of a desire oscillating between norm and exception, law and its suspension. I will call this the desire beholden to the idea of security.

Joined to its desire of security is the constant lament of the modern state that it is the most pitiable of victims. Just as terror and pity supported the ancient aesthetic subject’s desire for recognition, the modern political subject articulates its statist desire for security as an equivocal elixir distilled from terror and love.

(c) In 1794, Saint-Just declared ‘the Revolution is frozen’ and with fellow Jacobin, Maximilien Robespierre enunciated the latest policy of the Revolutionary French government: ‘Terror and Virtue!’ Sordid historical niceties apart, the moment had its structural signature. The desire of the absolute state, which was also the absolute desire of the state, in the European condition after the Treaty of Westphalia, was never rid of its fundamental impasse: if all war was now to be fought only between limited sovereign states and not between parties making absolute claims on their respective behalfs – that is the War of Religions – then wasn’t every limited war between states actually a civil war within the absolute state form? But endless bloody civil war in the European lands where each religious sect and movement claimed an absolute love of their respective patria, based on which they fought their just wars to their bitter end, was what the Treaty of Westphalia was supposed to prevent.

 

Strangely, the policy of Terror and Virtue in 1794 was structurally meant to constitute a new militant subject who would break through the above impasse. Striking terror in the hearts of the enemies of the revolution and cultivating in oneself a virtuous fidelity to the same, the new militant would neither be the old religious fanatic nor the modern statist patriot. She would be the militant of the event of a revolution which was historically contingent and yet in its contingent happening, opened up the possibility of revolutionary happiness for all humanity. So Terror, Virtue – and Happiness... For these ‘affections’, the new militant was ready to fight a new war, not on behalf of the ancient patria or the modern security state but on behalf of the revolutionary event itself. And she was ready to fight anywhere.

How terrible then that the internationalist policy of the revolutionary government was reduced to nothing short of the madness of a state attempting to incarnate the craziest of oxymorons: ‘revolutionary government’! How melancholy that the desire for the revolutionary idea ended up as a desire of the state in its weakest, most ‘terrorized’ form. In a letter to Marx, Friedrich Engels made an immortal axiom out of his historical judgement on 1794 – the terror is a reign of the terrorized.³

(d) Is it possible for the militant of the event – a subject of the desire for radical change – to survive the historical disaster of the policy of terror? Alternatively, is there some sort of monstrous utopian possibility that terror one day will find objective in worldly success? From the 19th century to the present, the chronicle of revolutionaries, anarchists, terrorists, always terrorists... is a chronicle divided between these two questions. Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst once said that the only successful act, which doesn’t misfire, is suicide.⁴ So, suppose, it became a matter of objective policy that the subjective act, en masse, will win success at the cost of suicidal disintegration, or self chosen destructive plasticity? It seems to me that to grasp the situation of the contemporary discourse on terrorism, one must traverse a complex line of what I will call, desire of performance, from the 19th century to now.

 

First, to make a distinction between performance-at-a-distance and performance-as-incorporation: for example, when Bhagat Singh in 1929 threw a bomb at an empty part of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, he, indeed, wanted to create a terrifying spectacle for the British imperialists. Some very foolish and cold-blooded people today are generating a lot of moral heat over the use of ‘revolutionary terrorist’ for Bhagat Singh in our history books. The important fact, however, is that the spectacle of terror was created by Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the name of a new emotion or (‘affection’) – enthusiasm for the idea of liberation, an idea not limited for its Indian audience but meant for all, including the British public. So we can characterize this act of terror and enthusiasm as the internationalist performance of the idea of freedom – azaadi – at a distance from the actual political forms of a revolutionary state, party or government. It was a didactic and aesthetic act, which demonstrated and taught the lesson of a revolutionary idea. In my view, those foolish cold-blooded people who mobilize outrage at the use of ‘terrorist’ for Bhagat Singh are actually terrified of the enthusiastic mobilizability contained in the idea of revolution and the name ‘revolutionary’.

 

At the same time, we would do well not to ignore the historical strategy someone like Bhagat Singh employed to incorporate himself along with his comrades, through the act, into the vision of a new political body, which could also be imagined as a Marxist-Leninist party with its ideological perspective on the question of national liberation. There is no shame in acknowledging that this incorporation could also take a sacrificial shape recalling earlier religious forms of martyrdom. But clearly, this sacrificial plasticity is strategic. And with this, we have enough genealogical material to ask the question of the day – when it is designated that the worst of all destructive plasticity is the plasticity of the terrorist act, what is the distribution in this designation between the distanced ‘cool’ teaching of the idea and the hyper-incorporated conflagration of the act?

 

According to me, the problem can’t even be analysed, let alone solved, unless one takes account of the so-called globalized world in which these acts take place. A world bearing the banal and true designation – ‘capitalist’. I think the first observation to be made vis-a-vis the diagnosis of Islamic radicalization and global jehadi terrorism is that no world is more radicalized than the capitalist one. And if indeed, we have to take the claim of a global capitalism seriously, then globalization must mean the radical saturation of the world by an intensity of the market into which the earlier force of the absolute state is already absorbed. Thus results a world without ideas, insofar as an idea is the form and intensity of thought that permits and inspires us to think that the world is not radically saturated, that it can still change.

Now suppose someone, anyone, actually believes that the world is globalized and that capitalism is the end of history but cannot accept this state of affairs for the good reason that a world without ideas is not worth living for, then what happens? In the circumstances, two possibilities exist. Either the subject philosophizes his disaffection into an adaptive disposition more suited to living life ‘happily’ but without the enthusiasm of revolutionaries, anarchists, terrorists, always terrorists, or he blows up a part of this world – and himself – to inconsolably accept that there is nothing beyond this globalized capitalist world and to nihilistically teach that this world is – nothing. This is the subjective, admittedly hallucinatory, portrayal of the problem.

Objectively presented, the problem unravels like this: if the premise is that capitalism is the only economic designation the world recognizes for its mode of material life – whether Islamic or western – and democracy the only norm by which all political ideologies measure themselves – whether theological or secular – then so-called terrorism and the so-called ‘war against terror’ are actually two expressions of the same global civil war. But this doesn’t mean that all parties of the civil war are placed on the same plane. The forces claiming to fight the ‘war against terror’ have the most radical political, military and financial stakes in maintaining the world as it is. This world they would ideally constitute as a society of ‘normal’ states, in other words, as a global market society. The ‘terrorists’, on the other hand, want to incorporate the nihilism of the world to decisively manifest it in their acts of annihilation. The ‘terrorists’ would like to be true terrorists and manifest the terror and boredom of the world without ideas in their experiments with destructive plasticity.

 

In truth however even their suicides misfire. First they, through a perverse logic of identification, identify too much with the world they want to destroy. They draw all their resources from the very object they utterly reject. Their meta-nihilistic project mostly fails while Capital ceaselessly affirms and advertises the immortal nihilism of a life among commodities. This is also the exhortation of capitalist morality for everyone to join the mainstream life cycle of production, circulation and consumption with nothing extraneous – like the meta-nihilistic project of ‘terror’ – to divert their thoughts. Not that this exhortation unerringly succeeds. But the point is, one side’s failure only reinforces the other’s and no real political or existential exit from the nihilist circle becomes possible through the creative power of what is at stake.

 

Second, even the so-called idea of terror is not the property of the ‘terrorist’. The free world markets the images and signs of terror with an efficiency which leaves organizations such as IS that much more exposed in a kind of sordid nudity. Posting videos of ritual slitting of throats overseen by masked blades only contributes to the naked effect.⁵ While the Free World of Capital wears more and more impenetrable veils.

Third, the desire for the idea that supports the destructive plasticity of the contemporary suicide bomber is borrowed from the world he would blow up. The idea of a global state, call it Islamic if you will, is a double borrowing: it borrows the image of a homogeneous global people from the enemy spectre of a single worldwide capitalist mass (or mob) and desires the incorporation of this image into the absolute form (caliphate) borrowed from the theory of the modern state. All this despite its anachronistic theocratic staging. So IS, from the position of an illegitimate debtor, is fighting a global civil war for the same rights to absolute legitimate violence that every ‘normal’ state enjoys. And I am glad it, the IS, is losing, just as the winners are. The last thing we need is one more state with a legitimate monopoly over violence; one more terrifying normal state.

 

Footnotes:

1. See Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (trans. Steven Miller). Fordham University Press, New York, 2012, p. 17. ‘Plasticity’, usually a term used for an art like sculpture, refers here to the brain’s capacity to receive form as well as to radically lose form, as in diseases such as Alzheimers. In Alzheimers disease it is as if the person completely vanishes from her previously led life and from that point of absolute destruction of personality starts to lead life once more. This makes her, according to Malabou, the new wounded.

2. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977-1978 (trans. Graham Burchell). Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 266.

3. See Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (trans. Elborg Forster). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1981), 1988, pp. 128-129.

4. See Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Kraus and Annette Michelson). Norton and Co., New York, London, (1990), 1999, p. 43.

5. Consider the following fictional scenario:

Islamic State (IS):Don’t think we are like normal Muslims. Some of us can go to any extent. Look at the video and you know how committed, how ruthless we are... We want you to tremble before us. We are the terrorists of the Absolute State.

Free World (FW): Don’t think they are the only ones who we see on these horrible videos. They could be anywhere, in our towns and cities, among the immigrants, among the citizens, among the bearded, among the clean shaven. They could look just like us, so watch out for the least sign of the Muslim among the most normal part of the population.