Public Reason 4 (1-2): 229-39

© 2012 by Public Reason

Philosophy, Terror, and Biopolitics

Cristian Iftode

University of Bucharest

Abstract. The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main argument will state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference.

Key words: terrorism, biopolitics, war on terror, modern individualism, hospitality, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas.

We are constantly reminded that terrorism poses one of the greatest threats to Western civilization. But we should also ask ourselves to what extent terrorism could be regarded as a ‘perverse effect’ of this same civilization. Here I am not referring only to some specific internal and foreign policies of U.S. and its allies, but rather to a general social and moral structure that has shaped the modern world in the West. As U. Steinhoff rightly points out, terrorism, broadly understood as “the direct attack on innocents,” “seems to be for many the very instantiation of evil, even worse than all crimes of war” (2007, 118). Yet it is hard to deny that the “satanic or apocalyptic connotations” of terrorism are in no small measure due to the fact that the word “terrorism” is usually used to describe “the acts of others” and not “one’s own actions,” with obvious “moral double standard” and “propagandistic” fury.

By way of combining a number of philosophical approaches mainly ‘continental,’ I shall try to propose a coherent critical perspective regarding our common understanding of the notion of international terrorism. From this perspective, 9/11 should be seen not only as a singularly traumatic event, but also as a horrendous illustration of a negative feature of the process that we call “modernity.”[1]

I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism have to be seen not only as reactions against modernity, secularization or ‘disenchantment of the world,’ but, in a very important way, as products coming from the same ‘factory’ as the modern individualism. They are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies that is confirming, in a paradoxical and most violent way, M. Foucault’s reflections about the biopolitical paradigm of our modern times. It would then follow that what we have to do is not only reshaping the current discourse on international Law, global justice and great alliances, but trying to alter, to modify the present value of our relationship to others (in a few words, trading the so-called “tolerance for “hospitality”). But this will remain a mere utopia as long as we are not really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-contained, self-encapsulated subjects, as monads that are ultimately lacking any power of transcending their solitudes in the open space of communal life, genuine encounter and authentic dialogue.

The method pursued in this investigation will be to confront some of the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics regarded as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments, in order to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror.”

I. Giovanna Borradori, who had the brilliant idea of the book of interviews and commentaries Philosophy in a Time of Terror, in which she invited Derrida and Habermas “to expose the frameworks of their thought to the hardest of all tasks: the evaluation of a single historical event” (Borradori 2003, XI-XII), that is the devastating terrorist act of 9/11, holds that both of the two great philosophers mentioned above should be placed in the tradition of social critique exemplary portrayed by Hannah Arendt. I think that we could easily claim that this is also true for M. Foucault and G. Agamben.

We all know that according to Arendt’s famous interpretation, “totalitarianism is a distinctly modern political danger, which combines unprecedented serialized coercion with a totalizing secular ideology. The ‘total terror’ practiced in the extermination camps and the gulags is not the means but ‘the essence of totalitarian government’.” (Borradori 2003, 7) But I think that one of the points in which M. Foucault takes one step further Arendt’s analysis of the modern political rationality by forging his concept of biopolitics is the highlight of the strange, perverse, insidious alliance between the effect of totalization and the effect of individualization that lies at the very heart of Western democratic societies. Foucault can thus convincingly argue that Fascism and Stalinism, the two great “diseases of power” of the 20th century, actually “used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies,” i.e., “the ideas and the devices of our political rationality” (1983, 209).

The notion of biopolitics designates a network of power relations in which the telos of our existence is practically reduced to the ‘ideal’ of physical and economic health of the society’s members, and the subjectivation of human beings is being realized by a repertoire of disciplinary techniques aiming at the ‘normalization’ and leveling of individuals. “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” (Foucault 1978, 138) Combining the disciplines of the body with the regulations of the population, we could state, following Foucault, that “never […] in the history of human societies – even in the old Chinese society – has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures” (1983, 213).

Foucault’s point is that the modern democratic state doesn’t actually offer that open stage where all of the citizens are invited to freely pursue their ideas of happiness or ‘good life.’ The modern individual, the result of a specific relationship to the self and to the others (the ‘social atom’ with rights and duties, the individual monad), is himself the product of biopolitics, “nothing else than the historical correlation” of a specific (disciplinary) “technology” (see Foucault 193, 222). The modern individualism is therefore not the disclosure of the ‘true’ nature of human beings, but merely “the effect of techniques of separation, isolation, individuation, and differentiation” that shape the modern world (McGushin 2007, 301 n76).

It is of course true that the exercise of disciplinary power in the context of neo-liberal democracies doesn’t amount to the use of physical violence or direct threats; but it nevertheless constitutes a structure of actions aiming to control our minds, bodies and actions, “a block of capacity-communication-power” that “incites,” “induces,” “seduces,” “makes it easier or more difficult” to obey (Foucault 1983, 218‒220). So the big problem and the seeming paradox, following Foucault’s interpretation, would be that biopolitics tends to hide from view “the fundamental political and ethical question ‒ How will I live? ‒ precisely by saturating space and time, our bodies and desires, with techniques, discourses, and relationships which have the goal of taking care of us and making us happy” (McGushin 2007, XX). Convinced that he is knowingly ‘choosing himself,’ the individual who is in complete ignorance of the ancient “techniques of the self” (techniques of detachment, of analyzing representations, of enhancing attention, and so on) that Foucault investigated in his final writings and courses (1988; 2005) is actually and unavoidably assimilating one of the identity ‘recipes’ that circulates on the market. Each of us thinks he is being ‘himself,’ but we all become the same: people following the latest fashion and trends, hollow, obsessed with material wealth and deprived of any spiritual horizon. At this point, if we were to pursue Ch. Taylor’s critique of modern individualism, we could agree that “the independence can become a very shallow affair, in which masses of people each try to express their individuality in stereotyped fashion. It is a critique that has often been made of modern consumer society that it tends to breed a herd of conformist individuals” (Taylor 1989, 40).

Having in mind these critical remarks about the modern individual and the contemporary society, how we are to approach the worrisome growth of religious fundamentalist movements and terrorist groups over the last decades?

On the one hand, it is obvious that these movements are trying to present their violent deeds as being desperate reactions not only to globalization, but also to the Western lack of spirituality and leveling consumerist culture. But if we were to look any closer, we could see, as suggested by Habermas, that what we are dealing with are actually “violent reactions against the modern way of understanding and practicing religion” in a pluralist society (Borradori 2003, 18).[2]

On the other hand and maybe on an even deeper level, what we are confronted with is again not only a violent resistance to the effect of totalization or globalization, but also to the effect of individualization in modern societies. What could finally force a young Muslim living in a Western country into embracing the horrifying ends of an Al Qaeda group, if not the sense of belonging to a community of faith and destiny, to a spiritual tradition that provides a higher purpose in life (and death) than the mere individual biological existence? In an insightful article, S. Žižek (2005) reminds us W.B. Yeats’s verses: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity (The Second Coming, 1920)”. And then he asks us: “Is this opposition not a good description of today’s split between tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of ‘passionate intensity’?”.

Of course there is nothing romantic or noble about terrorist activities, no matter of their nationalist or religious justifications. As Habermas puts it, “from a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out (…) Each murder is one too many” (Borradori 2003, 34). More than that, we could argue that a terrorist’s relationship to the self is not the result of a process of ethical subjectivation shaped in a traditional communal framework, but rather the effect of a successful brainwashing by his leaders, who will unscrupulously use him and eventually sacrifice him for their cynical and pragmatic purposes. And even if our young Muslim terrorist were to sustain that his affiliation to Al Qaeda is the result of an autonomous decision, we could argue, following a Habermasian argument, that a system of power relations that doesn’t recognize the equality of partners and in which you are not allowed to freely express your views and doubts on various subjects, including the ones having to do with religious faith, cannot constitute a genuine dialogical community. But the fact remains that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network.

II. The idea of reshaping Foucault’s concept of biopolitics by forging a theory of power that reveals the “hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” is arguably the most challenging part of G. Agamben’s intellectual project (see Agamben 1998, 6). In this famous book, entitled Homo sacer, the Italian thinker holds that “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original ‒ if concealed ‒ nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life”.

In a follow-up of this book, Agamben (2005) develops further implications of his concept of homo sacer (“bare life”) in the context of contemporary biopolitics by analyzing the state of exception established in the aftermath of 9/11. His critique aims at the very heart of Western democracies, arguing that, “faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war’, the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (2005, 2). Living in a “state of exception” means living “on a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism”, situation that would have been made obvious by the political decisions of Bush administration following the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

The immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities […] What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being […] The only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager [camps], who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity, but at least retained their identity as Jews. As Judith Butler has effectively shown, in the detainee at Guantánamo, bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy. (2005, 3‒4)[3]

III. If the policies of U.S. and its allies against terrorism seem to inspire further developing of Agamben’s radical critique of contemporary institutions and biopolitics, following the footsteps of Foucault, Arendt and Schmitt, it has to be said that the failure of Western political regimes to prevent the escalation of Islamist terrorism, as well as the growth in religious fundamentalism noticeable in many parts of the world, represent phenomena that are seriously putting to the test the whole theory of “communicative action” developed by the renowned philosopher J. Habermas during his entire career. The dilemma would be the following: based on Habermas’s universalist theory of communicative action, how are we to proceed when dealing with exponents of a culture that doesn’t believe in the value of rational dialogue and tends to consider any discussion with an unfaithful, at least on religious themes, rather as an evil temptation to be repressed than as a mean to reach some kind of agreement or mutual understanding? It could be argued that situations of this kind show the inherent limitations of Habermas’s approach.

Without going any further with this general criticism, I shall only mention one important critical point Habermas is making with respect to U.S. policy on terrorism after 9/11, when he considers “Bush’s decision to call for a ‘war against terrorism’ a serious mistake, both normatively and pragmatically. Normatively, he is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies; and pragmatically, one cannot lead a war against a ‘network’ if the term ‘war’ is to retain any definite meaning” (Borradori 2003, 34-35). Thus, we can evaluate, from a very different perspective than the one supported by Agamben, the negative implications and pitfalls of the ‘global war on terrorism.’

IV. In J. Derrida’s view, the most urgent and necessary action in the aftermaths of 9/11 would be the deconstruction of the notion of terrorism, “because the public use of it, as if it were a self-evident notion, perversely helps the terrorist cause. Such deconstruction consists […] in showing that the sets of distinctions within which we understand the meaning of the term terrorism are problem-ridden.” (Borradori 2003, XIII) For this purpose, in the interview given to G. Borradori only a few weeks after the tragic event of 9/11, J. Derrida formulates a number of questions destined to shake our common understanding of the concept of terrorism. In what follows, I shall only enumerate some of these questions, without going into further details, in order to focus, in the final part of this paper, on what I consider to be the most challenging thesis Derrida is supporting, a thesis that will also allow us to see what ultimately differentiates Derrida’s and Habermas’s approaches of public sphere, global justice and modern democracy.

First of all, Derrida is asking if we can really define “terror” in a way that “distinguishes it from fear, anxiety, and panic.” This question proves to be extremely important when trying to distinguish “a terror that is organized, provoked, and instrumentalized,” from a fear that the entire tradition in political thinking embracing the juridico-institutional model of power, “from Hobbes to Schmitt and even to Benjamin, holds to be the very condition of the authority of law and of the sovereign exercise of power, the very condition of the political and of the state” (Borradori 2003, 102). And if it is of course true that “not every experience of terror is necessarily the effect of some terrorism” (103), isn’t it equally true that there has never been a war that didn’t “entail the intimidation of civilians, and thus elements of terrorism” (XIII)?

More than that, having in mind the fact that “the political history of the word ‘terrorism’ is derived in large part from a reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, a terror that was carried out in the name of the state and that in fact presupposed a legal monopoly on violence,” how are we to deal with the notion of “state terrorism”? And this is of vital importance, since “every terrorist in the world claims to be responding in self-defense to a prior terrorism on the part of the state” (103), in this case, the alleged terrorism on the part of U.S. and its allies. Or how can we decide whether we should speak of a “national” or an “international” terrorism “in the cases of Algeria, Northern Ireland, Corsica, Israel, or Palestine” (104) ?

Are we allowed to forget the fact that “terrorists might be praised as freedom fighters in one context (for example, in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) and denounced as terrorists in another (and, these days, it’s often the very same fighters, using the very same weapons)”?

It is true that we usually understand terrorist actions as being direct attacks on civilians or direct threats posed to the lives of the innocents. But how confident are we that indifference and nonactions such as “letting die,” or “not wanting to know that one is letting others die” (the “hundreds of millions of human beings” dying “from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so on” in disadvantaged regions of the world) should not be considered, from a moral and political point of view, as “part of a ‘more or less’ conscious and deliberate terrorist strategy?” (108), asks Derrida.

I shall quote only one more question the French thinker challenges us to answer:

What would ‘September 11’ have been without television? […] [T]he real ‘terror’ consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting, having exposed and exploited, the image of this terror by the target itself. […] This is again the same autoimmunitary perversion. (108‒9)

By this last statement we are touching what is arguably the most provocative thesis in Derrida’s argumentation. The French philosopher is claiming that 9/11 was in fact only the latest manifestation, at that time, of a crisis of autoimmunization characterizing the very functioning or the very life of our modern neo-liberal democracies. This statement should be understood both on a symbolic level and on a very realistic one, if we take into account, on the one hand, the questions raised after 9/11 about the incapacity of the most advanced Intelligence services in the world to foresee and prevent the attacks and, on the other hand, the fact that the suicide terrorists that hijacked the planes had been trained in the States during the Cold War.

“As we know, an autoimmunitary process is 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” (Borradori 2003, 94). Derrida had already used the couple immunity/autoimmunization borrowed from biology when referring to the question of religion and its complicate relation to science (1998). Invoking it in order to explain what made possible ‘September 11th’, even without an explicit reference to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, seems to support the hypothesis that modern terrorism is, in many respects, an effect of the biopolitical matrix, a reaction somehow coming from inside the network of power relations that structure the Western world.

“A hypothesis: since we are speaking here of terrorism and, thus, of terror, the most irreducible source of absolute terror, the one that, by definition, finds itself most defenseless before the worst threat would be the one that comes from ‘within’, from this zone where the worst ‘outside’ lives with or within ‘me’. […] Terror is always, or always becomes, at least in part, ‘interior’. And terrorism always has something ‘domestic’, if not national, about it. The worst, most effective ‘terrorism’, even if it seems external and ‘international’, is the one that installs or recalls an interior threat, at home ‒ and recalls that the enemy is also always lodged on the inside of the system it violates and terrorizes.” (Borradori 2003, 188 n. 7)

From this perspective, Derrida can argue that by declaring a ‘War on Terror’, the Western coalition is in a way at war with itself. Nevertheless, is it possible to approximate a long term solution to the threat of global terrorism? An affirmative answer to such a question seems to request, in Derrida’s view, a radical rethinking of our relationship to others in the context of modern society, the deconstruction of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality.

Here lies an essential difference between Derrida’s and Habermas’s approaches. For the latter, tolerance remains an important value in the context of a democratic community, as long as “what is being tolerated is not one-sidedly or monologically established but dialogically achieved through the rational exchange among citizens.” (Borradori 2003, 73) Nonetheless, it may be argued that tolerance, in this case, does not result from the exchange, but rather it is the very condition of possibility in order for such an exchange, guided by the idea of reaching an intersubjective agreement, to take place.

From the point of view supported by Derrida, the problem with tolerance is that it is not engaging a real opening towards another person. When tolerance is not a name for mere indifference, it is usually a name for a condescendent relationship to another: “I am letting you be, you are not insufferable, I am leaving you a place in my home, but do not forget that this is my home…” (127) It is in this respect that we are speaking of a “threshold of tolerance” both to describe a characteristic of a living organism and “the limit beyond which it is no longer decent to ask a national community to welcome any more foreigners, immigrant workers, and the like.” (128) At the most, “tolerance is a conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality.”

Derrida is then referring to a famous Kantian text[4] in order to suggest a difference between the (conditional) hospitality of invitation and the (unconditional) hospitality of visitation:

Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. The visit might actually be very dangerous, and we must not ignore this fact, but would a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other, be true hospitality? (128-29)

The mere tolerance cannot be the just relationship to another person or even to a total stranger, because his or her alterity, the differences between us, cannot be acknowledged as long as I am not really trying to see things from the other’s perspective. And maybe it is only this true recognition of another person’s strangeness that can liberate the stranger within me. At this point, I think we could claim that unconditional hospitality is actually the inversion of the terrorist action, the one that is threatening me “from within,” according to Derrida’s reading.[5]

But in order for change to take place with respect to our relationship to others, it is first of all necessary to modify our relationship to the self, the way we understand ourselves as ethical and political subjects. In his final interviews and writings, Foucault repeatedly pointed out, as against a naïf conception about personal identity, the need for a permanent self-distancing (se déprendre de soi-même), the demand for a specific unsettlement and a continuous experimentation, an extreme willingness to place oneself in any position, to judge things from as many perspectives as possible, to think otherwise than before, to think against your own ‘intuitions’ and prejudices.

At this final stage, we should recall Foucault’s considerations about the strange alliance between the effect of totalization and the effect of individualization in the context of contemporary biopolitics. We could then state that the struggle for a modern subjectivity supposes two distinct levels: on the one hand, it is about fighting normalization and asserting “the right to be different;” on the other hand, it is about attacking “everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way.” (Foucault, 1983, 211-12)

Finally, it is this critical reassessment of the modern individualism that is of vital importance when trying to establish an acceptable meaning of cosmopolitanism, idea so often invoked in the context of the debates around global justice. In order not to give in to the ultimate biopolitical dream of a ‘meta-state’ (danger that Borradori rightly acknowledges in her dialogue with Derrida), maybe we should limit ourselves to the kind of civic attitude pointed out by Foucault in a declaration written in Geneva, in 1981:

“There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.” (2000, 474)

iftode@ub-filosofie.ro

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone. In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Translated by David Webb and Others. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.

———. 1983. The Subject and Power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

———.1984. What is Enlightenment?. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.

——— . 1988. Technologies of the Self. In Technologies of the Self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

———. 1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2): 198-227.

———. 2000. Confronting Governments: Human Rights. In Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3), edited by James D. Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley and Others. New York: The New Press.

———. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. Translated by G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Jackson, Richard, Eamon Murphy and Scott Poynting. 2010. Introduction: terrorism, the state and the study of political terror. In Contemporary state terrorism : theory and practice, edited by R. Jackson, E. Murphy, and S. Poynting. London: Routledge.

Kant, Immanuel. 2006. Towards Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Translated by David. L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askêsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Peterson, Richard. 2007. Violence, Power, and Identity. What are the Conditions of Terrorism?. In Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism,” edited by Gail M. Presbey. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Presbey, Gail. 2007. Introduction. In Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism,” edited by Gail M. Presbey. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Steinhoff, Uwe. 2007. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2005. With or Without Passion – What’s Wrong with Fundamentalism? Part I. http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm (accessed July 30th, 2012).

[1]  I believe this is precisely the kind of interrogation that forces us into rethinking the relationship between philosophy and modernity, the modern philosopher’s task of trying to seize the characteristics of his own time and place, to link his philosophical discourse to its own present or historical context, to engage in a permanent critique of our own historical being. This would be, following Foucault (1984), the actual legacy of Enlightenment.

[2]  As Peterson remarks, what seems to justify, in the Islamists’ minds, “a call to arms that suspends the demands of morality when it sanctions the killing of non-combatants” is not only the fact that they consider the Western policies to be “immoral,” but also that they consider them to be an attack on the idea of a “theologically conceived community,” which is essential to all religious fundamentalism (2007, 96).

[3]  From a similar perspective, some political analysts have argued that “certain anti-terrorism measures practised by Western states and their allies since 9/11 have amounted to state terrorism” (Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting 2010, 9). In the notorious case of the Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib’s “abduction, ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture, and incarceration without charge,” Poynting argues that the United States, Australia, Egypt, and Pakistan acted “illegally in common purpose to terrify particular sections of civilian populations for political ends”, or more precisely, in order “to send a message to the radical Muslim ‘other’.” It should be noted that this view is based on an understanding of the notion of terrorism according to which “the spreading of fear or the intent to spread fear is not only a usual but a defining characteristic of terrorism” (Steinhoff 2007, 112). The German author judges this idea as being ultimately “misleading” (115). And yet, Steinhoff seams to assume this feature of the definition of terrorism when he distinguishes terrorism from pure genocide, arguing that “genocide can be terrorist, for example, when it is used to frighten off the surviving part of the targeted population (making it leave a contended territory)” (119), and also when he states the conditions under which “a one-off act of violence can be called terrorist” (121).

[4]  It is the third article from section two of Kant’s much discussed writing Towards Perpetual Peace (2006).

[5]  Our purely formal understanding of the respect for the others is considered to be a possible root of modern terrorism also by authors drawing from the idea of recognition conflict initially formulated by Hegel (see Peterson 2007, 94), or by Feminists inspired, for instance, by Luce Irigaray’s conception of democracy “not in terms of individualistic strategic self-interest”, but in terms of love, respect, mutuality, conceived as the true “basis of a democracy.” The modern terrorism, as well as “the polarizing politics of the war on terrorism,” could be seen as the expression of our “failure to love across differences,” of the brutal opposition between “we citizens” and “our enemies” (see Presbey 2007, 2).