Philosophy, Terror, and Biopolitics

Space on earth, as far as humans are concerned, is in the process of being 'globalized', at least in the sense that many of the barriers that existed in the modern – as opposed to the postmodern – world have collapsed or have become more permeable than before, allowing two-way flows of various kinds. Most generally, these include cultural flows, economic flows, political and social flows. Unavoidably, they also create the opportunity for 'terror' to cross borders and slip through barriers. Two important thinkers who recently, in the wake of 9/11, responded philosophically to the (by now) ostensibly ubiquitous threat of terror, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, did so in interestingly divergent ways. This article is an attempt to characterize the significant philosophical differences between Derrida and Habermas on the question of 'Philosophy in a time of terror', and to situate their responses, elicited by Giovanna Borradori, in a broader context, partly suggested by themselves and Borradori, and partly by other thinkers such as Hardt and Negri. Given the comparably multifaceted character of Derrida's response, proportionally more attention is given to it than to Habermas's.

2018

Recent emphasis and attention by thinkers, media pundits, and politicians on terrorism requires new, critical evaluation of the processes by which terrorism is understood. By investigating the concept of biopolitics, as developed specifically through Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, new insights into the interactions between terrorism, politics, and religion can emerge. Most notably, the attempts to explain terror as simply an economic problem, an excessive form of violence, and/or as religious fervency gone awry rely on embedded biopolitical concepts. The continual attempts to solve terrorism through increased biopolitical strategies, thereby making terrorism a problem for biopolitics, only further substantiate the crisis that biopolitics brings about in the first place. Carefully investigating the relationship between biopolitical theory and religious concepts uncovers those very motivations of defining terrorism in certain forms (economically problematic, excessively violent,...

This paper explores Julia Kristeva’s discourse of the abject through the lens of Foucault’s antagonism strategies being a way of analysis of government techniques and processes of government of the population domestically, and mobilization into war internationally within the actuality of a world set to function in bio-political mode. The antagonism of strategies is a way of analyzing power relations within society by studying the opposite of the thing one wishes to analyze. The opposite is determined by the binaries defined by the actual conflict pinpointed at the points of contestation and consequently the manifestation of and the proliferation of discourse. So when one speaks of the terrorist one also speaks of government and the law. I compare Foucault’s archeology genealogy and the antagonism of strategies as tools of analysis of terrorism with Julia Kristeva’s semiotic psychoanalysis by taking the notions, of discourse, intertextuality and le langage as central points of comparison.

2010

This paper is an attempt to show that, as long as one approaches the question of ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ from the traditional (modern) perspective of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or, to put it differently, from that of the nation-state and its other, the question of whether terrorism could ever be ‘overcome’ or ‘defused’ – as opposed to ‘defeated’ by acts of war – is, regrettably, superfluous, because irrelevant. Irrelevant, because a novel logic is required to make sense of the possibility of defusing or overcoming terror(-ism). Derrida’s analysis of 9/11 as an ‘event’ that was both predictable as something anticipated within the horizon of familiar, hegemonic discourses, and utterly unpredictable, is noted, as well as his claim, that it displays the threefold structure of ‘autoimmunity’. According to the ‘autoimmunitary process’ the ‘very monstrosity’ that must be overcome, is produced. One encounters a similar logic on the part of the social thinker, Ulrich Beck, in his reflections on ‘cosmo...

New Political Science, 2009

The aim of this paper is to run a critical analysis – at a theoretical level – of the production of knowledge, specifically, the one on “terrorism”. The main argumentation is that the way this is created resembles in many ways the way scientific knowledge is produced in a society. In this sense, this paper seeks to draw a reflection on the creation of the discourse that constructs “terrorism”. The starting point is, hence, the fact that, as the creation of scientific truths is never neutral, so is the one related to this kind of specific violence. As a matter of fact, as other ones, this “regime of truth” on terrorism is created through specific processes that reify certain relations of powers. It is because of this reason that the “knowledge on terrorism” should not be accepted uncritically but analyzed and questioned.

dans Pierre Berthelot (dir.), « Théorie et pratique des relations internationales au Moyen-Orient », Éditions du Cygne, 2014

Parmi les pistes de réflexion favorisées par cet ouvrage, se trouvent la question du « redéploiement américain » et une réflexion plus large sur « le concept d'hégémonie ». Ce chapitre s'inscrit dans cette thématique de recherche, qui permet d'éclairer la théorie et la pratique des relations internationales au Moyen-Orient à travers les modalités d'interaction de l'hégémon dans la région. En effet, aucune analyse théorique ni pratique de cette région ne peut ignorer la force de l'influence américaine qui s'y exerce. Cette influence ressort à la fois du domaine des idées (comment les théoriciens construisent-ils l'objet Moyen-Orient ?) et de celui des actions (comment les praticiens interagissent-ils avec le Moyen-Orient en fonction de l'image qu'ils s'en font ?)

In this paper I discuss the positions of Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas on terrorism, as an example of their methods. I explain both deconstruction and reconstruction, and critically evaluate both approaches to philosophy. The paper is intended as a way towards Besinnung, in a time of frantic and confused conceptualization.

Perspectives on Politics, 2019

With Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony, C. Heike Schotten has written an urgent and provocative book that is indispensable reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of terrorism, the War on Terror, Islamophobia, settler colonialism and empire, Thomas Hobbes, the liberatory potential of queer critique, and the relationship between these. If this sounds like a tall order, it is. But Schotten delivers on all counts, masterfully weaving the canon of political thought, biopolitical studies, queer theory, and settler colonial and native studies into an intricate argument that reveals terrorism as the effect of a civilizationist moralism that valorizes some lives while marking others as and for death. The book is motivated by two overarching aims: first, to explicate the connection between settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and biopolitics to show that modern European sovereignty has been, from its conception, a settler colonial enterprise whose theoretical justification depends on the privileging of settler life through its distinction from natural life that is denigrated as a "savage" and near-death existence; and second, to articulate a queer politics of liberation that is uncompromising in its resistance to empire and-because such resistance is today branded as "terrorism"-unafraid in its demand for solidarity with "the terrorist." Schotten dedicates Chapters 1 and 2 to the first task of furnishing biopolitical analysis with an understanding of biological life as a political category that serves to justify, rather than undermine, settler colonialism and empire. To show that any appeal to biological life, even when celebrated as a site of resistance, surreptitiously reproduces the founding gesture of settler colonial sovereignty, in Chapter 1 Schotten examines the work of the "founding father" of the field of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben. Agamben claims that Western politics is characterized by the politicization of natural life by which the biological life of individuals is exposed to the unbridled power of the state. For Schotten, however, the distinction between natural life (zoē) and political life (bios) on which Agamben's argument rests betrays a moralistic hierarchization of political over natural life. Identifying Hannah Arendt as the source of Agamben's conceptual distinction between zoē and bios, Schotten further argues that his work inherits not only Arendt's privileging of political life but also her association of natural life with slavery and her civilizationist condemnation of lives that do not rise to her Greek-derived standard of political existence as unfree, antipolitical, and "savage." Moreover, Schotten carefully documents what she describes as Agamben's "Holocaust Exceptionalism," which posits the exceptional status of Jewish victims of genocidal violence and assumes Auschwitz as the reference point for any determination of injustice and suffering, a point of view that she insists is insufficiently attuned to other sites and forms of human suffering, such as that endured by Muslims as part of the War on Terror.