Many of us feel existential terror when contemplating our future nonexistence. I examine several attempts to rationally justify existential terror. The most promising of these appeals to the effects of future nonexistence on the meaningfulness of our lives. I argue that even this justification fails, and therefore existential terror is irrational.

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness (...) as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

section 1. Reason, language, and the self -- section 2. Law, emergency, and exception -- section 3. Terrorism as a paradigm of (in)security -- section 4. Terrorism and the crisis of the political.

The biopolitics of empire : slavery and "the Muslim" -- The biopolitics of settlement : temporality, desire, and civilization -- Foucault and queer theory -- Society must be destroyed -- Queer terror -- Bibliography.

This article begins by comparing terror and death and then focuses on whether killing combatants and noncombatants as a mere means to create terror, that is in turn a means to winning a war, is ever permissible. The role of intentions and alternative acts one might have done is examined in this regard. The second part of the article begins by criticizing a standard justification for causing collateral (side effect) deaths in war and offers an alternative justification that (...) makes use of the idea of group liability. (shrink)

En el artículo se exponen dos asuntos básicos: primero, más amplio, la aproximación literaria desde la semántica de lo bello a algunos pasajes literarios, y, segundo, más breve, la pregunta sobre qué significa valorar desde el punto de vista estético una pieza literaria; el primero permite introducir en el tema más genérico que indica lo segundo. Se resaltan dos temas que rodean a lo bello: el terror y lo erótico, unas relaciones que buscan desarrollar desde tres textos distintos: uno (...) contemporáneo de la poesía de Pablo Neruda y dos textos antiguos tomados de la literatura sagrada de la biblia judía y cristiana; la revisión de los textos permite ver los siguientes temas que se tratan por separado: primero, la belleza que redime lo abyecto; segundo, la belleza contemplada atípicamente desde lo sórdido, y, tercero, lo bello inefable o la imagen de terror como única expresión de la fuerza devastadora del eros. (shrink)

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the 9/11 hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn (...) how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush’s October 7, 2001 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan alongside the videotaped speech released by Osama bin Laden just a few hours later. As Lincoln authoritatively demonstrates, a close analysis of the rhetoric used by leaders as different as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden—as well as Mohamed Atta and even Jerry Falwell—betrays startling similarities. These commonalities have considerable implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture in a postcolonial world, implications that Lincoln draws out with skill and sensitivity. With a chapter new to this edition, “Theses on Religion and Violence,” Holy Terrors remains one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion. “Modernity has ended twice: in its Marxist form in 1989 Berlin, and in its liberal form on September 11, 2001. In order to understand such major historical changes we need both large-scale and focused analyses—a combination seldom to be found in one volume. But here Bruce Lincoln . . . has given us just such a mix of discrete and large-picture analysis.”—Stephen Healey, Christian Century “From time to time there appears a work . . . that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious discussion of religion’s significance within broader cultural dynamics. Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is one such text. . . . Anyone still struggling toward a more nuanced comprehension of 9/11 would do well to spend time with this book.”—Theodore Pulcini, Middle East Journal. (shrink)

Sleep is soothing, silent, and serene, until it is not. Sleep is often troubled, disturbed, or even “disordered” as the medical literature describes it. This paper begins from an extreme form of such disturbance—terrified sleep. Night terrors (pavor nocturnus), in which sleep is violently interrupted, offer important insights into sleep and the methods by which it is studied. The sanitising nature of the medical classification of night terrors as part of a continuum with sleepwalking and yet strikingly distinct from nightmares, (...) leads us into the arms of a more traditional, first-person, phenomenological investigation of night terrors. Without denying the power of both approaches, this paper offers a deconstructive alternative reading of this troubling of sleep through Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of the body, its suffering and materiality. Nancy, and Derrida, help us tarry with the body terrified and trembling in night terrors. First the paper explores the medical incisions within sleep that carve out night terrors, as a delimited phenomenon. This is followed by a consideration of what phenomenology can, and crucially cannot, add to our understanding of night terrors. Next a deconstructive critique of the phenomenological concepts of Leib and Körper is utilised to return to the material body gripped by the night terror. This in turn leads to an alternative account of this parasomnia through a post-Nancean phenomenology of terror as distinct from fear and Angst. The paper closes by drawing out several conclusions about the body, sleep, and phenomenology’s limits when approaching the somnolent. (shrink)

This volume collects Jeremy Waldron's challenging and influential work on the moral, political and legal issues surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics and security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.

The author analyses new meanings of "terror" and "terrorism" in political discourse as well as their implications in international politics. To some extent (and according to the needs of the moment, i.e. the needs of the powerful), the old and traditional meaning of those terms now still apply to conflicts and situations considered as local and globally inoffensive, or as having no global outreach or dimension. Following the paranoia instituted by the “nine-eleven” re-foundational moment in contemporary history, the new-fangled (...) usage of, and the recent meanings credited to those terms now roughly apply to the complex vaguely denoted as “Arabic-country-ethnicity-religion-and/or-Islam”. State terror is now considered to be exclusively defensive and justified in advance. However, it still includes para-statal terror and international “anti-terror strategies”, together with wars, torture, extraordinary renditions, extraterritoriality and extra-legality of detention, secret detention, man-made droughts, pollution, climate change, famines, forced migrations, terror against women and feminicide, trafficking of humans, sex-tourism etc. The author considers language as being not only the possibility for evening-out differences and conflicts through necessary and welcome negotiations, but also as providing a possible space for conflict. Language can be (but needn’t be) as much a weapon as any other. She therefore explores the politics of language, as she believes that the political (but not politics) “precedes” language. This is not only a question of freedom of speech, but a question as to who, for what purposes and under which conditions lays out those rights and that freedom, or triggers violence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBuilding on Google's efforts to scan millions of books, this article introduces methodology using a database of annual word frequencies of the 40,000 most frequently occurring words in the American literature between 1800 and 2009. The current paper uses this methodology to replicate and identify terror management processes in historical context. Variation in frequencies of word usage of constructs relevant to terror management theory are investigated over a time period of 209 years. Study 1 corroborated previous TMT findings (...) and demonstrated that word use of constructs related to death and of constructs related to patriotism and romantic relationships significantly co-vary over time. Study 2 showed that the use of the word “death” most strongly co-varies over time with the use of medical constructs, but also co-varies with the use of constructs related to violence, relationships, religion, positive sentiment, and negative sentiment. Study 3 foun... (shrink)

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. (shrink)

En el pensamiento de H. Arendt, las lecturas sobre el totalitarismo de The Origins of Totalitarianism, pueden ser leídas en paralelo a sus lecturas sobre la sociedad de masas, de la labor y el consumo en The Human Condition. Nos interesa mostrar en este artículo que se trata de lecturas convergentes, que se encuentran ligadas en la evolución del pensamiento de la autora y conservan algunas notas temáticas comunes como la preocupación por: el aislamiento, la soledad, el desarraigo y el (...) proyecto de convertir a los seres humanos en seres superfluos. (shrink)

Ten years after the assault on the World Trade Center, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum was opened to the public. Built amidst the busy financial corridors of Lower Manhattan, the memorial was designed to provide a tranquil space for honoring those who perished in the terror attacks. Yet reading the 9/11 Memorial in terms of public remembrance fails to account for either the ontopolitical impact of the attacks as an event that continues to unfold or the contingent (...) relationship of the monument to modes of narratizing 9/11 trauma. To counter the recuperation of the 9/11 Memorial within nationalist security discourses, this essay employs an object-oriented framework to evaluate how 9/11 texts, political symbols, and memorial components operate as things-in-themselves, retaining individual agency apart from human motivations. Theorizing the signifer of “9/11” as a fiction productive of homogenized affect, I argue that the 9/11-signifier stabilizes the equilibrium of the state by suppressing the agency of objects that propose ways of relating to 9/11 that challenge the “hyperrelational” logic of United States security constructs, whereby all objects are said to be interconnected through a conflation of the marketplace, Constitution, and God. In preserving the material displacement of objects from familiar spatiotemporal locations, however, I contend that the 9/11 Memorial deterritorializes becoming from human subjectivity to withdrawn objectal being, in turn creating space for an uncanny affirmation of difference. (shrink)

The article surveys the history of “terror” vis a vis the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. During the French Revolution, the word “terror” was coined to describe a deviation from the laws of war. Justified by a mixture of ideology and necessity. People who resort to terrorism either suspends or rejects the laws of war (jus in bellum) in the name of an alternative and heightened sense of truth. However, the terrorists’ strong sense of probity (...) and mission is also an opening for re-establishing communication, arbitration and mitigation of cruelty and destruction. This paper represents International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as an “abstract Leviathan”, submission to which is the contemporary norm of pacification. From the perspective of radical terrorism, it is tyrannical. From other perspectives, it is open to criticism and change. Most importantly, it is on the side of rational arbitration rather than arbitrary ordeal. Even radical terrorism, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the abstract Leviathan, seeks to communicate its radical messages rather than to seek victory my means of physical annihilation of its opponents. (shrink)

Religion has been responsible for both horrific acts against humanity and some of humanity's most sublime teachings and experiences. How is this possible? From a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, this book seeks to answer that question in terms of psychology dynamic of realism. At the heart of living religion is the idealization of everyday objects. Such idealizations provide much of the transforming power of religious experience, which is one of the positive contributions of religion to psychological life. However, idealization can also (...) lead to religious fanaticism, which can be very destructive. Drawing on the work of various contemporary relational theorists within psychoanalysis, this book develops a psychoanalytically informed theory of the transforming terror-producing effects of religious experience. It discusses the question of whether or not, if idealism is the cause of many of the destructive acts done in the name of religion, there can be vital religion without idealism. Thisis the first book to address the nature of religion and its capacity to sponsor both terrorism and transformation in terms of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory. It will be invaluable to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and religious studies. (shrink)

The essays in Waldron’s Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs have important implications for debates about the criminalization of terrorism and terrorism-related offences and its consequences for criminal law and criminal justice. His reflections on security speak directly to contemporary debates about the preventive role of the criminal law. And his analysis of inter-personal security trade-offs invites much closer attention to the costs of counter-terrorism policies, particularly those pursued outside the criminal process. But is Waldron right to speak of a ‘welcome (...) the return to the criminal justice model’? This article considers the arguments in favour of prioritizing the prosecution of terrorist suspects and asks if their prosecution can safely proceed without undue hazard to the criminal law and criminal process. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper addresses the ways in which the cultural, the affective and the political intersect, counter and/or feed upon one another in the context of contemporary terror. Initially, buildin...

Meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments address topics that range from pathos and genius to careerism and club sandwiches. Marcus Steinweg's capacity to implicate the other is beautiful, bright, precise, and logical, grounded in everyday questions, which to him are always big questions. —from the foreword by Thomas Hirschhorn The houses of philosophy need not be palaces. —Marcus Steinweg, “House,” The Terror of Evidence This is the first book by the prolific German philosopher Marcus Steinweg to be available in (...) English translation. The Terror of Evidence offers meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments—191 texts ranging in length from three words to three pages—the deceptive simplicity of which challenges the reader to think. “Thinking means getting lost again and again,” Steinweg observes. Reality is the ever-broken promise of consistency; “the terror of evidence” arises from the inconsistency before our eyes. Thinking is a means of coping with that inconsistency. Steinweg is known for his collaborations with Thomas Hirschhorn and the lectures and texts he has provided for many of Hirschhorn's projects. This translation of The Terror of Evidence includes a foreword by Hirschhorn written especially for the MIT Press edition. The subjects of these short texts vary widely. (“The table of contents is in itself excessive and ambitious,” writes Hirschhorn.) They include pathos, passivity, genius, resentment, love, horror, catastrophe, and racism. And club sandwiches (specifically, Foucault's love for this American specialty), blow jobs, and dance. Also: “Two Kinds of Obscurantism,” “Putting Words in Spinoza's Mouth,” “Note on Rorty,” and “Doubting Doubt.” The Terror of Evidence can be considered a guidebook to thinking: the daily journey of exploration, the incessant questioning of reality that Steinweg sees as the task of philosophy. (shrink)

The new idea of a 'parenting contract', explicitly taking as its point of reference the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is meant primarily to protect children's rights, and specifically the right to a proper upbringing. The nature of the parent-child relationship is thus drawn into the discourse of rights and duties. Although there is much to be said for parents explicitly attending to their children's upbringing, something of the uniqueness of the parent-child relationship seems to be (...) occluded by the language of rights and duties as that relationship becomes narrowed down to the confines of a contractual agreement. What comes to be foregrounded in the parent-child relationship is a defence of the various parties'—the parents' and the child's—interests. By drawing on the work of Annette Baier, we argue that this has considerable consequences in terms of trust and distrust, and parental engagement. It is questioned whether the concept of the parenting contract brings about the positive climate of engagement which it is meant to promote. (shrink)

In the ongoing war on terror both the American and Israeli governments have resorted to a policy of ‘targeting terrorists’. In essence, both governments authorize their military or intelligence services to kill specific ‘terrorists’ who they believe mortally threaten citizens and cannot otherwise be neutralized. President Bush calls this ‘sudden justice’ and the Israeli government ‘targeted killing’ but their critics speak of ‘assassination’, ‘liquidation’ or ‘extra-judicial killing’. Since 11 September 2001, America is reported to have killed at least 44 (...) people without warning or trial under the guidance of this policy, at least 18 of whom were civilians; the Israelis have killed at least 348, including 120 unintended targets. (shrink)

Terrorism challenges our Western world system with a new form of war. Terror contrasts strongly with the Western world's concept of freedom. Thus, an aggravation of this conflict is inevitable. In terms of technical equipment, we are prepared. Mentally, we are not. We know the mental treasures of mankind. We know examples of similar situations, which have happened before. We never wanted to meet them again. Thus, our awakening is even more terrifying. Referring to quite contrasting systems, eras, philosophers (...) and historical events, the volume shows what has to be taken into consideration. (shrink)

I. The Confrontation of Terror and Play: An Intellectual-Historical Constellation in Early West Germany In September 1968, a conference took place in the castle of the town of Rheda , remote from German intellectual centers. Boasting illustrious names from the German history of ideas, such as Jean Bollack, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Blumenberg, and Manfred Fuhrmann, this gathering of twenty-eight highly renowned scholars appears, in retrospect, to be one of the more memorable events in the intellectual history (...) of the Federal Republic of Germany. It had a lasting impact on German research in the fields…. (shrink)

The debate on religious backgrounds of the attack of the 11th of September calls for a theological protest above all for two sides. On the one side, it is factually not tenable to challenge the religious motivation of a terrorist on the basis of an »enlightened« concept of religion, as predominantly politicians with transparent motivation did. On the other side, it should towards those theologically be advanced who - on the basis of a generalized critical concept of religion- aim at (...) attacking Christianity at the same time as Islam as a source of intolerance and terror readiness. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (...) is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

The events of September 11th, 2001 have irreversibly marked the outlook of the entire world in the beginning of the twentieth-first century and its consequences will certainly continue to be felt for years to come. Although relatively new, such events have not passed without receiving attention from some among the foremost thinkers of our time. Given that, we intend to develop an interpretative hypothesis which, starting from the perspective opened by the reflections of Friedrich Nietzsche concerning the nihilism and the (...) great politics, seeks to understand both the violent actions which try to justify themselves from a fundamentalist world view as well as the recent political and military configuration of the U.S. liberal democracy as different forms of reaction against the deepening of the value crisis ​​through which the Western world passes. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ (...) is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The history of spectacle terror lynching remains one of the darkest and least explored political events in American history. In this article, I explore the aesthetic relation of this history to the formation of notions of public action and political assembly. I argue that the history of spectacle terror lynching establishes both a past and present form of public sovereignty. As such, I attempt to examine questions of what public action means with regard to a political context (...) of antiblack violence. I conclude that lynching festivals constitute not only a form of politics but a form of public sovereignty that is still in play in our notion of the public. At heart this notion informs not only antiblack forms of racism but antiblack forms of genocide. (shrink)

Drácula, Frankenstein, espíritus, asesinos en serie� el cine bebió del terror desde sus inicios como séptimo arte. El miedo y el terror son géneros capitales en la historia del cine como el "western", el cine negro o el "thriller". Su evolución a lo largo de las décadas se ha manifestado desde los títulos del cine mudo como Nosferatu a la sofisticación de El silencio de los corderos. Y siempre ha sido un cine de culto, tanto por su factura (...) estética como por sus personajes, terriblemente humanos. (shrink)

I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber which dominates this debate is underdetermined in three crucial respects: (1) the non-psychological worlds of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; (2) the psychologies of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; and (3) the structure of the thought-experiment, especially in relation to its similarity with the Trolley Problem. (...) (1) If the two worlds are not identical, then it may be these differences between the two worlds and not the Doctrine of Double Effect to explain the moral difference; (2a) if Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber have the same causal beliefs, then why does Terror Bomber set out to kill the children? It may then be this unwarranted and immoral choice and not the Doctrine of Double Effect that explains the moral difference; (2b) if the two have different causal beliefs, then we can’t rule out the counterfactual that, had Strategic Bomber had the same beliefs as Terror Bomber, she would have also acted as Terror Bomber did. Finally, (3) the Strategic Bomber scenario could also be constructed so as to be structurally equivalent to the Fat Man scenario in the Trolley Problem: but then the Doctrine of Double Effect would give different answers to two symmetrical cases. (shrink)

One of the main characteristics of this phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the resort by Palestinian groups to suicidal terror. This paper focuses on the unique nature of suicidal terror, since, I believe, it is this kind of terror that presents the most immanent threat to the foundations of politics and law in the free world. The article begins with a phenomenological exploration of the effect of suicidal terror on politics in Israel, inspired by the (...) work of Hannah Arendt. It presents the various manifestations of the suicidal terror as a new Paradigm of Violence. This new paradigm poses a great threat on politics: as the terrorists waive their effort to stay alive, deterrence becomes useless; the Israeli politics, in response, redraws the boundaries of the collective according to demographic lines; the feelings of helplessness reduces politics to personal tragedies giving up on normative arguments and long term policies. Compassion replaces persuasion. The attempt of an organized army to respond effectively to suicidal terror is ridden by the dilemma of effectiveness-legitimacy, that is, the more the response is effective, the more difficult it becomes to retain the distinction between the actions of the army and the actions of the terrorist. Moreover, during the attempt to bring the actions of the army to the review of the court, the legal system itself is infected by the same dilemma. The article examines the response of the Israeli Supreme Court to several petitions that questioned the legality of the means employed by the IDF in its fight against terror. These cases provide a unique opportunity to examine the way in which terror infiltrates into the very legal system that is called upon to respond to it, mainly by changing the legal language. The question that guides my discussion is what effect terror exerts on politics and law, and can law provide a way to resist the destructive influence of terror on the political system. (shrink)

An abiding concern in Žižek’s writings is with a central taboo of the modern age: the taboo of terror. We disavow terror only at the cost of accepting implicitly the violence and terror contained in the global capitalist logics and the fantasmatic structures that support them. The ongoing ideological attempts to neutralize the status of the capitalist economy, Žižek argues, are simultaneously accompanied by increasingly violent and authoritarian measures taken for its reproduction. Moreover, by failing to politicize (...) the economy and its constitutive violence, Western democracy is being reduced steadily to technocratic forms of administration. Focusing on recent work – and, in particular, The Defense of Lost Causes – this paper seeks to address Žižek’s cultivation of a new type of politico-philosophical engagement that does not shrink from the dimension of terror. (shrink)

A inicios del siglo XX, ya era común comprender la idea del terror difundida en los textos occidentales. Sin embargo, cuando en el Perú se intenta emular ese estilo tardíamente, es notoria la disfuncionalidad inmanente de ese género literario. Cuentos malévolos (1904) de Clemente Palma resultó ser un ejemplo de esa manifestación artística que revelaba carencias de un trabajo que tuvo por objetivo impactar y asustar al lector de ese tipo de narración. Para comprobarlo, en este artículo, confrontaré con (...) los relatos del escritor peruano para explicar cuáles fueron esos errores que impidieron la óptima configuración del cuento de terror, supeditada fundamentalmente a la propuesta teórica de Nöel Carroll. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between terror, power and the rule of law. First, tracing Burke’s use of the term terror back to ancient Greek usage, I argue that being terrified is incommensurable with the experience of acting together with others. In this way, terror and power are distinct. However, most acts of terror aim to terrify some people while inoculating others from terror. Witnesses to the terror of others may feel empowered by the (...) destruction of the power of others. Second, the rule of law and terror seem incommensurable because causing terror often involves violating the law. However, modern political thought is founded on the idea that the law itself ought to be terrifying. That the terror of non-state actors appears random and the terror of the law has hardly been noticed in recent commentary on terrorism indicate that the rule of law produces an interesting audience effect. In order to sustain power and legitimacy while practising terror, governments use the rule of law to divide audiences up into terrified criminals and innocent witnesses. The practice of terror as an ‘open secret’ also produces similar audience effects. Finally, despite these connections between power, terror and the rule of law, I argue that terror is always technically out of power, even when practised by states. Terror is the true weapon of the weak because it always admits a failure to foster human connections with certain people and groups. Nonviolence is a weapon of the weak in the sense that it instantiates new, unencumbered power. (shrink)

Place is sometimes understood as reinforcing personal and cultural identity in the face of dissipating versions of modernism or postmodernism. However, that identity can also come with a variety of cultural neuroses and manias that are inscribed on place. I consider the ways in which terrorism has become a feature of place, and how we can expect to see the terror of the place in the future. First, we can expect a relative diminishment in 'place-making imagination', the ability to (...) see places as rich, ambiguous, and multi-purposed. Second, we can expect the terror of the place to exhibit itself as an inability to come to terms with the other. Third, we can expect the continuation and development of a triumphalist narrative of place, including a sense of entitlement. Fourth, we can anticipate the death or the fear of the agora, the true 'agoraphobia', as the public space of discourse is closed down, and the private space of patriarchally enforced agreement gains ascendancy. Fifth, we can expect people to regard specific places as having fixed and permanent meanings, and to try to constrain those meanings in such a way as to guarantee that permanence. Sixth, we can expect topophobia, not only the fear of place but also stage fright, as the expression of self on the world stage becomes more and more limited and narrowly focussed. And seventh, we can expect a re-assertion of memory of place, perhaps with a shifted baseline, as the places of terror become exhausted. We can furthermore expect all of these phobias and manias to be rationalized as virtue in a society that cannot deal with the terror of the place. (shrink)

The present paper is devoted to a detailed presentation of a new Military Ethics doctrine of fighting terror. It is proposed as an extension of the classical Just War Theory, which has been meant to apply to ordinary international conflicts. Since the conditions of a fight against terror are essentially different from the conditions that are assumed to hold in the classical war (military) paradigm or in the law enforcement (police) paradigm, a third model is needed. The paper (...) proposes such a model in the form of principles that should govern the activity of a democratic state when faced with terror. Eleven principle are proposed. Two are on the level of the state, including the Principle of Self-Defense Duty. Six are related to military preventive acts against activities of terror, including new formulations of a Principle of Military Necessity, a Principle of Distinction, and a Principle of Military Proportionality. Principles of Low Probabilities, Time Span Considerations and Professional Understanding are also included. Finally, three principles that are related to consciousness-directed activities against terror are added: a Principle of Permanent Notice, a Principle of Compensation, and a Principle of Operational Deterrence. The exposition of the principles is accompanied by arguments about their moral justification. The doctrine has been developed on the background of the IDF fight against acts and activities of terror performed by Palestinian individuals and organizations. (shrink)

Este artículo comprende la periodización literaria del terror a inicios del siglo XX, expresada en la revista Variedades, dirigida por Clemente Palma, quien tuvo intereses artísticos e ideológicos similares. La compilación de textos afines se publicó en Cuentos malévolos (1904). Sus tópicos patentizados representan componentes indispensables para aludir al terror concomitante. Para demostrarlo, se efectuará un análisis discursivo de esas propiedades, tales como sus personajes consuetudinarios, el tipo de acciones desempeñadas, los escenarios configurados, la atmósfera inferida, la constitución (...) de los narradores y su forma de realizar sus enunciaciones. Igualmente, estos talantes se confrontarán con los relatos del escritor peruano. (shrink)

Richard B. Miller returns to the basic tenets of liberalism to divine an ethical response to religious extremism.

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida provocatively suggested that the greatest problem confronting contemporary democracy is that ‘the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternative ’. This article analyses the manner in which certain manifestly anti-democratic practices, like terror and torture, come to be taken up in defense of democracies as a result of what Derrida calls democracy’s ‘autoimmune’ tendencies.