The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: For a "Critique of Terrorism" to Come

Terrorism—The Ultimate Political Concept

Let me begin with Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, in which he says, "The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism" and "the substance of the political is contained in the context of a concrete antagonism."¹ This means that whatever term is used—totalitarianism, democracy, freedom—we cannot determine its concrete meaning in different contexts without taking into account that it is uttered at someone.

While Schmitt's proposition tends to dominate and regulate everything he says about the political in a self-referential fashion, I think, nonetheless, that the term terrorism provides a fine demonstration of what Schmitt calls the fundamental antagonism of the political concept. In this respect, might terrorism not be called the ultimate political concept?

Put differently, in another theoretical code, terrorism might be said to be a term whose operation is at once performative and constative (that is, in some sense, empirically verifiable), which is to say that one cannot determine if a certain phenomenon is terrorism without attending to its performative dimension. More than any other concept, with respect to the concept of terrorism, whenever and however it is debated, the constative cannot be thought of in isolation from the performative. This is what I would first like to clarify.

The term terrorism has been in use for some two hundred years, but it has not always been employed in the same context as it is currently used. It is necessary, then, to consider when the current sense of terrorism and its essential connotation appeared. Surely it is undeniable that it emerged from the historical and political conditions of the Middle East. In the following passage from Prisoner of Love (1986), Jean Genet recounts what a certain Palestinian said to him.

Although you had your white, royalist terror in 1795, the word terror wasn't too terrible in French until lately. Jack the Ripper spread terror nicely enough in London, and so did Bonnot in Paris, but the word terrorist has metal teeth and the red jaws of a monster. The Shiites have inhuman jaws like that, it says in the papers this morning, and Israel must lash them to death with the poisonous tail of their army—the army that ran away from Lebanon. If you're against Israel you're not an enemy or an opponent—you're a terrorist. Terrorism is supposed to deal death indiscriminately, and must be destroyed wherever it appears.

Very smart of Israel to carry the war right into the heart of vocabulary, and annex the words holocaust and genocide. The invasion of the Golan Heights didn't make Israel an intruder or predator. The destruction and massacres in Beirut weren't the work of terrorists armed by America and dropping tons of bombs day and night for three months on a capital with two million inhabitants: they were the act of an angry householder with the power to inflict heavy punishment on a troublesome neighbor. Words are terrible, and Israel is a terrifying manipulator of signs. Sentence doesn't necessarily precede execution; if an execution has already been carried out, a sentence will gradually justify it. When it kills a Shiite and a Palestinian, Israel claims to have cleansed the world of two terrorists at once.²

Here, amid the Israel-Palestine conflict, the term terrorism makes an appearance in its contemporary sense. Moreover, it appears as a symbol of almost theological evil. Simply put a d in front of the evil in Bush's "axis of evil" and you have devil. How easy it is in English to shift from evil to the devil.

The term terrorist clearly entails a move to dehumanize the enemy. As Schmitt was keen to point out in The Concept of the Political, the enemy existed in essence as a "proper enemy" in European common...