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Chapter 3: Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Love
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69 3 Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Love The attacks of 911 have made terrorism a household topic and a household anxiety. Fear, horror, and disgust toward the Muslim body have fueled “improved” security measures. In light of new permutations of racism, the political left has primarily turned its critical attention to neoliberal and authoritarian post-911 cultures (Giroux 2005; Butler 2004a, 2009; Asad 2007). But the proliferation of this scholarly work by and large addresses western responses to terrorism, not the status of the terrorist as a grievable subject in a postcolonial history. In other words, they take up the politics of terrorism but not the dilemmas and conÁicts that might inhabit terrorist subjectivities. Perhaps, in a climate of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, such a project seems misguided. For many, an examination of the terrorist is a study of his motivations. Since such studies are often pathologizing (Baruch 2003; Stein 2006; Khalid and Olsson 2006), it is understandable why Talal Asad, for instance, refrains from examining motivation in his text On Suicide Bombing. Indeed, he repeatedly reminds his readers that studying motivations is not his concern. In reading his text, however, I found myself moved in ways that inadvertently led me to think about violence itself as a site of psychosocial conÁict. Violence, as Judith Butler argues in Frames of War, forms the subject—at least in part. It does not simply exist on the outside; therefore, it poses an ongoing psychic struggle that is reiterated in norms of violence and nonviolence. Violence is elaborately legitimized and illegitimized in social narratives that stabilize its meaning. Arguably, Asad’s project deconstructs the problematic 70 The Better Story logic of western political narratives of violence. As he explains, western states (and the legacies of Judeo-&hristian tradition which inhabit them), validate their violence toward foreign others as a legitimate right. Indeed, all monotheistic traditions share elaborate constructions and rituals that sanction violence, even suicide (e.g., Jesus &hrist’s cruciÀxion as the greatest suicide). In other words, the strategies of Jewish, &hristian, and Islamic cultures are not dissimilar in how they have negotiated violence. If that is so, Asad asks, then why do so many people react to suicide bombing with such exceptional horror? He concludes that in the context of modern imperialism, Europeans “have learned to invest an aspect of their identity as humans” (2007, 90) in the horror of being killed by non-Europeans. Fanon (1952) made the same point when he argued that the European’s humanity depends on projecting the black man as an object of fear and horror.1 Though Asad does not look at the implications of this aspect of European identity on non-European identity, this is my starting point. The tragedy of modern colonialism is the terrorist’s psychic condition in the context of dehumanization—both historic and present-day. I take the view that the terrorist does not suͿer from a pathological condition, but grief. A discussion of this condition should not happen in the absence of racial politics or an anti-imperialist perspective, as some might assume, but in relation to the traumatic legacies of colonialism and racial hatred on postcolonial and neocolonial subjectivities. Sharing Paul Gilroy’s plaint that we have no “new ways of thinking ‘race’” (2005, 29), my question for this chapter is how do we humanely, ethically, lovingly represent terrorist subjectivity ? To love what is so untenable for so many people requires that we understand the terrorist’s actions as his survival story. This is not a Manichean love that excises or condones violence. Rather, this love integrates violence in the interest of ethical insight. It is not idealized love that needs to foreclose what is atrocious to continue to love. It is a kind of love that views terrorist acts as a symbolization of the aͿect of dicult experience. To do this work, I suggest we return to Fanon’s teachings: Fanon not only believed in revolution but in a “new humanism” that passes through an encounter with colonialism’s racializing logic as it “reaches out for the universal” and “understanding among men” (1952, 197 and 7). This is a humanism that understands the psychological violence of colonization and dehumanization of the colonized subject in hisher sociohistorical contexts. It also aspires to decolonization as the psychic strategy to restore the humanity of raced subjects. Fanon believed that the psyche universally structures human reality through complex dynamics de...