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)

Autores como Lovecraft, Llopis, Todorov y Carroll han conceptualizado el terror para explicar la recepción que tiene el lector al corroborar un objeto artístico que cuenta con sus propiedades particulares, además de que el resultado que se obtiene es útil como recurso para la Literatura y el Cine. En cambio, al hacer referencia al terror romántico, se alega a una de las múltiples manifestaciones que adopta este paradigma en la actualidad. Para este estudio, delimito su precisión léxica (convencional), (...) que es identificable por abordar los mecanismos que producen la destrucción de la noción del amor, la aniquilación del personaje que se respalda en este dogma y la intervención macabra del manipulador en las obras artísticas de esta índole. Estas peculiaridades se adecúan principalmente al funcionamiento de un psicodinamismo de confrontación del bien con el mal, que es notoria en las estrategias de manipulación que son empleadas en las relaciones de pareja de Cuentos malévolos (1904), al igual que la exposición a situaciones de riesgo y la ausencia de criterios ético y religioso. (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)

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)

This collection of essays represents a sample of the work carried out on the various urgent issues arising from the contemporary "war in terror" by researchers in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Swansea University UK and/or who attended the 2005 conference on politics and ethics at the University of Southern Mississippi (Gulf Coast). Certain specific topics are obviously prompted by this general theme; others dealt with in this book are perhaps not as obviously connected to it - (...) though they are no less important for that. This book is therefore intended to cover some ground in both types of topic and it is to be hoped that its contents will stimulate further reflection and writing on the deep controversies that recent events in world politics have stoked. However misguided much of the debate has been, many have contended that the present era is witnessing a "clash of civilisations", in which fundamentally different value-systems confront each other with their mutually opposed and antagonistic views of the world. This position often undergirds a moral relativism, which denies that there are any universal values: all we have, according to this outlook, are the different values of different cultures seeking (insofar as they "clash") to impose themselves on others. In the first essay, James Beard counters this argument with a case for what he calls a "thin universalism", a relatively sparse but powerful set of fundamental values which can credibly be demonstrated to have universal application.Many who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq now oppose it, not on the grounds that they were wrong at the outset but that hindsight and subsequent events have given them new reasons to revise their judgements. This has led some to think that arguments about whether a war is just, and justified, can very often only be satisfactorily made "down the line", thus excusing initial support for a conflict which thereafter goes badly wrong. In her article, Christine Stender reminds us of many of the considerations that were available in 2003 itself which readily led to just-war arguments against launching the invasion at the time. It may be easy for the passage of time to cause us to forget those factors. But, given that we can only become more adept at making just-war judgements by reflecting on past experience, it is crucial not to let them disappear in the morass of subsequent experience. Arguably, the Abu Ghraib scandal did more than any other single event to undermine what moral credibility the American occupation of Iraq ever had. It certainly raised acute questions about the conception of "virtue" that the role of combatant in war ought to necessitate and, in his essay, J. Joseph Miller subjects this issue to close philosophical scrutiny, with particular focus on the ethics of torture. Traditional just war theory has been composed of two elements: jus ad bellum, which sets out moral criteria which may sanction the resort to war, and jus in bello, which provides moral rules for its actual conduct. Recent events, and in particular the tragically chaotic situation of post-invasion Iraq, have helped to make the case for a third element: jus post bellum, which deals with the rights and responsibilities of just combatants with respect to the pursuit of a just peace once conflict has ended. This remains an under-researched area and, in their article, Mark Evans and Christine Stender introduce a wide-ranging set of considerations towards the construction of an adequate account of jus post bellum. A concept that has surged to the fore in recent times has been that of a "failed state", which has been invoked as part of arguments for "humanitarian intervention." (Afghanistan is perhaps the most obvious and pertinent example.) It is, however, a highly contentious concept and many think it has nothing other than ideological, polemical value. Whilst admitting that it is prone to such (mis)use, Mark Evans argues, in his essay, that it can be given a determinate and useful normative content, even if it does not necessarily sanction the kind of foreign policies which certain Western leaders have thought it does. Most liberal democracies have responded to the "terror threat" by introducing emergency legislation, or by otherwise suspending in some way what they would "ordinarily" have regarded as inviolable basic liberties and legal safeguards. Nazeer Patel argues that this dangerously undercuts the moral authority that these states claim for themselves and urges that we rethink how liberal democracy should appropriately respond to terrorism; it may take courage not to "overreact" against it, but he plausibly suggests a more measured and morally preferable attitude for it to take. Finally, in her essay, Claire Delisle focuses on one of the more bitter conflicts within a liberal democracy of recent times which has, it seems, been resolved in favour of peaceful accommodation: that between the Nationalist and Unionist communities in the north of Ireland/Ulster. The full story of how this peace became possible has yet to be fully told, and she adds a vital element to the tale, of how incarcerated combatants developed attitudes, strategies and a culture which built the foundations for a process that eventually brought "The Troubles" to what, it is to be hoped, is a permanent end. With the exception of the editor's contributions, the research which is published here is the product of the intellectual labours of scholars who are in the early stages of their careers. This volume is, therefore, a compendium of work in progress and the authors hope that this publication will help to further their reflections; certainly, the issues with which they engage are a long way indeed from being exhausted in terms of the scholarly attention they demand. Obviously, their appearance together in the same volume should not be taken to imply that any of the contributors endorse anything of what any of the others argue. (shrink)

Si bien hubo grandes pensadores a lo largo de la historia que hicieron referencia al concepto de «terror» (Kant y lo sublime, Hegel y el terror posrevolucionario francés, Heidegger y la significación ontológica del término, o la aproximación del psicoanálisis a lo siniestro), escasean aún los estudios vinculados a esta temática y los pocos que existen carecen de la profundidad adecuada para tratar este fenómeno. La presente edición cuenta con una serie de textos escritos por reconocidos especialistas (Vicente (...) Serrano, Antonio Castilla, Arturo Leyte, Miguel Morey, Mauricio Mancilla Muñoz, Ana Carrasco Conde, Jorge Fernández Gonzalo y Enrique Lynch) que nos permitirán adentrarnos de lleno en el tema del terror y sus principales vinculaciones con la filosofía, el psicoanálisis, la literatura y la sociedad en general. ¿Qué es el terror? ¿Cómo interpretarlo? ¿Cómo se representa en la literatura y el cine? ¿Cuál es, realmente, su función política? La filosofía, el terror y lo siniestro nos da la llave para acceder a estas y a otras cuestiones y abre vías de reflexión que resultan de vital importancia para comprender los resortes que operan detrás de nuestra sociedad contemporánea. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This is a new discussion in the philosophy of terrorism of the morality of Humanity, Palestine and Israel, right and wrong, liberalism, free riders, narratives, definitions of terrorism, objections to definitions not mentioning innocents, the question of who the innocents are, intentional action, objections having to do with definitions, inquiry, prejudice, pure inquiry, and advocacy, and other innocents. The discussion was prompted by a forthcoming paper by Tamar Meisels of Tel Aviv University 'Can Terrorism Ever Be Justified?', which paper and (...) the final reply to it by Ted Honderich will appear in a book edited by Stuart Gottlieb, Debating Terrorism and Counter Terrorism. Tamar Meisels' book, The Trouble With Terror, has lately been published by Cambridge University Press. She also has a paper in the collection Israel, Palestine and Terror edited by Stephen Law and containing various replies to Honderich. Another Meisels paper to which you can turn, The Trouble With Terror: The Apologetics of Terrorism -- A Refutatio n. There is also a Honderich reply to other objections, in this case by the German philosopher Georg Meggle. (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)

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.

¿Qué pasaría si, en el momento fundacional de la modernidad, el personaje principal no fuera el yo cartesiano, sino ese otro personaje que Descartes llamó genio maligno? Esa es la hipótesis que plantea el presente ensayo: ¿qué ocurriría si en lugar de la agotada certeza del yo, el mundo moderno se hubiera asentado más bien sobre la confusión y sobre la trampa que se condensan en la metáfora del genio maligno? Desde esa hipótesis, la mayor parte de las configuraciones filosóficas (...) de eso que llamamos modernidad aparecen transfiguradas, se convierten en meras repeticiones de aquel fraude básico que ocultan. Pero donde tales configuraciones velan ese gesto al repetirlo, el género de terror y los discursos sobre la angustia y la locura parecen haberlo denunciado como grietas de un edificio sin fondo. Este es el viaje apasionante que se propone en este libro, un viaje en el que autores como Poe, Stevenson o Conrad se atreven a proponernos lecturas de Nietzsche, Heidegger o Deleuze y Foucault, en el que personajes como Frankenstein o el doctor Jekyll nos enseñan aspectos inéditos de la filosofía de los siglos modernos, un viaje en el que la posmodernidad se revela como el penúltimo recurso retórico de un personaje ficticio y casi olvidado. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

Some theorists argue that appropriate responses to terrorism are in part shaped by popular sentiment. In two experiments, using representative design and ecological stimuli (e.g. actual news reports), we present evidence for some of the ways popular sentiment about terrorism tracks theory and can be constructed. In Experiment 1, we document that using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe a group of people decreases willingness to understand the group's grievances, decreases willingness to negotiate with the group, increases perceived permissibility of violence (...) against the group, and decreases the perceived rationality of the group. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that judgment about the permissibility of the use of force against terrorist groups can be biased by simple memory-priming manipulations. Results are interpreted in terms of (1) implications for philosophical theories about terrorism and (2) the role that experimental investigation can play in applied ethics. (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...

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.

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)

In his “Marxism and the Post-Modern Condition” Raulet examines the relation between modernity, post-modernity, and the aesthetics of the sublime. I would like to make a modest clarification. Raulet argues that I counterpose the Kantian sublime, which is based on incommensurability of powers [Vermögen], to the Hegelian dialectic which totalizes them. Thus I place myself in a position of being able to oppose totalitarianism only by means of a politics of terror. Both equations (speculative discourse = totalitarianism; and philosophy (...) of the sublime = terrorism) need to be dissolved. Let us briefly recall the objections to these equations. (shrink)

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction_including poetry, drama, and film_as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning, shortcomings, and the future of modern politics.

This is a reply to objections by the distinguished German philosopher Georg Meggle to Honderich's moral defence of Palestinian terrorism. It has to do with (1) the Principle of Humanity, (2) Zionism, Neo Zionism, a Palestinian moral right to terrorism within historic Palestine, (3) Just War theory and the Principle of Humanity, (4) terrorism in general defined as causing fear, (5) terrorism in general defined as the killing of innocents, (6) objections to the Palestinian moral right, (7) the case of (...) Palestine and the Principle of Humanity, (8) anti semitism, Meggle, Jurgen Habermas, and the publisher Abraham Melzer. There is also another reply to objections , in this case by Tamara Meisels, of Tel Aviv University. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses his ideas on perpetual peace, universal history, and critical philosophy.

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)

The aims of this essay are (A) to examine the extent to which Marx, Engels and Lenin believed in revolution by peaceful means and what was their attitude towards the phenomenon of war, and (B) to reflect on the different interpretations of their writings, discerning between three schools of thought. It is argued that Marx and Engels considered violence only as an instrument of secondary importance and desirable insofar as there is no other alternative to change the system. It is (...) further contended that while they, in the course of years, adopted a more moderate position regarding the use of violence, Lenin's viewpoint radicalized as the possibility of a revolution in Russia became real. As years went by Lenin affirmed not only the use of violence but also the resort to terrorist activities. Unlike Marx and Engels he became an ardent supporter of all types of terror. (shrink)

Ian Ward argues that through a closer appreciation of the ethical and aesthetical dimensions of terror, as well as the historical, political and cultural, we can better comprehend modern expressions and experiences of terrorism.

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)

ABSTRACT This article problematizes Santiago Castro-Gómez’s rupture with genealogy in favor of normative political philosophy. This rupture is characterized by a turn toward a political ontology that transforms political concepts into ontological categories that allow Castro-Gómez to posit a category of “the marginalized” as the ultimate foundation of political normativity. Through a dialogue with Frank Wilderson and Frantz Fanon, this article argues that such an ontologization of political categories, Castro-Gómez’s political ontology, leads to the reinscription of a colonial foundationalist logic (...) of the terror of exclusion and leads Castro-Gómez to erase the specificity of incommensurable struggles and to constrain political imagination. (shrink)

Religious violence may trigger feelings of repulsion and indignation, especially in a society that encourages toleration and respect, but rejection contradicts the principles of inclusion that define a democracy and its core moral values. How can we think ethically about religious violence and terrorism, especially in the wake of such atrocities as 9/11? Known for his skillful interrogation of ethical issues as they pertain to religion, politics, and culture, Richard B. Miller returns to the basic tenets of liberalism to divine (...) an ethical response to religious extremism. He questions how we should think about the claims and aspirations of political religions, especially when they conflict so deeply with liberal norms and practices, and he suggests how liberal critics can speak confidently in ways that respect cultural and religious difference. Miller explores other concerns within these investigations as well, such as the protection of human rights and a liberal democratic commitment to multicultural politics. In relating religion and ethics, he develops a new lens for viewing political religions and their moral responsibilities. This probing inquiry also forces us to rethink our response to 9/11. (shrink)

This essay focuses on James Baldwin's treatment of the Atlanta child murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a book that began as a series of reports for Playboy magazine. Returning to the United States from France, Baldwin not only reported on the child murders, but offered a treatise on terror as well: a treatise that distinguishes an imagined or remembered menace from a terror that might be considered constitutive, ontolological. This terror persists, Baldwin maintains, as (...) the negative cause of African American existence. Insistently political, the kernel of nonbeing to which Baldwin's thought appeals is not the grand abstraction of death but the becoming-abstract of abduction and permanent disappearance. Baldwin's essay on the Atlanta child murders thus seeks not only to bear witness to the plight of the missing children, but of the persistence of this “terror of being destroyed” as well. This essay revisits Baldwin's late work, often dismissed as either lackluster polemic or as sermonizing reportage, as no less apocalyptic a work of Pauline witnessing than The Fire Next Time. (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)

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)

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

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)