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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
We are inclined to see terrorist attacks as an aberration, a violent incursion into our lives that bears no intrinsic relation to the fundamental features of modern societies. But does this view misconstrue the relationship between terror and modernity? In this book, philosopher Donatella Di Cesare takes a historical approach and argues that terror is not a new phenomenon, but rather one that has always been a key part of modernity. At its most basic level, terrorism is about the struggle for power and sovereignty. The growing concentration of power in the hands of the state, which is a constitutive feature of modern societies, sows the seeds of terrorism, which is deployed as a weapon by those who are exposed to the violence of the state and feel that they have no other recourse. As Di Cesare illustrates her argument with examples ranging from the Red Brigades and 9/11 to jihadism and ISIS, her sophisticated analysis will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand contemporary terrorism more deeply, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy and political theory.
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Table of Contents
Cover
1
:
Planetary Terror
1
Bataclan
2
War on terror
3
Global civil war
4
The bomb of modernity
5
The ghost of bin Laden
6
Philosophies of terrorism
7
Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and the impossible exchange
8
The absolute weapon of one's own death
9
Atmoterrorism: Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, and so on
10
Heidegger and the ban of existence from the biosphere
11
The monopoly of negation
12
The metaphysics of the terrorist attack
Notes
2
:
Terror, Revolution, Sovereignty
1
A brand name
2
Defusing terrorism
3
Notes on fear, anxiety, and terror
4
Revolutionary terror is not terrorism
5
Are terrorists nihilists?
6
Why defend anarchists?
7
Dostoyevsky and the terrorist inside me
8
Terror and sovereignty: on Lenin
9
“Once upon a time there was a revolution”
10
The partisan, the guerrilla, the terrorist
Notes
3
:
Jihadism and Modernity
1
Radicalization
2
The political theology of the planetary neocaliphate
3
The postmodern horsemen of the Apocalypse
4
The path to terror
5
Cyberterrorism
6
Jihadist thanatopolitics
7
Media, new media, and terror
8
The car bomb
9
Explosions, massacres, decapitations
10
Vulnerability, or innocence lost
11
The negated ethics of the hostage
12
The future in the time of terror
Notes
4
:
The New Phobocracy
1
Clash of civilizations, class struggle, or “holy” war?
2
The offensive of radicalized secularism
3
Hermeneutics counters violence
4
Sedative or stimulant? Religion according to Marx
5
The left and jihad
6
Spanish brigades, Syrian brigades
7
The terrorism of global capitalism
8
Democracy put to the test by antiterrorism
9
Snowden: on planetary surveillance
10
The new phobocracy
Notes
Selected Bibliography
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Terror and Modernity
Donatella Di Cesare
Translated by Murtha Baca
polity
First published in Italian as Terrore e modernità © Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a, Turin, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3148-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3149-3 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Di Cesare, Donatella, author.
Title: Terror and modernity / Donatella Di Cesare.
Other titles: Terrore e modernità. English
Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018049242 (print) | LCCN 2018051323 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509531516 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509531486 | ISBN 9781509531486q(hardback) | ISBN 9781509531493q(pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism. | Terrorism–Religious aspects–Islam. | State, The.
Classification: LCC HV6431 (ebook) | LCC HV6431 .D52416 2019 (print) | DDC 303.6/25–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049242
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1 Planetary Terror
No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.1
1 Bataclan
The lively shouts of students who were rushing out of the Robespierre school were dying down, while the usual background noise that marks ordinary life on the Rue Georges Tarral, a small street in the modest Parisian quarter of Bobigny, resurged. It was the afternoon of November 13, 2015. In an anonymous second-floor flat of a modern apartment block across from the school, seven men were beginning to get prepared, after having meticulously studied the plan and activated their cell phones, Kalashnikovs, and suicide vests. They were members of two commando units: one would attack the Stade de France, the other would target the open-air bistros in the 11th arrondissement, which had itself become a symbol of openness and intermingling. The members of a third group of commandos were staying in the Appart’City complex in the suburb of Alfortville, about ten kilometers from the Place de la République.
This type of operation is called “oblique” because of the strategy that was followed: organized in Syria, it was directed from Belgium. The religious mentor of the group was a 35-year-old Algerian known to French antiterrorist forces, Mohamed Belkaid. He was preparing to coordinate the attacks with a single Samsung cell phone and two subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. He would die on March 15, 2016, in Forest,2 after having thwarted no fewer than three raids by the Belgian police, in the attempt to cover Salah Abdeslam's escape.
The three commando units spread out across Paris from one end to another were perfectly synchronized. Nothing was left to chance. The first attack, during a soccer match at the stadium, was intended to divert attention; the second, to draw all the resources of security forces and emergency services through a series of surprise raids, paving the way for the third, decisive attack: the massacre at the Bataclan theater. The final toll would be 130 dead and more than 360 wounded. It was the bloodiest attack on French soil since World War II. Leaving aside the devastating effects of the explosions, the men in the three commando groups fired at least six hundred rounds from their Kalashnikovs. The meteoric sequence of attacks violently imposed a battle scene reminiscent of Iraq or Syria at the heart of the metropolis. The City of Lights was plunged into the darkness of a long, bloody night. For the first time the victims were not sworn enemies; nor were they journalists or apostate Muslims, as in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, or Jews, as in the attack on the Hypercacher kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes. Global jihadism had abandoned any criterion: people were massacred indiscriminately.
The three cars used in the attacks—a Volkswagen Polo, a SEAT, and a Renault Clio—had Belgian license plates. They had been rented by Brahim and Salah Abdeslam, two French Moroccan brothers who had spent their life in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, an overcrowded suburb of Brussels and a powder keg of radical Islam. But it cannot be said that Brahim and Salah were fervent Muslims. In 2013, after having accumulated a series of convictions for petty crimes, they opened a bar, Les Béguines, where alcohol, gambling, and drugs were the norm. Brahim, a consumer of marijuana, introverted and suggestible, was 31; he was very different from his younger brother Salah, a ladies’ man who loved cars and spent his days watching ISIS videos. Both had become radicals only since the previous year, dedicating themselves to preparations for the Paris attack. Salah would be the only one to survive; after a massive manhunt he was arrested on March 18, 2016 and as of this writing he is incarcerated in the maximum-security prison of Fleury-Mérogis.
Not much is known about Mohammad al-Mahmod and Ahmad al-Mohammad, both Iraqis, who were destined to blow themselves up outside of the stadium. The same fate awaited 20-year-old Bilal Hadfi, a Belgian citizen who had enrolled the previous year in the Katībat al-Muhajirīn, the brigade of foreign fighters in Syria, where they met Abdelhamid Abaaoud and a 25-year-old French Moroccan named Chakib Akrouh. The video of Abaaoud dragging the corpses of Syrian civilians behind his off-road vehicle in the Raqqa desert had already made the rounds on the Internet. Although sought by many intelligence agencies, this Moroccan, by then 28 and carrying a Belgian passport, had managed to enter the French capital, where he was soon leading a group of nine men in a terrorist operation of unprecedented sophistication.
The three protagonists of the Bataclan massacre were all French citizens of Algerian origin. Samy Amimour, 28 years old, with a penetrating gaze and a thin mustache, was a hothead. In fact, his head would be found four hours after the attack, at the scene of the massacre, blown off by the explosion of his suicide vest. Ismaël Omar Mostefai, with his emaciated face, blue eyes, and long, scraggly beard, would have turned 30 on November 21; after a past of petty crime, he appeared in a video in the act of decapitating a hostage. At the Bataclan he fought to the end; beside him, also killed when his suicide vest exploded, was Foued Mohammed-Aggad, 23 years old, from Strasbourg. A practicing Muslim, Mohammed-Aggad shaved his armpits, a practice followed by “martyrs” before they die. This was confirmed by the coroners who performed the autopsy on his few remains. They also noted a “hyperkeratosis zone” on his forehead—a mark left by frequent prostration during prayers. The three jihadis, who had trained in the ranks of ISIS for two years, had all the determination of soldiers going into combat.
The unbroken series of attacks began at 9:17 p.m. with the first explosion. Ahmad al-Mohammad blew himself up outside Gate D of the Stade de France. Two minutes later, Mohammad al-Mahmod did the same outside Gate H. Although the shrapnel from the bombs wounded dozens of people, the casualties would have been much more serious if the attacks had taken place inside the arena. The reason why the jihadis stayed outside the stadium – a blip or part of the plan? – remains a mystery. There was a final telephone call at 9:20 p.m. between Abaaoud and Bilan Hadfi, shortly before Hadfi blew himself up.
A few minutes earlier, the SEAT in which the second group of commandos was riding had started cruising the cafés and restaurants of the 11th arrondissement—Carillon, Petit Cambodge, À la Bonne Bière… Kalashnikovs—combat weapons that are easy to procure and leave no chance of escape—were used to mow down women, men, and children, who were high-value, soft targets. The death toll came to 39. At the end of this deadly periplus, Brahim Abdeslam got out of the car and entered the small bistro Comptoir Voltaire. The images from the closed-circuit camera are grainy but Abdeslam's movements in the video are clear: he rises slowly, puts his left hand over his eyes, as if to protect them, and activates his suicide vest with his right hand.
The Bataclan, a concert venue in an orientalist architectural style that opened in 1865, got its name—originally spelled Ba-Ta-Clan—from Ba-ta-clan, a popular operetta or chinoiserie musicale composed by Jacques Offenbach. Having continued for decades as a performance venue, it offered a variety of programming, including rock concerts. On November 13 the featured act was a group from California, the Eagles of Death Metal. More than 1,500 people were packed in the orchestra pit and in the balconies, swaying to the music, dancing, taking selfies. Frontman Jessie Hughes pounded on his guitar. At 9:50 p.m. he began singing “Kiss the Devil,” which starts with the lines “I'll love the devil!/I'll sing his song!” At that very moment, the first shots rang out; initially they were believed to be sound effects.
On est parti, on commence. This was the last message sent to Abaaoud by the third group of commandoes as they were about to enter the Bataclan theater. “We're on our way. We're starting.” The first victims were gunned down on the sidewalk, outside the entrance. Inside the building, the sound of automatic weapon fire took the place of the music, marking the rhythm of the carnage for more than a half hour. From near or far, taking careful aim or firing at random into the crowd, amid cries for mercy and screams of pain, the attackers did not pause in their slaughter. Amimour and Mustafa in particular wended their way though the bodies that littered the floor, finishing off anyone who was still alive. “Why are we doing this? You bombed our brothers in Syria, in Iraq. Why did we come here? To do the same.” They spoke briefly, only to justify themselves. At 10:19 p.m. they moved upstairs with a group of hostages. In the meantime, the Reuters news agency sounded the alarm. But no one could imagine the extent of the carnage. The BRI—Brigade Recherche Intervention, an elite unit of the French national police—sent special squads to the Bataclan. But there was nothing to negotiate. The jihadis only wanted to make sure that the media were present.
Barack Obama appeared on television at 11:40 p.m. to condemn “an attack not just on Paris … an attack not just on the people of France, but … an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.”3 A few minutes later François Hollande announced a state of emergency throughout France and ordered the borders to be sealed.
It was past midnight when the BRI units launched their assault with grenades and automatic weapons. Foued Mohammad-Aggad blew himself up. A bullet reached Mostefai's heart. The macabre performance was over. Piles of corpses, tangled limbs, blood everywhere. The theater was pervaded by a deathly silence, broken only by the sound of cell phones ringing unanswered. The victims were more or less the same age as the attackers. “A few angry men have delivered their verdict with automatic gunfire. For us, it will be a life sentence.” Thus wrote Antoine Leiris, who lost his young wife, Hélène Muyal, in the attack on the Bataclan.4
The next morning, a communiqué from ISIS appeared on YouTube: “The Islamic State claims responsibility for Friday's attacks in Paris.”
2 War on terror
Are we at war? Many people ask this question, without finding an answer. It is as if, even on this point, all were doubt, confusion, disorientation. And yet, the day after the November 13, 2015 attacks on Paris, French authorities spoke explicitly about “war.” Many western leaders took up the term, declaring “war” on the black caliphate in their turn. If on the one hand this took jurists by surprise, perplexed as they were about the possibility of recognizing ISIS as a belligerent party, on the other hand it irritated analysts, political scientists, and ordinary citizens, for whom that word carried a disturbing echo of the “war on terror” proclaimed by George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
We are at war and at the same time we are not at war. The grip of this contradiction brings out how difficult it is to make sense of the current epoch, which is still anchored to the bonds of peace, yet already projected toward conflict. Perhaps the new phenomenon is precisely the impossibility of distinguishing between war and peace, as if a gray zone were growing larger—a zone where traditional boundaries are blurred to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Peace and war are no longer opposites like light and darkness. And in this shadowy zone many other boundaries are in danger of disappearing. While peace appears to be increasingly illusory, war is unleashed everywhere. But what war are we talking about?
Two wars have been explicitly declared: “holy war” and “just war.” On the one hand there is the attack on the West; on the other, the American military response that went into effect on October 7, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, and was justified as an unending act of retribution. The “just war” gave rise to Operation Infinite Justice—the first code name of the counteroffensive, later to be replaced by the milder Operation Enduring Freedom. In both cases—the holy war, and the just war—each side imposes its own version of the conflict, and there is a foreboding that the war, be it holy or just, will never end.
The war, infinite and without boundaries, that began on September 11, 2001, at the dawn of the new century, does not contradict the “end of war” that philosophy has long posited. Indeed, for a long time war was understood as an armed conflict, motivated by a political objective, defined by rules, and itself capable of controlling and giving shape to potential chaos; the obvious conclusion to war was peace, as provisional and unstable as it might be. But this classic version of war no longer exists. The end of war no longer means the end of violence; rather, humanity has entered into a period of its history that is distinguished by “states of violence.”5 Conflict evades ritual and breaks protocols; the rule of law is shattered to bits; disorder cannot be controlled; destruction breaks down barriers and violates taboos.
The change could not be more profound. In fact it is epochal—in the sense that it marks an epoch, namely that of globalization. This is why one could speak of a “global war.”6 Of course, the term “war” seems to emphasize continuity rather than interruption. But its recurrence is inevitable in the absence of words that are capable of expressing the unprecedented condition of a world at arms, resigned never to lay them down.
Widespread, intermittent, endemic, the new global war is not an event carved into the flesh of history; rather it is a permanent state of violence, a belligerence that threatens to perpetuate itself ad infinitum, an absolute hostility, unhampered by limits, that becomes a way of life. War was supposed to be an extreme choice, a transitory exception, circumscribed in time and space; but now it is becoming a chronic process. Whatever the reasons for the innumerable conflicts throughout the world might be, war will have no end. It will never close—never come to a conclusion. The war of the new millennium, which promises to become millenary, has already englobed peace within itself—because it is a war that, in its totalizing expansion, has become one with the planet.
A decisive difference from previous war scenarios should be noted here. In order to grasp it in all its depth, we need to reconsider the relationship between war and politics. The Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that “war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.”7 This famous dictum sums up the way in which, in modernity, war has been seen as an ultimate tool of politics. For his part, Carl Schmitt, although he criticized Clausewitz and pointed to the “presupposition of politics” present in war, did not depart from this modern view.8 Proof of this is Schmitt's perplexity about gray zones and his effort to maintain stable boundaries—first and foremost between war and peace. Schmitt's entire political theory revolves around the concept of boundaries.
It was instead Martin Heidegger who cast a visionary gaze beyond modernity. In a passage in the Black Notebooks, he spoke of a “total war” that was neither a presupposition nor a continuation of politics; rather it seems to be a “transformation of politics.”9 Having emerged from the womb of politics, war was for Heidegger an excrescence that had taken the upper hand. Without being decided through a sovereign act, war constrains politics to take decisions that are as basic as they are imponderable. There are no longer winners or losers here. There is no longer room for peace, simply because war has become one with the planet and the planet has become war.
While World War II was raging, Heidegger was perhaps the only one to sense that the relationship between war and politics was being turned upside down to a point where war would imprint its seal upon that violent process of uniformization of the world that today is called globalization.
Global war, which marks a caesura with the past, is the way in which the new planetary politics manifests itself; it is the emergence of a world at arms, the epiphany of armed globalization.
This is why we should speak of a Global War I rather than a World War III. Otherwise one might believe that the current war is nothing more than a clash between worlds—between America and Islam, for example. World wars came to an end with the twentieth century—not that we didn't have enough disturbing premonitory signs, especially during World War II: for example the industrialization of war, the metallic assembly line in which soldiers were deployed like laborers, according to the rhythms of total mobilization. And we must not forget the figure of the internal enemy that the Jews represented for the Third Reich. But the geographical and ideological fronts were easily recognizable in that wartime scenario, just as the strategies and targets of the warring parties appeared to be clear. In spite of everything, politics was still managing to give shape to the world. And finally a peace was reached, no matter how unstable, and a bipolar order was achieved.
The Cold War marked the decline of modernity, its last horizon. It was difficult to imagine then that it would have been precisely the tension between the two superpowers that blocked the advent of a new, incomparably more violent epoch. The ice melting in which many saw a metaphor for a new spring caused instead increased turbulence in the stormy sea of globalization. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the attack on the heartland of America, the victorious superpower that had remained the epicenter of global chaos, marked the passage to the uncharted era of postmodernity. September 11, 2001 was the first dramatic revelation of the global war.
3 Global civil war
One might be tempted to interpret that stormy sea, its currents, and its waves according to familiar, well-established schemas. But globalization goes beyond liberal logic, Marxist criticism, negative thinking. Where definite forms and clear differences are missing, not only concepts but even metaphors risk being inadequate. Thus for example Zygmunt Bauman's well-known formula “liquid modernity” seems to be misleading, both because it suggests that the modern epoch has not come to an end and because, by emphasizing the fluid nature of reality, which is incontestable, it passes over the rigidities, resistances, and attritions that foment a potentially permanent conflict. It would be more appropriate to speak of “global disorder,” but bearing in mind that chaos has different, often contradictory faces and that disorder is a plural phenomenon.
Planetary domination of technology, expansion of the capitalist economy, triumph of the market, vertiginous movement of trade, tyranny of finance, acceleration of the rhythms of production, competition, and at the same time decline of the nation-state, crisis of democracy, social unrest, ethnic contentions, wave of unprecedented migrations: globalization is all this—but not just this. Each phenomenon needs to be seen in the new context where it takes on unknown and unexpected meanings. What can be clearly seen, however, is that the inclusion of lives has also been, in great measure, an exclusion. The net has been spreading along lines of crisis, abysses in which innumerable people perish. Globalization has occurred under the banner of violent inequality. This is why it has been for some time now an armed globalization.
The new war of the globe in arms is spreading everywhere. There are no longer frontlines or frontiers. Above all, what has disappeared is the oldest and most reassuring boundary: the one between internal and external. Exteriority has dissolved. The planet is a place that no longer has external borders, while the interior is flooded with turbulent waters. This unprecedented geopolitical landscape, with its constellation of innumerable low-level conflicts, explains the characteristics of global war. Given that every point is connected with everything, even a marginal conflict at the most distant periphery could give rise to a deflagration of cosmic proportions. Any conflict is potentially global, because it catches fire in a planetary disorder that, far from containing it, in fact exacerbates it. If any place can be a frontline, it would be pointless to employ age-old war strategies such as advances and retreats. The global war is made up of attacks, reprisals, incursions, surgical bombings, high-tech operations carried out from a distance by trained technicians. It is a war of drones. The touch of a finger can blow up a city on the other side of the world. Once the frontline is dissolved, war is waged from a distance and with the aim of striking on a global scale. The theaters of war multiply and intersect. Land, sea, air: the deterritorialized war is transferred to satellites in interplanetary space. But the ominous backdrop of all of these conflicts is nuclear apocalypse—these being conflicts cloaked by delegating power, conflicts dissimulated through proxy, conflicts waged here and there in the world out of a paradoxical intention of keeping catastrophe infinitely at bay.
In earlier times, war involved two armies facing each other on battlefields outside populated centers, outside “open cities,” which were not supposed to come under attack. The new global war has no regard—it explodes within cities, it strikes civilians and civilizations, it destroys skyscrapers filled with offices, cafés, supermarkets, embassies, schools, hospitals. The children lying dead beneath the rubble are considered collateral damage.
It is true that the distinction between military and civilian had already started to disappear as early as World War I. No fewer than 62 million civilians were killed in conflicts of the twentieth century. But the peculiarity of global war, which is situated at the end of this process, resides in the growing privatization of war. As the monopoly on legitimate violence is increasingly taken away from nations, civilians are not just helpless victims—they are also protagonists. Suffice it to think of jihadi militants, Kurdish peshmerga, or independent philo-Russians, for example.
In a note added to War and Peace, Tolstoy mocked the pretensions of those who thought that they could discover the causes of war. This applies all the more to an infinite and boundless war that, properly speaking, has neither beginning nor scope. It is impossible to say that globalization is the cause that has unleashed it. Nor does it make sense to trace it back to a chain of causes. It is rather as if this intermittent war took concrete shape here and there for the most diverse reasons, which often pile up—from control over oil to control over water, from famine to ethnic violence. Globalization is the frame in which the latent potential of each individual conflict comes to light.
Global war, which has gained the upper hand over politics, leaving behind the duel between nations, no longer depends upon the sovereign decisions of nations. It imposes itself—to such an extent that it ends up looking like a natural phenomenon. The exception becomes the rule, the extreme takes an established place among daily occurrences.
If the internal and the external dissolve into each other in a geopolitical landscape characterized by outbursts of hostility and animated by outpourings of rage, the global war has yet to reveal its most horrifically savage aspect: that of civil war. But in this case as well, the form that emerges is not the traditional one. This is not merely the case of a fratricidal war within the boundaries of a single nation. Within the global frame, civil war takes on particular contours.
It was not by chance that, independently of each other, both Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of a “worldwide civil war” for the first time in 1963. Schmitt alluded to it in his Theory of the Partisan, where he spoke of a new world order, a “nomos of the earth” in which mutual recognition between sovereign nations would fail and war would criminalize the enemy to the point of instigating his annihilation.10 For her part, Arendt, in her book On Revolution, briefly examined “the civil discord that tormented the Greek polis”; but in the end she left the topic in the dark.11
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why there is still no doctrine of civil war, a phenomenon that is at least as old as democracy. This absence is all the more glaring if we consider the proliferation of conflicts that are no longer “inter-national” but have been defined as “internal wars” or “uncivil wars.” In reality such wars seem to be aimed not at transforming the political system but rather at making disorder more acute and widespread. While the need to manage conflict has been affirmed, the question of civil war has instead been neglected.
Giorgio Agamben has dedicated a short book to this theme—Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. The word stasis in the title is the ancient Greek term. Philosophers were very familiar with civil war. Plato dwelled in several places on that singular conflict, which had divided the citizens of Athens—a “family” war in which brother killed brother. In the classical Greek world, stasis was the bloody discord that always lay in ambush in familial relationships and in the end assailed even the city with its deadly outcomes. “War at home,” un-political in and of itself, thus became a political event.
It is precisely for this reason that Agamben refused to regard civil war as a simple family secret. He saw it instead as the threshold between the family and the state. When discord is unleashed, brothers kill each other as if they were enemies. Civil war makes it impossible to distinguish between inside and outside, home and state, the familiar and the foreign, blood relationships and citizenship. As political relationships forcefully invade the home, the family bond becomes even more estranged than the bond that separates warring political factions. Thus stasis is not war within the family; rather it is a device that functions “in a similar way to the state of exception.”12 This is how Agamben safeguards the irregularity of stasis.
The global civil war is the extension of stasis to the entire planet, by means of the incessant violence that pervades it, as if an epoch of absolute hostility had begun—so much so that one might think of the state of nature described by Hobbes in his Leviathan; except that that was a natural, pre-political violence that could be overcome by reason, while the current global violence follows upon political agreements—it is later, postmodern. This is because it is from modernity that the abyss upon which the political order of the world has been artificially constructed came to light. Hobbes offered another important suggestion in his De cive (2, 7, 11). Once a people is united under a sovereign, or in a democratic assembly, it becomes a multitude but is no longer a disunited multitude that precedes political agreement; it is a “dissolved multitude.” Here one gets a glimpse of the threat of civil war, which always remains possible as long as the dissolved multitude inhabits the city-state.
The black banner of terror indicates the darkest and most brutal form of global civil war; it is its inexorable shadow, inscribed within its grammar, embedded in its logic. It lies hidden beneath outbursts of hostilities, it is aligned with the spurts of rage that stir up the stormy sea. The more politics assumes familial aspects and the world appears to be nothing but global management of the economy, the more terrorism becomes extreme, escalates, and erupts in its full, deadly potential.
4 The bomb of modernity
When we speak of modernity, we imagine a train that picks up speed after stopping at each station. It takes on the passengers who are waiting for it, exultant and festive as they stand on the platform. Some get into first-class cabins, others into second, others perhaps into third. But the train brings them all the light of reason and the equality of speed. It pulls them from old prejudices, cuts them away from habits and customs inherited from the past, emancipates them from the weight of tradition, liberates them from the yoke of religion. Once they have boarded the train, they are finally autonomous subjects who have stepped out of the age-old state of minority and are capable of evaluating critically everything that concerns them. They are ready to begin their life. No more impositions, no more chains, no more coercions. The passengers say farewell to the past, with no regrets. Full of hopeful expectations, they entrust themselves to the overpowering clatter of the train as it hurtles assuredly toward progress. Nothing can stop it, nothing can derail it. Expert machinists and able technicians are constantly improving the machinery, occasionally replacing the worn-out wheels with increasingly sophisticated, perfected equipment. Further checks are no longer required. The train of modernity speeds boldly toward final victory, nurturing faith in science, the certainty of improvements brought about by technology. The train's forward movement is a confirmation of progress. Everyone on board is “progressive.” How could it be otherwise? Freed from the fears that in the distant past were inculcated by religion, these passengers are no longer enslaved by arcane fears—so much so that, even as they savor the thrill of high velocity, they can nevertheless fall asleep, lulled by the ideology of comfort and by the safety of the “happy ending.”
It is possible that they wake up only moments before the train suddenly explodes, like a projectile out of control, first rearing up and then twisting back on itself, almost as if it were taking a final glance at all that long road it has traveled before it is blown to smithereens. The progressivists’ imagination could never, even remotely, have foreseen such a tragic, inglorious end to this powerful convoy.
For the adepts of modernity, which is at once a conception of the world and above all a vision of history in which each epoch recapitulates and surpasses the preceding one, nothing could ever compromise the program of emancipation that had arisen from the Enlightenment. From this perspective, wars, massacres, and mass exterminations appear to be incidents along the way, irrational remnants of premodern barbarity, pathological phenomena, moments of insanity that have not yet been vanquished—which is tantamount to expunging them from history and from reason. All this was considered to have happened in a time and place untouched by modernity. For a long while, it made possible a sanitized, reassuring image of human progress. But this image had already begun to disintegrate in the last century, during the two world wars, and especially after Auschwitz.
At that point philosophers began to divide into those who maintained intact their faith in the light of reason, treating extermination as a result of “madness” or “barbarism,” and those who had already discerned in barbarism—and for some time—the hidden face, the dialectical other side of civilization; especially Walter Benjamin. And, following in his wake, beacons of fire—from Hannah Arendt to Günther Anders, from Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse—saw Auschwitz as an “administrative extermination” produced by modern western society in its most advanced stage.13 In the gas chambers, the process of industrializing death, which during Hitler's regime functioned like an assembly line, took on the almost ritual precision of technology. These philosophers were the first to put modernity under indictment. For them, Auschwitz was not an aberration on the path of progress; on the contrary, it had sprung from instrumental reason. Therefore it could even constitute the kaleidoscope in which modernity could be observed. They recognized the traces of that self-destruction of reason that were increasingly evident after Hiroshima; they warned against the danger of getting blinded, caught in the illusion of those who mistakenly believed that they had defused the bomb of modernity.
Since that time, through ups and downs, the discussion around modernity has never stopped. The heated debate about “modern and postmodern,” which was ignited in the 1980s by Jean-François Lyotard, proved to be only a new chapter.14
