Victoria University of WellingtonSTRA531 Strategic Studies

Assignment Two, 2014

Due Date: 12 May 2014Length: 5000 words +/- 10%

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1. Name: Shane Wilcox

2. Student ID: 300309751

3. Question Answered: “Terrorism doesn’t work.” Evaluate this claim

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5. Date Submitted: 11/5/14

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The Work of Terror

What would be the “work” of terrorism? What would answer the charge against terrorism

that it does not work, would answer what amounts to a demand that it does work? We might

begin with a return to the origins of modern terrorism, to the Terror of 1793-94, to an event

drawn out over a long year, the fifth of the French Revolution, and to the dark work of

maintaining the sovereignty of the people against counter-revolutionary incitement,

insurrection and invasion.

Accounts of the Terror have typically viewed it as an aberration, whether as a sort of

diseased limb which came to infect and corrupt the entire project of the Revolution, finding

later expression in twentieth-century totalitarianism and other forms of political oppression;

or as a merely parasitic extension, feeding on true revolutionary ideals and metabolizing them

into a hideous caricature, but more or less successfully excised by the actions of the

Thermidorians, who restored to the Revolution its force as the founding moment of Western

democracy. An understandable revulsion, perhaps, in the face of the litany of thousands

executed, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, of whom many thousands died, and a

murderous civil war (Gough, 2010, chapter 1). Nevertheless, the numbers alone cannot be

inspiration for such a visceral response, pale as they are beside the records of innumerable

infamies before and since. Denial of this order is born of a certain recognition, a suspicion

that what one can barely regard might be little more than one’s own reflection. It may be that

there nags the doubt that some work yet remains; not, to be sure, in the elimination of terror,

for that this will always be ahead of us there can be no doubt, but that terror’s work has left a

trace we cannot put entirely behind us, that marks all our political projects.

The Terror was conceived as a work of transformation of violence. An escalating series

of popular actions, primarily in Paris, from the petition of the Champ de Mars in July 1791,

to the invasion by the sans-culottes of the Tuileries in June 1792, and culminating in the

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“September massacres” of the same year, prompted Danton, credited along with Robespierre

with the institution of Terror, to call for the establishment of a revolutionary tribunal,

exhorting the National Convention in March 1793 to “let us be terrible so as to save the

people from being so” (quoted in Wahnich, 2012, chapter 3). In the matter of less than a

month, an entire administrative apparatus sprang into being, comprising regional deputies of

the Convention, the revolutionary tribunal, and the Committee of Public Safety. A system of

surveillance, conducted by committees in every town and village, identified counter-

revolutionary activity ranging from armed rebellion, to interference with the recruitment of

soldiers, to the mere voicing of support for the monarchy. Those held responsible for such

activity were summarily executed, or brought to trial before the tribunal without right of

appeal; with passage of the Law of Suspects in September 1793, any and all dissent in word

or deed was a crime against the Revolution and therefore a capital offence – anyone could be

made a suspect at any time, and the threat of execution therefore hung over all (Gough, 2010,

chapters 3 & 4; Wahnich, 2012, chapter 3).

The transformation of the wild violence of the people into the ordered, juridical violence

of the state was the accomplishment of the Terror. With no one exempt from suspicion, no

one beyond the reach of Revolutionary law, there would remain no one to serve as the object

of the people’s wrath. It is tempting to read this transformation as simply the harnessing of

the rage of the people by the mechanisms of the state, as if by applying the law as a kind of

algebraic function, violence could be converted from one form to another without loss or

remainder. Such a formulation implies an equivalence between these two, between two faces

of a violence that is in essence one. In his “Critique of Violence” of 1921, Walter Benjamin

distinguishes two irreconcilables – mythic violence and divine violence:1

1. It should be noted here that, as Benjamin’s translator points out, the German Gewalt means both “violence” and “force;” there are also connotations of “power” and “control,” the implications of which should become clear.

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Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine.

And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythic violence is

lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter

boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution,

divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is

bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. … Mythic violence is bloody power

over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake

of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it (Benjamin, 1996, pp.

249-250).

Mythic violence (so-called on the basis of Benjamin’s reading of the legend of Niobe)

operates in the realm of law, and expresses, in a sense, the tension between the “just” ends of

natural law and the “justifiable” means of positive law. Under the law, violence itself is a

means; positive law sanctions violence directed towards ends supported by “general historical

acknowledgment,” and declares illegitimate violence that serves ends not so supported, which

are deemed thereby to be “natural” rather than “legal” ends (Benjamin, 1996, pp. 237-238).

Violence may therefore be “law-preserving” or “lawmaking” – violence serving natural ends

must come into conflict with legal ends, and may, if it prevails, form the basis of new law,

finding its historical acknowledgment in general recognition of the new circumstances. This,

for Benjamin, is the function of the peace ceremonies that mark the end of military conflicts,

whether between “primitive” societies or modern states (1996, p. 240) – even an

overwhelming victory, not susceptible in any practical way to a reversal, requires a verifiable

witness if it is to be institutionalized as the preserve for further legal violence. The state as,

inter alia, the embodiment of law, cannot tolerate the potential for lawmaking violence in its

subjects or in its relationships with other states, and wields law-preserving violence as a

threat. Benjamin opposes “threat” to “deterrence” on the basis of the uncertainty that

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characterizes the former (1996, p. 242). Law-preserving violence – in the form of, for

example, punishment – may be eluded: the murderer may go uncaptured, the state may annex

the territory of its neighbour without reprisal. Those above whom the sword is suspended are

at the mercy of a fate that magnifies the threat of this violence. It cannot be known in

advance where, when, or how hard the sword will fall. The criminal may be apprehended,

but at trial could be acquitted. If found guilty, the sentence may be out of proportion with the

crime. By virtue of this uncertainty, this action of fate in the very mechanism of the law,

every instance of law-preserving violence threatens to create a new circumstance, a new

precedent, and so to reveal itself as lawmaking violence. Here, ends and means find

themselves out of joint: a violent act may conform with all relevant statutes and legal

precedents, and therefore be entirely justifiable as a means, yet serve ends that none considers

just, and that cannot be just, if that term is to have any meaning. The legal, justifiable

violence that upholds the law remakes it in the same act, inscribing violence as the founding

principle of all law, which is to say that mythic, lawmaking violence is power, in principle

and manifestation (1996, p. 248).

Divine violence is the negation of mythic violence. Benjamin writes “antithesis” in the

passage cited above, recalling the terms of the Hegelian dialectic, which fairly describes the

synthetic relationship between law-preserving and lawmaking in mythic violence given

above. Benjamin’s own description suggests something more radical than a simple,

dialectical negation of the mythic by the divine, however: divine violence is “boundless,”

“pure,” it annihilates without leaving a trace of blood. Or rather, if negation it is, then it is

the negation of a negation – the expiatory transformation of a retributive power that has

inverted the law it upholds. Divine violence always risks being misinterpreted, and even

risks going completely unrecognized; as a violence done to violence, as a violence

emanating, therefore, from outside the law and aimed at the very dialectic that sustains the

law and thereby the state itself, it can always appear as “outlaw,” merely criminal, and by the

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very uncertainty of its status be drawn back into the dialectical structure of myth. “For only

mythic violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in

incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men”

(Benjamin, 1996, p. 252). Indeed, should a divine act be made visible by a witness, be

recognized and interpreted as such, this alone must suffice to “restore” power, returning it to

history.

Benjamin’s final sentence: “Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the

means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ violence” (1996, p. 252). Žižek cautions

the reader regarding the correct interpretation of this sentence – where mythic violence serves

as a means towards the establishment of the rule of Law, divine violence serves no ends: “It

is just the sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically ‘out of joint’,” but

this is a sign without meaning – “there are no ‘objective’ criteria enabling us to identify an act

of violence as divine; the same act that, to an external observer, is merely an outburst of

violence can be divine for those engaged in it” (Žižek, 2008, p. 169). As act, divine violence

is negation of the Law; as sign, it is the negation of meaning; as means, it is the negation of

ends; as event, the negation of history. And therefore, it is sovereign – for itself, unbounded

by relations external to it, radically free; in short, it is the negation of power – as power-over,

or as the power to hurt and destroy, to fix relations, to write history.

How, then, to interpret the transformation of violence in the Revolutionary Terror? For

Wahnich:

the Terror consisted precisely in forestalling and punishing any arbitrary and bloody

overflow, which in the revolutionaries’ vocabulary was seen as “anarchy” or “fury” –

and in the vocabulary of Walter Benjamin, as a mythical violence. … Over against

such a foundation, the Terror sought to give the anger of the people, as divine anger,

forms that were neither discretionary nor arbitrary. The sacrifice of life had to be

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made to the benefit of a “living-well” that neither could nor should be confused with

the simple fact of living (Wahnich, 2012, chapter 3).

The divine anger of the people, when given violent expression in the riots, invasion and

massacre that preceded the Terror, was too easily captured by the mythic forms of destructive

power that marked them as merely criminal, bloody and retributive. Popular vengeance fell

upon those deemed guilty, whether by act or association, of specific injustices or threats: a

pair branded spies by the petitioners at the Champ de Mars hanged on the spot, the Swiss

Guard slaughtered at the Tuileries, the mass execution of prisoners thought to be in league

with an advancing Prussian army bent on restoring monarchical rule. Vengeance transformed

in the Terror by means of the Law of Suspects was universal, directed not on behalf of one

group against another, but against all for the sake of all, against the lives of the people for the

Life of the People. Certain structural features of the Law were also such as to support its

divine character: it was in fact a decree of the Committee of Public Safety rather than a law

of the Convention, administered by regional surveillance committees rather than the legal

authorities (Ballard, 2012, p. 196), and served to reduce bloodshed – resort to the guillotine

was not mandatory, many more were tried and imprisoned than executed, and there were no

bloody reprisals during this time. This changed with the Law of 22 Prairial, year II (10 June,

1794) — suspects could no longer retain defence counsel, and were judged on the basis of the

“moral certainty” of the jury after only three days. Moreover, death was now the only

sentence available, and the accelerating rate of executions gave rise to the Great Terror’s re-

establishment of retributive justice and ultimately the Thermidorian Convention of 27 July,

1794 which dismantled the Terror and saw the return of popular, and frequently counter-

revolutionary, violence (Ballard, 2012, pp. 195, 357).

For a period of some nine months, the Terror effected a “suspension” of mythic violence,

between the poles of the lawmaking violence of the sans-culottes and their fellow

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insurrectionists, and the law-preserving violence of the Great Terror and Thermidorian

reversal. Such an effect of suspension can be the only discernible, historical manifestation of

divine violence as the negation of mythic violence. A “true” negation of violent, lawmaking

power would be a conflagration, the end of history, the final sacrifice of mere life to the

Absolute. “Sovereign” violence – the sign of a free people, of the will and capacity for self-

determination not subject to fate or reducible to meaning – must stand against mythic power

and endure it without overcoming. By holding this power in suspension, at arm’s length, its

destructive potential can be deferred, and in the moment before it descends, a certain duration

might open within which a sovereign power can function, can begin the work of establishing

political relations not immediately subject to the hierarchy of imposed ends. By exposing

and holding open this rift in the logic of mythic violence, holding in suspense and drawing

out the moment in which law-preserving and lawmaking violence become simultaneous,

sovereign violence disrupts the “natural” functioning of the Law as the warrant of destructive

power, making plain the merely contingent relationship between “might” and “right,” and so

raising the possibility of new contingencies, unwitnessed and without precedent. The divine

right of kings is exposed as a myth, no more than a vagary of history, and subject to the will

of a sovereign people. The work of the Terror, then, becomes nothing less than the

inauguration of the conditions for democracy, a work always only beginning, always

threatened by a collapse into the ends of History, Law, the State.

∻∻∻∻∻

Modern terrorism found its apotheosis in the singular event of September 11, 2001. A

singular event, but almost immediately doubled as a second identical passenger jet struck the

second Twin Tower in grisly replay, and then, as in the aftershocks of a great earthquake,

echoed in the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crashes. Even before the second plane struck, and

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with it the decision that an act of terrorism was occurring, images of the scene had been

transmitted everywhere, triggering the generation and accumulation of a discourse that

seemed to bring everything into relationship with this event, which came to function as a

centre of gravity, increasing the range of its pull as it gathered a rapidly expanding mass of

discursive production, in all conceivable modes, into orbit around it. “9/11” became the sign

of a fracture in history, a disjunction requiring the reorganization of domestic and

international political and economic relations, the military, security structures, strategic

thought, even the interpretation of individual psychology and behaviour. Almost before the

dust and debris had settled over lower Manhattan, there were signs in the media, especially in

the US, but also elsewhere, of an incipient nostalgia for a lost innocence, serving both to

lament the past and to justify future sacrifices (Internet Archive, 2011). This nostalgia soon

took on a decidedly millenarian tone – within two days, television evangelists claimed that

the actions of domestic liberal organizations were ultimately responsible for the attack, by

causing “God to lift the veil of protection” in place over America since 1812 (CNN.com,

2001a). And on September 20, American President George W. Bush declared the “war on

terror.” An unprecedented response to an unprecedented attack: “Americans have known

surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought on in a

single day, and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.”

After denying the “piety” of terrorists who invoke the will of God, a claim on the divine:

“The course of this conflict is not known, but the outcome is certain. Freedom and fear,

justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between

them” (CNN.com, 2001b).

Žižek is quick to distance the terrorism represented by 9/11 from revolutionary terror and

divine violence (2008, p. 157). Doubtless, he is correct to do so, but the haste of his

denunciation demands attention, especially in light of his claim, cited earlier, that there are no

objective criteria by which we can judge a violent act to be divine or, presumably, otherwise.

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Wahnich is more measured: she, too denounces the drawing of a “moral equivalence”

between the two as “historical and philosophical nonsense,” but goes on to identify the work

of “sacrality” in the transformation of the human stories of the victims (told in the New York

Times) into “the sacred identity of the American nation,” profaned by the attack. In his “war

on terror” speech, Bush attempted a redemptive tale, in which the sacred body of a profaned

America could be restored by the heroic actions of the rescuers already underway, and by the

military adventures about to commence. But for Wahnich, the “resistance to

discouragement” shared by the French revolutionaries and the Americans gives way before

the “forms of dread the American response has provoked – the dread of a violence that is not

foundational but policing, and recently also preventive” (2012, “Conclusion”).

If the work of divine violence, however compromised, is to be found in terrorism, perhaps

it lies somewhere between the attack and the response to it. Although cast in rather different

terms, this is the problem raised by Schinkel, for whom the reduction of terrorism to events

defined by the intentionality of terrorists “enables the negation of history and the rhetoric of

response” (2009, p. 186; italics in original). Drawing on Raymond Aron’s definition,

Schinkel elaborates the paradox of terrorism, which “consists of the fact that ‘terrorism’ is

constituted by the (over)reaction to it” (2009, p. 187), suggesting that the American invasions

of Afghanistan and Iraq in the course of the “war on terror” were what provided the event of

9/11 with its force as a terrorist act, by generating “widespread support for Al Qaeda in the

Islamic world … and the most serious post-Cold War rift between continental Europe and the

USA” (2009, p. 186). The resources of the state that are brought to bear against the declared

perpetrators are exploited as if in advance by the terrorists: “terrorism works via the strength

of the enemy” (2009, p. 187). The paradox is resolved by considering terrorism to be the

“unfolding” of what Schinkel terms the “dialectic of (over)reaction” in historical time. One

of the events of this unfolding “is usually a refolding of events into a designated starting point

of terrorism, which is a specific instance of violence … where current definitions usually

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locate ‘terrorism’” (2009, p. 189). Each event in the unfolding reaction involves a refolding

that anchors the chain to the putatively initiating terrorist event, reinforcing the rhetoric of

response by which overreactions are justified, and overwriting the “real” historical traces of

these events. The process of refolding is made specific to “terrorism” by three supporting

“discourses.” The “discourse of identification” serves to identify the initiating event

produced by refolding as a discrete terrorist act for which certain terrorist actors can be held

responsible, and which situates other events in the chain respectively as either “causes,” or

“responses” and “repetitions.” In addition, the initiating event is identified as an act

perpetrated against “the collective body of the nation” as opposed to random citizens or the

state as an economic and legal construct – the random citizens that actually fall victim could,

according to this discourse, be anyone, and therefore represent everyone (2009, p. 191). The

“discourse of denunciation” must serve as a constant reminder of the provocation represented

by the initiating terrorist event, and therefore as justification for the state response and any

privations suffered by the population. The “discourse of endurance and victory” ensures both

that the “dialectic of action-reaction” can unfold over sufficient time, and that this duration,

while it may be prolonged, will not be eternal and will culminate in the “total annihilation of

terrorism,” that rarely, if ever, occurs (2009, p. 192). There is nothing in Schinkel’s account

that would preclude these discourses operating in reverse, as it were, on behalf of the

“terrorists” rather than “the state,” indeed, it would seem that his logic demands it. What

provides their direction is the action of the globalized mass media which disseminate these

discourses and the fear attendant upon them (Schinkel, 2009, pp. 192-194), and which

largely, though by no means exclusively, serve Western-state interests.

The terrorist “event,” on this account, is a complex of acts, supporting discourses along

with their modes of transmission, and recursive temporality, irreducible to the narrative of

intention which is among its products. The event is above all a logical structure, a

mechanism which passes back and forth between terrorist and state, action and reaction, in its

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weaving of an ideology of terrorism. Each term in the function, so considered, is necessary

to the production of terrorism, but is at the same time logically interchangeable, their relative

positions “fixed” only in the mediated discourse consumed by a global population that itself

functions primarily as an audience, and only secondarily as (potential) victim. Here again,

we are presented with what appears at first glance to be a work of transformation, but one

which is now curiously bereft of the violence lying at the heart of the relationship between

terrorism and state, and constitutive of both. Schinkel’s “dialectic” wavers: there is no

negation of terrorism in the state, or of the state in terrorism. An event, as such, never takes

place. The logic of this structure is what Badiou has described as “paraconsistent” – with

respect to Aristotelian principles of logic, it obeys the exclusion of a middle term, but not that

of contradiction (2008, p. 1879). There is an identifiable movement in the mechanism – an

act is said to have taken place, an image passes across the screen, and we hear, several days

later but as if in an instant, that there will be a response, that it is already underway – but

there is no discernible change in the system of interchangeable parts. An event, “a sudden

change of the rules of appearing; a change of the degrees of existence of a lot of multiplicities

which appear in a world” (Badiou, 2008, p. 1881), has not occurred. “Yes, something

happens, but, from the point of view of the world, everything is identical. … We say then

that we have a false event, or a simulacrum” (2008, p. 1883).

This is no denial of material reality. Of the fact that a certain rearrangement of mass-

energy according to physical laws, entailing loss of life and material destruction, took place

“on 9/11,” there can be no doubt. But the very proliferation of competing interpretations,

conspiracy theories, even denials regarding what happened, attests to the fact that the

oscillating, discourse-transmitting machine did not skip a beat, that this “dialectic,” perhaps

better described as “recycling,” continues its endless, reproductive equilibration. If any work

is to be done, any real, negating, transformative, violent work, it will and can only be done at

the point of consumption. But even here, the paraconsistent logic of the recycling machine

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exerts its influence. Conspiracy theory and denial are modes of popular consumption of

“official” discourse that clearly continue its reproduction, continue, albeit now explicitly, to

re-engage in the seamless interchangeability of terms (“Bush/Obama is the terrorist!”) in the

guise of dissent and outrage. Fear, too, generally considered the sine qua non of terrorist

production, is simply reinserted as fuel and justification for the next reaction in the chain (“If

you want to be safe, this is what we must do to you, this is what you must give up.”).

Žižek and Wahnich are right to be cautious. That there is no moral equivalence between

9/11 and revolutionary terror it is clear, but there is always the risk of logical equivalence.

Earlier, we demonstrated that divine violence is always on the verge of collapsing into mythic

power, and that a great deal of work must be performed to keep poles apart, so to speak. An

even greater risk, perhaps, is that myth might at any moment simply dissolve into the banality

of the recycled slogan. And as we have just seen, denial is no antidote to this. As Badiou has

shown, what is at stake in this successive degradation is precisely the weakening of negation

as one passes from one logic to another, from classical, to intuitionist, to paraconsistent.

These logics result from the permutations of Aristotle’s principles: in classical logic, both

contradiction and the excluded middle are observed; in intuitionist logic, contradiction is

observed, but not the excluded middle; paraconsistent logic, as shown above, reverses this

observation. The fourth permutation, in which neither principle holds sway, results in an

inconsistent framework within which no proposition is possible. At each step, we move from

a state of strong negation (not-P excludes not only P, but also any other proposition

concerning its content in classical logic, and there is therefore a clear and absolute boundary

between P and its negation), to a weaker state (in intuitionist logic, not-P excludes P, but there

is an ambivalence regarding possibilities that lie between P and not-P), to weaker still (our

paraconsistent logic, in which states between P and not-P are excluded, but each term may

include the other) (Badiou, 2008, p. 1879).

Law, for Benjamin the realm of mythic violence, is for Badiou a field of intuitionist

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logic – “innocent” and “guilty” are mutually-exclusive terms, but the law admits of various

mitigating and aggravating factors, technicalities and hierarchies of evidence (Badiou, 2008,

p. 1881). This is entirely consistent with the properly dialectical relationship between law-

preserving and lawmaking violence, in which the action of fate on the exercise of law

produces a state in-between statute and precedent, ultimately resolved one way or the other,

but at the same time shifting the boundary between the two.

Revolution, for Badiou, is the realm of the Event, of classical logic. The Event effects a

shift from “inexistent” to “maximal intensity of existence” (2008, p. 1882), from nothing to

all, feudal peasant or artisan to Citizen. There is a complete transformation, a negation of the

prior state, with no middle ground. This is opposed to an intuitionist “reformist politics”

(2008, p. 1882), which allows for intermediate intensities, just as the classical logic of the

existence of God, heaven and hell, is opposed to the intuitionist logic of religion, with its

invention of purgatory as a range of intermediate states (2008, p. 1881). This is, in short, an

opposition between ontological and existential logics.

The modern consumer-citizen situated in an “age of terror” is thus presented with a

choice of sorts. One can remain within the realm of the simulacrum, flickering between

acceptance and denial of recycled banalities, appearing and reappearing at either end of a

featureless logical (and, one might here venture, ethical) landscape. One might attempt, or be

jolted into the attempt, to snatch at the simulation, from either end – the decision as to which

made consciously or by accident of circumstance – and drag it into the field, imagining, or

even simply pretending at first, that one has grasped reality, beginning thereby to construct an

agenda, to sculpt the landscape while remaining, legally, within it, fashioning perhaps a

liberal or a conservative politics that ripples the surface, maybe even incites the occasional

wave, but which leaves this world fundamentally intact.

There remains the impossible, divine, ontological choice. This is bipolar – Revolutionary

or Totalitarian – but the ground between them is utterly razed, obliterated. This choice would

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seize upon the Event, and in so doing, risk all in absolute annihilation. But Badiou’s

ontology of the Event immediately admits of a weakening of negation, it is compromised by

existence. It remains bipolar, but it stops just short of the Absolute – maximal and minimal

intensity rather than Being and Nothingness. Nevertheless, it remains impossible; not

because it risks all, but precisely because it does not, because it puts lives at stake without the

possibility of sacrifice2 for the sake of Life. There is, in this logic, no space for democracy.

For this, the citizen must undertake the work of not choosing, of holding in suspense both

terms, action and reaction, terror and state, at one and the same time, not in order to deny

history, but rather to ensure that each is held to full account and responsibility for its

complicity in mere violence. This would be the full expression of a dangerous and fragile

sovereignty of the citizen.

2. There is not space here for a full rehearsal of a sacrificial ontology, but I have pursued this at length in Wilcox (1998).

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