Dying for Ideas by Costica Bradatan;
Author:Costica Bradatan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00
Dying to kill
The suicide-bomber, too, uses his dying body politically, but there is nothing passive about his gesture. His action is designed to cause the death of others even as its author dies performing it.46 Yet the ultimate objective here does not seem to be the sheer volume of victims, but what the suicide-bomber projects in the process: the terrifying image of an individual (one of the many out there) who does not fear death, who does not hesitate to waste his life, or anyone elseâs, for the cause. What these people mean to communicate is that they are above âlife and death,â and that they strike like natural disasters: mercilessly, implacably, and indiscriminately. It is this carefully induced perception that counts most. For suicide-bombers, and those who commission them, know only too well that they cannot win anything strictly militarily. Their primary targets are not those whom they kill, but those before whom they perform the act. Thatâs why they perform it as if on a stage: the videos they leave behind, with all their rehearsals, elaborate mise-en-scène, and standard recitations; the posters displayed afterward; and the entire publicity industry backing them. This is a fundamental part of what suicide-bombing is about; it is perhaps more important than the act of killing itself.
Yet no matter how sophisticated the propaganda machine, there is something at the core of the suicide-bomberâs gesture that prevents it from generating the kind of effective, constructive social energy that, say, Quà ng Äúcâs deed did. The latterâs power came from the fact that the harm he was causing was directed exclusively against himself; nobody else was hurt, nor meant to be, in the process. The only body Quà ng Äúc disposed of was his own. What produced a change in society was not some physical pressure he put on its members, but the strong impression left on their minds by the public spectacle of a supremely selfless act. By contrast, the change that the suicide-bomber seeks to produce is done, by definition, through the harm he causes to the bodies of others. Such a gesture cannot go unnoticed: the event is noisy, messy, and bloody, the carnage unbearable and traumatic, and the terror is real. But thatâs pretty much what suicide-bombing is all about. Its significance exhausts itself on the stage of the killing, be it a bus, metro, or café. There is nothing in this gesture that transcends it such as a wave of genuine sympathy from the larger community. Society is terrorized, but not moved. This is why suicide-bombing is doomed to remain within the confines of guerilla warfare. Far from being structured by some symbolic values, by something higher, these actions, as Malise Ruthven observed, remain driven âby a combination of realpolitik and despairâ (Ruthven 2002: 101).
From the perspective of the Gandhian method of the âreversal of opposites,â one may say that suicide-bombers are eventually powerless precisely because they appear so powerful. Their impotence comes from the offensive nature of their act. You cannot use actual weapons and still turn your body into a symbolic weapon, one nullifies the other.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Anthropology | Archaeology |
Philosophy | Politics & Government |
Social Sciences | Sociology |
Women's Studies |
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 1 by Fanny Burney(31322)
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 3 by Fanny Burney(30928)
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 2 by Fanny Burney(30885)
The Great Music City by Andrea Baker(21166)
We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union(18064)
Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime by Sullivan Steve(13100)
Pimp by Iceberg Slim(12922)
All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda(12739)
Fifty Shades Freed by E L James(12443)
Norse Mythology by Gaiman Neil(11873)
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell(11860)
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan(8340)
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas & Mark Olshaker(7827)
The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols(6462)
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker(6402)
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou(5760)
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz(5502)
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil(5029)
We Need to Talk by Celeste Headlee(4861)