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Critical Studies on Terrorism

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The terrorist subject: terrorism studies and the absent subjectivity

Joseba Zulaika a; William A. Douglass a
a
Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2008

To cite this Article Zulaika, Joseba and Douglass, William A.(2008)'The terrorist subject: terrorism studies and the absent
subjectivity',Critical Studies on Terrorism,1:1,27 — 36
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 Critical Studies on Terrorism
Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2008, 27–36

SYMPOSIUM
1753-9161
1753-9153
RTER
Critical Studies on Terrorism,
Terrorism Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan 2008: pp. 0–0

The terrorist subject: terrorism studies and the absent subjectivity

Joseba Zulaika* and William A. Douglass
Critical
J. Zulaika
Studies
and W.A.
on Terrorism
Douglass

Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

Keywords: terrorism literature; subjectivity; discourse; detective fiction; desire; purpose;
suicide; critical terrorism studies
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Introduction
In the most comprehensive research guide to concepts, theories and literature on terrorism
studies ever written, in 1988 Alex Schmid complained that the field suffered not only from
conceptual disarray (a lack of agreement regarding the basic concepts of ‘violence’, ‘polit-
ical’, ‘aggression’ – or the concepts that are then used to define ‘terrorism’), but also that
the very ‘general framework [that] is chosen for definition’ (p. 8) was at issue. The horri-
ble images and facts were evident, but the experts perceived the nature of the violence, let
alone its cultural and political contexts, in starkly different conceptual and rhetorical
terms.
In 2004, Andrew Silke summarized the more recent trends in terrorism research during
the 1990s and came to the conclusion that ‘the situation … is even worse today’, despite the
fact that the published literature continues to expand exponentially. He perceives a field
that is still young (about 99% of its publications post-date 1968) and remains plagued by a
number of problems (such as that as much as 80% is condemnatory and prescriptive). It
relies on the work of too few individuals, is rarely carried out by teams of researchers, and
is dominated by political scientists (Silke 2004, pp. 186, 188, 189, 191, 194). During the
1990s, only one article was dedicated to al-Qaeda, whereas nationalist/separatist groups
such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA)
received most of the research effort. As a final conclusion, Silke states the obvious, ‘It is
generally agreed that terrorism lacks an agreed conceptual framework’ (Silke 2004, p. 207).
John Horgan sums up the literature of the psychology of terrorism and the search for a
‘terrorist personality’ with the observation that ‘its presuppositions are built on unsteady
empirical, theoretical and conceptual foundations’ (Horgan 2003, p. 23). He wonders
whether ‘a fresh start’ is not needed. After examining terrorist networks, Marc Sageman
remarked that, ‘The finds seem to reject much of the conventional wisdom about terror-
ists’ (Sageman 2004, p. 96). Silke went on to observe that although such conceptual disar-
ray might have presented a massive obstacle in other fields, terrorism studies has reached
‘something of a war-weariness among established researchers over the definitional quag-
mire’ and that ‘researchers seem to have resigned themselves to accepting the current state
of uncertainty’ rather than engaging in ‘the somewhat wasteful definitional debate’,
although he assumes that at some point ‘such conceptual confusion in the area must begin
to severely hamper progress’ (Silke 2004, p. 208). If the indictments by Schmid and Silke

*Corresponding author. Email: zulaika@unr.edu

ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online

© 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17539150701844794
http://www.informaworld.com
 28 J. Zulaika and W.A. Douglass

refer to the state of affairs in terrorism studies in the 1980s and 1990s, consider the situa-
tion after 9/11. How do we label that event? Under what premises and limitations are we
allowed to even speak about it? What is the really real of suicidal terror? Who is this ter-
rorist subject? How do we study it? Yet perhaps we should not become overly obsessed
with the so-called ‘definitional quagmire’ since, after all, most disciplines debate furiously
and endlessly their defining conceptual premises and paradigm. The problem with terror-
ism studies has more to do with how to diagnose the very nature of the beast, of the thing
itself – both in the starkly concrete ‘reality’ of the event and the starkly abstract ‘unreality’
of its premises and consequences.
These methodological and epistemological difficulties are not unrelated to the political
implications of terrorism as a field of both knowledge and agency. There is little doubt
that the military, legal and moral consequences inherent to the semantics of terrorism have
become the cornerstone of the George W. Bush Administration’s post-9/11 policies. Jackson
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(2007, pp. 244–251) and Gunning (2007, pp. 236–243), among others, have recently
insisted on the state-centric, problem-solving nature of much of what passes for terrorism
studies and which is embedded in state institutions. It has long been noted that much of the
field is ‘counterinsurgency masquerading as political science’ (Schmid and Jongman
1988, p. 182). The intention of Critical Terrorism Studies to aspire to knowledge under-
stood ‘as a social process constructed through language, discourse and inter-subjective
practices’ (Jackson 2007, p. 246) is thus a welcome alternative.
The attacks on New York, Madrid, and London by Islamists appear to have made
almost obsolete much of the literature on groups such as the IRA or ETA. A conse-
quence of post-9/11 terrorism is that it has made the very existence of such groups
appear obsolete – by placing them squarely in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’,
the regional significance of their activities has been radically altered and diminished. If,
in the past Israel, Cuba and Algeria could be taken as models of liberationist violence,
and even if analysts such as Bruce Hoffman have underscored the changing meaning of
terrorism (Hoffman 2006), now the only valid referent in the international media
appears to be al-Qaeda. Some of the basic premises of what is sometimes described as
the ‘old terrorism’ – nationalistic in the narrow sense of a quest for a nation-state;
through opposition to liberal states that represented historical oppression; left-leaning,
progressive; embedded in a larger social network – seem not to apply to the new Islamist
manifestation which transcends any concrete nation, history, ideology or social organi-
zation. Mohammed Atta, the leader of 9/11, did not consider himself a member of any
organization; of al-Qaeda it could be said that, besides Osama bin Laden and his close
confidants, it had ‘no independent institutional anchor’ (Gerges 2005, pp. 35, 39). In the
current discourse of the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’, the very idea of ‘insurgency’ and the
antinomy between ‘terrorist/freedom fighter’ seem to have become largely obsolete.
The classical distinctions and links between terrorist groups and political parties
(Weinberg and Pedahzur 2003) are not helpful for understanding how al-Qaeda
operates.
After 9/11, for the Bush administration counter-terrorism has become the single
agenda in its global policy. As we foresaw in the mid-1990s, the USA is now the ‘new
promised land of terrorism’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, p. 228). Far from the phantasma-
goria of the Ronald Reagan period, now terrorism is the prime mover in American politics –
driving military strategy, national policy and legislation, and the domestic agenda.
Terrorism is now the monster transformed into an omnipresent risk that so dominates
American life that nothing else makes sense without reference to it.
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 29

Yet, are we not allowed to ask: what is the reality itself? Or rather, what are the
categories and allegories, the actions and the rhetoric that give the dragon its shape? Even
more significantly, who is this terrorist subject, seemingly mad, so willing to embrace sui-
cide, so unapologetic about becoming a moriturus as the means of liberation? Terrorism
has become the Foucaultian ‘épistémè’ of our times, the epistemological gatekeeper that
determines which ideas are allowed currency and what sciences may be constituted. Exca-
vating the genealogy of this culture, investigating its conceptual premises and ritual strate-
gies, delving into its political goals and rhetorical contexts, perhaps by invoking Vico’s
advice that ‘the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of
fables’ (Vico 1968, p. 210) taking into account the subjectivity and the desires of the ter-
rorists, naming the real of the post-9/11 type of terrorism – these are the preliminary and
primary challenges of a Critical Terrorism Studies.
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Necessary naming: the realities and limits of discourse analysis

The media confronts us daily with the ‘realities’ of terrorism, as well as with the discur-
sive nature of many of the ‘facts’. Far from being a mere mirror of events, discourse may
create its own reality. We are by now used to apocalyptic terrorist plots and heightened
states of alarm which days later are demonstrated to be overblown. For certain some facts
are there (the alleged plotters are clearly up to something), but they take shape against a
background of threats and fear that then become constitutive of the events themselves. All
of this points to the rhetorical dimension of terrorism discourse, that is, that the link
between actions and goals is mediated by interpretations. This is equally true for the
terrorist actor, since more important than the violent act itself is the reaction to it. Thus,
the impact can be produced as much by the discourse as by the immediacy of the threat, let
alone the violence. Counter-terrorism is equally rhetorical in that a primary concern for
officials in their ‘War on Terror’ is the public perception of their actions. There is a long
history of politicians turning terrorism to their advantage. Such rhetorical dimension,
whereby the public’s interpretation of potential threats can be manipulated, becomes even
more critical in a situation in which the activities of the terrorists, as well as those of the
counter-terrorists, are shrouded in classified secrecy. This can lead to the not uncommon
situation in which the alleged enemies feed rhetorically into one another’s interests, as
each side perceives political advantage in the very existence of the other.
Should our writing help to constitute1 further terrorism discourse or rather critically
undermine and resituate it? Terror and Taboo was a clear instance of the latter; our argu-
ments, based on the ethnographer’s proximity we had experienced as anthropologists
among ‘terrorists’, centred on the rhetorical nature of counter-terrorism and, more signifi-
cantly, on the disastrous reality-making power of a discourse that worked off the fears of
taboo and imaginary apocalypse. If the book predicted 9/11 in its ‘Epilogue as Prologue:
The Apotheosis of Terrorism Foretold’, post-9/11 counter-terrorism discourse has fulfilled
our worst fears. Jackson (2005) examines in depth the massive post-9/11 discursive
investment in the new war on terrorism, and how it hinders rather than helps the search for
solutions. A crucial requirement of the discourse is the creation of the ‘myth of excep-
tional grievance’ whereby Americans must be seen as the primary victims of terrorism.
An assessment of the rhetorical aspects of the phenomenon requires close attention to
the writing of terrorism and the narrative plots in which the arguments are couched.
Hayden White labelled this ‘tropic’, namely, the presence of tropes (metaphor, metonym,
synecdoche, irony) used in ‘the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects
 30 J. Zulaika and W.A. Douglass

which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyse objectively’ (White 1978,
p. 142). The dominant tropic space in contemporary political and journalistic discourse is
‘terror’. Such tropics of terror, whereby attention is paid to the conceptual premises,
emplotted stories, and the very illusion of sequence of narrativity, should be of primary
concern to a Critical Terrorism Studies.
Specifically, there is thus a constitutive relationship between terrorism and statistics.
Until the 1970s, the New York Times Index and the London Times Index had no statistical
indices for ‘terrorism’ and therefore there were no ‘terrorist acts’ (only kidnappings,
assassinations, bomb explosions, threats, and the like). The assassination of President
John F. Kennedy was just that – an ‘assassination’. Discursively, the attack on President
Reagan became a ‘terrorist’ act. In a notorious case that underlines the link between vio-
lent events and statistics, while the 1979 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report
claimed that there had been 3336 terrorist incidents since 1968, the 1980 report claimed
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that in fact there were 6714 over the same period. This was the result of subsequent inclu-
sion of ‘threats’ and ‘hoaxes’ in the statistics. In short, if there was no statistical category
of terrorism, no ‘terrorist’ incident would be possible. In Terror and Taboo (Zulaika and
Douglass 1996) at times we approximated this position, according to which the category
subsumes the being itself. But, even if the tropics of terror have become constitutive of its
very reality, what is the historical imperative and subjective perception that has required
such a discourse? Is there anything but statistics and discourse? It is time to contemplate
objects that do not fall under any category – the subjectivities of the terrorist actors
themselves.

The terrorist subject: read my desire

Recently, John Mueller has demonstrated convincingly how ‘overblown’ the threat of ter-
rorism is; he writes that the likelihood of dying from it is about the same as from the
impact of a falling asteroid or an allergic reaction to peanuts (Mueller 2006, pp. 2, 13).
What about the vaunted threat of terrorists deploying weapons of mass destruction? The
actual capacity for them to develop a nuclear device is considered by the experts to be
extremely low (Mueller 2006, pp. 15–24). The technological sophistication of the 9/11
attacks rested upon box cutters. But such a reality check does not address key components
of the terrorist phenomenon – those having to do with the imaginative and subjective
aspects of the threat.
If objectively the danger is so minimal, yet is perceived by the public in such apoca-
lyptic terms, the challenge for Critical Terrorism Studies is how to account for the dispar-
ity. This requires investigating that most tabooed of topics, namely, terrorist subjectivity
and the ways in which terrorist desire may paradoxically advance its agenda through non-
events. A case in point is the reality and dialectics of threats, a key ingredient of terrorism
discourse and performance. The very meaning of the act that constitutes a threat is
entwined with perception of it. The same threat can be dismissed as irrelevant and make-
believe, a non-event, or else as deadly serious, depending on context, on interpretation, on
who perceives it. The Unabomber managed to bring the traffic in California airports to a
halt simply by sending a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that said that within a week
he would blow up an airliner (while sending another to the New York Times stating that the
threat was a ‘prank’). The actual reality of a catastrophic threat might be mere ‘prank’, but
it can still be deadly serious – a non-event that was at once utterly terroristic. What did
lend credibility to the Unabomber was that he had shown in the past his capacity to
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 31

outmanoeuvre the police and engage in lethal action. Feared terrorists might be simply
‘playing terrorist’, yet who else knows that they are not acting seriously this time?2
The actual evidence of terrorism may be lacking, yet the public feels that there are rea-
sonable grounds to be scared. The Islamic apocalyptic threat feeds off of the recent history
of other acts of terrorism having taken place, as well as from the fact that we can safely
guess their intentions; that is, their burning antagonism against the Occident in general.
We are forced to take into account the subjectivity of the terrorist plotters – their humilia-
tions and desires, their ‘death instinct’ and potential for madness – and not only their
actual deeds.
Detective fiction teaches us that the tough cop is always outsmarted by the apparently
ignorant detective who ends up resolving the case by bringing into the equation the mur-
derer’s desire. The detective’s problem is not unlike that studied by Gottlob Frege regard-
ing set theory. To begin with, Frege’s numbers, as well as the detective function, assume
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that the categories of counting create the objects that fall within them. As noted above,
terrorism is a prime instance of the power of statistics to constitute rather than calculate
the phenomenon. The category subsumes the being. But, as pointed out by Joan Copjec,
there is a different reading of Frege by Jacques Lacan who, on the contrary, argues ‘that
there are real objects that are not reducible to any category’. That derives from Lacan’s
logical insight that for counting to be possible:

the set of numbers must register one category under which no objects fall. The category is that
of the ‘not-identical-to-itself’; the number of objects subsumed by it is zero. (Copjec 1994,
p. 171)

Regarding terrorism, as in the detective’s case, the actual evidence might be missing
(zero), yet we can still infer its reality from the traces left by the desire of the potential
actors and the interpretations given by their audiences. The view that interpretation is
desire – for both the actor and his/her audience – cannot be ignored in terrorism studies.
This is how we have become accepting of alleged terrorist plots that, as unconvincing
as they might be if actually scrutinized and pondered, are still so frightening when
perceived through the imputed and imponderable subjectivities of the potential
terrorists.
The paradox of set theory is articulated by logicians as the inability of an infinite series
of numbers to effect their own closure. The endless waiting for terror, its ever-present
threat, is also premised in this inability to close the field. The entire theory of set numbers
hinges on the internal limit of the series, and that which is impossible to think from the
logical functioning of numbers whose sets are closed or ‘sutured’ by such limitation. The
logical suture is empty of content while at the same time it determines the autonomy of the
series of numbers.

Suture, in brief, supplies the logic of a paradoxical function whereby a supplementary ele-
ment is ADDED to the series of signifiers in order to mark the LACK of a signifier that could
close the set. (Copjec 1994, p. 174)

This non-empirical ‘addition’ that closes the field is what confers a differential quality to
‘our’ side. Hence, the counting and naming performances assume foundational powers. If
it can be said that modern nations are the product of counting, of collating diverse peoples
into citizens, in the post-9/11 world what matters is the set defined as ‘terrorist’ – this is
the ‘addition’, the suturing point that differentiates them from us, and it is in itself devoid
of content, it is the ‘zero’ of set theory that allows for the internal limit.
 32 J. Zulaika and W.A. Douglass

One can read terrorism as a detective would, namely, through the subjectivity of the
terrorist, and not as does the plodding policeman, namely, blinded by the literalness of the
corpse, unable to see that the entire thing consists in taking into account the internal limit
or zero that makes the series possible. The point is that a performance in the space of such
deep play leaves so many traces and unaccounted-for alternatives that it can never be fully
described, and that the very meaning and perpetuation of the catastrophe, the never-ending
threat it poses, depends in the end largely on the interpretation given to it. The detective
pays attention to the law of limit, of ignorance, of the point at which all the premises fail
and therefore have to be relinquished. There is more to the evidence than the evidence
shows – the way it is given, what it conceals, the gap between the ‘facts’ and that which
they confirm. In Lacanian vocabulary, the real is always lurking about ready to intrude in
the symbolic. The detective, like the psychoanalyst, has to read what remains hidden, the
real of desire – desire that is ruled by the law of the negative, the ‘zero’ that closes the
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series. The premise is that:

There is a gap, a distance, between the evidence and that which the evidence establishes,
which means that there is something that is not visible in the evidence: the principle by which
the trail attaches itself to the criminal. (Copjec 1994, p. 176)

Terrorism experts and commentators are for the most part like the realist policemen
gazing at the evidence, yet unable to read the paradoxical logic of the desire that fuels it,
whereby lack turns into excess and whereby interpretation establishes the evidence’s
meaning (success or failure of the violence, martyrdom or catastrophe for its perpetrators)
both for ‘them’ and for ‘us’. Interpretation being the work of desire, it implies acceptance
that one does not know everything, that the evidence does not tell us how to read it. Only
through the intervention of one’s own desire can analysis interpret what ‘terrorism’ is tell-
ing us. The terrorist’s desire, the terrorist’s real, can only be understood through the ana-
lyst’s desire. Still, even if interpretation thinks under the effect of desire, this does not
mean that the interpreter is not seeking objectivity. As a result, in terrorism, as in detective
fiction, it is not the evidence that has to be taken literally, as does the ignorant policeman,
but rather ‘desire must be taken literally’ (Copjec 1994, p. 178). Intrinsic to desire is the
inner gap that results from the absence of a final signifier and which calls for interpreta-
tion. To understand the horror and the erotics of terrorist martyrdom, one has to take into
account the logic of desire whereby lack turns into excess.
This requires that we take the terrorist subject himself/herself as a primary and autono-
mous locus of investigation. The will of the terrorist does not figure in our discourse.
Some expert might know, of course, that what enraged bin Laden is the US military pres-
ence in his native Saudi Arabia, which for him amounts to occupation of sacred lands by
an invader. But these are footnotes to a public debate overwhelmed by the perception of
utterly senseless nihilism on the part of the terrorists. It is the all too present logic of taboo
obtaining here: since terrorism is unspeakable Evil, you must avoid any contact with it or
even contemplation of it, let alone projecting yourself into the terrorist’s subjectivity. The
mere act of paying attention to what the terrorists have to say is a fateful step towards per-
haps making an effort to understand their motives, something that might lead to somehow
‘justifying’ what is unjustifiable. Can you appease Adolf Hitler? But it is one thing to seek
understanding and quite another to justify. The terrorist’s actions might be saying: read
my desire, read my terror. But if to just pay attention to the terrorist is to already give in,
there is no way to learn about him or her. Who wants to be confronted with the maddening
paradoxes of suicidal desire?
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 33

Chance, purpose, and suicidal terrorism

What appears most shocking about the ‘new’ type of terrorism is its primary reliance on
the activist’s wilful acceptance of his/her own self-immolation. Willingness to risk one’s
own life for the embraced cause has been a feature of militant groups everywhere, but it
was a willingness accepted as the final unavoidable possibility. Risking one’s life was a
crucial component of the militant’s agenda, but never the goal of the action, never the
most salient message of the action itself. Thus, in yesterday’s terrorism, the ‘political’
message of militant activism was framed by copious writing, by spectacular actions staged
primarily to be read as a message to the media; in short, as a means for articulating to the
public a set of historical grievances and demands. Resort to terrorist means was largely an
attempt at constructing an alternative discourse, backed up by the willingness to resort to
violence, including risking one’s life, but the ‘fallen comrade’ was at best an unwanted
by-product of the struggle.
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Terrorism is always the ‘weapon of the weak’ versus the ‘weapons of mass destruc-
tion’. Yet we seem to have moved into a new phase in which, in order to effect instrumen-
tal as opposed to symbolic violence, but against the near overwhelming force of the state,
we now have the more efficacious suicide bomber. The state’s computerized laser-
directed ‘smart bomb’ gets trumped by the ‘smartest bomb’, the concealed packet of
explosives directed by a human brain. Part of the reason that ‘old terrorism’s’ efficacious-
ness was limited was because its perpetrators sought to survive. Any plan of attack is
weakened if, as a crucial element, the imperative to escape is in play. If you are prepared
to forego personal survival, then you have raised the ante enormously. The suicide
bomber, despite even draconian security measures, appears capable of penetrating the
crowd or even targeting the enemy’s key operatives, whether political or military. When
the object becomes to produce dozens or hundreds of fatalities, or take out critical compo-
nents of your adversary’s command structure, we are no longer speaking of violence
understood in purely symbolic terms.
Suicide bombing points squarely to the subjective dimension of terrorism. To fail to
address the terrorist subject is to incapacitate our analytical exercise irrevocably. It seems
easy to ascribe suicide bombing to Islamist jihad with its preferred prospect of eternal
bliss as reward. Yet what do we make of the Chechen woman raped by Russian soldiers
and bereft of her deceased husband, brothers and sons, who volunteers to strap on a bomb
and take some of the enemy with her, less as a political act than as straightforward revenge
for having had her life destroyed? How do we explain the Tamil woman who exploded the
bomb that killed both her and Sanjay Ghandi – surely not in terms of Islamic theology.
As far as that goes, how do we explain the sacrifice of the posthumous awardee of the
Congressional Medal of Honor who, against all odds, lays down his life taking out
the machine gun nest that was killing his buddies? What all three have in common are the
personal decision to eschew survival in order to realize a higher goal the essence of which,
however, differs since it is culturally conditioned. In this regard the ‘suicide bomber’ is
but one more limited and one-dimensional creation of counter-terrorism discourse, one
more form of madness ascribed to the Other.
Conventional wisdom has explained the phenomenon of suicide terrorism in terms of
religious fanaticism, psychological imbalances, social isolation, deep poverty, or as the
product of domestic competition. The work of Pape (2005), Schwitzer (2006), Reuter
(2002), and Bloom (2005), among others, dismisses each one of these explanations as
unfounded: most of the suicide terrorists have emerged from secular groups (not religious);
 34 J. Zulaika and W.A. Douglass

their profile does not fit the profile of the suicidal individual; 95% of all suicide terrorist
attacks take place as the result of organized campaigns in a given time; a comparison
between the economic indicators of the countries producing suicide terrorism and those that
do not shows that poverty is not a convincing explanation; domestic competition may
account for some behaviour in the Palestinian case but overall is not adequate. Indeed,
‘What is frightening is not the abnormality of those who carry out the suicide attacks, but
their sheer normality’ (Hassan, quoted in Silke 2003, p. 97). This does not deny that the
individuals who choose suicide are likely to have experienced some deep personal trauma
(Speckhard and Akhmedova 2006). But it is the politics of what Sigmund Freud termed
the death instinct that must be studied in order to understand what bin Laden meant when
he stated in his declaration of war on America: ‘These youths love death as you love life’
(quoted in Wright 2006, p. 4).
If the strength of a conventional army is its organizational formality and hierarchical
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complexity, the effectiveness of an insurgent armed group is its organizational informality

and its chance-based strategy of deliberate formlessness (Douglass and Zulaika 1990). Not
surprisingly, students of al-Qaeda have ‘concluded with the crucial role played by weak
acquaintances that provided the critical bridges to the jihad’ (Sageman 2004, p. 172). If
formless chance behaviour is key to terrorism, the investigation of purpose and feedback
become crucial fields for studying the entire phenomenon.3 The terrorism literature distin-
guishes between the victim that is the ‘target of violence’ and the wider group that is the
‘target of terror’. There is an ‘externality’ to the chance logic of terrorism from the view-
point of the victims; the hostages cannot influence the behaviour of the skyjackers whose
ultimate target of terror lies outside of what is happening on the plane. On the basis of the
subdivision of purposeful behaviour’s aspects as teleological (‘feedback’) and non-
teleological (‘non-feedback”), the terrorists have created a purposeful system but with no
recourse to immanent feedback and purpose. If feedback is required for teleological
behaviour, ‘by non-feed-back behavior is meant that in which there are no signals from the
goal which modify the activity of the object in the course of the behavior’ (Rosenblueth
et al. 1943, p. 19, Italics in original). Such ‘purposelessness’ once the course of action has
been put in place, logically implicated with the innocence and impotence of the victims,
and subjectively enacted by the terrorists as a form of personal transcendence and
innocence, is what makes terrorism so frightening. This does not mean of course that
terrorist behaviour is devoid of purposes. Yet what is typical of terrorism is the use of a
non-feedback strategy, a situation of no way out, in order to call attention to and achieve
the goals.
Intimately associated with this logic of non-feedback chance are the ethics of personal
martyrdom. If ‘transcendence’ derives initially from the logical terms of higher external
purpose, its subjective implication is that the actors relinquish any control over the
purpose of their own lives. ‘Terrorism’, ideal-typically, is a strategy that plays Russian
roulette with the general public in order to convey the message of random terror and
thereby provokes uncontrollable fear. It is a military strategy premised on deliberate non-
teleology. Personal suicide is the one action that unmistakably conveys to oneself and
others such a message of no return. It is a way of saying: this action is so out of control
that I will not even spare my own life. The premise of non-teleology covers thus not only
the fate of the victims but also of the perpetrator.
The threat posed by terrorism is, in the final analysis, parasitic on the existence of
nuclear arms. It was Iraq’s potential for nuclear arms that justified invasion of it and the
ongoing war, portrayed by the Bush Administration as the main front in the ‘War on
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 35

Terror’. What makes the possession of nuclear arms by North Korea and, potentially, Iran
so threatening to the West is that they may fall into the hands of a terrorist group such as
al-Qaeda. Thus terrorism may be seen as the symptom of Western nuclearism and its read-
iness for destruction on a global scale.4 It is the task of a Critical Terrorism Studies to
bring together these symbiotic links between nuclear power and terrorism within a larger
cultural and political context. We need to address the mutual feedback between the terrorist
and the counter-terrorist by looking into, among other dynamics, the links between West-
ern nuclearism and fundamentalist terrorism.

Notes
1. Richardson (2006) seems a good example of a well-informed study that in the end aims at further
reconstituting the field in its narrow sense on the grounds that: ‘A terrorist is a terrorist, no matter
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whether or not you like the goal s/he is trying to achieve, no matter whether or not you like the
government s/he is trying to change (p. 10).
2. The authors borrow the expression ‘playing terrorist’ from Begona Aretxaga, an activity she
attributed to young Basque street saboteurs as well as to the Spanish state. Aretxaga’s ethno-
graphic analysis underscores the ways in which terrorist violence and state violence produce each
other phantasmatically, ‘a structure and modus operandi which produce both the state and terror-
ism as fetishes of each other, constructing reality as an endless play of mirror images. This play
of terrorism is what makes the State (with a capital S) and Terrorism (with a capital T) so real,
organizing political life as a phantasmatic universe where the ‘really real’ is always somewhere
else, always eluding us’ (Aretxaga 2005, p. 229).
3. In a seminal paper that preceded the development of cybernetics, Rosenblueth et al. (1943, p. 19)
stated that: ‘Purposefulness … is quite independent of causality, initial or final’, and that they
considered it ‘a concept necessary for the understanding of certain modes of behavior’.
4. Jacques Derrida has described these relations through the law of ‘autoimmunitary process’,
which he describes as ‘that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion,
“itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’, a mod-
ern disorder that in his view threatens the life of participatory democracy and the legal system
(interview with Jacques Derrida, cited in Borradori 2003, p. 94).

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