The figures of terror and the philosophical debate on Modernity

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT

París

Simposio; Societies, States, “Terror” and “Terrorism” - A Historical and Philosophical Perspective; 2006

Collège International de Philosophie y Maison des Sciences de l'Homme

Something seems to have moved dramatically within the semantic space of what we associate with the terms “terror” and “terrorism” after 9-11. Those events seem to have certain absolutely unprecedented features, and the gathering of such features seems to be able to reactivate new semantic potentialities of the expressions “terror” and “terrorism”, no longer bonded to its classical ideological-political profile as it was described with reference to national insurgencies or anti-colonialists traditions, where terror is the instrumental aspect of a political struggle which is more or less clear. The twenty-first century begins moving to the center of international public attention the subject-matter of terrorism. It appears as a universal anxiety and as a sign of a radical break-off with the past, submerging contemporary politics in a permanent state of radical exceptionality. Thus, terrorism not only displaces and radicalizes the classical concern with political violence and war between and inside national states, but it would initiate a new era, quite different from the classical secularized politics. In this way, a conceptual slipping from traditional political language takes place: its categories would still be valid, but only as long as they are projected within civilized modern world, within the limits of a Humanitas defined by contrast with and in opposition to Barbarism. In the interior of modern Humanitas, all the categories of politics would be valid. But at the borders of Humanitas, facing Barbarism, those same categories would loose its validity, since global terrorism would not be susceptible of forming any kind of interest mediated rational cohabitation; on the contrary, they would obey anti-modern, irrational and unpredictable patterns of behavior. The categories that have until recent coordinated political equilibrium would thus be discredited in order to think the new constellation: nor the modern notion of interest neither that of international law, nor the postmodern notion of différend neither that of plurality, would allow us to think the dimension of radical otherness with which the terrorist phenomenon challenges Humanitas. This new constellation would only leave unharmed the pre-modern criminalization of enemies and the understanding  of war as a conflict that would fall under the idea of total extermination, referred by Carl Schmitt under the heading of moralised war, proper of the pre-modern religious era. The war against terror is not a clausewitz notion of war: the continuation of politics under other means. It is an ontological war, a war that have no end. It is not a war against any definied political enemy: it is a war against radical evil as an ontological condition of globalization. As long as terror is a global trend of globalization war against terror seems also to be installated to be a structural condition of it.