Podcast of the Day- Talal Asad

Talal Asad talks about his book, On Sucide Bombing;

The book itself has a simple structure. In the first chapter, I begin by examining the “clash of civilizations” thesis that purports to explain contemporary Islamic jihadism as the essence of contemporary terrorism, and I argue against the kind of history that assumes self-contained civilizations having fixed values. I then discuss the attempt by a distinguished philosopher to differentiate just war from terrorism, and I speculate on the reasons for the prominence of a public discourse on terror. Terrorism, I point out, is an epistemological object in modern society, something that calls for theorization (what is terrorism?) as well as for practical information gathering (how can one forestall this danger?). These two tasks are dependent on each other. Terrorism, however, is more than the object of these tasks. It is also an integral part of liberal subjectivities (the urge to defeat political terror, the fear of social vulnerability, the horror and fascination with death and destruction), although terror itself is dismissed as being essentially part of a nonmodern, nonliberal culture. In the second chapter, I look critically at a range of current explanations of suicide terrorism that are now being put forward, and I question the preoccupation by writers on the subject with attributing distinctive motives (as opposed to the manifest intention to kill) to perpetrators of suicide bombing. I say that motives in general are more complicated than is popularly supposed and that the assumption that they are truths to be accessed is mistaken: the motives of suicide bombers in particular are inevitably fictions that justify our responses but that we cannot verify. I then move away from writers attempting to explain the phenomenon of suicide bombings who address larger questions of killing and dying in relation to politics. Drawing on the history of ideas, I emphasize that although liberal thought separates the idea of violence from the idea of politics, mortal violence is integral to liberalism as a political formation. More significantly, I suggest that legitimate violence exercised in and by the modern progressive state—including the liberal democratic state—possesses a peculiar character that is absent in terrorist violence (absent not because of the latter’s virtue but because of the former’s capability): a combination of cruelty and compassion that sophisticated social institutions enable and encourage. In the third and last chapter, I explore the idea of horror as a common reaction to suicide and especially to suicide bombing. On the one hand, I turn to anthropological writing to elaborate the notion that horror has to do with the collapse of social and personal identity and thus with the dissolution of form. On the other hand, I draw on some aspects of Christian theology: the crucifixion is the most famous suicide in history, whose horror is transmuted into the project of redeeming universal humanity—again, through a combination of cruelty and compassion. This is the most speculative part of the book, but it is essential to the layered account I finally offer of what horror at suicide bombing consists in.

A brief warning against a possible misreading of this book: I do not plead that terrorist atrocities may sometimes be morally justified. I am simply impressed by the fact that modern states are able to destroy and disrupt life more easily and on a much grander scale than ever before and that terrorists cannot reach this capability. I am also struck by the ingenuity with which so many politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists provide moral justifications for killing and demeaning other human beings. What seems to matter is not the killing and dehumanization as such but how one kills and with what motive. People at all times have, of course, justified the killing of so-called enemies and others they deem not deserving to live. The only difference is that today liberals who engage in this justification think they are different because morally advanced. That very thought has social implications, and it is therefore that thought that makes a real difference. Liberal thought begins from the notion that everyone has the absolute right to defend himself, in the full knowledge that the idea of defense is subject to considerable interpretation, so that (for example) liberation from the oppressor in Iraq becomes part of defense for both the American occupier and the insurgency. Many liberals also believe that people have a moral obligation to attack evil, either in order to redeem themselves or to redeem others who cannot do so for themselves. The notion of evil is not conceived of as a principle essential to the world—as in Manichaean and Zoroastrian teaching—but as a dynamic principle that opposes divine will and is therefore eliminable. Consequently, it is resistance to that will that defines evil, and all virtuous men are urged to overcome it at any cost. (According to Christian belief, Christ triumphed over evil, God reconciled the world to himself, by the crucifixion.) Fighting evil is, of course, an old justification, but it often finds new formulations today. I do not mean by this that today’s modern world is, as many hold, simply an unfolding of Christianity. In my view there are continuities and also crucial ruptures between secular modernity and its past.

Finally, this book does not pretend to offer solutions to moral dilemmas about institutionalized violence. It makes no case for accepting some kinds of cruelty as opposed to others. Its hope, rather, is to disturb the reader sufficiently that he or she will be able to take a distance from the complacent public discourse that prepackages moral responses to terrorism, war, and suicide bombing.

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I think the cover of this book could have been made much better.