11 - The Spectacle of Terror

Summary

In a celebrated passage of City of God, St Augustine asks: ‘What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not’ (Augustine 2016: 239). So what if one asks: What is terrorism then? If no one asks us, we know: but if we are desirous to explain it to one that should ask us, plainly we do not know. Images of terror are ubiquitous, yet no term is more contested and more opaque than ‘terrorism’. We both know and do not know what it is. Terrorism’s effect – which, of course, principally lies in its affect – is transmitted and felt not via the event-like eruption violence of itself, but via the threat of its purely arbitrary, contingent, random manifestation. Terrorists don’t trade in fear as such, insofar as fear takes a specific, finite object, but rather in an infinite atmospheric anxiety. While fear results from a direct confrontation with the object that presents itself before us, anxiety is produced by a sense that the potential violence that surrounds us could be dynamised from what Deleuze calls the ‘virtual’ into the actual with lightning speed at the flip of a switch or, more likely, the click of a mouse, the swipe of a smartphone or tablet.

The seemingly sheer randomness of terrorism is, furthermore, compounded by the very nature of a society that keeps the truth about itself from itself. A society that both knows yet at the same time doesn’t know the truth about terrorism; a society that is unable to face the way in which its own deterritorialisations contribute to terroristic forms of reterritorialisation. In this deterritorialising logic, according to the media, terrorism is the violence that mostly happens over there but whose effects are mostly felt over here, although, of course, this binary logic is becoming harder and harder to maintain. The way the logic of terror plays itself out in the West is through the anxiety that the over there will eventually bleed into the over here. Terror crystallises the transversal logics of the global capitalist order, either in the form of ISIS or in the form of fascist accelerationism inspired by Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin).