In Defence of the Terror (13 page)

And I will carry this. It is the police shield of a man named George Howard who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end.

In this unending task, the grief of a mother could be redeemed by her heroic pride, and it became imaginable again for Americans to ‘die for the country'. The break this made with the First Gulf War and the intervention in Kosovo was evidence of this:

Now, this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

The assault on the sacred body of the beautiful day of life brings a resurgence of the sacred body of the heroic citizen, whether for a civilian or a military task.

A different sacrality – that of religion – is associated with this political sacrality in the moment of dread. The ‘lighting of candles', ‘the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew and Arabic' find a place in Bush's speech, which offers a manner of employing the subjective reprise as a return of ardour around these modalities of the sacred. In order to evoke the gaping profanation of the sacrality of the beautiful day of life, Bush declared: ‘I ask you to live your lives and hug your children . . . I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions.' The sacrality of the country is evoked more discreetly, as it is not so easy today to maintain that there are values justifying a human death. The statement here remains elliptical: ‘I ask you to uphold the values of America.' Finally, religion remains a point of support that ties together all the infringed sacralities: ‘Please continue praying for the victims of terror and their families, for those in uniform and for our great country. Prayer has comforted us in sorrow and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead.'

What is sought here is thus a transmutation of the discouragement linked with fear into the will to act. What this speech aims to display is indeed that decisive shift of ‘being in fear'.

Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

Anger and justice were also the key words of the ‘terror-response' of the French revolutionaries, but the forms and sites of profaned sacrality have fundamentally changed. Where formerly it was an attack on the body that represented the political project, represented the Declaration of the Rights of Man and ofthe Citizen, which called for heroism in the face of profanation, now it is an attack on the body that represents a humanism outside of politics which presupposes this resort to heroism. These bodies divested of their responsibility for common political existence are the effective representation of the American political project – a project that assumes that the veritable mode of liberty consists in no longer acknowledging any such responsibility. This absence of knowledge leads to a disinterest in the lives of others, in their equal or unequal value. The desire to promote equality in free action on a cosmopolitan scale now appears inconceivable.

The Americans responded to this ‘being in fear' just as the French revolutionaries had done. If there is an analogy to be drawn between 1793 and 2001, this should be sought in a common resistance to discouragement. But the reprise of courage does not have the same sense at these different dates. The Americans, despite what they say, do not live in a time of foundation, and we have not finished observing the forms of dread that the American response has provoked – the dread of a violence that is not foundational but policing, and recently also preventive.

A reading of Benjamin offers bearings as we seek to orient a judgement of cruelties both past and present: ‘For a cause, however effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it enters into moral relations. The sphere of these relations is defined by the concepts of law and justice.'
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Right and justice, however, are values that disappear in the response to contemporary terrorism, a response that is no longer founded on justice but invents the legal rules necessary for repression; as is happening at Guantánamo.

The ignominy of such an authority [as the police] . . . lies in the fact that in this authority the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended. If the first is required to prove its worth in victory, the second is subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends. Police violence is emancipated from both conditions. It is lawmaking, because its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the assertion of legal claims for any decree, and law-preserving, because it is at the disposal of these ends . . . Rather, the ‘law' of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain.
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The political project of the French year II aimed at a universal justice that still continues to remain a hope: that of equality among men as a reciprocity of liberty, of equality among peoples as a reciprocity of sovereignty.

On 20 September 2001, George W. Bush declared: ‘The United States respects the people of Afghanistan – after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid.' In the images seen on television, the logic of arithmetical reparations for domination is expressed in the use of the whip to control hungry people struggling for this so-called humanitarian aid.

The violence exercised on 11 September 2001 aimed neither at equality nor liberty. Nor did the preventive war announced by the president of the United States.