By inventing the neologism ‘terrorist’, the Thermidorians not only anthropologized a violence that was also seen as popular, but they actively obscured what had given this terror a situational legitimacy: a juridico-political process of collective responsibility. In fact, the duty of insurrection made each person a watchman who had either to rise up at the risk of his life, or take responsibility for the decisions of the national Convention.4
Active forgetting is what is effected after the time of foundation, when the notion of the irreconcilable enemy becomes obsolete and intolerable. From this point on, the ‘terrorists’ were the Other of the republicans. The most fervent of these, such as Victor Hugo – little suspected of counter-revolutionary ideology – constantly asserted that, even faced with a crime such as that of 2 December 1851, they would never call for revolutionary terror. The acts of those defeated by history became infamous for those of their heirs who might be of a mind to repeat them. Even if they were understood – and Hugo’s 1793 bears witness to this – no situation could lead to their repetition. Even those responsible for defending revolutionary memory knew that the foundational time was not replayable, and that such acts of terror now belonged to a different age.
‘What difference does it make whether one dies from plague or revolution? Moral nature (or history) does not have to be any more moral than physical nature.’ This is the argument attributed to Saint-Just by Georg Büchner in Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death; 1834–5), in this way championing the Thermidorian view. This has recently been reprised in Le Monde’s op-ed section, where a certain philosopher claimed to make Saint-Just speak about the events of 11 September 2001.5 We are thus faced with a double condensation: the language of the nineteenth century founds the representation of those events of the eighteenth century that composed the ‘French Revolution’, and more precisely, the ‘revolutionary Terror’. This representation, not made specific, but cited as a source by the author of this text, is supposed to be able to inform us about what happened on ‘9/11’. To make a contemporary moralizing use of this literary text under cover of a source means introducing political confusion over what meaning to give to acts of cruelty in history, and deploring a non-meaning that one has oneself put forward. For nowadays, it does not matter which body is cruelly affected and for what reason; the only worthwhile thing is the ‘beautiful day of life’, whatever this might be. To destroy it always means producing a victim and becoming guilty. Walter Benjamin protested against this kind of morality. In his text on violence and law, in fact, Benjamin criticized a ‘theorem’ that has become a virtual rule in the West, namely
the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal and even vegetable life, or limit to human life. Their argument, exemplified in an extreme case by the revolutionary killing of the oppressor, runs as follows: ‘If I do not kill, I shall never establish the world dominion of justice . . . that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist . . . We, however, profess that higher even than the happiness and justice of existence stands existence itself.’6
For Benjamin, however,
the proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life . . . Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, any more than it can be said to coincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even the uniqueness of his bodily person.7
‘Terrorist’ is thus used as a normative disqualification which proclaims both the intolerable character of the danger that circulates and traverses exposed bodies, and the de-legitimation by the Thermidorian victors of a sovereign violence, practised yesterday by the legitimately elected representatives of the people who are now turned into defeated terrorists, retrospectively criminalized and excluded from the legal and legitimately political field. The terrorist is someone potentially defeated and always outside the law.
The term has been often recycled. It was a label used for résistants who proclaimed, at the cost of their lives, that they were not yet defeated under the regimes of occupation and collaboration during the Second World War. In Algeria, again, those who proclaimed the necessity of ending the second-class citizenship that France then offered its colonial subjects were ‘terrorists’. Likewise all who sought to found the possibility of a politics that stood against the domination experienced by the conquered. As well as those who were known, from 1969 on, as ‘hijackers’.
Revolutionary terror is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the Revolution’s year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense. Is this the effect of what we have called the persistence in vision of the image of revolutionary terror? The point is to note the effects of this disturbance of vision on the moral appreciation of various political cruelties that have been practised, and still are practised, around victors and the defeated, the perpetrators and victims of the events of 9/11. If care is not taken, this deadly ballet could become unending.
The events of 9/11 have not yet found a name. They are spoken of as a fascinating shock, with all that such fascination means in terms of ambivalence: the irresistible attraction of seeing and the privation of defensive reaction.
Under Thermidor, such fascination with the representation of cruelty was not deployed immediately, in real time, but after the event. What has since been constantly represented as object for this fascination are the massacres. The September massacres, the Nantes noyades, the forests of guillotines . . . the tale of cruelty offered as the only image of the Revolution, the only fascinating explanation of this history with its trail of victims and executioners.
In September 2001, the image preceded the story, fascination with cruelty preceded analysis and political judgement. But if such deprecation and disgust attest to some people’s inability to understand, these sentiments cannot completely obscure a different reception of these events. We saw the ‘V’ of victory in Nigeria and Palestine, while adolescents in Seine Saint-Denis – department 93! – chose to write in the name of Bin Laden on their voting slips for the election of school councillors. Commentaries from several countries of the global South immediately gave these events a dimension of implicit revenge against the imperial domination of a hegemonic political model. The dissymmetry of weapons no longer seems an obstacle in causing the eternal victor to bend. It is less a question of approving this cruel decision than of declaring that the United States also shares responsibility for it.
Rather than proposing an explanation for the decision in favour of terrorism, we should grasp in relief how this enabled those who never have access to public speech to take hold of this, to make known through it what is happening today on the side of those left out of account. If the French Revolution can help in analyzing such events, this is perhaps in the connection between the public speech of the voiceless, the ‘understanding nothing’ of this speech by those who make politics, and certain events of cruelty.
The absence of public spaces in which popular speech could beat a path for itself, be heard and echoed in the form of pacifying laws, is partly linked with the upsurge of violence. When it is no longer possible to have insurrection recognized as such, violence can no longer be restrained and bloodshed is no longer unanimously reproved.
A DIFFERENT POLITICAL SACRALITY
After 11 September 2001, New York experienced a ‘state of dread’. Disturbance and discouragement came in the wake of the large number of dead and this mass-death’s effect of de-subjectification. As the target of these attacks, the ‘sacred body’ of the United States had been assassinated. The question was how to rediscover courage after the misfortune. Such was the rhetoric of the discourse that followed, starting with George W. Bush’s speech to the joint houses of Congress and the nation on 20 September 2001.
The American sacred body is of course the centre of commerce, the fetish of capitalism, the government in Washington, the presidential and military power, but
above all – one might say, before all else – the bodies of the dead. In the New York Times, it was the ‘beautiful day in the life’ of the dead that had become the sacred body of the American nation. Each of these ‘beautiful days’ was reconstituted in a little story which, narrating marriage proposals, diseases overcome, beloved children, memories of childhood, spoke this sacrality. It was one of an ordinary humanity that now founded an indescribable or undiscoverable citizenship. Whereas in the eighteenth century, it was by becoming a citizen that the humanity of humanity was attained, everything here seems to say that it is as a human being without civic history that the sacrality of the political body was is attained. These stories constitute so many little cenotaphs for the dead, who, in their multiplicity, speak the sacred identity of the American nation. It was in the face of this profaned sacrality that Americans had to rediscover energy against discouragement.
Bush set out above all else to describe the operations that made this subjective reprise possible. He opened his speech on 20 September with what would replace the funerals that were impossible: ‘We have seen the state of our union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion.’ The rescue operations made possible a sublimation in the event. Bush could then reconnect with the aesthetic of emotional heroizing. He closed his speech with an anecdote worthy of a funeral oration for simple heroes:
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.’8 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.9
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.
1 René Char, ‘Recherche de la base et du sommet. Billets à Francis Curel, II’ (1943), Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, p. 633.
1 Recall how, decades ago, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, one of the US foreign policy ideologists, drew a distinction between Rightist authoritarianism and Leftist totalitarianism, privileging the first: precisely because Rightist authoritarian leaders care only about their power and wealth, they are much less dangerous than the fanatical Leftists who are ready to risk their lives for their cause. Is this distinction not at work today, in the way the US privileges a corrupt authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia over Iran’s fundamentalism?
2 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, New York: Random House, 2001, p. 114.
3 See the review of Bolkovac’s book, The Whistleblower, in Daisy Sindelar, ‘In New Book,
Whistle-Blower Alleges US, UN Involvement in Bosnian Sex Trafficking’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 9 February 2011, at rferl.org.
4 See Stephen Holden, ‘American in Bosnia Discovers the Horrors of Human Trafficking’, New York Times, 4 August 2011.
5 I owe this idea to Udi Aloni.
6 One can dream further here: what about fully exploiting the accidental fact that the film was shot in Serbia, with Belgrade as ‘a city that called itself Rome’, and imagining the Volscians as Albanians from Kosovo, with Coriolanus as a Serb general who changes side and joins the Albanians?
7 Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, vol. 1, trans. J. Dryden et al., New York: American Book Exchange, 1880, p. 340.
8 Che Guevara, ‘Message to the Tricontinental’, in Guerilla Warfare, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 173.
1 Marc Fumaroli, ‘Terreur et cinéma’, Cahiers du cinéma, July–August 2001, p. 42.
2 Ibid., p. 44.
3 Thus François Furet can write: ‘Today the Gulag leads us to reflect afresh on the Terror, by virtue of its identical project’, and again: ‘Solzhenitsyn’s work . . . ineluctably locat[es] the issue of the Gulag at the very core of the revolutionary endeavour.’ Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 12.
4 Marcel Mauss, Essais de Sociologie, Paris: Minuit, 1969, p. 88.
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