Terrorism: Within and Without
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In the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Michel Foucault wrote: “The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” The proposed paper will address the question not only of the fascist, but of the terrorist within each of us. After the events of the last four years, we should no longer speak of terrorism without recognizing that the key to combating this global pandemic is the recognition that it is, in fact, an auto-immune disease. Following Badiou and Baudrillard, I propose that we look beyond the traditional polarities of Good/Evil and Other/Same; instead, we must look at terrorism through the looking-glass. If we survive terrorism, it will be because we free ourselves from the delusion that terror lies somewhere ‘out there’, and realize instead that we must take a much more radical approach to the problem, by understanding and coming to terms with our own deep-seated propensities for terrorism. The paper will include a call to a radical form of hope which will attempt to begin a rapprochement between the philosophies of Badiou and Levinas on the subject of evil.