Eileen A. Joy

Dept. Of English Language & Literature

College of Arts & Sciences Colloquium

Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville

“Thinking About Empire”

22-23 April 2004

Empire and the Obscure Object of Terrorism

“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”

                                                                        —Simone Weil¹

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”

                                                                        —Emmanuel Levinas²

“I’ll have you know, I’m not afraid of witches, spirits, phantoms, boastful giants, rogues, knaves, etc., nor do I fear any kind of beings except human ones.”

                                                                        —Francisco Goya³

Prolegomenon: What I offer here is a rumination that is related to a larger project having to do with the relationship between monstrosity and terrorism, and between violence and justice, in both Beowulf and contemporary life; relevant to this colloquium’s subject, “Thinking About Empire,” I have been thinking a lot lately about asymmetry as one of the defining features of empire, and terrorism as one of the natural (even, inevitable) outcomes of empire’s asymmetrical relationship to those who have, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, “ended up on the wrong side of the global order.”⁴ In an essay on the events of September 11^th, Baudrillard wrote that, “by seizing all the cards for itself,” Western global power “forced the Other to change the rules. And the new rules are fierce ones, because the stakes are fierce. To a system whose very excess of power poses an insoluble challenge, the terrorists respond with a definitive act which is also not susceptible of exchange.”⁵ But even more troubling, perhaps, is that while many in the West would like to blame a singular entity or philosophy for terrorism—say, Islam, or organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah—as Baudrillard also writes, these entities are just “moving fronts” for terrorism. Ultimately, “The antagonism is everywhere, and in every one of us,” and further, because we in the West have all dreamed, even before it happened, of an ultimate terrorist event, terrorism is also our “obscure object of desire.”⁶ What is needed then, is a psychological excursion into the deep heart of this obscure object, as well as an ethics for our finding our way back out again.

I           It captivates by its grace⁷

            For a while now, I have been worrying the beads of the twins strands of two obsessions: the ethical philosophy of Emamnuel Levinas and suicide bombers. I have been thinking a lot about Levinas’s statement in Time and the Other, that “the encroachment of the present on the future is not the feat of the subject alone, but the intersubjective relationship,” and further, “[t]he condition of time lies in the relationship between humans, or in history.”⁸ Levinas’s philosophy is deeply concerned with the metaphysical excellency of the moral subject who understands that ethics comes before ontology, or being—“Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy,”⁹ and is rooted in a fierce attention and subjection to the command of the Other [l’autre], who is both the proximate neighbor and the unknown stranger. For Levinas, morality posits a face-to-face relationship with the Other—what he termed le face-B-face sans intermediaire—in which the Other is not so much an actual face as “pure expression, an extradition without defense or cover, precisely the extreme rectitude of a facing, which in this nudity is an exposure unto death.”¹⁰ Moreover, this “pure expression” always exceeds any limits we might put on it—“Expression, or the face, overflows images.”¹¹ Further, as Levinas writes,

There is in the Other a meaning and an obligation that oblige me beyond my death! . . . Responsibility for the Other, responding to the Other’s death, vows itself to an alterity that is no longer within the province of re-presentation. This way of being avowed—or this devotion—is time. It remains a relationship to the other as other, and not a reduction of the other to the same. It is transcendence.¹²

But we mustn’t assume, either, that the I, or ego, is left aside in this encounter, for as Levinas reminds us, “Only an I can respond to the injunction of a face.”¹³

            Even though I know that, in Levinas’s scheme of things, the face is not really a face, per se, but rather, an expression—and even, the overflowing of expression—I find myself thinking, obsessively, about faces, and more specifically, about the face of Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, the twenty-year-old Chechen woman who approached the admissions booth of an outdoor rock festival in Moscow on July 5, 2003 and detonated the explosives strapped to her belt, killing only herself (apparently, the explosives in her “martyr’s belt” were faulty somehow, and did not detonate properly). Another female suicide bomber accompanying her was more successful—if that is the right word—and managed to kill sixteen people, along with herself.¹⁴ Browsing the Internet one day searching for pictures of this event, I came across a photograph of Yelikhadzhiyeva lying on her back between police barricades, one first clenched on her chest, an empty beer can on the ground beside her head, her eyes closed, and her mouth half-open—the scene is almost peaceful, and the face, serene, if also vulnerable; after all, she was only twenty years old, the same age as many of my students. I have never considered a twenty-year-old as someone who could be capable of such a fierce will and desire to kill herself and others, out of vengeance, or perhaps, a desperate powerlessness (which could also be a desperate facelessness). While many were transfixed by the gruesome images of the shredded bodies of bombing victims under white sheets, I couldn’t get this face out of my mind, nor can I, even now. Yelikhadzhieyeva’s face haunts me precisely because it is what Levinas would have said is not really a face, but a façade, in which “the thing which keeps its secret is exposed and enclosed in its monumental essence and in its myth, in which it gleams like a splendor but does not deliver itself. It captivates by its grace as by magic, but does not reveal itself.”¹⁵

II            Exteriority is not a negation, but a marvel¹⁶

            Between August of 2002 and just this past February when a bomb explosion on a crowded Moscow subway train killed over forty people, Russia and Chechnya have witnessed the emergence of what many consider to be a shocking phenomenon—female suicide bombers. Because many Chechens reject the idea that these women have embraced a radical Islamic fundamentalism, and many Russians, conversely, have assumed that these women embody what they see as the “Palestinianization” of the Chechen rebellion,¹⁷ a certain tension, confusion, and even hysteria, attaches to the ways in which ordinary Russians and Chechens, government officials, and the international press have attempted to describe these women. It has been said about the female Chechen suicide bombers, alternatively, that they have been kidnapped by Islamic extremists, given psychotropic drugs, and then raped as part of their coercion into doing what no woman would supposedly do of her own accord;¹⁸ that they are emotionless “brick walls,” “pre-programmed,” “brainwashed,” and “de-humanised”;¹⁹ that they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder;²⁰ that they are blackmailed “zombies”;²¹ and that they are the harbingers of the fact that “something has come unglued at the heart of Chechen society.”²² But even more central to the issue of what might be called the troubling, yet intimate alterity of these women, is the name given to them, as a collectivity, by the Russian government and happily picked up by the international press: they are the “black widows” of Chechnya–that is to say, they are the actual widows, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men killed in two wars with Russia that have claimed over 100,000 lives, but they are also venomous black widow spiders, who kill with one bite. They are therefore both intimately familiar, yet also monstrously Other, and as such, they embody the phenomenon labeled by Jacques Lacan as “extimité,” explained by Jacques Alain Miller as designating “in a problematic manner the real in the symbolic.”²³ More simply put, this is the state of affairs where the exterior is always present in the interior, and further, “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy [but rather] . . . the intimate is Other—like a foreign body.”²⁴ In this sense, those whom we perceive to be Others, and whom we assume are distantly foreign and opaque, are really our intimates—our excluded interior—and it is precisely because of their intimacy, that they frighten us. Terrorists, especially, frighten us, because we believe, naively, that they cross over from somewhere out there to here (the home), and threaten our fragile bodies, which we believe are bounded and inviolable territories of identity unto themselves. And this is why terrorists are often referred to as being inhuman, and even, monstrous, and their acts, evil and unspeakable. Terrorists are ultimately the figures of what Freud termed the Uncanny (or, unheimlich, both “not like home” and “like home” simultaneously)—they are the shadow-stalking phantasms of the Unconscious who have been repressed but never stop returning to view in various distorted shapes;²⁵ further, terrorists frighten because they represent the excess, or exorbitance, of our nightmares. Their acts, as Baudrillard writes, represent “an excess of reality,” for terrorist violence is both the “exorbitant mirror” of the West’s own violence as well as “the model of a symbolic violence forbidden to it, the only violence it cannot exert—that of its own death.”²⁶

            We must never forget that terrorists are real persons with real lives grounded in all the material and psychic particularities of the local—Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, for instance, lived with her sister in a brick house in a small Chechen village and studied at the medical vocational school there²⁷—and furthermore, that the terrorist’s acts are both real and immoral. But our understanding of the terrorist, if we are willing to embark on such a project, will have to begin with an understanding of our perception of them as monsters. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, the monster’s body is always a cultural body:

The monster is born . . . as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture.²⁸

In his “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” Cohen argues that the monster is always a “harbinger of a category crisis.”²⁹ In other words, monsters are “disturbing hybrids” who resist easy categorization and, in fact, threaten to smash the distinctions in any system we might devise to describe their freakishness: “In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble,” and further, “the geography of the monster is an imperiling expanse.”³⁰ Because the monster also always embodies difference writ large (usually along lines that are sexual, racial, and cultural), “the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur” in the body of the monster which always threatens “to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.”³¹ The Chechen suicide bombers are especially troubling in this scenario because they bring together in their cultural bodies two “signs” that have traditionally terrified through their Otherness: “woman” and “nonwhite” (what Cohen terms She and Them!).³²