Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:23:37.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Terror, Sovereignty and Law: On the Politics of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Saul Newman

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between violence, law, and sovereignty in the context of terrorism today. It focuses, not on normative questions about terrorist violence, but on its structural relationship to law and the sovereign state. Part of the difficulty in theorising terrorism is its heterogeneous and indeterminate nature. For instance, if terrorism is to be characterised by a form of violence designed to inspire fear, then one can of course speak equally about state terrorism as one can about non-state terrorism. Indeed, one might recall that the very word terrorism derives from La Terreur of the post-revolutionary French Republic in the early 1790's. Saint-Just's words stand out as one of the most infamous justifications of state terrorism: “What do you want, you who do not want virtue in order to be happy? What do you want, you who do not want the Terror to be used against the wicked?” That the highest ideals of the Republic were accompanied, and indeed inscribed, through a systematic, yet often indiscriminate, register of violence – that Republican virtue came to be associated with the willingness to be merciless – is more than just a vicissitude of history. It speaks perhaps to the very nature of political discourse itself, unmasking the violence implicit in every political symbolisation, at the base of every law, no matter how democratic.

Type
Research Article
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 5: Security, Democracy and the Future of Freedom: Assessing the Impact of War on Terror on Civil Liberties in Contemporary Democracies , 01 May 2004 , pp. 569 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Cited in Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory 72-73 (David Macey trans., Polity Press, 1988).Google Scholar

2 Id. at 84.Google Scholar

3 Giorgio Agamben, Security and Terror, in Theory and Event, 5: 4 (2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Lefort, , supra note 1, at 73.Google Scholar

5 Benjamin, Walter, Critique of Violence in Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, 236, 236-7 (Marcus Bullock ed., Harvard University Press).Google Scholar

6 Id. at 238.Google Scholar

7 Id. at 243.Google Scholar

8 Id.Google Scholar

9 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 15 (Daniel Heller-Roazen trans., Stanford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

10 Benjamin, Walter, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, 255, 259 (Hannah Arendt ed. & Harry Zohn trans., Fontana, 1982).Google Scholar

11 See Lefort, supra note 1, at 73.Google Scholar

12 As Agamben shows, this deliberately ambiguous category of “illegal combatant” denies the detainee any legal status and, thus, any legal rights, leaving them vulnerable to the unrestricted power of the state. See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Emergency, address at the Centre Roland-Barthes, Universite Paris VII, Denis-Diderot at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm.Google Scholar

13 Benjamin, , supra note 5, at 248.Google Scholar

14 See Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice 13 (Drucilla Cornell et al. eds., Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar

15 Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in The Foucault Reader 91 (Paul Rabinow, ed., Pantheon Books, 1984).Google Scholar

16 Foucault, Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 109-133, 121 (Colin Gordon ed., Harvester Press 1980).Google Scholar

17 There is an excellent survey of this course in Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (Routledge 2000).Google Scholar

18 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, Lecture at the College of France (14 Jan. 1976), in Society 1975-76 23 (David Macey trans., Allen Lane 2003).Google Scholar

19 Id. at 1-21, 15.Google Scholar

20 Foucault, Michel, War in the Filigree of Peace: Course Summary, Address (1976) in Oxford Literary Review, at 17-18, (Ian Mcleod trans.,(1976)).Google Scholar

21 Id. at 16.Google Scholar

22 Pasquale Pasquino, Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory, in Economy and Society 22, 84 (1993).Google Scholar

23 Again we see the parallel between violence and sovereignty – the way that the condition of sovereignty is also this undecidability, in relation to the law.Google Scholar

24 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Vo. 1, 136 (Robert Hurley trans., Penguin 1990).Google Scholar

25 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan trans., Penguin 1991).Google Scholar

26 See Georges Bataille, The Psychological Structure of Fascism, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 137-160 (Alan Stoekl ed. and trans., University of Manchester Press 1985).Google Scholar

27 Id. at 148.Google Scholar

28 Id. at 150.Google Scholar

29 Id. at 152.Google Scholar

30 Baudrillard, Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism, Le Monde, 2 November 2001.Google Scholar

31 Alain Badiou, Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts, in Theory and Event, 1-13 (Steven Corcoran trans., 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar