I thank Heike Schotten for her careful and generous review of my book and for giving me the opportunity for reflection on the commitments that led me to undertake this project. As Schotten correctly notes, my aim in Genealogies of Terrorism is to offer a critique of the received wisdom about terrorism, understood as an account of the conditions of possibility of our present discourses and practices around the phenomenon that we call “terrorism.” In this sense, it is a decidedly non-normative reconstruction of the objectification of terrorism; that is, of its becoming an object of political and scholarly concern in need of intervention. As a description of the historically contingent and specific processes through which terrorism became the problem it currently is, this account is thoroughly uninterested in generating a program for action, and to this extent it is non-normative. Yet, Schotten is also correct in pointing out that such a project of critique cannot but be motivated by a sort of second-order normativity, a pretheoretical sense, that the specific object of inquiry is, in fact, in need of critique. This may be a different kind of normativity from the one we find in prescriptive theory, but it is normativity nonetheless.

Here is an easy answer one might be tempted to give to the question what it is about terrorism that is intolerable. On the one hand, those who understand terrorism in its everyday sense as a particular form of violence against innocent civilians will insist that such violence is obviously intolerable and that anyone who denies this is, by the logic Schotten articulates so clearly in her own work, a terrorist sympathizer. On the other hand, those who regard appeals to terrorism as a pretext for increased surveillance, military intervention, new forms of racism, and a dismantling of rights will argue that the oppression enabled by such appeals is obviously intolerable.

What strikes me about both positions is the claim to obviousness, which, from a philosophical point of view, I find itself intolerable. For appeals to what is obvious, what everybody knows, and what is self-evident betray a form of thought that substitutes cliché for creative thinking, privileges common sense over good sense, and ends all conversation by reference to what, ostensibly, we all know. To my mind, it is precisely the resort to what is obvious and to a kind of thinking based on what we already know and recognize that makes terrorism—and the militarism, imperialism, and racism that it facilitates—such an insidious and intractable problem. As a work of philosophy, Genealogies of Terrorism is thus motivated by philosophical hostility to common sense, but it is not apolitical. Instead it is committed to restoring our ability to think as one, although not the only, tool we have available to sway those who welcome old and new forms of oppression, exclusion, and securitization under the pretext of terrorism.