Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson begins her important new study of terrorism with the assertion that “we seem to have a pretty good sense of what terrorism is” (p. 1). She starts here not because she thinks this is true, but because Genealogies of Terrorism, like so much good philosophical inquiry, begins with a seemingly simple, commonsense intuition only to complicate it and compel us to rethink our assumptions.
This is an urgently needed intervention. The long-standing shared academic/policy-maker endeavor to define terrorism has failed spectacularly, to the point that cliché now best expresses the term’s meaning. “One man’s [sic] terrorist is another man’s [sic] freedom fighter” is effectively the reigning default wisdom on political violence, a collective throwing up of hands at the impossibility of eliminating relativity from this morally overloaded term and a synopsis of the intellectual and political state of things when it comes to terrorism expertise. Notably, this vacuum has diminished neither the importance of terrorism as a policy priority nor attenuated its stigmatized status as beyond the pale of humanity. As with the definition of pornography offered in Justice Potter’s famous Supreme Court opinion, we may not be able to define terrorism, but we still think we know it when we see it (and we know it is really, really bad).
Genealogies of Terrorism not only shows that we do not have “a pretty good sense of what terrorism is” but it also refuses the will to truth that would demand its author simply supply a better definition to quell the uncertainty her study provokes. Indeed, Erlenbusch-Anderson rejects “a definitional approach” because “terms like terrorist or robber…do not refer to a natural kind that exists in the world independently of human thought and practice” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Rather, “acts of naming something terrorism are impositions of power” (p. 6) and thus participate in constituting the very thing they attempt to describe. Moreover, such impositions of power are historical, and thus contingent and variable. This means that “ostensibly objective and universal definitions of terrorism are divorced from the social world they describe,” leading to “rarefied, impoverished, decontextualized, and ahistorical account[s] of terrorism” (p. 162).
Understanding terrorism in the contemporary moment, then, requires not abstract philosophical reflection but genealogy, a method Erlenbusch-Anderson borrows from Foucault (and which Foucault himself borrowed from Nietzsche). Genealogy tracks the vicissitudes of history and power that both bring something into being and are produced by it in turn. Moreover, genealogy investigates particular kinds of objects: objects that are understood as objects precisely because of their journey in and out of discourse and specific historical situations of power. Foucault calls these objects dispositifs. A genealogy of the dispositif of terrorism, therefore, reveals what a definitional approach to an essentialized, ahistorical terrorism phenomenon cannot: how configurations of power/knowledge transform and are transformed by a seemingly singular element—in this case, terrorism—and how those transformations endure and inform contemporary usage, regardless of what particular speakers may understand by their own invocation of terrorism.
Erlenbusch-Anderson argues that the distinguishing feature of the dispositif of terrorism is its function as a mechanism of “social defense.” Whether in revolutionary France, revolutionary Russia, French Algeria, or the contemporary War on Terror, terrorism justifies the sovereign taking the life of some in the name of protecting the greater good of the life of all—whether that “all” be the race, the nation, the revolutionary class, or even the revolution itself.
In this sense, then, we certainly will know terrorism when we see it, but not because it fits into a prefabricated definitional or behavioral framework. Rather, we will recognize terrorism anytime we see sovereign power—that is, the power to let live or make die—being mobilized in the name of social defense. In Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Foucault distinguishes between sovereign power and biopower, neither of which falls solely within the domain of the state. Rather, the distinction parses power’s relationship with life and death: whereas biopower nurtures and sustains the life of some population(s) and neglects others, leaving them to decay and die off, sovereign power, by contrast, allows for the population to live—except in cases of juridical transgression, when it exercises its punitive power to make die. Foucault calls the mobilization of sovereign power in the name of social defense racism, which Erlenbusch-Anderson actually argues is misplaced. Rather, she reworks Foucault’s theorization of racism to show that it better names the broader function and operation of terrorism. (This may not be so far off from Foucault’s original usage, however: many have persuasively argued that terrorism’s twenty-first-century usage functions to produce the racialized subordination, abjection, surveillance, and targeted elimination of Arabs, Muslims, and other “Middle Eastern” populations.)
Erlenbusch-Anderson takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of various important moments of radical political history, elaborating the dizzying number of usages of terrorism in the last 200 or so years: to describe the rule of Robespierre, to critique the rule of Robespierre, to name the system of government Robespierre inaugurated; to name a political philosophy of government akin to “liberalism” or “Republicanism,” to identify adherents of a particular political philosophy; as a description of Bolshevik state violence, as a defense of Russian antistate revolutionary violence; as the proper mode of governance in French settler colonialism and as the self-description of the FLN’s violent resistance to that settler colonial governance. She usefully classifies these different usages according to how they are mobilized in specific contexts: charismatic terrorism (the rule of Robespierre), doxastic terrorism (terrorism as political philosophy), identitarian terrorism (“terrorist” as the name of the adherent of terrorist political philosophy), strategic terrorism (as a tactic for revolutionary success), and polemic terrorism (as a legitimate means of warfare, whether invoked by the colonizer or the colonized).
Each of these different historical forms of terrorism remains as a kind of trace in the contemporary moment’s invocation of terrorism, which Erlenbusch-Anderson names synthetic terrorism. Today’s terrorism is “synthetic” presumably because it is a kind of synopsis of terrorism’s many prior meanings, but also because, to return to the problem of definition, in contemporary usage, terrorism is by turns “applied to tyrants and dictators, failed or rogue states, belief systems, racial identities, criminal actions, tactics of warfare, and types of war” (p. 135). This is possible (and not simply incoherent) because terrorism is not an objective or natural “kind” that preexists the social world, but rather is a dispositif that has accumulated sedimented layers of meaning throughout its constitutive and constituting journey through world politics and history. Indeed, Erlenbusch-Anderson asserts that it is precisely because of this sedimented meaning that synthetic terrorism has such a powerful hold on us today.
Genealogies of Terrorism is a refreshing refusal of both philosophical and political orthodoxies that have only obscured clarity on the subject of terrorism, whether they be a dogmatic insistence on the definitional enterprise or the outright refusal of history. Erlenbusch-Anderson also rightly refuses to answer the “so what should we do?” question that so often attends critique. This is in keeping both with Foucault’s aversion to intellectual saviorism and the resolutely non-normative character of genealogical inquiry. As she explains so well, problematization is the point of genealogy, and such critique is worthwhile both in its own right and as the necessary precursor to normative action.
That said, Erlenbusch-Anderson nevertheless diverges from her otherwise resolutely non-normative practice of genealogy near the very end of her book, where she claims that genealogy is normative to the extent that it investigates aspects of our contemporary moment that Foucault called “intolerable”—his primary referent for which was the prison—and that genealogy examines the intolerable from an interest in “transformation” (p. 173). This made me desperately want to know more: What makes terrorism (like prisons for Foucault) intolerable for Erlenbusch-Anderson? What kind of transformation of this dispositif motivates her genealogical study?
I do not think that Erlenbusch-Anderson needs to answer the “so what do we do?” question. But I do want to know where her genealogy comes from and why she undertook it. Nietzsche would be the first to point out that genealogy, even when ostensibly divorced from normativity, is nevertheless always undertaken by a specific person located in a specific time and place. It is thus necessarily informed by a set of contexts and commitments that can in no way be either “disinterested” or “objective.” Given her invocation of the intolerable, then, I am curious: Who and where is Erlenbusch-Anderson? What does her genealogy tell us about what she finds intolerable and why? She declares the aim of her book to be a return to thinking: “My point has not been to offer a better answer to the question what terrorism is but to loosen the rigidity of our thought and make us a little freer by rendering seemingly obvious answers a little less obvious” (p. 184). Yet in her brief mention of the intolerable, she also suggests that such freedom of thought is “required for defensible and productive strategies of transformation” (p. 173). What are Erlenbusch-Anderson’s aspirations for transformation?
These questions are perhaps more important from an expressly political standpoint than a purely philosophical one. But they are no less urgent for all that, given how many people are surely interested in greater transformation of the dispositif of terrorism because they find its current form intolerable, yet for wildly divergent reasons. Indeed, in the twenty-first-century War on Terror, reactionary forces across the globe are interested only in expanding the reach of the security state and extending its imperial, colonial, and military power. Indeed, if Erlenbusch-Anderson is right, the War on Terror may be the twenty-first century’s premier form of securitized racism. Nietzsche aside, then, it seems all the more pressing for any genealogy of the “multiple origins” of terrorism to make clear precisely what it finds to be intolerable and to what it aspires when it comes to the future of this historically variable yet politically quite resilient dispositif.
