Terror, philosophy and the sublime: Some philosophical reflections on 11 September

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 23-51

  Kearney, Richard ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Al Qaeda; Arendt; Baudrillard; Kant; monsters

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749361181     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453703029001831     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Edward Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, Z Magazine (September 2001). Samuel Huntington later published a full-length book on the subject entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (2001) where he expanded on his prediction that 21st-century global conflict would not be waged between nation-states but between general ‘civilizations’ defined by shared cultures, values and religions and transgressing the boundaries of sovereign nations. Of the eight major civilizations, Huntington predicts that the most violent clash will occur between the Christian West and the Muslim nations of the East stretching from Africa and the Middle East as far as Indonesia. While I do not deny that this scenario may indeed be the preferred view of Bin Laden and certain generals in the Pentagon, I would support Said's argument that we should do everything to combat such monolithic models of schismatic thinking to the extent that they deny the complex realities of difference, diversity and dissent within every civilization, no matter how hegemonic or totalizing it may presume to be. The curious irony is that the most enthusiastic beneficiary of the Huntington thesis is the Al Qaeda itself. Said concludes that the Huntington thesis is an ideological distortion that wants to make ‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that ‘the clash of civilizations’ argues is the reality. The hasty attempts to draw unambiguous lines in the sand, in the immediate wake of 11 September — between US and THEM, West and Islam, etc. — not only denies the disorderliness of reality but also masks the ‘interconnectedness of ordinary lives’, ‘ours’ as well as ‘theirs’. It often takes writers like Conrad, for instance, to remind us that the ‘heart of darkness’ we think is located way out there is also frequently to be found in the midst of the ‘civilized’ world itself. It was also Conrad, Said adds, who in The Secret Agent (1907) so brilliantly described ‘terrorism's affinity for abstractions like “pure science”’ (and by extension for ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’), ‘as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation’.
2. Alan Wolfe adds: ‘By insisting that we are not at war with Islam, Mr. Bush deprives Mr. Bin Laden of the religious battle he so intensely desires’ (‘The God of a Diverse People’, New York Times, Op-Ed, 14 October 2001.
3. Greisch, ‘The Great Game of Life’.
4. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965).
5. Considering this wide variety of monsters and their enduring ability to provoke terror in us, the museum's curator, Nick Capasso, wrote: ‘Monsters are everywhere, and always have been. These terrible and wonderful beings, since the dawn of human consciousness, have lurked at the edges and stood front and center in all our far-flung cultures. Their ubiquity and longevity are based on their power and adaptability as symbols and metaphors for a great number of things, all centered upon anxiety. Whenever we are bothered, nervous, frightened, uncertain, threatened, alienated, oppressed, repressed, confined, irrational, guilty, ill, flawed, sad, or angry, monsters can appear. They are part and parcel of our condition, our imagination, our spirituality, our arts, and they won't go away — ever. We need them too much, and hence we are ever finding them, creating them, carrying them with us, and surrounding ourselves with them. They are legion.’ Nick Capasso, Introduction to Terrors and Wonders: Monsters in Contemporary Art (Lincoln, MA: DeCordova Museum Publications, 2001), p. 7, 9, 10.
6. Timothy Beal, ‘Our Monsters, Ourselves’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 November 2001, p. 14.
7. More precisely: ‘In the aftermath of September 11, Americans are all too familiar with the ways religious discourse can serve political rhetoric in making monsters out of others, imbuing them with diabolical power and construing our war against them as a holy war of absolute good against absolute evil. The questions raised by horror culture can introduce ambiguity into this cultural mix, undermining attempts to boil things down to a battle between us versus them, good versus evil. They invite us to discover our monsters in ourselves and ourselves in our monsters’. This goes in a similar direction to Jacques Derrida's response to 11 September and its aftermath, when he declares, in our New York dialogue of 10 October, that ‘in this war, no one is innocent’. ‘Terror, God and the New Politics: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Traversing the Imaginary, ed. J. Manoussakis and P. Gratton (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
8. Jean Baudrillard, from ‘Simulations’, in Continental Aesthetics, ed. R. Kearney and D. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 423.
9. J. Baudrillard, ‘L'esprit du Terrorisme’, Le Monde, 2 November 2001p. 3.
10. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, extract from the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, para. 23, in Continental Aesthetics: An Anthology, ed. R. Kearney and D. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 24, 26, 27.
11. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), p. 58. I am indebted to Michael Halberstam for this and other references in my discussion of Arendt and the sublime
12. see in particular his article, ‘Hannah Arendt on the Totalitarian Sublime and Its Promise of Freedom’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 105f, 118.
13. Arendt herself uses the term ‘terror’ to refer both to the literal terrorization of society by a certain political movement or event, and also to a complex sentiment of existential dislocation, characterized by a paradoxical response of horrible humiliation and enthusiastic collusion on behalf of the ‘subjects of terror’. See H. Arendt, ‘Ideology and Terror’, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979). On the more specific issue of our response to ‘Terror’ resulting in a collapse of the real into the imaginary, see also the trenchant remarks of Susan Sontag on 11 September (‘Ne Soyons pas Stupides Ensemble’, Le Monde, 26 September 2001: ‘Mais ceux qui occupent des functions officielles … ont decidé — avec la complicité volontaire des principaux médias — qu'on ne demanderait pas au public de porter une trop grande part du fardeau de la réalité. Les platitudes satisfaites et unanimement applaudies du Congrès d'une partie soviétique semblaient méprisables. L'unanimité de la rhétorique moralisatrice, destinée à masquer la realité, débitée par les responsables americains et les médias au course de ces derniers jours est indigne d'une démocratie adulte. Les responsables americains … nous ont fait savoir qu'ils considèrent que leur tâche n'est qu'une manipulation: donner confiance et gérer la douleur. La politique d'une démocratie — qui entraîne des désacccords et qui encourage la sincérité — a été remplacée par la psychothérapie. Souffrons ensemble. Mais ne soyons pas stupides ensemble. Un peu de conscience historique peut nous aider à comprendre ce qui s'est exactement passé, et ce qui peut continuer à se passer.’
14. Apart from those already cited above, see also our dialogue with Jacques Derrida on the events of 11 September, recorded in New York University on 10 October 2001 and published in Traversing the Imaginary, ed. Manoussakis and Gratton. See also the illuminating discussion of the events by two other French philosophers, Paul Ricoeur and Stanislas Breton, in ‘Décrypter la Violence Terroriste’, Le Croix, 25 October 2001: 14–15, where such issues as violent and non-violent resistance, the ‘Just War’, monotheism and the western crisis of democracy, are debated. The key point issuing from this exchange is the need to ‘understand’ as well as to ‘judge’. See also Thich Nhat Hanh's and the Dalai Lama's Buddhist reflections on 11 September excerpted in Sunday Tribune, Dublin, September 2001. ‘All violence is injustice — the only antidote to violence is compassion. And what is compassion made of? It is made of understanding … To understand, we must find paths of communication so that we can listen to those who desperately are calling out for our understanding — because such an act of violence [as 11 September] is a desperate call for attention and for help.’
15. Ian McEwan, Guardian (UK newspaper), 15 September 2001, p. 199. I am grateful to my friends Michael and Cathy Fitzgerald for bringing this text to my attention.
16. See here Jeremiah Conway's illuminating article, ‘Socrates and the Minotaur: Following the Thread of Myth in Plato's Dialogues’, Teaching Philosophy 16(3) (September 1993): 193–243. I am grateful to my graduate student Carlos Bohorquez, for bringing this essay to my attention. Conway argues that the Minotaur itself is not the real threat: ‘the original threat is the greed, self-promotion, fear and revenge that led Minos to possess what belonged to the gods; these forces, not the Minotaur, are the real danger and responsible for creating the monster in the first place’ Conway concludes that ‘The role of Theseus (which the Athenians are busy celebrating) is a story of heroism built on forgetfulness. In killing the Minotaur, Theseus mistook the image of danger for the source of danger itself’ Theseus was unmindful of the surrounding circumstances and deeper sources of evil. He forgot his own family's complicity with the creation of the Monster and that his own actions would make him just as monstrous as the Minotaur. By contrast, Socrates' heroic refusal to engage in revenge and violence ‘repairs the forgetfulness of Theseus and restores to the myth precisely those dimensions that Theseus (and the Athenians who model themselves after him) overlooked. The hero's journey for Socrates is learning to do no harm, ridding from the soul the desire for revenge. Though he sees Athens and its laws have become misshapen into a devouring Minotaur, Socrates will not slay it’. In this manner, Plato is suggesting that philosophical understanding may help to guide Socrates out of the labyrinth of popular opinion and myth, which holds that one should answer one wrong with another wrong. ‘The thread of philosophy’ is thus offered by Plato to the Athenian audience as an alternative to the received propaganda of blood-cycles: ‘love of truth’ (philein-sophia) is proposed as an alternative to the sword.