PROOF - Macmillan International Higher Education · PROOF 9780230_218819_01_prexii.tex 7/3/2009 15: ... Moira Inghilleri 11 Resisting State Terror: Theorizing Communities of Activist

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Contents

List of Figures and Table vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Globalization, Political Violence and Translation: an Introduction 1Esperanza Bielsa

Part I Interpreting Global Violence

1 The Terminal Paradox of Globalization 25Keith Tester

2 Translating Terror: Siting Truth, Justice and Rights amidstthe Two ‘Terror’ Wars 45Upendra Baxi

3 Ethics and Violence 72Antonio Aguilera

4 The Sovereign, the Martyr and ‘Just War’ beyond theJus Publicum Europaeum: the Dilemma of Political Theology,Discussed via Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin 88Sigrid Weigel

Part II Narratives of Global Terror

5 Semantic Asymmetries and the ‘War on Terror’ 117Martin Montgomery

6 Missiles in Athens and Tanks at Heathrow: Urban Security andthe Materialization of ‘Global’ Threat 135Stuart Price

7 Between Exceptionalism and Universalism: Photography asCultural Diplomacy 152Liam Kennedy

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vi Contents

Part III Translating Terror

8 Translation, Ethics and Ideology in a Violent Globalizing World 171Maria Tymoczko

9 Translation – 9/11: Terrorism, Immigration, Language Politics 195Emily Apter

10 Translators in War Zones: Ethics under Fire in Iraq 207Moira Inghilleri

11 Resisting State Terror: Theorizing Communities of ActivistTranslators and Interpreters 222Mona Baker

Conclusion: Globalization, Political Violence and Security 243Christopher W. Hughes

Index 255

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Part IInterpreting Global Violence

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1The Terminal Paradox ofGlobalizationKeith Tester

I do not have many memories of my schooldays but for some reason one ofthe few concerns a ludicrously old atlas that we used. I remember it as onein which the nations of the Commonwealth were all coloured pink, so as toremind us all of Britain’s former glories (and as if to suggest to the children ofpost-imperial Britain that the Commonwealth was merely the Empire witha different name, all the better to trick the ‘colonials’), but what most sticksin my mind is a page that had on it three circles representing the world. Thetop circle was large, the middle one smaller and the one at the bottom of thepage was tiny. The intention was to show how technological developmentssince the eighteenth century meant that men and women needed to spendless time to travel a given distance; the world had become a smaller place.Of course, it was never actually mentioned whether the speed of movementwas the same for everyone, and neither was any thought given to why peoplewould want to move around the globe in the first place. The presumptionwas, I think, that this is how quickly we lucky Westerners (and specifically weBritons) could move about if we so chose. The movements of other peoplewere not really our concern.

It would have been interesting if these three circles had been juxtaposedwith three others, this time representing the number of casualties in war.Once again, these circles would have told a story which would have been atleast in part about technological developments (in the means of killing andcommunication alike), but also they would have said something about thesense of neighbourliness of those who would be otherwise happy to travelspeedily here, there and everywhere. As the circles in the atlas went from bigto small, these three imaginary circles would have shown a series going fromsmall to huge. But in this way the two series would highlight a relationship.The message would have been that as men and women increasingly becomeneighbours so they kill one another with greater efficiency. Indeed, theremight even have been the suspicion that the nations that have benefitedmost from the process signified by the circles in the atlas – the West of theold European empires and the United States – are also the most responsible

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26 Globalization, Political Violence and Translation

for the sequence of the imaginary series. That suspicion would not havebeen original. As long ago as 1795 Kant was noting the dreadful ‘conductof the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states, theinjustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and people (whichin their case is the same as conquering them)’. All of these foreign places ‘werelooked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for thenative inhabitants were counted as nothing’ (Kant 1991: 106).

The Kantian insight seems to have been lost in the contemporary rush toidentify a genetic determinism behind social and historical processes, a rushthat contains an extremely worrying flight from any semblance of respon-sibility. Consequently it would not be surprising to find that one popularway of coming to terms with these two series of circles would be to natural-ize their story, to draw the conclusion that obviously humans are not muchdifferent from laboratory rats and so simply to accept that much like ani-mals we humans too engage in fights to the death when our space is invadedor our food threatened. A slightly more nuanced version of this argument,which nevertheless leads to paralysis parading as realism, is to talk about‘deep-seated human traits’ of violence and cruelty that can be unleashed byfear and scarcity (see for example Gray 2003, 2006). However, such conclu-sions say more about the counsellors than the counselled. They are giving upon humanity itself (humanity as a quality and aspiration) by surrendering towhat they purport to be utterly inevitable. Yet these counsellors contradicttheir own messages of doom. After all, if we were little more than laboratoryrats, and if we had learnt the lesson that actually that was all we were, whywould we read and write books of such gloom? If there really were ‘deep-seated human traits’ about which nothing could be done, there would beno point doing anything other than barricading the doors and taking rifle-shooting lessons (authors would be unlikely to thrive if such human traitsreally existed, and spending time writing books would be a remarkably sillyactivity). The point is that animals do not surround their actions with culturalmeanings – however desolate those meanings might be – whereas humansdo. The point is precisely that men and women are capable of reflection,of thinking, and of being concerned about the world in which they live withothers. It is in this way that the juxtaposition of the two series of circles raisesa problem rather than a mere fact.

Yet even the word problem is not strong enough since it implies merelya situation that is hard to resolve, and perhaps there is no solution to theconundrum of closer neighbours becoming greater killers. More exactly thenthe two series of circles highlight a paradox. They intimate a situation that iscontradictory, inconsistent and maybe even absurd: the more we becomeneighbours the more we kill one another. However, to say that this is aparadox is to make some assumptions without which contradiction, incon-sistency and absurdity could not be known since there would be no criterionof the consistent and no norms to contradict. Such a slippage is appropriate

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since there are some norms that are fundamental to the Western imagination.Indeed without them the presently hegemonic mainstreams of thought andaction in the world would be quite literally unimaginable.

These central norms of the Western sensibility revolve around the princi-ple of the solidarity and unity of humanity. Without these norms Westernpolitical and ethical systems would be impossible and, indeed, they were alsoconfirmed through negation by the rise in Europe of fascism and national-ism. After all they both involved the replacement of what was taken to be atoo universal unity with a particular solidarity. In other words, the norms ofunity and solidarity were not so much repudiated by fascism and national-ism as they were specified. The norms of solidarity and unity facilitate claimsabout contradiction, inconsistency and absurdity and thus make it possibleto conceptualize a paradox rather than a problem or a fact. In the first instanceat least, the paradox is that the world that the West played such a massivepart in shaping does not live according to the norms and values that the Westupheld and ostensibly exported. As such the exploration of the paradox isalso an immanent critique of the West and its world. The norms and val-ues can be identified as the expression of a number of various processes, andprobably they have been all the more resilient precisely because they coalescedifferent and deep forces. Their three most obvious roots can be identified asbeing theological, ethical and political.

The theological root of the norms of solidarity and unity is located in Chris-tianity. The point was made clearly by Saint Paul. He announced that thanksto the coming of Christ, men and women needed no longer to be dividedagainst one another or in themselves by the rule of law, rather all was unifiedin faith: ‘But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian;for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith . . . There is nei-ther Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male norfemale; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3: 25–8). Paul does notdeny social hierarchies and differences, but what he does say is that Christredeems them, and therefore despite appearances all humanity can be unifiedif it so chooses to accept the principle of being ‘all one’. The repudiation ofthat unity consequently becomes a sign of the Fall and thus something to beovercome through faith and commitment. The charge of this point becameclear in 1550 when two theologians, Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé deLas Casas, were brought together by the King of Spain to debate how theindigenous people of the Americas ought to be treated. The debate turnedon the problem of whether these people were naturally inferior because theyhad no knowledge of Christ (and whether they were therefore properly ordeficiently human), or whether they were indubitably human with their dif-ference merely being a sign of the fecundity of God’s work. Sepúlveda took thefirst position, Las Casas the second (Las Casas’ position is discussed clearly inSmith 1999, an article that also shows how it fed into twentieth-century lib-eration theology). In Kant’s terms, the debate was about whether the natives

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counted as nothing or as something. Regardless of the practical effects of thedebate (it scarcely saved many of the indigenous population from slaughterand exploitation), Las Casas placed a depth charge in Western consciousness.According to Finkielkraut he demonstrated that humanity is unified and thatthe challenge is to find truth, and not error and hierarchy, from out of thestuff of surface diversity: ‘Truth is one, as it must be, but it can no longer beeasily recognised. Instead, it creeps in between unity and diversity . . . It isno longer error, but truth that manifests itself in many ways; the very mul-tiplicity of forms of religious belief demonstrates the universality of religion’(Finkielkraut 2001: 15). In short, the universality of religion demonstratesthe universality of human qualities and, therefore, the unity of humanityitself in such a way that contemporary differences become either signs ofwonder or of different journeys to the same destination (this latter positionremains of central importance to Catholicism; see John Paul II 1998).

However significant this kind of theological argument might be, never-theless it was marginalized by the Enlightenment secularization of thought,with its commitment to the free human creation of the human world. AsKant announced, this was the moment in which to ‘Have courage to use yourown understanding’ (Kant 1991: 54). This is the context in which the ethicalroot of the norms of solidarity and unity emerged. Implicit to the Enlight-enment declaration is a confidence in the ability of human understandingto overcome what the agents of the Enlightenment condemn as superstitionand tradition, and therefore it expresses a belief in the ability of humans tomake the world for themselves. As soon as the constituency of the humanis determined (although that was, of course, the political problem to whicha return was always made, just as in practice Christianity has never entirelydealt with the question of salvation either outside of the Church or withoutexplicit faith), there is the presumption that all humans are equally capableof using their own understanding. As such, humanity is unified in and by theuse of its reason and this demands that human others are treated as an end inthemselves and never as means to our own ends (the other must be countedas something). This is of course one of the principles of the categorical imper-ative, and Kant put it very clearly: ‘I say that the human being and in generalevery rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be usedby this or that will at its discretion; instead he must in all his actions, whetherdirected to himself or also to other rational beings, always be regarded at thesame time as an end’ (Kant 1997: 37). Admittedly, there is something of a gapbetween the dictates of the categorical imperative and Western history, butnevertheless the ethical importance of the Kantian position is that it pointsto autonomy in unity and to solidarity of actors treating one another as endsand never merely as means.

In their narrative implications at least the theological and ethical roots ofthe norms of unity and solidarity were but the shortest of steps away from thepolitical root: democracy. Democracy unifies humanity by formally counting

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each individual as equal with his or her peers regardless of differences, andthen by pulling those individuals together into a community in which theirfranchise counts and is counted. Yet this political form is only viable if eachand any individual is presumed to be able to identify with his or her fel-lows. Without that identification, and without the ability to put oneself inthe place of others irrespective of their social attributes, democratic formswould collapse in the face of pure and atomized individualism. Finkielkrautmakes the point well: ‘The democratic man who emerges . . . has lost his inno-cence but gained feelings. His sense of sympathy increases as his respect forhierarchy decreases: the less bedazzled the more tender; the less deferential,the more impressionable; the less obsequious, the more forgiving.’ Indeed:‘Under the influence of this new form of coexistence – of the rising equalityof conditions – one’s fellow man becomes everybody and anybody, even ifhe is a foreigner or an enemy’ (Finkielkraut 2001: 20–1).

It would be foolish to pretend that these norms have been upheld with gleeand straightforward acceptance. But it would be equally wrong to dismissthem purely because they are so out of kilter with historical events. They areso deeply embedded in the Western sensibility that they are pre-hermeneuticin as far as they have come to possess a foundational status. However, theclaim that they are pre-hermeneutic is not to say that they possess a privilegedidentity with some precognitive transcendental object (although neither isthat possibility being denied; for the purposes of this chapter the questionof identity is besides the point). Rather, a claim of a different order is beingmade. These norms are pre-hermeneutic to the extent that they have becomeconditions of the possibility of the Western imaginary itself. An imaginary isthe way in which ‘people imagine their social existence, how they fit togetherwith others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expecta-tions that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and imagesthat underlie these expectations’ (Taylor 2004: 23).

As such the paradox that needs to be explored is this: If the norms ofhuman unity and solidarity are pre-hermeneutic and accepted without a sec-ond thought, how is it possible for men and women to so accept them and yetremain prepared to live in the conditions of their practical denial and repu-diation? If unity and solidarity are fundamental to the Western imaginary,how is it also that the Western imaginary is able to come to terms with prac-tical demonstrations of their weakness? If the norms are pre-hermeneutictools that make thought possible, how can thought – and for that matteraction – continue when those tools are seen to be broken on a more or lessdaily basis?

These are neither philosophical nor abstract questions. They are essentiallysociological, and this chapter is an attempt to come to terms with them. Thechapter has two substantive parts. In the first section, it will be argued that thesemantic shift from imperialism to globalization signifies a transformationin the self-understanding and what might be called the ‘group charisma’ of

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the West. This transformation has been of such a magnitude that the West isno longer possessed of any group charisma or, indeed, metaphysical depth. Itlives by excess alone. The second part of the chapter contends that the evacu-ation of the meaning of the West results in the adoption of a sensibility that isoriented around limitation, and therefore in the emergence of communitiesand selves that identify themselves first and foremost as victims. In this wayit is possible to bring together the two series of circles. The series in the atlasbecomes a story of Western expansion, and the story of the imaginary seriesbecomes one about the sense of Western limitation and victimhood. More-over, as the axis of action and agency of the first series shifts from the West tothe formerly repressed, so Western attention to the imaginary second seriesof circles (the series of war deaths) is likely to diminish. Put another way, itis likely that those parts of the world that are imaginatively, materially andinstitutionally the best equipped and resourced to be able to put the normsof unity and solidarity into effect are precisely those that are least likely todo so.

The Western excess

Once upon a time it was contended that the forces of imperialism were pullingthe world together, but now the organizing principle is called globalization.The speed of the shift is illustrated rather well in the work of Zygmunt Bau-man. In 1998 he published a book called, simply, Globalization (Bauman1998), but nine years earlier when Bauman tried to conceptualize the emer-gence of what he then called ‘inter-state space’, the word ‘globalization’ neverappeared (Bauman 1989), although admittedly neither did he talk aboutimperialism. This is not simply the result of linguistic failure on the part ofone commentator (here Bauman’s work is being used solely to make a point).Rather the failure of the word ‘globalization’ evidently to cross Bauman’smind in 1989, although he published a book about it in 1998, signifies arapid and still unravelling shift in the conditions of the Western understand-ing of both itself and its place in the world. In retrospect it looks as if the 1989reference to ‘inter-state space’ points to a paper that was written either toolate (because it did not talk about imperialism) or too early (because neitherdid it talk about globalization).

With its ‘ism’ suffix, the word ‘imperialism’ implies an act or practice thatis consciously and deliberately carried out. As such ‘imperialism’ means thepolicy and practice of the construction and maintenance of an empire. Impe-rialism is an action in the world, and also then a subordination of the worldto a design that is imposed upon it and which would be lacking without thatimposition. Specifically, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centurythe West was the home of the imperial powers because it was also the power-house of the world. The West had the ability, opportunity and the motivationto subordinate the rest of the world to its designs. Obviously the ‘West’ was

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not a monolith, but there was little questioning of the project. Imperialismwas accepted and only German or French or British or Russian imperialismwas condemned. The ‘West’ was pulled together and constituted as a kindof community by the commonality of imagination, experience and expec-tation as opposed to alliances between states, and its motivation was theattempt to order the world according to predominantly material interestsand designs that emphasized foundational universal norms over and abovewhat became the merely contingent and particular (and therefore implicitlylacking in what the Western imperialists proclaimed that only they couldprovide).

Meanwhile, with its root suffix ‘ize’, globalization implies a process ofbecoming. Globalization is about how the world is changing. From this itfollows that globalization is a word that describes a process that is takingplace regardless of any given agent or agency. Imperialism is about what isdone, and globalization is about what is happening. The first word impliesresponsibility (a responsibility that rebounded on the old imperial powersin the shape of struggles for post-colonial emancipation), whereas the sec-ond word suggests something amounting to a flight from responsibility, andtherefore a flight from any sense that to be human is to strive to be differentto what must be.

Why has the terminology changed? Perhaps part of the answer is amnesia,and perhaps another part is simply fashion and opportunism, but arguablythere is more than either of those tendencies going on beneath the surface.The move from talk about imperialism to globalization intimates quite dif-ferent ways of seeing the world and, more significantly, different ways inwhich the erstwhile actors of the world understand their position within it.As soon as that point is realized and appreciated, the shift in words becomesextremely interesting, and what comes to the fore is a loss of confidence and,to make the point somewhat larger, even a sense of emptiness. However inde-fensible and immoral it was (an immorality that was glimpsed so early byKant), and without wishing to defend it, there can be no doubt that impe-rialism was only possible because the actors of the policy were extremelyself-assured about their ability to go out into the world and pull it undertheir dominion. That confidence came from a combination of economic andindustrial might, military strength and a social imaginary that identified theworld as an empty place of frontiers, behind which untold riches might befound and into which endless expansion would be possible. It was predicatedupon the sense that the world and its contents were possessed of no worthapart from that which imperialism itself imposed. The world was imaginedas simply being ‘there’, waiting to be used. The world was empty, and theimperialists were full of their own assurance.

Globalization is different. Instead of confidence and ambition, it regis-ters precariousness and risk. Content comes from anxiety, maybe even fearand blind panic. Globalization is a process that seems to be outside of any

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controlling agency, and which reveals to be mere hubris the claim of insti-tutions and leaders that they are in control. In these terms perhaps TonyBlair is the exemplary representative of the sensibility that is associated withglobalization. Whenever he talks about it he always makes it clear that glob-alization is a process to which we must accommodate ourselves, because it isgoing to carry on regardless of our intentions or actions. For him all we canpossibly do is protect ourselves from globalization’s worst ravages and, bymaking ourselves flexible, we might even maximize the chances that we willbe among the winners. As Blair put it in a Newsweek article: ‘Complainingabout globalization is as pointless as trying to turn back the tide.’ Just likethe incoming tide, globalization is a naturalized process about which noth-ing can be done even by the most powerful social forces, and Blair impliesthat complaint is a sign of weakness and loss of nerve: ‘There are, I notice,no such debates in China. They are not worrying about potential threats butare busy seizing the opportunities in ways that are transforming their societyand ours as well. So, too, are the other emerging economies in Asia and SouthAmerica’ (Blair 2006).

As such, whereas imperialism presumed that the imperial power was insome way above or apart from what was to be subjected to the imperial project(the old British imperialists would never have imagined it possible that Chinacould change British society, except through the provision of tea), globaliza-tion assumes that everyone is in the same world together, and that all areactual or potential victims of this process that is beyond the available con-trolling powers. As Blair suggests when he remarks that China is changingBritish society, in the conditions of globalization everyone is equally inter-dependent. But the equality might be lost if one proves oneself to be morecomplaining and less forward-looking than one’s competitors. For Blair asan exemplary figure of globalization, the point is not to question the worldbut, simply, to flourish within the narrow terms of material competitionand competitiveness that it venerates. Blair demonstrates the narrowness ofthis hegemonic (because backed by institutional and economic power) per-spective on globalization, albeit almost certainly despite himself, when hecomments that: ‘Success will go to those companies and countries whichare swift to adapt, slow to complain, open and willing to change. The taskof modern governments is to ensure that our countries can rise to this chal-lenge’ (Blair 2006). It is not necessary to scratch too deeply to find the anxietyin that bald statement, nor indeed an abdication of power and responsi-bility because companies are made equivalent to – and yet distinct from –countries (and Blair’s comment only makes sense if ‘countries’ are in turnidentified with nation states). Blair is worried that globalization will makevictims out of those who are unwilling to adapt (hence his political leitmotifof modernization).

The shift from imperialism to globalization reflects a change in powerbalances between the West and the rest of the world. Imperialism was the

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confidence that the West was all-powerful and indeed possessed of an imag-inary that gave it meaning, while globalization reflects a situation in whichthat Western hegemony has been undermined by the increasing economic,military and technological might of what were previously taken to be littlemore than empty spaces to be expanded into and exploited at will and with-out counting the locals as anything more than obstacles or sources of verycheap labour. Blair gestured towards this realization in his comment aboutChina, Asia and South America. He nonchalantly gave them the integrityand independence that imperialism denied. Consequently perhaps it is notat all far-fetched to define globalization as the return or even the revengeof the repressed of imperialism, and as the attempt by the former agents ofimperialism to come to terms with having to compete with those who wereonce simply counted as nothing.

The problem is that those Western nations that were once the agents of aprocess of their own making have constructed their individual and collective(national and Western) group charisma around traditions and commemo-rations of their dominance, yet these traditions and commemorations nolonger have a single meaning and are, instead, contested by the rise of theonce repressed. Here, the phrase ‘group charisma’ refers to the ‘bonds of iden-tification of individuals with their group and their participation by proxy inthe collective attributes’ (Elias and Scotson 1994: 103). Group charisma canbe understood as the expression of, and commitment to, the categories ofthe social imaginary. The imaginary creates the imagined world, and thegroup charisma creates affiliation to it. The imaginary can be thought ofas the form, and group charisma as the content. By this definition, it isthrough a sense of the unique quality of the group (a uniqueness that is iter-ated through history and frequently spatially; hence racism is an expressionof an attempt to shore up historically validated group charisma in circum-stances of spatial polymorphism) that individuals (either nations or persons)actively identify themselves as ‘Western’ and connect with the memories ofthe ‘West’. For those individuals that remain tightly connected to historicalmemory (through institutions or spatial immobility), the West is likely tobe associated with values of a civilizing mission (a mission that can be eithermilitary or ethical; it is noticeable that this sensibility is especially prominentin the United States and the United Kingdom, two of the Western nationswith the most clearly defined spatial boundaries), whereas for other individ-uals, whose social situation is more polymorphic, the category of the West ismore likely to occasion meaninglessness. This latter group is in the increasingmajority, and ironically better connected to the dominant version of global-ization that is associated with the likes of Blair than he is himself when heassociates with the vestiges of a civilizing mission (for example through theonce much vaunted humanitarian foreign policy). To put the matter moresimply: the West is haunted by memories of empire that are without hege-monic contemporary foundation, yet without those memories the West is

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possessed of no positive content. Inevitably Blair makes the point well, andthrows the baby of the West out with the bathwater of the past when hesays that: ‘the new world we now find ourselves inhabiting is indifferent totradition and past reputations, unforgiving of frailty and ignorant of customand practice’ (Blair 2006). The Western imaginary, and the principle of dom-inance which is the historical form of the constituency of the West, is outof kilter with the hegemonic sensibility of globalization, and something hasto give.

What has to give is the memory of former hegemony. Yet paradoxically itis precisely the fact that hegemony is no more that is the explanation of whyits memory is so very attractive. The lesson that the naturalizers of globaliza-tion wish to have drawn from the recognition of the new world is that it isnecessary to stop looking to the past for certainty and instead to confront thepresent with a lean and hard nose, all the better to thrive within the future.In this way, the globalizers magnify the loss of group charisma, and thereis reason to suggest that they cause long-imprisoned genies to be released.Indeed, it is noticeable that something very odd begins to happen. The pro-tagonists of globalization would claim that they are the agents of the rapidand purposeful modernization of the world, and yet aspects of the socialrelationships that ensue from the version of globalization that they makehegemonic are remarkably reminiscent of the understandings of witchcraftthat anthropologists discovered in very traditional societies. Mary Douglasnotes of traditional African groups that: ‘Small competitive communitiestend to believe themselves in a dangerous universe, threatened by sinisterpowers operated by fellow human beings. Instead of prayer, fasting and sac-rifice to the deity, ritual activity is devoted to witch hunting, witch-cleansing,witch-killing and curing them from the effects of witchcraft’ (Douglas 1973:137). Now, globalization makes formerly large imaginaries small through jux-taposition and moreover it puts all communities into competition with oneanother. Consequently, if this anthropological insight can be generalized itought to be possible to identify in the West variations on the theme of fearsabout witchcraft. It ought to be possible to identify a belief in a ‘sinisterpower operated by humans’, and it ought also to be possible to see attemptsto extirpate the latter-day witches through their identification as outsidersand maybe even their annihilation (and certainly their criminalization), asopposed to any attempt to reconstruct or reconfigure a Western imaginaryaround any positive identification with them. By this argument, it oughtto be possible to see a West that defines itself through ‘doing something’(making ‘something happen’), rather than through ‘being something’. Such‘doing something’ is nothing more than a vestigial attempt to maintain a pre-tence of Western activism despite all of the other senses and experiences ofglobalization, and it has the distinct advantage of pushing aside all the ques-tions of group charisma that would be raised – and could not be answered –if an attempt were made to ‘be something’.

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What is interesting is that it is possible to see in the West in the conditionsof globalization exactly what the discoveries of anthropology would lead oneto expect. The witches of globalization appeared to the West on 9/11. As theAustralian sociologist John Carroll asks in his provocative but eye-openingreflections on the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attempts by theWest to come to terms with this deliberate act (that did not ‘just happen’like globalization ‘just happens’): ‘Who, or what, had done this? One man,shown alone on horseback, riding through the wastes of Afghanistan, tall andhandsome, with clear skin and full lips, sun-tempered, with a mocking smileand invincible aura, nonchalantly looking the West and all its might straightin the eye’ (Carroll 2004: 255). That passage is meant to bring to mind thehero of movies set in America’s ‘Wild West’, because Carroll’s point is thatOsama bin Laden, to whom he is of course referring, is nothing less thanthe West’s ‘nightmare from within’, constructed by the West to a significantdegree according to its own cultural typologies (Carroll 2004: 255). Indeed,Carroll makes the intriguing observation that before 9/11 the name Osamabin Laden was more often spelt Usama bin Laden by the Western media, yetafter 9/11 there was a subtle and significant shift: ‘The opening three let-ters had understandably spooked America. To the elites – intellectual, media,corporate and political – it was vital that the man who had done this wasan outsider, an alien personification of evil’ (Carroll 2004: 256). Osama binLaden became the sinister power of the dangerous universe of globalization,and the activity that was – and continues to be – directed towards him isprecisely what Mary Douglas would expect: the cleansing of the endangeredcommunity of the traces of evil (witness the introduction of anti-terroristlegislation), killing (witness the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq)and curing (witness the attempts by Western governments to bolster thevoices of ‘moderate Islam’).

But the parallel between traditional African societies and the West in thecontext of globalization goes even further. Douglas says that the external-ization of evil is also a way of avoiding having to pray on account of one’sown culpability, or of making sacrifices to the deity. Those kinds of prac-tices involve attempts to make reparation or pay penance, but a belief inwitchcraft means that responsibility need never be confronted because thesource of evil is pushed away from the self. This is a move that Carroll rightlyrejects. He says that the deeper metaphysical meaning of 9/11 was an attackon Western values that, precisely because those values were shown to beempty and meaningless, can never be confronted by the West itself. Accord-ing to Carroll, Western practice has contradicted the foundational Westernvalues. Carroll turns to the ancient Greek virtue of sophrosune, which stressedmoderation and an avoidance of excess, and argues that this is precisely thetruth that the West has transgressed over the past five centuries or so (Carroll2002: 14). Western culture has abandoned any commitment to moderationin favour of an embrace of a material excess which distracts from the hard

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questions and praises the superficial, the showy and the safe: ‘This is a culturethat has managed to remain standing by encapsulating itself in the packagetour through life’ (Carroll 2002: 18). The Twin Towers themselves symbol-ized the cult of excess, and in a decidedly backhanded compliment Carrollsees them as: ‘A symbol of the heights reached by industrial civilization,they presided over its achievement. One could have dreamed them, whenapproaching New York by plane or boat from certain angles, or by camera, asa metaphysical gateway’ (Carroll 2002: 19). They were a gateway to a culturethat had forgotten the virtue of sophrosune and, were they still standing, theywould also be a gateway to a globalization that emphasizes and acknowl-edges only the material excess that ensues from economic competitiveness,over and above any other human pursuit (here it is worth thinking about thecurrently hegemonic arguments about the role and purpose of the univer-sity, in which liberal ideals have been sacrificed to the alleged needs of theeconomy).

For Carroll, bin Laden symbolizes the revenge of sophrosume on a West thathas lost its metaphysical moorings in the chase of excess. Consequently heappears in a guise that is particularly haunting, and especially attuned to theghosts that lurk in the recesses of Western culture. Carroll says that bin Ladenhas ‘an aura that is alien while, at the same time, familiar’. He continues:‘His smile is Satanic, while seductively mysterious. His Semitic features, hisfree, long, black hair, and his doleful expression, awaken in many a Westernpsyche its own iconic memory of the Jesus face . . . The Antichrist comes withconfronting, nightmare familiarity’ (Carroll 2002: 41). It is clear that thehegemonic Western response to this witch in the form of the Antichrist hasbeen excessively materialistic and has contained little or no sense of balanceor, to gesture back to the anthropological terms of Mary Douglas, no sense ofthe sacrifice of the irreplaceable. Even the willingness of the West to soak upmilitary casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan until ‘the job is done’ reveals thatthe normative values of unity and solidarity have become practically emptyto such an extent that they can accommodate torture and killing (Tester2005). Yet the excessive wars that have followed in the wake of the attackon the Twin Towers ostensibly have been fought in the name of just thosenorms.

If Carroll is right, the material, human and ethical excess of the wars showsthat nothing has been learnt from the appearance of bin Laden as the West’sAntichrist or witch. Carroll says that: ‘Usama bin Laden cannot be answeredby the . . . doctrines of universal human values, and the inalienable right tothe pursuit of happiness . . . Altogether, we have been plunged into a sea ofdifficulty utterly beyond our conception. Our preparation could not havebeen worse – a half-century Golden Age of comfortable, oblivious excess’(Carroll 2002: 98). Carroll’s work is a call to the West, and he asks that itaccept its own role in the creation of its demons: ‘We are all responsible. Wehave drunk in the excess and indulged in the comfort’ (Carroll 2002: 99).

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Yet the implication of the hegemonic version of globalization is that theWest’s preparedness is going to get even worse, since the ruins of groupcharisma are linked only to individualizing economic wealth creation, andtherefore to consumption and, ultimately, to excess itself. The challenge thatis symbolized by the figure of bin Laden riding his white horse across the plainis being met in precisely the wrong way in both military terms and in terms ofany chance of a reconstitution of group charisma for men and women after9/11. These are men and women who look at a world that cultural mem-ory tells them was once their playground, but competitive globalization tellsthem is instead incredibly dangerous.

Limits and victims

Whereas imperialism was based upon a possibility of expansion, globalizationis the lesson to the formerly expansive that they are limited. In this way, inaddition to the devastation of its group charisma, globalization also forcesthe West to come face to face with aspects of the human condition of beingin the world that were submerged in the buoyancy of imperialism, and whichwere pushed to one side (only however to remain whispering insistently inthe wings) by the pursuit of excess.

Arne Johan Vetlesen identifies ‘certain given, irremovable, and hence non-optional conditions of human being-in-the-world – namely, dependency,vulnerability, mortality, the frailty of interpersonal relationships, and exis-tential loneliness’ (Vetlesen 2005: 10). These conditions are inescapableprecisely because to be human is inevitably to be in the world first of allwith others and, second, as an embodied being. The point of being humanis that no individual or community is entirely sufficient unto itself or alonein the world, and therefore what Vetlesen identifies as non-optional condi-tions all emphasize the boundaries and limits that necessarily ensue from thepresence of others and physical embodiment. We (as individuals and groups)are limited in our actions by our interdependency with others; we are vulnera-ble because our existential and even physical well-being is dependent uponothers over whom we only have a limited control at best (hence the socialcentrality of the problem of the management of the action of others, andthe concern to render their action predictable); we are mortal because we areembodied; our interpersonal relationships are frail because they are always tosome degree contingent, and not least they are rendered more or less doubtfulbecause of the mortality of the other; and we are existentially alone since ourdependency upon others means that we possess no self-knowledge withoutthem, and yet upon them ultimately we cannot depend.

In Vetlesen’s own work, these non-optional conditions are used to providea foundation for an analysis of the perpetration of evil. He contends that evilis an attempt to negate or transcend the boundaries and limits that the con-ditions imply, and he argues that evil-doing is a kind of action ‘that is carried

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out in the form of a protest against such givens; recognizing their realness forothers . . . but denying their realness for oneself’ (Vetlesen 2005: 10). Evil thenconsists in hurting others against their interests in order to assert that the lim-itations that one imposes upon those others do not apply to oneself (Vetlesen2005: 223). Through this argument it is possible to explain the extraordinaryviolence that was so often involved in the imperial projects. It can be under-stood as an attempt to transcend local limitations on empire building, sincelocal resistance proved that the world was not an empty space but rather thatit was – and of course remains – populated by different groups that requiredto be counted as something (to recall Kant’s phrase), precisely and simplybecause they were in the way of unrestricted expansion. The mere presenceof others, and most certainly their independent action, is a limitation and abinding of any designs that might be imposed upon them, and therefore theybecome at once an obstacle to be overcome and, perhaps more importantly,an existential challenge that needs to be transcended. From this it followsthat the more of a challenge that the locals presented to the imperial project(and it could have been through conflict or extreme cultural difference), themore likely they were to be subjected to acts of evil-doing.

This approach opens up one connection between the two series of circlesthat were mentioned at the very beginning of this essay. There was the seriesin the atlas that showed the world getting smaller and the imaginary seriesthat showed the increasing number of war dead. An application of Vetlesen’sapproach would lead to the conclusion that the number of dead grows inquantity – and indeed the quality of the deaths becomes increasingly asso-ciated with acts of evil-doing – precisely as the limits and boundaries thatothers impose become more and more inescapable to those for whom theworld is becoming smaller. What the killers are therefore doing is not somuch exterminating potentially social, but certainly physical, neighbours,as they are struggling to prove, primarily to themselves, that the constraintsof human being in the world do not apply to them in the way that theyapply to the victims. In turn, this means that the killers can believe them-selves to be morally superior to their victims, and most certainly possessedof a greater humanity than them, precisely as the quantity and quality of thekilling is exacerbated. To paraphrase the point: We kill, therefore we are ableto transcend our limitations; you can be killed, therefore you are incapable oftranscending your limits and you deserve to die because you are inferior to usand of a lesser humanity. At its starkest and most simple, historically this isone of the practical consequences of the group charisma of the West, at leastin its dealings with the rest of the world. But it is important to note that thiskilling neither reflects nor expresses some ‘deep-seated urges’. It is an entirelysocial and existential action that is contingent upon social relationships.

Vetlesen’s argument is intriguing and offers one of the most insightfulways of understanding recent, Holocaust and indeed post-Holocaust, evil-doing. But another dimension can be added to his approach. What Vetlesen

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emphasizes is how the attempt to transcend the limitations of human beingin the world results in the annihilation of others. This argument can beextended to inform the thesis that it is precisely through violence that asense of charisma can be reinforced, reiterated and, for that matter, imposedupon a group’s current and future members (if only through a legacy of mem-ories of collective and original guilt) on the part of a group that is otherwiseonly experienced through its boundedness and vulnerability (with the initialgroup identity coming from memories of charisma). By this argument glob-alization implies an increase in evil-doing, precisely because it forces groupsto deal with the presence of others. Where group charisma is naturalizedthrough intimations of ethnicity or insurmountable cultural difference, orwhere it is identified with definite places, it is likely that acts of evil-doingwill ensue and be justified by some rhetoric of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or defence ofthe spaces that are supposedly imperilled by ‘swamping’ or an uncontrolled‘influx’ of immigrants. But this is only part of the story. It is also reason-able to propose that where the group charisma has been weakened througheconomic competition and the ‘package tour through life’ that is associatedwith the pursuit of material excess to the exclusion of any other values, thenprotest against the enforced confrontation with the non-optional givens ismore likely to lead to a sense of victimhood. This version of protest – theprotest of the victims – will take the form of an attempt to turn away fromthe limiting world and will involve, instead, a turn to the care of the self (butironically this will be a self that has been evacuated of content by the pur-suit of excess, and therefore the care will involve surrounding the self withsymbols and attributions of self-hood).

When Mary Douglas says that witchcraft beliefs are dominant in socialgroups that identify themselves as small and in competition with others, andwhen she says that witchcraft consists in the belief on the part of these com-munities that they are under the influence of powers manipulated by otherhumans (Douglas 1973: 137), she is also saying that witchcraft involves asense of victimhood. Moreover, if the argument of this chapter is accepted,and a connection is made between the social context of witchcraft beliefs andthe condition of globalization, then it can also be contended that globaliza-tion leads to senses of victimhood on the part of a West that has historicalmemories of expansion but is now forced to recognize its limits, limitationsand essential boundedness. The West has become a victim to the extent thatit has suffered a loss of the contemporary plausibility of its historical imagi-nary. Furthermore, individuals in the West experience themselves as victims,because group charisma has collapsed and they are left alone, without com-plete confidence in the distractions of excess (even as excess is pursued, since9/11 it is always with a sense of desperation and of the need to stay onestep ahead of the revelation of the metaphysical emptiness of this way oflife). They experience themselves as sacrifices to forces that are out of control(think back to Blair’s remarks about globalization. He seeks not to control

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but to win a game that generates its own rules), and therefore their concernis simply to survive or ‘get by’.

The oddity of the link between traditional African social groups and theexcessively materialistic communities and individuals of globalization isthrown into relief if Douglas’s remarks about witchcraft are compared witha comment that was made by Christopher Lasch, when he was looking withtypical keenness at America at the beginning of the 1980s:

We think of ourselves both as survivors and as victims or potential victims.The growing belief that we are all victimized, in one way or another, byevents beyond our control owes much of its power not just to the generalfeeling that we live in a dangerous world dominated by large organizationsbut to the memory of specific events in twentieth-century history thathave victimized people on a mass scale. (Lasch 1984: 66)

The idea of the dangerous world is the same in both of these accounts,and the inchoate ‘sinister forces’ to which Douglas refers have been replacedwith the faceless and mysterious ‘large organizations’ to which Lasch drawsattention (and Kafka bequeathed to the West the principle that large organiza-tions can be very sinister). The difference is of course that Lasch also stressesthe importance to the sense of victimhood and survival of the mass hor-rors of the twentieth century. These were horrors that played no small partin gutting the group charisma of the West of its sense of moral superiority,so that there was no core that could withstand the ravages of globalizationand its celebration of the economic alone, or provide a compelling riposteto attacks on Western memories of its own supposedly superior imperialhumanity.

If one is a victim, the fact of one’s continued material presence is proofthat one is also a survivor. Yet if some of Christopher Lasch’s contentions areexpanded, the valorization of survival means nothing less than an attenu-ation of the feeling that the world is a place of limitations that have to beendured or avoided, as opposed to a place that is open to human action. Sim-ilarly, the stress on survival means that individuals (and the point can alsobe applied to groups) derive their moral value not from what they have doneor what they might aspire to do, but from the simple fact that they are stillaround and have got through the latest struggle. From this no strength orfortitude can be drawn, and there can never be rest, because a new strugglemight always appear, and its nature might be one that has never been experi-enced before. Once again, the past becomes but a pale memory and it makesthe present even more confusing: ‘The survivor cannot afford to linger verylong in the past, lest he envy the dead. He keeps his eyes fixed on the roadjust in front of him. He shores up fragments against his ruin. His life consistsof isolated acts and events. It has no story’ (Lasch 1984: 96). The narrative ofhuman endeavour becomes retrospective, and not at all prospective. There

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can be no prospect because the world is not conceived as open to change. Allconfidence has gone and all that remain are limits. As Lasch puts it:

One reason people no longer see themselves as the subject of a narrativeis that they no longer see themselves as subjects at all but rather as thevictims of circumstances; and this feeling of being acted on by uncontrol-lable external forces prompts . . . a withdrawal from the beleaguered selfinto the person of a detached, bemused, ironic observer. (Lasch 1984: 96)

This is the implication for individuals of living in a small community in thethreatening condition of globalization. They become observers, onlookers,bystanders, and not actors. They will not sacrifice themselves because theyalready see themselves as sacrificial victims who, by some quirk of fate andwell-found ruins, have had the fortune to survive.

Where there is redemption only through excess not piety (and of course theidentification of globalization with economic flourishing is predicated uponexcess), where limits contradict an imaginary that stresses expansion, thenthe protest against what Vetlesen calls the non-optional conditions of humanbeing in the world takes the form of a flight to the sanctuary of the cared-forself, and that care consists in protection through the use of things to create atonce a symbolization of self-hood and a barrier against the world. It leads toa withdrawal from the world and therefore from potential neighbours. Theseneighbours, who of course act as limits and boundaries on dreams of expan-sion, are subjected to strategies of avoidance rather than met with designs oftheir annihilation. After all, if we (individuals and groups alike) experienceourselves as victims and survivors in a harsh world, then the implication isthat we are not responsible for others since they might well be our victim-izers and the actors against whom we need to struggle to survive. Moreover,in these terms it is certainly the case that we are not responsible for whathappens to them, since at best it is only thanks to good fortune that it hasnot happened to us, and therefore our survival itself is not due to our ownqualities but only our better luck.

The meaning of the two series of circles is radically transformed. The firstseries, the series in the atlas which showed how the world had got smaller,stops telling a story about technological progress, and instead it becomes aseries of snapshots in the limitation of the possibility of expansion. This seriesconsequently becomes about boundedness and the inescapability of con-frontation with the non-optional limitations of human being in the world;the very limitations that Western imperialism sought to deny applied to theWest itself. Meanwhile the second series, the imaginary series of the num-ber of war casualties, stops telling a story about evil-doing, and instead itbecomes a retrospective caution that even though survival has been ensuredthus far, there is no guarantee that one will not become a victim in thefuture.

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If that is indeed the case it raises a question about how the war dead arelikely to be seen and encountered by the West. The implication of this analy-sis is that the war dead will be seen as either extremely unfortunate, deservingof their fate in some way, or as the occasion of an ironic shrug of the shoul-ders and the declaration that ‘this is just the way things are’. In these terms,it is possible to see one more aspect of the contemporary appeal of assertionsthat violence is the product of ‘deep-seated natural urges’. If the bloodshedis inevitable, then we ought to count ourselves lucky and, indeed, it is notour responsibility to help or pay heed since, by virtue of our writing booksinstead of killing neighbours, we are obviously more restrained than ‘them’even though we might do the same as ‘them’ in certain circumstances. More-over, this Western regard upon the victims will be carried out by detachedobservers who identify themselves too as victims of a world that makes nosense, and who just happen not to have been killed yet. The Western regardwill emphasize survival of the lucky, not the fate of the unlucky. Conse-quently, attempts will be made to defend the self against the world, and todefend the nation against the ravages of globalization, through an increas-ingly frantic participation in excess since that offers the chance of avoidingconfrontation with the limitations of human being in the world. Excess willbe pursued according to a promise of exemption.

Zygmunt Bauman has noted that ‘it has been precisely in that unprece-dentedly secure and comfortable part of the world – in Europe and its formerdominions . . . as well as in a few other “developed countries” with a Euro-pean connection . . . that the addiction to fear and the securitarian obsessionhave made their most spectacular careers in the recent years’ (Bauman 2006:129–30). He sees the paradox that ‘it is the people who live in the greatestcomfort on record, more cosseted and pampered than any other people inhistory, who feel more inclined to panic . . . than people in most other soci-eties past and present’ (Bauman 2006: 130). What he failed to add was thatthese are also the people who feel themselves to be the greatest victims ofglobalization and yet also the greatest survivors. The West is populated bynations and individuals without moorings, who have retreated to the self,and who seek only to survive a world that is so limited and limiting thatmaterial and existential protectors are at once necessary, endangered andall that remain. In these terms, a juxtaposition of the two series of circlesis taken as proof that as the world has become smaller it has become morethreatening, and that the ‘package tour through life’ at least offers some kindof certainty – until the next 9/11 anyway.

Conclusion

The solutions to this situation are extremely easy to identify. First, what isneeded is a metaphysical awakening in the West in which human respon-sibility will be embraced and excess repudiated in favour of a new ethic of

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moderation and seriousness. Second, what is needed is the construction of anew global imaginary that will build on norms and values of human unityand solidarity in a truly neighbourly manner and that denies succour to anyparticularism. This imaginary would offer the chance of the constructionof a truly human and universal group charisma. Third, what is needed isthe establishment of global institutions and civil society that will pull glob-alization within the ambit of purposive control and hold it to account forits human consequences. At which point it is vitally necessary to remem-ber something that George Orwell wrote about H.G. Wells’s plan to bringglobal peace through the establishment of a world state: ‘All sensible menfor decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wellssays; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no dis-position to sacrifice themselves’ (Orwell 1984: 195). That remark ought tobe borne in mind by any and every intellectual who ever makes a statementabout ‘what is needed’. It might be indubitably true that certain things areneeded, but the wish will not bring them about.

A more pertinent conclusion is to return to the claim that was made atthe beginning of this chapter, that if the two series of circles are broughttogether it is possible to identify a paradox. At the beginning the paradoxwas identified as one in which men and women become enthusiastic killersof one another the more they become neighbours, but as the chapter hasprogressed it is possible also to see the paradox that the more that a formerlyexpansionist imaginary and group charisma is pulled into the condition ofglobalization the more it confronts its limits and the more it leads to nar-row horizons within which the death of others proves that we are all victimsor survivors nowadays. Consequently, it is possible to talk about somethingmore than a simple paradox. It becomes possible to talk about a terminal para-dox. The phrase is from Milan Kundera, and a terminal paradox exists whena situation emerges in which contradictions that are absurd or contradictoryalso dominate and prevail (Kundera 1988: 10). In these terms, the paradoxesthat have been outlined in this chapter are indeed terminal. It is only wishfulthinking that says that they can be overcome through the universal practicalacceptance of the seminar room ‘what is needed’ (wishful thinking that doesnot at all approach the stature of a hope against hope).

But the identification of a terminal paradox does not mean that the situ-ation has to be accepted as given, and neither is it beyond critical questioning.Yet neither is it appropriate to exempt critical thought from the paradox andto see it as the magical solution that comes from outside, since to do thatwould be to set it over and above the contradictory and absurd situations inwhich men and women find themselves in the conditions of globalization.Rather the task is for critical thought to be situated firmly in the terminalparadox, and to use norms and values on the one hand, and actuality onthe other, as levers, one against the other, in order to make a question ofeach. In this way the norms of human unity and solidarity can be rescued

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from any pre-hermeneutic embrace and they can become inspirations. Theycan become ambitions to be achieved as opposed to foundations that havebeen lost. Humanity and human being can become goals to which to aspireand not facts. Meanwhile, actuality can become a question to be addressedrather than a nature to be accepted. Such a questioning spirit, if it is given thechance, can pull men and women out of their limitation, create an endlessconversation and ultimately open up the possibility of a distinctively humanaction in the world. Can . . .

References

Bauman, Z. (1989) ‘Sociological Responses to Postmodernity’, Thesis Eleven, no. 23:35–63.

Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: the Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear, Cambridge: Polity.Blair, T. (2006) ‘Europe is Falling Behind’, Newsweek, issues 2006. Available at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11020913.Carroll, J. (2002) Terror: a Meditation on the Meaning of September 11, Melbourne: Scribe.Carroll, J. (2004) The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, Melbourne: Scribe.Douglas, M. (1973) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, Harmondsworth:

Penguin.Elias, N. and Scotson J. (1994) The Established and the Outsiders: a Sociological Enquiry

into Community Problems, 2nd edn, London: Sage.Finkielkraut, A. (2001) In the Name of Humanity. Reflections on the Twentieth Century,

London: Pimlico.Gray, J. (2003) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, London: Granta.Gray, J. (2006) ‘Thinking out of the Box’, The Guardian Review, 5 August.John Paul II (1998) Faith and Reason. Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II, London:

Catholic Truth Society.Kant, I. (1991) Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Kant, I. (1997) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. M. Gregor,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kundera, M. (1988) The Art of the Novel, trans. L. Asher, London: Faber and Faber.Lasch, C. (1984) The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, New York:

W.W. Norton.Orwell, G. (1984) The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Smith, A. (1999) ‘Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: V – The New World:

Bartolomé de las Casas and “the Option for the Poor”’, New Blackfriars, no. 937,March: 119–27.

Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke University Press.Tester, K. (2005) ‘Reflections on the Abu Ghraib Photographs’, Journal of Human Rights,

4 (1): 137–43.Vetlesen A. J. (2005) Evil and Human Action: Understanding Collective Evildoing,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Abu Ghraib 89, 205, 211, 214, 215translators working in 200

Academics for Justice 235activist translators/interpreters 229–33Advancing American Art 155Afghanistan 6, 13, 57, 92, 122, 171,

188, 205Agamben, Giorgio 7, 52, 208

Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and BareLife 88–9, 100, 110

ahimhsa 50Al-Jazeera 12Americanization 244–5Anders, Günther 73anti-Semitism 73, 98–9apartheid 50, 58, 68Appadurai, Arjun 4–5Arendt, Hannah 7, 11

The Origins of Totalitarianism 109Arrojo, Rosemary 175asymmetric threats 5axis of evil 95Axis of Logic 234–5

Babels 229–30Badiou, Alain 56, 64Baker, Mona 186barbarism 75, 172bare life 7, 88, 89, 90, 106, 109,

110, 111see also mere life

Bassnett, Susan 199Batson v. Kentucky 201Bauman, Zygmunt 2, 11, 42, 73, 132

Globalization 30Beers, Charlotte 156, 163Behdad, Ali 202Benjamin, Walter 18, 47, 53, 72, 79–80

‘Critique of Violence’ 108–11dialectic of secularization 106–8divine violence 82educative violence 81‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ 108‘On the Concept of History’ 107

The Origin of German Tragic Drama 92‘The Task of the Translator’ 107Trauerspiel 104, 105

Berman, Paul, Terror and Liberalism 66betrayal 5, 64, 187, 204, 219Bhabha, Homi 19bilingualism 198, 202bin Laden, Osama 35–6, 45Blair, Tony 2, 32, 138–9, 145Blumenberg, Hans, Legitimacy of the

Modern Age 96, 97Blunkett, David 135, 137Boal, Iain 5body, translation to terror 59–62Boéri, Julie 230Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 16, 181Bredekamp, Horst 111Breton, André 92Buchanan, Allan 57Buck-Morss, Susan 11, 18Burke, Anthony 7Butler, Judith 7–8, 64

Card, Claudia 56Carroll, John 35–6causal emplotment 227–8Chandrasekaran, Rajiv 211, 214chaos 76, 172, 188, 211, 212Cheney, Dick 64, 129Cheney, Lynne 164Chesterman, Andrew 175, 190chosenness 99civil society 49Clair, Jean 92Clark, T.J. 5clash of civilizations 48, 61Clifford, James 19Cole, David 198collaborators 213, 216collective security 144Commonwealth 25community interpreting 177, 239conflict transformation 247–8conspiracy 123, 197, 198

255

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256 Index

conspiracy theory 147Coppola, Sophia, Lost in Translation

195cosmopolitan law 8, 86counter-terrorism 51, 53Cronin, Michael 15, 173–4cross-border terrorism 50, 53, 54cultural difference 222–4cultural diplomacy 152–65cultural exchange 172–3

equity in 180and political violence 179–84see also translation

Daily Telegraph, The 123, 129Debord, Guy 88democracy 28–9, 86, 142–4der Derian, James 19deregulation 12Derrida, Jacques

Politics of Friendship 67Specters of Marx 78–9views on 9/11 78

deterritorialization 99, 250Devetak, Richard 19diglossia 198, 199disciplinary narratives 226–7divine mandate 107, 109Douglas, Mary 34, 39Durkheim, Émile 60Dworkin, Ronald 6

economic globalization 145–6ECOS 229–30, 232Edmonds, Sibel 196Elshtain, Jean Bethke 58Enlightenment 28, 72–3ethical peace 57, 67ethics

of translation 184–8, 209of violence 81–2, 85

ethnic cleansing 4, 39, 58etymologies 47–8evil 10, 35, 37, 38–9, 52, 63exception 7, 90extermination camps 73, 89

failed states 3fatwa 45, 58–9fidelity 45–6, 64

linguistic 46Financial Times, The 123Fisher, Walter 225Fish, Stanley 63fixers 215–16Foucault, Michel 7, 47Fountain, Henry 203freedom fighters 95

Gandhi, Mahatma 50, 68García Canclini, Néstor 19Geneva Convention 6, 90genocide 4, 50, 171Glanz, James 199global immanence 11globalization 1–18, 25–44, 243–4

conceptualization of 244–7cultural 3economic 145–6inequality of 78negative 1, 2and security 248–52survivors 40–1and translation 14–18, 188–91vs imperialism 30–2

globalized democracy 84global spectacle 10–14global terrorism 5, 74, 76, 80,

83, 84global threat 135–48glorification of terrorism 51–3, 65governance 49, 136Grandin, Temple, Animals in Translation:

Using the Mysteries of Autism toDecode Animal Behavior 195

Great Terror 130Gregory, Derek 19Griemas, A.G. 64Gross, Raphael 99, 112group charisma 29–30, 33, 39Guantánamo 6, 47, 51, 53, 89,

128detention of Yasser Hamdi 202interrogations at 217military leadership at 218suicides at 122translators in 208, 211, 214, 216

Guardian, The 123, 139, 149Gully, Jennifer 201Gutt, Ernst-August 178

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Index 257

Habermas, Jürgen 8, 9, 48public sphere concept 133views on 9/11 77–8

habitus 181, 210Harrison, Patricia 156Hatim, Basil 180hegemonic liberalism 77Held, David 9

Democracy and the Global Order74

Hernandez v. New York 201Holocaust 38, 226Hughes, Christopher 19human bombs 60human rights 4

languages 46Hussein, Saddam 105–6hyperglobalization 245

identity cards 122, 200Ignatieff, Michael 83

The Lesser Evil. Political Ethics in an Ageof Terror 10

imperialism 30–1Inárritu, Alejandro González, Babel 195insecurity 1, 4, 5, 154, 243, 248, 250,

251institutionalized racism 67intelligent bombs 82interdependence 37, 250International Information Programs

157internationalization 245, 250international law 6, 8–9, 66, 73, 74, 80,

82, 86, 93–5, 97, 98, 99international security 8, 9, 141, 243,

245, 249, 252, 253international terrorism 74, 143interpreters 222–39

activist 229–33inter-state space 30intralingual translation 118Iraq 6, 35, 36, 122, 139, 143, 188

Coalition Provisional Authority211–12

Emerald City 211–14fixers 215–16

Iraq war 45, 72, 82, 89, 90, 105–6, 120,199–200

translators in 207–19

Islam 12–13martyrs in 102political 54, 62, 66

Islamophobia 62

Jazz Ambassadors Program 156jehad 45

truth productions 54–5Johnson, Catherine, Animals in

Translation: Using the Mysteries ofAutism to Decode Animal Behavior195

Jus Publicum Europaeum 93–4,98–101

role of US in ending 98

Kaldor, Mary 3Kant, Immanuel 8–9, 26, 28Kapitan, Tomis 67Kassimeris, George 142Katan, David 180Kierkegaard, Søren 47King, Martin Luther 136Kraus, Karl 107Krishnamurthy, Ramesh 133Kristy, Judith Kenigson 197Kundera, Milan 43

Laclau, Ernesto 61Lagouranis, Tony 215Lane-Mercier, Gillian 190language

national policy 203profiling 202racism in 202weaponization of 200

Lasch, Christopher 40law of oscillation 109League of Nations 8Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 102Levinas, Emmanuel 62–3,

208–9liberalization 2, 245Life magazine 153–4linguistic fidelity 46linguistic racism 202, 206Lockman, Zachary 197London bombings 141Luce, Henry 153–4Lyotard, Jean François 59

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258 Index

Macdonald, Robert 159Madrid bombings 17Mamdani, Mahmood 62Manningham-Buller, Eliza 141Mardan, Basim 200martyrs 92, 95, 101–3

Christianity 102–3Islam 102, 103tyrants as 103–6

Mason, Ian 180Matthews, Joseph 5media

globalization of information 251language of reporting 118–21role of 10–14use of terror expressions 124–5

mere life 88, 102, 109, 110see also bare life

meta narratives 226, 227Meyerowitz, Joel 152, 158, 159–62

After September 11 159–65militarism 83

failure of 76narcissistic 83

militaryneo-liberalism 5privatization of 250soldiers as translators 216–18

mistranslations 195–6mobility 4, 95Muller, Robert 239

Nancy, Jean-Luc 63narrative analysis 226–7narrative communities 225–9narratives

causal emplotment 227–8construction of 227–9disciplinary 226–7meta 226, 227particularity 228personal 226, 227, 233, 234, 240public 140, 225–6, 231, 233, 235,

237, 238selective appropriation 228temporality 227

National Association of JudiciaryInterpreters and Translators 197

national ethnos 4

national security 17, 67, 137, 143, 156,196, 203

National Security Council 154negative globalization 1, 2New York Times 199, 200, 203nihilism 56, 73, 83nine/eleven attacks 2, 6, 35, 72–3

After September 11 exhibition 159–65lessons from 79photography in communication of

155–9response of US to 76, 77

non-governmental organizations 249Nuzzo, Angelica 55

Observer, The 123, 127, 129Olympic Games 141–2

Padilla, José 202Pape, Robert A. 83Peterson, Erik, Monotheism as a Political

Problem 96–7phenomenology of terror 47photography 152–65

and American world view 153–5police bombing 100political Islam 54, 62, 66political theology 93–6

and secularization 96–8political violence 179–84, 243–4

and translation 188–91politics 48–9, 138–9

transformative 50Pollack, Sydney, The Interpreter 14, 195Powell, Colin 121–2, 163Pratt, Mary Louise 203Pred, Allan 19private military companies 250public diplomacy 157–8Pym, Anthony 186

Rabassa, Gregory, If This be Treason:Translation and its Discontents 195

racism 33, 58, 73, 201institutionalized 67linguistic 202, 206state 50

Rahman, Sheik Omar Abdel 196Raulff, Ulrich 111Reagan, Ronald 54

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Index 259

reign of terror 47, 130Retort 5revolution 78, 82Rice, Condoleezza 122, 141Ricoeur, Paul 65rogue states 73, 78, 82, 88, 98Romanticism 73Roth, Henry, Call it Sleep 198rule of law 27, 46–7, 50, 111Rumsfeld, Donald 122

Saar, Eric, analysis of Guantánamo217–18

Said, Edward 49Covering Islam 12–13on cultural difference 222–3

Schmitt, Carl 7, 72, 90, 218–19anti-Semitism of 98–9political theology 93–6Political Theology. Four Chapters on the

Concept of Sovereignty 93, 97Political Theology II: the Legend of the

Demolition of Political Theology 96,101

The Concept of the Political 93The Nomos of the Earth in the

International Law of the Jus PublicumEuropaeum 91, 93, 95, 97

Theory of the Partisan 91, 94, 95Schwankungsgesetz 109secularization 91, 92, 96–8

dialectic of 106–8security 243–4

and globalization 248–52international 8, 9, 141, 243, 245,

249, 252, 253national 17, 67, 137, 143, 156, 196,

203rhetoric of 142–4

security agenda 146Sekula, Alan 165Shared Values initiative 157Shock and Awe 130Shore, Marguerite 197Silton, Susan 200Simon, Sherry 180skopos theory 222slavery 80Smith–Mundt Act 154solidarity 27–8, 29

sovereign states 84, 85sovereignty 78sovereign as tyrant 103–6Spanish Inquisition 130spectacle

global 10–14Ground Zero 164public 135–8

state of exception 210state racism 50state terror 50

resistance to 222–39state as terrorist 89state transformation 247–8Steichen, Edward 155Stewart, Lynne 196Strauss, Leo 90stringers 199suicide bombers 59–62, 68, 88–91supraterritorialization 245survivors of globalization 40–1

terror 117, 118, 122–3, 130expressions used to describe 123lexical interpretation 127–8media use of term 124–5as premodifier 123–4

terror groups 124, 127terrorism 120, 172

cross-border 53global 74glorification of 51–3, 65international 74

terror laws 124terror suspects 125–6, 127terror warriors 63Tertullian 101texts of terror 45The Family of Man 155–6theology 27–8threats

asymmetric 5economic globalization 145–6global 135–48

Tilly, Charles 247Times, The 123Tlaxcala 230–1, 233–8Tobar, Héctor, Translation Nation 195torture 10, 214–15Townshend, Charles 137

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Traductores sen Fronteiras 230Traduttori per la Pace 230, 233translation 14–18, 45–64, 171–2

body 59–62consistency in 185–6domestication vs foreignization 199as domination practices 49, 50–1enabling role of 189–90enlarging contemporary concepts

173–9ethical issues 184–8, 207–19Eurocentricism of 176and globalization 14–18, 188–91intralingual 118linguistic fidelity 46memory beyond history 54–5non-Western words for 177and political violence 188–91transfer metaphor 175, 191and transgression 48–50as transgression practices 49, 55–8in war zones 218–19

translation errors 195–6translation universals 48translators 175, 182, 222–39

activist 229–33affective ties 198mistrust of 214–15neutrality of 186, 223task of 208–11training 186US soldiers as 216–18in war zones 207–19

treason 53tyrants 103–6

Unger, Roberto 63unilateralism 9United States 5–10

as nation state 5–6Patriot Act 6public diplomacy 157–8world view 153–5

United States Information Agency155–6

Venuti, Lawrence 15, 180Vetlesen, Arne Johan 37

victimhood 39, 40, 42violence 172

cultural 75diabolic 75–6, 86divine 47, 82, 86educative 81and ethics 72–86ethics of 81–2, 85globalized 1, 3, 5as global spectacle 10–14lawmaking 86law-preserving 86mobile 74natural 75political 179–84, 243–4public 92social productivity of 4

Voulgarakis, Georgios 141vulnerability 37

Wacquant, Loïc 16wars 117, 118, 130

contained 91, 99holy 95just 67, 97, 98–101language describing 118–21new 3–4, 74terror 58–9

war against terror 120war crimes 99war dead 38, 42war of terror 57, 67war on terror 6, 57, 117, 118, 126

collocational strings for 129–30war on terrorism 118, 119Watts, Michael 5Webster, Frank 12, 19Williams, Kayla 217Williams, Raymond, Keywords 132Wirth-Nesher, Hana 198Wolfowitz, Paul 139

Yousry, Mohamed 196–8

Zizek, Slavoj 2

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PROOF - Macmillan International Higher Education · PROOF 9780230_218819_01_prexii.tex 7/3/2009 15: ... Moira Inghilleri 11 Resisting State Terror: Theorizing Communities of Activist