Terror and the literary: an introduction

Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs (2001: 22-41). Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism,’ in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note: “Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recognize.” (2007: xvi) If contemporary bio-politics frames life from a normative position of mortality, as Badiou argues, its ethics foregrounds a ‘victimary’ notion of the human subject. The task for Badiou’s ethics is to counter-emphasize the ‘immortal’ in man where he treats a situation from the point which is impossible in relation to that situation. To treat the situation qua its impossible point is to change the situation and replace it with a new one and this highlights the subject’s immortality over the ephemeral situation. If this change is premised on the evental dimension of novelty, it encounters the impossible, which is not without its horizon of terror and trauma