What if, What One Needs to Cure Oneself of is the Cure?: The Clandestine Complicity of Opponents

It would not be an exaggeration, perhaps, to suggest that a spectre is haunting the West: the spectre of the ‘suicide bomber’. The ‘un-beautiful’ figure of the suicide bomber operating at what Freud calls the ‘border of the knowable’,¹ the uncanny and inexplicable ethic of such a figure² – an ethic that goes beyond the paradigmatic ‘acting out’ of legitimate violence: war – is putting into crisis the logic of pure reason, as also the simple division between an Ordered social and the unanticipated rupture: terror. ‘Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die’ –