Thinking in Terror: refocusing the interreligious challenge from thinking after terror

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Thinking in Terror
Complicity with terrorism
Elusive way forward
Fish-scale model of religious complicity
Mysterious practice of tolerance
Identification of clues to the mystery
A Wholly Trinity?
Petrifying abomination: personal complicity?
Thinking within a terrifying reality
Withdrawing into the stones
References

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Prepared for publication in Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads (2, 1, April 2005) as a reflection on Thinking after Terror: an interreligious challenge by Richard Kearney (in the same issue)

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Nature of terror

Richard Kearney's valuable exercise explores some possibilities for interreligious dialogue as a response to the terror of 9/11. The paper is valuable in shifting the level and subtlety of reflection. What follows is an effort to work with some of the arguments put forward, but to suggest that there may be some vital dimensions that might be usefully added to Kearney's insights as Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin and Boston College -- and as a poet and Irish cultural critic.

A first concern would be with the identification of the nature of terror and who is exposed to it in the light of the range of its forms as explored elsewhere (Varieties of Terrorism: extended to the experience of the terrorized, 2005). The purpose there was to demonstrate that "terror" is not just what lends itself to extensive representation according to media criteria. The media cannot show the terror experienced daily by inarticulate "unimportant" people subject to every form of deprivation and suffering -- or even the bullying, intimidation and violence to which many are exposed in schools, housing estates or on the street -- whether or not these result in obviously violent death. Like the Holocaust, 9/11 dramatizes the challenge of terror but it does not help understand its ubiquitous nature that many (if not all) are complicit in sustaining to some degree. Avoidance of this challenge suggests that the "terror of thinking" about these dimensions is as important as a particular stimulus to "thinking after terror".

Kearney provides an excellent description of how religious imagery has been appropriated to reinforce portrayal of the cause of some as an "evil" infliction on the condition of others as innocent victims -- thereby framed through binary logic as the "good". It is clear that this form of argument lends itself to appropriation in support of particular political perspectives. But he does not consider how the imagery of the standard fare of crime and espionage movies has been similarly appropriated -- perhaps deliberately so, given the documented relationships between the Pentagon and Hollywood.

Kearney also recognizes that those perpetrating "terror" have their own way of framing themselves as the "good" and those they attack as "evil" -- or complicit with it. Both sides feel justified in excusing themselves a degree of "collateral damage" in the event of any violence. Kearney however warns against the trap of moral relativism or equivalency in envisaging the need for some other way of articulating the challenge. But in doing so there is nevertheless a need to recognize that there may be dimensions to the understanding and position of those righteously perceiving themselves as representing the innocent or "good" that are as questionable as the refusal to accept a degree of "good" in those framed as inherently "evil". This radical polarization, the "dualist thesis" identified by Kearney, excludes any possibility of dialogue. No doubt; no dialogue? It even suggests that attempts at such dialogue would be tantamount to "supping with the devil".

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