[A-List] Terry Eagleton on suicide bombers

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

A different way of death

Terry Eagleton
Wednesday January 26, 2005
The Guardian

While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a
silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like
hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death.
They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice;
and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is
possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually
desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being
incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could
have avoided it.

Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel
worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are
more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up
what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause.
They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name
of a more abundant life all round.

Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just
that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr
bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets
your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it
contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence
meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be
known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic
radicals it is both inseparably.

Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one
that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable
to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes
dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence.
Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy
does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between
the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and
the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could
live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be
his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to
you is the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky
recognised, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over
life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away
with yourself for all eternity?

Suicide bombers and hunger strikers are out to transform weakness into
power. Because they are ready to die while their enemies are not, they score
a spiritual victory over them. The ultimate freedom is not to fear death. If
you no longer fear it, political power can have no hold over you. Those with
nothing to lose are deeply dangerous. But suicide bombers also cheat their
antagonists of the only aspect of themselves that they can control: their
bodies. By depriving their masters of this manipulable part of themselves,
they become invulnerable. Nothing is less masterable than nothing. By
slipping through the fingers of power, leaving it grasping at thin air, they
force it to betray its own vacuousness. It is, to be sure, a pyrrhic
victory. But it proclaims that what your adversary cannot annihilate is the
will to annihilation. Like the traditional tragic hero, the suicide bomber
rises above his own destruction by the very resolution with which he
embraces it.

Blowing himself to pieces in a packed marketplace is likely to prove by far
the most historic event of the bomber's life. Nothing in his life, to quote
Macbeth, becomes him like the leaving of it. This is both his triumph and
his defeat. However miserable or impoverished, most men and women have one
formidable power at their disposal: the power to die as devastatingly as
possible. And not only devastatingly, but surreally. There is a smack of
avant garde theatre about this horrific act. In a social order that seems
progressively more depthless, transparent, rationalised and instantly
communicable, the brutal slaughter of the innocent, like some Dadaist
happening, warps the mind as well as the body. It is an assault on meaning
as well as on the flesh - an ultimate act of defamiliarisation, which
transforms the everyday into the monstrously unrecognisable.