Life - Death - Secret - Terrorism

The aim of this paper is to show that terrorism is such a usage of death which essentially is inseparable from the secret. We could describe terrorism as the breeding ground of terror and anxiety turned into an instrumentand evoked by death-causing, respectively by death-causing presented as constantly possible – that is: threatening – in its secret unidentifiability. For the power of terror consists exactly in the quite particular instrumentalization of death, as well as of man’s attitude towards death – especially the instrumentalization of the fear of death. One basic and essential characteristics and aspect of this instrumentalization is the secret. It is exactly the secret that organizes, articulates, wraps and brings to reality terrorists as individuals, terrorist organizations, their activity, aims, instruments, members, plans and in short all their deeds. In the terrorist act exactly “this” secret blows fatally into (and often also blows up in) the public… Therefore the secret is not “one” feature or “attribute” of death-causing terrorism, on the contrary, it is the atmosphere and the horizon in which terrorism is outlined as the mode of existence of the being called “man” – and in which, hence, it must be considered. Consequently, the war on terrorism (too) should/must widen into a “fight” against the denial of death. A fight which should/must be fought (after all) not only and not exclusively and mainly on the secret fields, but, on the contrary, in the depth and womb of history – which becomes more and more visible in the fractures of history by means of present day terrorism.

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