Fear, Terror and the New Global Economy of Salvation–Global Excess and ‘Suicide’ Bombing in London

Abstract

The article looks at the London bombing of July 2005 as a double volunteered witnessing. The four male British ‘suicide’ bombers purported to witness the plight of the victims of global excesses in places like Iraq and Palestine as Muslims and their own privileged membership of the Muslim Community (umma). The witnessing was as much a trans-national self-identification by the bombers with their Islamic faith as a counter-identification against their British citizenship. On their trails of death and destruction, the bombers advocated the supremacy of the privilege of faith over the rights of citizen by destroying the mortal bodies of individuals to which is anchored citizen rights in order to provide room for the immortal body of the Muslim Community which cherishes the privilege of the faithful. In their surrogacy for the will of fellow Muslims, the bombers drew on a new economy of salvation that promised them the magnanimity of the witnessing (martyrdom) for the Muslim Community and offered the Other the ignominy of an apocalyptic retribution. By substituting the body for the mind as the immediate object of power the Muslim volunteers inspired fear among the potential victims of their violence without giving them the opportunity to reciprocate fear thus turning the fear into a sense of despair—terror—that makes power incontestable and abolishes politics. Faced with the threat of terror, the British public erected invisible, internal borders within which they constructed an invincible Britishness from which no one was excluded. The insurrectionary, multicultural assertion of British identity through recourse to the notion of individual rights is followed by a moment of constitution of Britishness by the institutions of government. An institutional construction of the general will to protect public safety within the spatially fixed borders is mediated by the Anglo-American model of multiculturalism. The article explores the incompatibility between cultural construction of boundaries sanctioned by the model and the state's educating role to dis-identify the faithful in order to identify them as citizens.