Liberalism, Political Theology and Suicide Bombing

Abstract

This article sets out to interrogate the relationship between Liberalism and suicide bombing. It maps and critically examines accounts of suicide bombing as a practice diametrically opposed to the secular logics of liberal governance, or as the direct expression of the traces of sovereign exceptionalism that haunt the global operation of Liberal biopower. I argue that a uniquely liberal analytic of human finitude establishes conditions of political intelligibility for suicide bombings today. As such, the contemporary politics of suicide may be understood as in critical communication with liberal political theologies of immanent governance over the human qua mortal, rather than as structurally deriving from political theologies of sovereign power.