563 E SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Hansen. M 1-2:50
TOPIC: Terror and the State of Modernity
Much has been made of the Bush Administration’s claim that “everything changed after 9/11,” but the political practices and rhetorical poses enacted in response to the concept of terror are by no means new . In fact, following Edmund Burke’s polemical retro-fitting of the idea of sublime “terror” in his 1790 anti-Jocobin treatise, Reflections on the Revolutions in France, the term has become a permanent part of the vocabulary of legitimation for the modern nation-state. In response to Burke’s arguments that the anti-traditionalist French masses were the purveyors of political terror, many of the rebel “United Irishman,” the leaders of Ireland’s 1798 uprising, claimed that terror could never be enacted by an eternally disempowered and feminized peoples, but rather always came from on high. From an historical perspective, then, the identity “terrorizer” or, if you will “terrorist,” seems evacuated of any substantial meaning almost from the very moment of its first invocation. By acting as the eternal other of one’s own political cause, “terror” plays the simple, equivocal role of label in the political and social rhetoric of legitimation . Any terrorist is always already an illegitimate political entity. The dynamic seems driven by what we might call the logic of the justified victim, a logic that is further complicated by the fact that any victim, as the claims of the United Irishmen underscore, is also invariably identified as feminine. Each side identifies itself always and only as terrorized in order to justify its own occasional terrorism. This peculiarly persistent double-bind appears to be an integral part of the foundation of the modern state. By exploring the underlying gender and social structures at play in “terror” fiction, this course will attempt to find a language that short-circuits this dichotomy. A 1797 review of Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian referred to the Gothic Romance as “the Terrorist Genre” because “it makes us fall in love with what we fear to look on.” The kind of “Terrorist” fiction written by the Gothic novelists actively manipulates the reader’s identification with fictive characters, but the narrative desire for conflict that subtends these fictions also places the reader in a rather precarious position that relies on identification with both the terrorized and the terrorist. That is, the novels rely on their readership’s unacknowledged sadistic identification with the terrorizer as much as they rely on a more overtly narcissistic identification with the victim. By reading a certain tradition of “Terrorist” fiction alongside later political, philosophical, and literary writings about “Terror” and the “State” this course aims to interrogate what we might call the Gothic double-bind that underwrites and shores up the logic of modern nationalism and of its other, terrorism.