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On ‘Suicide Bombing’: Three Thuological Theses
In order to justify any expenditure that seems beyond all reason or reality principle, you
have to turn to sacrifice. Witness President George W. Bush increasingly invoking
‘sacrifices’ that have had to be made in America’s ‘war on terror’—particularly in its war in
Iraq.i Witness also the so-called ‘suicide bombings’ that have been increasing apace in Iraq
and Palestine, bombings that are steeped in notions of sacrifice. On both sides, such
sacrifices are deemed beyond measure because they have supposedly been made for
priceless things and transcendent values—whether ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘God’, or ‘the
nation’. Such sacrifices call for more sacrifices to the extent that the lives of those remaining
are supposedly indebted to the immeasurable gift that those who died have given as a legacy.
And because of these sacrifices’ perceived infinitude, they cannot be repaid but only added
to in kind.
Little wonder, then, that some scholars have turned their attention from notions of
biopower to cultures of death.ii Achille Mbembe, for one, has recently argued that in order to
confront the novel forms of ‘death world’ and ‘necropolitics’ that face us, we could benefit
from considering how necropolitics involves new compounds of the ‘theological-political’.
In this little paper I want to suggest that the current intimacy of theology and politics
evidenced in the current wars of terror are based on what I’m going to call the ‘thuological’.
‘Thuo’ in Greek means ‘to sacrifice’. ‘Thuology’, then, is a discourse, a logic, pertaining to
sacrifice. But I also want to argue that the thuological pertains increasingly to the sacrifice of
logic as a reality principle. Because of the time constraint, I’m going to discuss this mostly
in relation to Islamic suicide martyrdom. As I hope you’ll see, though, I don’t wish to
suggest that sacrifice is more an issue for Islamic militants than for other agonists, or for the
other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity) that have been made to play roles in
the wars of terror.
Thesis One: God is not dead, he is death. Unfortunately, in order to have the opposite
proposition—God is life—in order to make that proposition work, you need to make
sacrifices.iii This is nothing new to any of the Abrahamic religions. Death makes it possible
to realize the difference between the finite and infinite, life and after-life; hence, the genesis
of God calls for death. The principle that recognition and love of God require the negation of
other mortal lives is reiterated throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible (Old and
New Testaments) and The Quran. God’s ongoing need for recognition from mortals ends up
necessitating a repeated call for death—from Abraham’s pledge to sacrifice his son Isaac to
the crucifixion of God’s own flesh-and-blood.iv
Once a corpse can be made to bear testament to an after-life, dying can be for God.
The corpse can be seen as the appearance of God’s difference; its debased thingliness is
called for to give God holy life.v Labouring for the divine, then, means turning what we
could call ‘reifice’ (thing-making) into sacrifice—which literally means ‘making holy’
(Latin, sacrificium). And that is why the Abrahamic religions forbid ‘suicide’, dying for
oneself, for it is tantamount to cheating God of his vital, ritual due. Accordingly, ‘suicide
bombing’ is eschewed as a term by Islamic militants. The practice is justified by Shiites and
Sunnis alike only as a form of self-sacrifice (tad’hia) and/or martyrdom (shahadat) for God
in a time of holy war (jihad).vi
‘Martyr’ in Greek means ‘witness’ as does the Arabic for martyr, ‘shahid’. In giving
one’s life for God, in thereby giving God life, the shahid bears testament to God for the
good of the community. If sacrifice thus becomes a performative requisite for God’s being
and recognition, it also performs a transcendence of community for believers. This provides
Alex Houen, ‘On “Suicide Bombing”, Terror & the Postcolonial Colloquium, 30/06/06
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a basis for thuology as a fundamental intimacy of theology and politics. Freud, Bataille, and
Girard have each in their own way argued that the death of the sacrificial victim places
victim, community, and God in communion with each other.vii Such communion is echoed
in many statements on martyrdom from radical Islamic theologians and militants. ‘A
shahid’, argued Ali Shariati, for example, ‘is the one who negates his whole experience for
the sacred ideal in which we all believe. [...] He had been an individual who sacrificed
himself for “thought”. Now he is “thought” ’.viii ‘Self-annihilation in God’ (fana fi Allah) is
thus envisaged as a way of dying into God, just as the martyr’s death is turned into the
realization of the community’s capacity to overcome any threat. ‘Shahadat means the
transfusion of blood into a society’, declared Murtada Mutahhariix; a sentiment frequently
reiterated by militant groups (both nationalist and Islamic) in Palestine, as well as by groups
in Iraq and elsewhere.x Such transfusions are fusions of the theological and political.
Thesis Two: Death increasingly cannot take place because its place keeps being taken. Socalled ‘suicide bombing’ is in part a response to new forms of colonial warfare that thrive
not so much on ‘necropower’ or ‘biopower’ as on the power to suspend animation.xi This
power is being exercised on a number of fronts. One that Baudrillard has asserted is that of
virtual mediation. Regarding the 1991 Gulf War, Baudrillard’s argument that the ‘war did
not take place’ was never that people weren’t fighting and dying, but that the reality of these
events was hijacked in being screened as sanitised images by the military and media alike.xii
Televised ‘live’, the 11 September suicide attacks turned the power of mediating suspension
against itself. As Baudrillard argued, the globally broadcast images both exalted the event,
multiplying it ‘to infinity’, and neutralized it, taking its reality hostage.xiii
Since the 11 September attacks, America, in particular, has waged its war of
suspended animation on new legal and political fronts. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and
other ‘detention’ camps are literally the ‘taking place’ of a resuscitated sovereignty that
predicates its exceptional status on the right to place the life and death of detainees and
‘unlawful combatants’ in suspension.xiv Instituting indefinite detention, this sovereignty
places its own exceptional powers beyond life and death. As a new form of playing God,
then, indefinite detention is the continuation of sacrifice by other means. But if God is death,
by deferring the sacrifical killing of detainees indefinitely, the sovereign usurps God (and
death) in the name of networked administration.xv Thus, while indefinite detention continues
the work of sacrifice, it also marks the apogee of a networked modernity that thrives on
producing security for its population, security mostly against death.xvi
This hypocrisy is partly what the recent hostage-takings in Iraq were aimed at. The
hostages were frequently made to wear orange jump-suits like inmates in Guantanamo Bay
and were then videoed being sacrificed.xvii Once again, it was an instance of militants
turning the power of suspension against itself while simultaneously mirroring that power
and drawing it to its conclusion. An underlying thuology thus draws all sides of the war
around terror into an escalating system of mimetic exchange.xviii So while the Bush
administration has been forced increasingly to invoke ‘sacrifices’ the more it’s become
mired in its ‘war on terror’, the sacrifice martyrdom of militant groups has been increasingly
inflected with aspects of the networked modernity that the groups avowedly seek to
oppose.xix That’s to say, sacrifice martyrdom is no longer just about dying for the
community’s God; it’s also about securing one’s community as an after-life, a power of
suspension, in and for itself.
Thesis Three: The thuological system of exchange escalates around a new compound
phenomenon: narcomimesis. In Greek, narké is not death so much as its approximation:
numbness, torpor, anaesthesis. The intimacy of such anaesthesis and mimesis is already
Alex Houen, ‘On “Suicide Bombing”, Terror & the Postcolonial Colloquium, 30/06/06
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patent in the myth of Narcissus.xx I want to argue that narcomimesis increasingly both
potentiates sacrificial death and deadens it, usurps it. Providing a medium for sacrifice to the
extent that it robs sacrifice of its end, narcomimesis thus fuels an unlimited escalation of
thuological exchange. In short, its mirroring becomes addictive. I’ll close by considering this
in terms of suicide martyrdom.
A number of commentators have examined the importance of media production in
turning suicide martyrdom into cultural capital.xxi As Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, a Hamas
spokesperson, told Barbara Victor, a shahid ‘watches many, many films which show the
atrocities the Israelis have done to our women and children’.xxii Like the images of the 11
September attacks, such films multiply and amplify past deaths for other individuals. The
films turn atrocities and deaths into virtual after-lives that circulate hauntingly and
indefinitely, accruing indebtedness like interest.xxiii Pledging to repay the lives of past
martyrs, the lives of one’s God, the shahid is usually required to make a video testament for
posterity. The video functions as a contract: having made it, the shahid is declared al-shahid
al hai, a ‘living martyr’; that is, an after-life incarnate.xxiv Already, then, the distinction
between the martyr’s life, death and after-life are suspended, flickering between God and
film. And this confusion of death and virtuality continues up to, and past, the act of sacrifice.
The shahid repeatedly watches his/her own video testament and those of other martyrs in
order to familiarize death and so narcotize any fear of it. After the suicide bombing, the
martyr’s video testimony is distributed and broadcast, and posters are made to attest publicly
to the deed.
The confusion of martyrdom and celebrity is one aspect of a narcomimesis that
forces God, film, martyr, and sacrifice into a serialised system of exchange.xxv For Farhad
Khosrokhavar, this confusion means that if suicide bombing is a last resort for defending the
community and its God against new forms of colonial modernity, such martyrdom also
incorporates aspects of that modernity—like its cult of individual celebrity.xxvi Sacrifice
martyrdom is thus potentiated by narcomimesis, but narcomimesis also entails that
supposedly opposed entities like the following exchange places: God and virtuality; sacrifice
and reifice; shahid and celebrity; shahid and his/her victims; shahid and the indefinite
detainee. It’s tempting to look for a way out of this by asking: What is the opposite of
sacrifice? But isn’t it precisely the logic of sacrifice that is doing away with its opposites?
See, in particular, transcripts of the following speeches by Bush: ‘President Discusses War on Terror
at FBI Academy’ (11 July 2005) at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005.07/20050711html>;‘President Discusses War on Terror’ (28 October 2005) at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/
releases/2005/10/20051028-html>; ‘President Commemorates Veterans’ Day’, (11 November 2005) at
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051111-1.html>; and ‘President Bush Visits
Troops in Iraq’ (13 June 2006) at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/200606132.html>.
ii
Much of this ‘turn’ has been inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (1995; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). For
notable engagements with the latter, see Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes,
Public Culture 15:1 (2003): 11-40, and Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004).
iii
Georges Bataille in Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (1973; New York: Zone, 1989)
argues that ‘Sacrifice is the antithesis of production’ because ‘the offering is rescued from all utility’
(49). Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (1976; London:
Sage, 1993) follows suit. Because ‘death is perhaps the only thing has no use value’, he argues,
i
Alex Houen, ‘On “Suicide Bombing”, Terror & the Postcolonial Colloquium, 30/06/06
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sacrifice and suicide undermine any social reality-principle based on the need to affix value to things
and to exchange those values. I want to argue that sacrifice is becoming a fight for exchange value par
excellence; a production in which death must be substituted for God, martyrdom, after-life, and where
those entities must be convertible back into consumable things and values for a community. The way in
which symbolic capital and financial capital merge in producing martyred after-lives (see Thesis Three
of this paper) is a case in point.
iv
Jacques Derrida discusses the common importance of Abraham’s sacrificial pledge for the
Abrahamic ‘religions of the Book’ in The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills (1992; Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1996). As well as considering at length the possibility of ‘dying for’ an
‘other’, Derrida also relates Abraham’s crisis to more recent wars in (and over) Iraq, Palestine, and
Israel (86-7).
v
Bataille argues in Theory of Religion that ‘The thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to
destroy in the victim’ (44). Farhad Khosrokhavar quotes Islamic theologian Ali Shariati making a
similar claim: ‘Martyrdom is an act whereby a man suddenly, and in a revolutionary mode, flings his
vile being (the diabolic half) into the fire of love and faith and thus becomes completely good’ (in
Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, trans. by David Macey [2002; London: Pluto, 2005], 44).
vi
For discussions by various commentators and Islamic theologians of these terms, see, in particular:
Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, ch. 1; Mehdi Abedi and Gary Legenhausen, eds., Jihad and
Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam (Houston: The Institute for Research and Islamic Studies,
1986); Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd ed.
(2001; Berkeley: University of California Press), ch. 4; Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism
(Cambdridge: Polity, 2005), ch. 1; Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of
Suicide Bombing, trans. by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 5;
Diego Gambetta, ‘Can We Make Sense of Suicide Missions’, in Gambetta, ed. Making Sense of Suicide
Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 294-7; John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the
Name of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 2; and Ivan Strenski, ‘Sacrifice, Gift and
the Social Logic of Muslim “Human Bombers”’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15:3 (Autumn
2003): 1-34.
vii
See Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 13, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), ; Bataille, Theory of Religion, 52-5; René Girard,
Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (1972; London: Continuum, 2005), chs. 8 and 9.
viii
Ali Shariati, ‘A Discussion of Shahid’, in Abedi and Legenhausen, Jihad and Shahadat, 233. See
also: Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, ‘Jihad and Shahadat’ in ibid.; and Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 61,
135.
ix
Murtada Mutahhari, ‘Shahid’, in Abedi and Legenhausen, Jihad and Shahadat, 136.
x
Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg in The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World
of the Suicide Bomber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) discuss how nationalist and Islamist
Palestinian organizations figure martyrdom as a social blood transfusion, 91-3. Regarding Iraq, see, for
example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s untitled pamphlet published by the Coalition Provisional Authority
of Iraq at <http://www.cpa-iraq.org/transcripts/20040212_zarqawi_full.html>. Al Zarqawi argues that
‘empowerment cannot grow [...] without blood and defiance of death, [...] the Islamic nation cannot
live without the aroma of martyrdom and the perfume of fragrant blood spilled on behalf of God [...]’
5.
xi
On current coloniality and warfare, see Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 25-30, and Gregory, The Colonial
Present, chs. 1 and 9.
xii
See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. by Paul Patton (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995). The idea of the war not ‘having’ a place is clearer from the original French
title: La guerre de Golfe n’a pas eu lieu.
xiii
Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’ in The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. by Chris Turner
(London: Verso, 2002), 27.
xiv
I have discussed this in more detail in my ‘Novel Spaces and Taking Place(s) in the Wake of
September 11’, Studies in the Novel (Fall 2004): 419-37, and in ‘Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use
of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker’, Theory & Event 9:1 (Spring 2006).
xv
For a discussion of how sovereignty and biopolitical administration are both involved in camps like
Guantanamo Bay, see Judith Butler, ‘Indefinite Detention’, in Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 58-67.
xvi
On this point, see Baudrillard’s, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 31-8; also Michael Dillon, Politics
of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), ch. 1.
Alex Houen, ‘On “Suicide Bombing”, Terror & the Postcolonial Colloquium, 30/06/06
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See Jason Burke, ‘Theatre of Terror’ The Observier, ‘Review Section’ (21 Nov 2004): 1-2; Cahal
Milmo, ‘The Life and Death of Kenneth Bigley’, The Independent (9 Oct 2004): 1-3; Richard Lloyd
Parry, ‘Video’s Theatre of Macabre Devised by Brutal Militant’ The Times (9 Oct 2004): 1-2.
xviii
Consider also the economy of identification that is frequently invoked for suicide martyrs and their
victims. Oliver and Steinberg, noted a reversible everyday rhetoric of martyrdom during the course of
their research in Palestine. On one hand, the killing of Israelis was frequently cited as a sacrificial ‘gift’
for God, community, or organization. On the other hand, they found numerous slogans calling for a
sacrifice of self at the hands of the enemy, for example: ‘The child shouts, From my blood, O
Jerusalem, I’ll give you drink [...]’ 91. Regarding the identification of suicide martyr and victims, see
also Jacqueline Rose, ‘Deadly Embrace’, in London Review of Books 26:21 (4 November 2004): 21-4.
xix
Khosrokhavar discusses the intimacy of martyrdom and modernity in Suicide Bombers, chs. 2 and 3.
xx
Rosalind C. Morris, in ‘Images of Untranslatability in the US War on Terror’, interventions 6:3
(2004) considers America’s ‘war on terror’ and the insurgency of terrorists as being drawn into a
mutually assured ‘suicidal narcissism’, 411-21.
xxi
See, in particular, Oliver and Steinberg, The Road to Martyr’s Square, pp. 60-73, 84-97, 118-81;
Reuter, My Life is a Weapon, 75-6; 87-8; Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of
Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (2003; London: Robinson, 2004), 53-4, 145-6; Pedahzur, Suicide
Terrorism, ch. 7.
xxii
Victor, Army of Roses, 145.
xxiii
In Baudrillard’s essay, ‘The Impossible Exchange of One’s Own Life’, he writes: ‘In the final stage
of his “liberation” and emancipation through the networks, screens and new technologies, the modern
individual becomes a fractal subject, both subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed on himself and
doomed to endless identity. In a sense, the perfect subject, the subject without other—whose
individuation is therefore not at all contradictory with mass status’ (in Impossible Exchange, trans. by
Chris Turner [1999; London: Verso, 2001], 47-8). The social production of suicide martyrdom shows
that one can substitute ‘death’ for ‘modern individual’ in that passage—testimony to just how
exchangeable life and death can be.
xxiv
Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism, 179.
xxv
Martyrdom as industry also blurs the difference between itself and the production of a ‘pathological
public sphere’ that Mark Seltzer links to American consumer culture in his Serial Killers: Death and
Life in America’s Wound Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 29-101.
xxvi
See Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 45-6, 53-8, 159-68.
xvii
Alex Houen, ‘On “Suicide Bombing”, Terror & the Postcolonial Colloquium, 30/06/06