Zizek, terrorism and belief
Robert Poe at COMOPS Journal has an interesting post, Do Terrorists Really Believe? in which he outlines the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, the prolific Slovenian psychoanalyst, in addressing the issue of whether jihadists are true Islamic fundamentalists. An answer in the negative would not be unfamiliar to readers of Olivier Roy, for example, and Žižek comes to a similar conclusion:
How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation daily Danish newspaper … To put it simply, a fundamentalist does not believe in something, but rather knows it directly. In other words, both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept these statements as such, while sceptics mock them. What is unthinkable for both is the ‘absurd’ act of a decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision that cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reason’, in positive knowledge.
As Poe says, ‘[t]his passage illustrates a very important point, namely that fundamentalist terrorists measure themselves by the standards of their secular enemies in the Western world’:
True fundamentalists are not bothered by the lost path being walked by others, nor are they provoked to violence by it. Žižek wonders whether in fighting against the sinful other one is not really just fighting against one’s own temptation to that sinful lifestyle. The violent outbursts of fundamentalist, Islamic terrorists are examples of resentment and envy for Žižek and mark their lack of true conviction/belief.
Žižek is a fascinating character, and Poe’s post adds yet more depth to the growing body of analysis on the true motives of many jihadists, if indeed they are aware themselves. What is clear is that labelling them ‘fundamentalists’ is erroneous. Mind you, we can’t even call them ‘jihadists’ now.
My copy of Žižek’s 2008 book, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, is currently languishing in my antilibrary, so in the meantime I’ll continue reading this op-ed he wrote for the New York Times a couple of years back, Defenders of the Faith.
