The Metapolitics of Terrorism in Fiction

Abstract

Our inquiry into the historical roots of extreme violence has revealed two contrasting species of terrorism: Zealotic and Modernist. Outside the artificially tidy world of idealizing abstraction, in the so-called ‘real world’, fuzzy boundaries and porous membranes naturally exist between these two types. The last three chapters will use specific case studies to illustrate the hybridization that tends to arise as complex ‘mazeway resyntheses’ come into being which identify new causes to kill and die for so as to save, regenerate, or create the nomos. Each offers to the convert a way of overcoming one of the unique configurations of anomic, ‘soul-destroying’ forces constantly arising in the modern world as political situations emerge which threaten established cultures with rapid physical or cultural extinction, or traditional nomoi are degraded and eroded by globalizing ‘disenchantment’ and its concomitant processes of rapid or gradual culturecide. To prepare the ground further for the unusual ‘reading’ of terrorism offered in this book we will turn for deeper insights into the underlying metapolitical dimension and ‘creed’ of fanatical violence to those non-academic explorers of human spirituality and motiovation: novelists and film-makers.