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HOLY TERROR This page intentionally left blank HOLY TERROR Terry Eagleton 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Terry Eagleton The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc, Suffolk ISBN 0–19–928717–1 978–0–19–928717–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To Alice, with apologies for the world we have brought you into Preface This book is not intended as an addition to the mounting pile of political studies of terrorism. Instead, it tries to set the idea of terror in what I hope is a rather more original context, one which might loosely be termed ‘metaphysical’. As such, it belongs to the metaphysical or theological turn (or full circle) which my work seems to have taken in recent years, one welcomed by some but looked upon with alarm or exasperation by others.1 As far as the exasperation goes, I would point out to my friends on the left that the politics implicit in this rather exotic talk of Satan and Dionysus, scapegoats and demons, are more, not less radical than much that is to be found in the more orthodox discourses of leftism today. In any case, terrorism itself is not political in any conventional sense of the term, and as such poses a challenge to the left’s habitual modes of thought. The left is at home with imperial power and guerrilla warfare, but embarrassed on the whole by the thought of death, evil, sacrifice, or the sublime. Yet these and allied notions, I believe, are quite as germane to the ideology of terror as more mundane or material conceptions. Like a number of my recent books, then, this one seeks to extend the language of the left as well as to challenge that of the right. Perhaps this is partly because I live in a country which used to teach politics and metaphysics together in its national university, and in which it has not been unknown for hairdressers and bus drivers to have a passing acquaintance with notions of natural law or theories of just warfare. The genealogy I trace for terrorism, all the way from ancient rites and medieval theology to the eighteenth-century sublime Preface vii and the Freudian unconscious, may look not only arbitrary but perversely unhistorical. It is the former in the sense that it is not, of course, the only pre-history of the phenomenon that could be sketched; it is the latter, I think, only in a somewhat impoverished understanding of the historical. Some of the material in the book was delivered in different form as the Sir D. Owen Evans Lectures at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 2003, and as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 2004. I am deeply grateful to my hosts in both establishments for their kindness and hospitality. As always, I am also greatly indebted to the wisdom and friendship of my editor Andrew McNeillie. T.E. Dublin 2005 This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. Invitation to an Orgy 1 2. States of Sublimity 42 3. Fear and Freedom 68 4. Saints and Suicides 89 5. The Living Dead 115 6. Scapegoats 128 Notes 141 Index 145