{"title":"Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things","authors":"Bruce Robbins","doi":"10.1111/criq.12759","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12759","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"54-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140487102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Digressing from decidedly prosaic themes in a letter to his mother in December 1919 – a lingering cold, Christmas plans and a vague New Year's resolution of writing ‘a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’ – to include a rousing, two-pronged critique against American apathy towards global peacemaking, and the complicated reconstruction of new nation-states, T.S. Eliot pulls no punches at the state of post-war Europe:</p><p>Eliot was commenting on American isolationism and neutrality following the First World War, with Woodrow Wilson's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and limited American support for the League of Nations. He was also referring to the slow burn and enduringly complex effort to establish the boundaries of the newly appearing nation states of Europe, especially in its east.<sup>2</sup> This is a passage, we might argue, which reveals Eliot's interest in the east of Europe – an interest particularly manifesting as a recurrent anxiety about affairs in Vienna, which he pedestals as a site of inarticulable human suffering, reflecting the widespread popularity of support for the city at the time in British cultural and political circles.<sup>3</sup> However, the letter also suggests a certain tension within Eliot's perspective. For whilst he specifies Viennese sympathy, this is counterpointed against a stigmatisation of the wider political difficulties in the region post-war, which were contributing to civic breakdown. Central Europe and Vienna are to be supported, but the wider politics is a ‘fiasco’; a word which imagines not only disaster but also sheer ludicrousness, as if it is unreasonable to even think of the possibility of a ‘reorganisation of nationalities’ in that area in the first place. For Eliot, concepts of national structure, curation and control have limited scope within what was a multi-ethnic and transforming space.</p><p>Eliot's interest in the region remained; for, three years later, a note he provided within the first edition of <i>The Waste Land</i> – that ‘long poem’ he mentions in his letter – claimed the masterpiece (or, at least, one of its sections) was similarly inspired by what he described as ‘the present decay of Eastern Europe’.<sup>4</sup> Similarly, but not quite: for this time Eliot does not redeem the region with tales of victims of Vienna but simply inflates the appalling conditions in the region to a broad-sweep devastation. His description, as many critics have noted, reflects common stereotypes about the region following the First World War: the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and German Empires, cultural heterogeneity, rising nationalism and lack of legal-political authority in the area meant it was often seen as unstable and volatile within western-inspired and universally applied models of nationality and statehood.<sup>5</sup> In 1919, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George, suggested the region's ‘nations were going straight to perdition’;
{"title":"T.S. Eliot, Post-War Geopolitics and ‘Eastern Europe’","authors":"Juliette Bretan","doi":"10.1111/criq.12766","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12766","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Digressing from decidedly prosaic themes in a letter to his mother in December 1919 – a lingering cold, Christmas plans and a vague New Year's resolution of writing ‘a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’ – to include a rousing, two-pronged critique against American apathy towards global peacemaking, and the complicated reconstruction of new nation-states, T.S. Eliot pulls no punches at the state of post-war Europe:</p><p>Eliot was commenting on American isolationism and neutrality following the First World War, with Woodrow Wilson's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and limited American support for the League of Nations. He was also referring to the slow burn and enduringly complex effort to establish the boundaries of the newly appearing nation states of Europe, especially in its east.<sup>2</sup> This is a passage, we might argue, which reveals Eliot's interest in the east of Europe – an interest particularly manifesting as a recurrent anxiety about affairs in Vienna, which he pedestals as a site of inarticulable human suffering, reflecting the widespread popularity of support for the city at the time in British cultural and political circles.<sup>3</sup> However, the letter also suggests a certain tension within Eliot's perspective. For whilst he specifies Viennese sympathy, this is counterpointed against a stigmatisation of the wider political difficulties in the region post-war, which were contributing to civic breakdown. Central Europe and Vienna are to be supported, but the wider politics is a ‘fiasco’; a word which imagines not only disaster but also sheer ludicrousness, as if it is unreasonable to even think of the possibility of a ‘reorganisation of nationalities’ in that area in the first place. For Eliot, concepts of national structure, curation and control have limited scope within what was a multi-ethnic and transforming space.</p><p>Eliot's interest in the region remained; for, three years later, a note he provided within the first edition of <i>The Waste Land</i> – that ‘long poem’ he mentions in his letter – claimed the masterpiece (or, at least, one of its sections) was similarly inspired by what he described as ‘the present decay of Eastern Europe’.<sup>4</sup> Similarly, but not quite: for this time Eliot does not redeem the region with tales of victims of Vienna but simply inflates the appalling conditions in the region to a broad-sweep devastation. His description, as many critics have noted, reflects common stereotypes about the region following the First World War: the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and German Empires, cultural heterogeneity, rising nationalism and lack of legal-political authority in the area meant it was often seen as unstable and volatile within western-inspired and universally applied models of nationality and statehood.<sup>5</sup> In 1919, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George, suggested the region's ‘nations were going straight to perdition’; ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"51-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12766","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139585533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.<sup>1</sup> Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it?</p><p>One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.<sup>2</sup> Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase.</p><p>As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch <i>hunting</i> until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.<sup>3</sup> The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch <i>hunt</i> without introduction or qualification.<sup>4</sup> It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now.</p><p>In other words, the
{"title":"Witch Hunt","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12768","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12768","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.<sup>1</sup> Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it?</p><p>One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.<sup>2</sup> Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase.</p><p>As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch <i>hunting</i> until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.<sup>3</sup> The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch <i>hunt</i> without introduction or qualification.<sup>4</sup> It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now.</p><p>In other words, the ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"121-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12768","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139557497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>In 2010, when a book I'd written called <i>How to Become a Scandal</i> was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I'm sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men's room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: ‘Christopher – you are a scream!’ she'd written back, to which he responded, ‘Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.’</p><p>I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher's, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you'd go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him. Mocking him on gender could even be fun, as at least there, unlike elsewhere, the positions seemed lightly held. When he published his notorious ‘Why Women Aren't Funny’ piece in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, I responded (I hope a teensy bit funnily) in <i>Slate</i>, where he also frequently wrote, that though it was a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, it was unclear to which decade it applied – it had the slightly musty air of 1960s-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia ‘for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “Oh Mr. Hitchens!” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.’</p><p>My problem with Christopher, hardly mine alone, was (to state the obvious) simply that he was one of the more charming men on the planet and mixed with liquor, this is a dangerous combination. Like most people who knew him at all, a few of the drunkest nights of my life were spent in his company. Conversations were funny, flirtatious, frank. Yet the rightward turn and increasing political rigidity also made him seem ridiculous: eruditely shrill.</p><p>Oh man, the rigidity. On one occasion, Christopher was speaking at Northwestern, outside Chicago, where I was teaching – I believe he was to talk on Kissinger, so it must have been before 9/11 and the endless chest-thumping about Islamofascism. The talk was arranged by one of his devoted local lieutenants, Danny Postel. I knew Danny slightly, in part because his uncle Bo
{"title":"Oh, Mr Hitchens!","authors":"Laura Kipnis","doi":"10.1111/criq.12758","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12758","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2010, when a book I'd written called <i>How to Become a Scandal</i> was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I'm sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men's room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: ‘Christopher – you are a scream!’ she'd written back, to which he responded, ‘Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.’</p><p>I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher's, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you'd go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him. Mocking him on gender could even be fun, as at least there, unlike elsewhere, the positions seemed lightly held. When he published his notorious ‘Why Women Aren't Funny’ piece in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, I responded (I hope a teensy bit funnily) in <i>Slate</i>, where he also frequently wrote, that though it was a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, it was unclear to which decade it applied – it had the slightly musty air of 1960s-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia ‘for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “Oh Mr. Hitchens!” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.’</p><p>My problem with Christopher, hardly mine alone, was (to state the obvious) simply that he was one of the more charming men on the planet and mixed with liquor, this is a dangerous combination. Like most people who knew him at all, a few of the drunkest nights of my life were spent in his company. Conversations were funny, flirtatious, frank. Yet the rightward turn and increasing political rigidity also made him seem ridiculous: eruditely shrill.</p><p>Oh man, the rigidity. On one occasion, Christopher was speaking at Northwestern, outside Chicago, where I was teaching – I believe he was to talk on Kissinger, so it must have been before 9/11 and the endless chest-thumping about Islamofascism. The talk was arranged by one of his devoted local lieutenants, Danny Postel. I knew Danny slightly, in part because his uncle Bo","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"80-84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138826120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of a word. And within that argument, it is perhaps even more surprising that anger should focus not, as usually happens, on something that was offensively said, but exactly on what was not said. The protestors had a specific, favoured term, and were outraged when they did not hear it. This suggests a sort of super-censorship, a regime which, not content with telling broadcasters what they mustn't say, seeks positively to dictate what they must say. Indeed, the point was pressed in just that form when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, told the world's press that they ‘must declare and call Hamas a terrorist organization without ifs and buts, without explanation’.<sup>1</sup> On what basis does the head of a democratic state issue instructions to independent journalists about their detailed lexical choices? And why this particular word?</p><p>Obviously the word itself is contested ground. In a despairing <i>tour de force</i> Alex P. Schmid, a leading academic in the field, compiled 250 different definitions of ‘terrorism’, the great majority of them formulated between 1970 and 2010.<sup>2</sup> It is not surprising that such a heavily debated term should prove to be a flash point at a moment of crisis. On the other hand, it is puzzling that its use is so passionately required (or resisted) when there is such a spectacular lack of certainty about what it actually means. Its clarity seems to be of a different kind, a definiteness that is independent of definition. The people who use it, or who insist on its use, may not be sure of its meaning, but they know very well what they mean by using it. As Schmid notes at the head of his article, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking shortly after 9/11, brushed aside the whole business of defining one's terms: ‘What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism’.<sup>3</sup> This is to ground the meaning of the word in a gut feeling; it expresses an encounter with the concept which is not intellectual and analytic, but sensory and immediate. It thus goes some way to explain the heat of the debate. The belief that this is the right word to use is visceral.</p><p>It is a coherent position, but the trouble with it is that it treats the word as if it were <i>only</i> emotive, and therefore fails to acknowledge that it does also, despite everything, have definite referential content. A glance at those 250 definitions is enough to see that, for all their differences, they converge on a substantive if approximate object. For example, the US State Department's working definition from 2006 is that terrorism is
2023年10月7日，以色列南部发生平民大屠杀，几天后，英国广播公司受到犹太团体、保守党报纸和包括两大政党领导人在内的议员们的批评，因为他们没有将行凶者称为“恐怖分子”。令人惊讶的是，一个政治国家竟然对一件可怕的暴行作出反应，就一个词的使用展开争论。在这个论点中，也许更令人惊讶的是，愤怒不应该像通常发生的那样，集中在冒犯性的话上，而是恰恰集中在没有说出口的话上。抗议者有一个特定的、喜欢的术语，当他们没有听到这个词时，他们感到愤怒。这暗示了一种超级审查制度，一个不满足于告诉广播公司什么不能说的政权，它寻求积极地规定他们必须说什么。事实上，当以色列总统艾萨克·赫尔佐格(Isaac Herzog)告诉世界媒体，他们“必须宣布并称哈马斯为恐怖组织，没有如果和但是，没有解释”时，这一点正是以这种形式被强调的一个民主国家的首脑根据什么向独立记者发出关于他们详细的词汇选择的指示?为什么是这个词呢?显然，这个词本身是有争议的。该领域的权威学者亚历克斯·p·施密德(Alex P. Schmid)编纂了250种不同的“恐怖主义”定义，其中绝大多数定义是在1970年至2010年之间形成的。在危机时刻，这样一个备受争议的术语会成为引爆点，这并不奇怪。另一方面，令人费解的是，在对其实际含义如此缺乏确定性的情况下，人们却如此强烈地要求(或抵制)使用它。它的清晰性似乎是另一种类型，一种独立于定义的确定性。使用它或坚持使用它的人可能不确定它的意思，但他们非常清楚他们使用它的意思。正如施密德在他的文章开头所指出的那样，英国驻联合国大使在9/11事件后不久发表讲话时，把定义一个人的术语的整个事情抛在一边:“看起来、闻起来和杀人都像恐怖主义的就是恐怖主义。这是为了把这个词的意思建立在一种直觉上;它表达了与概念的相遇，这个概念不是理智的和分析的，而是感觉的和直接的。因此，这在某种程度上解释了辩论的激烈程度。相信这个词是正确的是发自内心的。从BBC采纳和捍卫的观点来看，这种强烈的情感似乎正是问题所在。反对说“恐怖分子”的理由是，这是一个“情绪化”的术语——也就是说，它不仅意味着一个客观的指涉物，同时也意味着一种对它的主观态度。根据BBC编辑指南的要求，公正的报道意味着将自己限制在语言的参考功能中，并尽最大努力避免使用贬义(或修饰)的术语。用《世界事务》编辑约翰·辛普森的话来说，恐怖主义是一个隐含的词，人们用它来形容他们在道德上不赞成的组织。告诉人们该支持谁，该谴责谁，谁是好人，谁是坏人，这根本不是BBC的工作。因此，新闻简报的作者应该想出至少更接近中立的同义词:指南建议使用“炸弹手”、“攻击者”、“枪手”、“绑架者”、“叛乱分子”或“激进分子”这是一份经过仔细考虑的清单:虽然这些词当然不是没有内涵，但它们中的任何一个都可以毫无矛盾地用于支持所述行动的声明中，或用于明确的谴责中。此外，它们都比“恐怖分子”更具体。每一种都适用于某些“恐怖”事件，而不适用于其他事件，这取决于具体情况:即它们不仅具有较低的情感内容，而且具有较高的信息内容。因此，他们只是试图报道所发生的事情。正如BBC的辩护者所指出的那样，10月7日发生的事情(以及报道的事情)是如此骇人听闻，以至于很难想象观众需要新闻播音员的口头提示才能得出判断。小报习惯将臭名昭著的杀人犯称为“邪恶的野兽”或“邪恶的怪物”。即使这种语言在某种意义上被事实证明是正确的，它也有一种欺凌的味道，就好像报纸不仅在描述罪犯，而且还在敲打监狱货车的侧面。避免使用这些术语的新闻媒体并不是在表达对相关罪行的道德矛盾;他们只是尊重信息和情感之间的区别，让事实，正如我们所说，“为自己说话”。英国广播公司(BBC)在避免使用“恐怖分子”这个词时，也遵循着大致相同的原则。 这是一种连贯的立场，但它的问题在于，它只把词当作感性的东西来看待，因而不承认，不管怎样，词也有明确的指称内容。浏览一下这250个定义就足以看出，尽管它们存在种种差异，但它们都集中在一个实质性的(如果近似的话)对象上。例如，美国国务院2006年的工作定义是，恐怖主义是“有预谋的、出于政治动机的、由次国家组织或秘密特工针对非战斗目标实施的暴力行为”这个公式做了很多工作，区分恐怖主义行为与自发的愤怒爆炸(“有预谋的”)，与普通的暴力犯罪(“有政治动机的”)，与常规战争(“对非战斗目标实施的”)，以及与公认的民族国家(“次国家组织或秘密特工”)的直接行动，无论其破坏性如何。毫无疑问，反对意见是开放的——它的条款需要被重新定义，或者它遗漏了一些关键的因素。但在我看来，它划出的界限似乎是广泛的共识:这确实是大多数人对这个词的大致理解。它还有一个额外的优点——在上下文中是一个引人注目的优点——它本身是不加评判的。它没有将恐怖主义定义为道德上的错误，它只是试图说明恐怖主义的构成。因此，它证明了这个词不能还原为它的贬义功能。它也有外延维度。在这一点上，很容易理解争执双方的相互恼怒。BBC看到了“恐怖主义”的负面含义，而不是它的指代意义，因此听到了使用这个词的禁令，试图颠覆自己长期以来的公正性。它的批评者看到的是参考意义而不是内涵，所以在他们看来，BBC似乎是在固执地拒绝用正确的名字来称呼事物。双方都听不懂对方在说什么，因为他们站在世界结构的不同层次上。然而，这种对称的对峙并不能公平地表达词语的意思。它们不是随意的名字(甚至是贬义的名字);它们在语言、词源、搭配等方面都有自己独特的生命力。在这种情况下，它的形式很简单:正如《牛津英语词典》所说，它是“恐怖n + -ist后缀”。这个词根名词从一开始就明确地出现了(第一个“恐怖分子”是法国大革命时期恐怖统治的倡导者)，并在乔治·w·布什于2001年宣布“反恐战争”后，它重新被人们所重视。这场战争的真正敌人当然不是字面上的“恐怖”，而是伊斯兰恐怖分子，特别是基地组织，该组织对9/11袭击负有责任。但是，在“恐怖”、“恐怖主义”和“恐怖分子”之间轻松地来回转换，被广泛地复制在诸如“恐怖袭击”或“反恐法”之类的新闻捷径中，有一种潜意识的效果，即把特定的武装组织等同于恐惧本身。任何带有“恐怖”的词都不仅仅是指国务院冷静列举的行动特征;它还说，“这就是我们所害怕的”，甚至含蓄地说，“这就是我们所害怕的一切”。这种威胁的普遍性被后缀强化了。相对而言，“恐怖主义”进入了合理论述的范围:例如，它表示一个革命组织可能会明智地(如果令人遗憾地)决定采用的一种策略。但是“恐怖分子”，与“民族主义者”或“和平主义者”类似，听起来像是相信恐怖的人。他们可能也相信其他的东西——宗教信仰，反抗压迫的使命——但这些动机被世界的形态所边缘化。正是恐怖分子的可怕行为构成了他们的本质。这样看来，指称与情感、外延与内涵的对立就显得太抽象了。“恐怖分子”这个词所暗示的“主观”反应并不是辛普森所想象的那种“不赞成”，而是一种完全明确的恐惧。这种情感并不是附加在概念上的一种偶然的反应，这种反应没有它也能被充分地传达:单词的动态将其深入到对象本身的提名中。恐惧，这个世界告诉我们，就是一切的意义。不是先有一个零度的人，然后才会害怕地从他身上退缩。有一个天生害怕的人;如果它是一个“加载词”，这个词和加载词是一体的。这意味着，除其他外，“恐怖分子”必须是说话者以外的
{"title":"Terrorist","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12755","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12755","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of a word. And within that argument, it is perhaps even more surprising that anger should focus not, as usually happens, on something that was offensively said, but exactly on what was not said. The protestors had a specific, favoured term, and were outraged when they did not hear it. This suggests a sort of super-censorship, a regime which, not content with telling broadcasters what they mustn't say, seeks positively to dictate what they must say. Indeed, the point was pressed in just that form when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, told the world's press that they ‘must declare and call Hamas a terrorist organization without ifs and buts, without explanation’.<sup>1</sup> On what basis does the head of a democratic state issue instructions to independent journalists about their detailed lexical choices? And why this particular word?</p><p>Obviously the word itself is contested ground. In a despairing <i>tour de force</i> Alex P. Schmid, a leading academic in the field, compiled 250 different definitions of ‘terrorism’, the great majority of them formulated between 1970 and 2010.<sup>2</sup> It is not surprising that such a heavily debated term should prove to be a flash point at a moment of crisis. On the other hand, it is puzzling that its use is so passionately required (or resisted) when there is such a spectacular lack of certainty about what it actually means. Its clarity seems to be of a different kind, a definiteness that is independent of definition. The people who use it, or who insist on its use, may not be sure of its meaning, but they know very well what they mean by using it. As Schmid notes at the head of his article, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking shortly after 9/11, brushed aside the whole business of defining one's terms: ‘What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism’.<sup>3</sup> This is to ground the meaning of the word in a gut feeling; it expresses an encounter with the concept which is not intellectual and analytic, but sensory and immediate. It thus goes some way to explain the heat of the debate. The belief that this is the right word to use is visceral.</p><p>It is a coherent position, but the trouble with it is that it treats the word as if it were <i>only</i> emotive, and therefore fails to acknowledge that it does also, despite everything, have definite referential content. A glance at those 250 definitions is enough to see that, for all their differences, they converge on a substantive if approximate object. For example, the US State Department's working definition from 2006 is that terrorism is ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 4","pages":"124-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12755","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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