Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists: On Suicide Bombing and Literature

Abstract:Even as suicide bombing attacks have become a disturbingly regular feature of today's geopolitical landscape, the phenomenon continues to figure an upper limit to thinking on contemporary violence. As psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose writes in The Last Resistance, suicide bombing is considered "a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman, aberration that cannot—or indeed must not—be understood."1 Although statistically, Rose points out, suicide bombings claim far fewer victims than acts of conventional warfare and state violence, neoliberal democracies in the West reserve a special kind of dread and antipathy for the suicide bomber. Perhaps this is because suicide terrorist attacks, as Alex Houen suggests, are both "experienced and expressed as hyperbole," or because they provoke a public response that can only be classified in terms of sheer "horror."2