Situating Genealogies of Terrorism

In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, journalist Jason Burke—who has written extensively on terrorism—frames a commentary on the 2019 Christchurch shootings with the observation that terrorism is effective because “it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal.” Burke continues that “ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialized cities of the west in the late 19th century, this has been true.”1 This narrow casting of terrorism as a western industrial phenomenon only 150 years old is perhaps enough to show why Genealogies of Terrorism is a necessary book. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson has also more interestingly demonstrated, however, that while terrorism may feel near, new, and personal, this is itself a contingent response that deserves to be unseated with the more careful historical and conceptual analysis she offers. Indeed, to the extent that contemporary western states iteratively reinvent terrorism as whatever feels near, new, and personal, we are held captive by an unexamined picture of terrorism (and the terrorist) that easily serves propaganda purposes—perhaps especially purposes of state security. This book has a complex argument, and I am not a scholar of terrorism. Rather, I have worked with a similar Wittgensteinian-Foucauldian method (most notably in my book Self-Transformations,2 and here I have little to say about the historical work that forms the body of the book (and which clearly relies on a deep grasp of a diverse and difficult archive). Instead, I focus on the book’s intriguing method and on the later chapters, which constitute an important intervention in contemporary political philosophy and a corrective to much contemporary political rhetoric about terrorism. Suffice to say that Erlenbusch-Anderson is arguing that a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the conditions of the emergence of “terrorism” best addresses the methodological challenges in its articulation. Rather than make ahistorical, stipulative assumptions about what terrorism is, Erlenbusch-Anderson suggests that it is best understood as a plural and contextual phenomenon that, as Wittgenstein might have said, gains meaning from the