Theorizing Self-Destructive Violence

Abstract

The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.