Riot of Language On the Performativity of Terrorism

This book poses alternative theoretical modes of understanding the terrorist act as “disclosure” through a critical appropriation of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory and a rigorous exploration of the Foucauldian revision of classical claims for theparrhesiast. This book explores terrorism’s performative inscriptions of ritualized atrocity and its invocation of an existential register of “truth telling.” Exploring the Boston Marathon Bombing as an exemplar, this work takes as its subject a contemporary terroristic pattern constituted by 1) an act of irruptive, spectacular, violence that 2) prompts (seduces) an investigation and engagement with a manifesto, and 3) results in agonistic rituals of adjudication of truth that are rarely convergent with the original intended disclosure. This phenomenon, the book argues, can be productively thought of as a failed ontological disclosure enunciated by the perpetrators. Such a failure is not the simple matter of an uncompelling rhetorical claim, or the unsuccessful transmission of information. The terrorist act succeeds, in fact, in a kind of seduction that prompts an investigation around which tremendous resources are expended. Such acts seek to catalyze a form of recognition of the perpetrator’s being that is never fully realized. The existentially underwritten disclosure is doomed, then, to be passed over unheard, and yet its inherent infelicity makes it recognizable as a terrorist act.