It would not be an exaggeration, perhaps, to suggest that a spectre is haunting the West: the spectre of the ‘suicide bomber’. The ‘un-beautiful’ figure of the suicide bomber operating at what Freud calls the ‘border of the knowable’, the uncanny and inexplicable ethic of such a figure – an ethic that goes beyond the paradigmatic ‘acting out’ of legitimate violence: war – is putting into crisis the logic of pure reason, as also the simple division between an Ordered social and the unanticipated rupture: terror. ‘Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die’ – the suicide bomber – and someone ‘who dies in order to kill’ – the soldier? Is there a need to think beyond the ‘mythology of suicide as [mere individual] pathology’, or as ‘motivated irrationality’ (see Lear [1998] for a discussion on akrasia)? Further, is the suicide bomber uncanny and inexplicable because it is ‘not properly integrated’ into the standard logic-language-ethos of, at times, ‘liberalism’, and at other times, ‘Western civilisation’, in general? Does this explain the horror – the horror Western societies experience when faced with images of suicide bombing, societies used to and complicit in the perpetration of unimaginable cruelties? Rose (2004) notes that suicide operations do not kill as many civilians as conventional warfare does, and yet people in the West react to them with exceptional horror. Is it also because the suicide bomber is offering to a largely ‘sick’ context a form of ‘cure’ that is uncanny, that is neither the logic of war nor the logic of medicine, that is neither the logic of medicine that speaks the language of war (antigen/antibodies) nor the logic of war that speaks the language of public hygiene or (ethnic) cleansing?

What explains this horror?