Winter 2001
Volume 28, Number 2

Is terror one or many? Does it constitute a global network whose center is nowhere and circumference nowhere, or is it concentrated in a few cave-dwelling fanatics? Does terror have policy objectives and specific grievances, a coherent worldview that contrasts, but also compares, with our own? Or does terrorism seek only terror, the specific concrete acts producing a general state of mind in a nihilistic frenzy of self-replication? Is terror political or eschatological, worldly or otherworldly? Are terrorists people possessed of a singular, horrid mania, or are they mere figureheads, tokens of a general and systemic derangement? Are we in the midst of terror or is terror in the midst of us? Who knows the answer to such questions--who knows, these days, what terror is?

Terror, I think we must begin by saying, is not trauma. A tidal wave might kill 5,000 people without producing terror. Terror is a feature of the symbolic order, the vast mesh of representations and narratives both official and unofficial, public and private, in which a culture works out its sense of itself. It affects that dynamic but relatively stable set of implicit parameters that establish a group's sense of the actual and the possible and create a loose but definite sense of collective identity. Terror may or may not be itself symbolic, but its effects are registered in the symbolic domain.

The two phases of our current terror affect the symbolic realm in different ways. The events of 11 September--the terrorism--have reconfigured the world political-military order in obvious but still-evolving ways. But even more resonant, in terms of the nature of terror, is the anthrax crisis that, at this moment in early November as I write, is dilating each day, communicating itself invisibly, on surfaces and in the air, with the most deadly form described as "floaty." Its delivery system is the very symbol of the symbolic order, the postal service, which faltered. Through this system, terror can go anywhere at all and can affect or infect anyone along the way before it reaches its addressee, if it ever does. This new kind of letter does not, in fact, have to reach what Jacques Lacan called its "destination" in order to communicate itself; we are all the proper but horribly improper destinations of its ghastly message. The system itself, including the common air we breathe and form into words, has become anthraxed.

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The question is, Has the terror sown disorder and confusion at every level of the geopolitical world order? Or has it produced a radical clarification of the order that already existed, an order hidden beneath layers of hypocrisy and duplicity? From another point of view, we might pose a slightly different but clearly related question, Is terror fundamentalist, a consequence of a warped ideology issuing from the wretched caves of Afghanistan? Or is it fundamental, a feature of the contemporary world order that we had always, in the past, been able to conceal, ignore, or deny but is now floating freely around the world? Has terror produced a new reality or disclosed an old one?