Riot of the Unheard: A Genealogy of Dis/Closive Terror
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Date
2023-03-09
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Abstract
This dissertation, grounded in the literary concerns of speech and narrative, poses alternative theoretical modes of understanding the “terrorist’s” utterance, or disclosure, through a critical appropriation of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory and the Foucauldian revision of classical claims for the parrhesiast. In so doing, it more fluidly integrates the performative inscriptions of ritualized atrocity and the existential register of “truth telling” that underlie the proliferating narrative accounts of terrorism into a framework for understanding the mechanisms animating this explosive phenomenon. This work takes as its subject a terroristic pattern that has emerged in recent decades constituted by 1) an act of irruptive, spectacular, violence that 2) prompts an investigation and engagement with a manifesto, and 3) results in agonistic rituals of adjudication of truth that are rarely convergent with the original disclosure. This phenomenon, I argue, 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 kind recognition of being that is never fully realized. The existentially underwritten disclosure is doomed to be passed over unheard, and yet its inherent infelicity makes it recognizably terrorism, as such.
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Speech act theory, J.L. Austin, Parrhesia, Foucault, terrorism, performative speech acts