The Exceptional Case in Situations of Normalcy

Abstract

The latest attacks by Islamic terrorists – in Nizza, Berlin, Barcelona and elsewhere – create a existential challenge for the free constitutional nations of the West simply by virtue of the fact that their goal is to provoke, attack, disintegrate and eventually destroy the self-directed understanding and the values of these nations – peace, freedom, equality, brotherhood, etc. – in the name of an atavistic belief. Until now, the societies affected by this challenge have accepted it with amazing serenity. Still, it may well be only a question of time – that is, of the number and intensity of future attacks – when this serenity comes to an end and is brusquely replaced by anxiety and panic. That will put politics under massive pressure to act and to “somehow” come up with an appropriate, quick and effective response to prevent future perils. Then, if not sooner, the frequent claim of politicians that one-hundred-percent certainty is impossible to achieve will fail to provide a persuasive argument for not implementing the maximum possible number of preventive measures. The fairly tenuous legitimization of the State’s lack of activity by the slogan “freedom cannot be saved by doing away with it” refuses to confront the fact that the point of preventing peril is to ensure security so that freedom can develop effectively. Thus, security is a precondition making effective freedom possible. The opponent we are facing does not present rational and verbal arguments; rather, he kills, violently and indiscriminately, with the aim of arousing and spreading shock and fear in the population. In the face of this scenario, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communication – which maintains strong influence over German political thought, and which believes that every political conflict can be transformed into a peaceful discussion – has finally been unmasked as a naive “fair-weather philosophy”. By leaving unanswered the elementary question as to how one can start a dialogue with a jihadist consciously unI.