Introduction to the Special Issue: Fundamentalism and Terrorism

Abstract

Fundamentalism and terrorism grip our minds. The terms are not identical, but they spread into each other. For me, fundamentalism once had a good meaning, having to do with the roots, the basis of something. Dizzy Gillespie once described his connection to blues music as “steeped in fundamentals.” To be oriented toward seeking the fundamentals of a good life has been a driving pole for me. Suddenly, this drive is uprooted, exposed as naive, everything changed, reversed, weird. Definitions fail as reality keeps shifting. The change is not so sudden as it feels. Years ago in school we read studies on the authoritarian personality, which have a lot in common with portrayals of violent fundamentalists today. The events of 9/11 galvanized the current abundance of mental work and psychic elaboration, as we try to figure out what is happening and what might happen. As a child during World War II, I found an external match for childhood terrors in pictures of Nazi extermination camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Ku Klux Klan, and later, on a lesser scale but still of crucial significance, everything that was signified by the advent and fall of Senator McCarthy’s persecutory spirit. A persecutory spirit is very much at work today. For one of the things we fear most in violent fundamentalism and terrorism is a lethal, ruthless persecutory spirit that kills without conscience, that does not care for the other’s life. Freud teaches that pronouns (I–you), subject–object, and specific affects are subject to reversal around deeper emotive tendencies. It almost seems that who destroys whom is less important than destruction as such. Nevertheless, more boundless, faceless de-