“Terrorism”: Reality and Conceptual Framework

The purpose of the article is to embed the modern representation of terrorism into the conceptual framework defined in the horizon of the fundamentals of the dominant liberal version of the economic paradigm of the political (“managerial paradigm”). The political is presented as a balance of interests, fixed at the moment as the result of endless public discussion; politics in this case is management, whose task is to harmonize interests and ensure conditions for peaceful existence – based on a liberal consensus on basic rights. The reality of the political arises in the process of aesthetic/historical representation, for which perspectivism is constitutive; such reality is fragmented and centered relative to an empty place (the exclusion of the sovereign and the sovereign decision), has the properties of hyperreality, the phenomena of which are simulacra of the third level. The absence of the possibility of drawing a border (the exclusive prerogative of a sovereign decision) leads to the non-distinction of “internal” and “external”, the area of “order” and “anomie”. In this situation, war becomes a permanent mechanism for the biopolitical production of life; an unrecognized enemy is a party to the war; the war is presented as fair, the goal is declared to restore the disturbed order. An unrecognized enemy is called a terrorist; the conceptual horizon for defining the concept of “terrorism” is the anti-terrorist war in the nearest way. Thus, the philosophical approach differs from the disciplinary scientific one; the philosophical concept of terrorism has other grounds than its ideal-typical concepts, which are operated by the disciplinarily organized sciences; the evidence of paradigmatic principles makes philosophical conceptualization difficult.