Displacement and Condensation: The Internalization of the Clash and the Construction of the Homo Terrorismus

Abstract

As Yi Fu Tuan states in his phenomenological study of fear, “Many people in the modern and affluent Western world are haunted by fear.”¹ Although this fear manifests in a multitude of different forms and at different scales, a sacerdotal fear emerges within specific temporal and spatial conjunctures that diffuses through and transfixes the national imagination.² However, this sacerdotal fear is not permanent and is not linked to “invariant segments of tangible reality”³ that are atemporal in their expression. Rather, sacerdotal fear changes over time and space and is contingent upon political moments both external and internal to a given nation-state. For instance, during World War II the sacerdotal fear for many Western nation-states was Fascism/Nazism. Subsequent to World War II, the sacerdotal fear was characterized by Communism. The effect of this fear is that particular types of political/social/cultural differences become objects of abjection because of the perceived threat these differences pose to the identity, system, and order of the national body. Consequently, particular social groupings both external and internal to the nation-state that are associated with these differences become an abject Other who is the subject of not only national contempt and derision but political and social exclusion, division, and violence.