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A different way of death

Terry Eagleton

Wednesday 26 January 2005The Guardian

While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed

about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not

necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of

attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is possible to act in

a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the

World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no

way they could have avoided it.

Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and

who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa

Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more

valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a

more abundant life all round.

Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they

take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom;

the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it

contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what

you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostlyknown as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.

Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and

defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-

dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence.

Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you

anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-

determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his

everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his

death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is

the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognised, means the death of

God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of

omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity?

Suicide bombers and hunger strikers are out to transform weakness into power. Because they are

ready to die while their enemies are not, they score a spiritual victory over them. The ultimate

freedom is not to fear death. If you no longer fear it, political power can have no hold over you.

Those with nothing to lose are deeply dangerous. But suicide bombers also cheat their

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antagonists of the only aspect of themselves that they can control: their bodies. By depriving

their masters of this manipulable part of themselves, they become invulnerable. Nothing is less

masterable than nothing. By slipping through the fingers of power, leaving it grasping at thin air,

they force it to betray its own vacuousness. It is, to be sure, a pyrrhic victory. But it proclaims

that what your adversary cannot annihilate is the will to annihilation. Like the traditional tragic

hero, the suicide bomber rises above his own destruction by the very resolution with which heembraces it.

Blowing himself to pieces in a packed marketplace is likely to prove by far the most historic

event of the bomber's life. Nothing in his life, to quote Macbeth, becomes him like the leaving of

it. This is both his triumph and his defeat. However miserable or impoverished, most men and

women have one formidable power at their disposal: the power to die as devastatingly as

possible. And not only devastatingly, but surreally. There is a smack of avant garde theatre about

this horrific act. In a social order that seems progressively more depthless, transparent,

rationalised and instantly communicable, the brutal slaughter of the innocent, like some Dadaist

happening, warps the mind as well as the body. It is an assault on meaning as well as on the flesh

- an ultimate act of defamiliarisation, which transforms the everyday into the monstrouslyunrecognisable.