International Terrorism and the Human Condition

Donald Phillip Verene, III, Emory University

Philosophical reflections on terrorism by Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Richard Kearney have focused on the political, historical, and cultural conditions of terrorism, its connections to the legacy of the Enlightenment, fundamentalism, and so forth. They have not raised the fundamental question of who the terrorist is, how the being of the terrorist arises from the conditions of human existence from which all types of lives are formed. This question is not merely theoretical. Its answer involves considerable practical, political, and ethical implications.