Bombs, bodies, acts: the banalization of suicide

Abstract

Two and a half decades ago, it would have been fanciful to imagine; men and women ramming into targets and blowing themselves and all else around them into bits with bombs strapped to their bodies or vehicles. It would have been even more difficult to imagine that such acts would become everyday occurrences in places as geographically separated and culturally diverse as Algiers, Baghdad, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Colombo, Grozny, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kabul, Karachi, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, and St. Petersburg. Then, the radicality of these acts of suicide violence was their original and irreducible character, as Baudrillard saw, which gave life and death new meanings. Now, the acts are no longer unexpected, unpredictable, or original, but rather routinized, ritualized, and mimetic practices. If Albert Camus thought suicide was the only serious philosophical problem, what would he have thought of banalized suicide violence