This essay seeks to reframe the question of continuity (or discontinuity) between
Orientalism and Islamophobia as, underlying the question, is an enduring conception
of history as agentive, as a “making,” a “construction,” or a “production” (“Men make
their own history …”). Turning our attention instead toward
destructive power—distinct from repressive and coercive
and from productive and enabling modes of power (Foucault, Said)—a distinct history,
or anti-history, emerges, which necessitates a different lexicon. Political or subject
formations might still be at stake, but another logic or illogic, a different politics may become
visible where the main concern is not the making of world (Arendt), but its undoing;
not the production of collectives or of individual subjects, but their destruction.
Torture, as Jean Améry described it, is one such destruction of world. It may thus
become possible to ask whether, between Orientalism and Islamophobia, the Muslims
or
Muselmänner of the Nazi camps were a “product,” whether they were “made” into subjects. The essay
builds on earlier reflections where elements of a lexicon and analytics of destruction
were considered (Heidegger, Derrida), along with preliminary answers to the question:
what is destruction? Or here: is there a history of destruction?
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