Human bomb murders
“Melanie Phillips” punctuation appeal
February 2, 2007 14 comments
What should we call suicide bombers? After all, it is well known that the phrase “suicide bombers” makes us swell up in tearful sympathy for the perpetrators, entirely forgetting the victims. That is why Fox News, bless it, chooses the silly “homicide bombers”, as though “normal” forms of bombing did not also kill people. And “kamikazes” is too historically specific. Galloping to the rescue is “Melanie Phillips”, who offers a pert new alternative:
After the human bomb murders in Eilat last weekend…
Human bomb murders? Wouldn’t it make more sense, to express one’s proper outrage towards such killings, to call them inhuman bomb murders? But then, murder as an activity is all too human. The difficulty in parsing “Melanie”‘s phrase derives from a lack of clarity as to which term is qualifying which. I suppose “human bomb murders” is not to be constrasted with animal bomb murders. We can also dismiss the possibility that “Melanie” is talking about humans who murder bombs. Obviously she is thinking of murdering humans, using bombs. But to distinguish this particular form of murdering humans using bombs, in which the perpetrator also blows himself up (are you getting nostalgic for the simplicity of “suicide bombings” yet?), “human” must also qualify “bomb”: these are murders using “human bombs” as a weapon.
Someone lend Melanie a hyphen! Then she could write “human-bomb murders”, and though there would still be the faint possibility for a cynic to read it as murders of human bombs, we would have the established pattern of “knife murder” or “shotgun murder” to back her up. As his preferred phrase to describe this sort of crime, “suicide-murders“, attests, at least Christopher Hitchens knows how to use a hyphen. Perhaps someone should send “Melanie” a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves?
It would be very wrong to point out that madmelphillips.com is still free to purchase. Perhaps I should buy it and auction it off.
“Human bomb murders” might refer not to the murder of bombs by humans, but the murder of human bombs, so yes, some clarity is in order. Perhaps “human-bomb human-murders,” making explicit the method of murder and the species of victim. But then you run the risk that people will think that the explosive devices themselves have become human, possibly due to an ill-thought-at experiment in Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps we should just pelt Melanie Phillips with water balloons and call it a day.
I fear we’re losing the battle for the hyphen, Steven. The number of times I’ve seen hyphenless phrases open to several interpretations (well, mostly two) just for the want of a hyphen …
I usually use the example: ‘four year old horses’. How many horses? How old?
I recently copy-edited a book and did a hyphen count on the original MS and the one I had edited. The number of added hyphens in the latter was in the hundreds.
Steve, I think that you hit on all the right referents here (human/inhuman, suicide/homicide), but we can give it a Zizekian twist. Forgive the length of this quote:
That last phrase quivers with Zizekian recklessness (what phenomena does he mean, and what exactly is that label and what exactly is it broadly covering?) But surely in the shift from ‘suicide bomber’ to ‘homicide bomber’ there is not just the refusal to recognise the perpetrator as a Subject (by way of his or her suicide) in the insistence that the Subjects of importance are the victims (of homicide), but also the denial of this latent monstrosity in the human: look away from the perpetrator (not just from his politics; from the reasons why she is committing this act; but also from the person qua subject capable of doing this by virtue of being a human). By this logic, the shift also protects the vague humanist notion that humans just don’t do this sort of thing, and there is a retreat into innocence (reified with the identification with the victims, who are innocent civilians). The shift specifically unspeaks an “an ethics that fearlessly stands up to the latent monstrosity of being human.”
Zizek goes on:
You yourself almost say exactly this, rather more succinctly:
To call it inhuman-bomb murders both captures and denies this exact excess (“denies” insofar as there is a simultaneous disavowal of the human in inhuman, not just in negation but in its own paradoxical state, which I think Zizek captures in saying the ‘inhuman . . . is neither human nor inhuman’). To call it human-bomb murders negates the excess of humanity itself, mechanising the human, replacing DNA with TNT, veins with blue and red wires, bones with dynamite. The human, in this formulation, is not excess in itself, but becomes excess as cyborg: ‘not human’, after all, includes more than just animals and the divine; Zizek forgets that there are also robots and machines.
While you are obviously not endorsing these terms, it is worth considering that these are real problems: how does one talk about the humanity of those who commit these “all too human” acts of inhumanity? What, then, is the humanity of inhumanity? How does one describe what it is that humans are doing to one another?
Further – and in all fairness, Fox, Hitchens, and Phillips are in some (maybe glib) way addressing this – What are the ethics to these acts of description? How does one fearlessly address these ethics, and when one does, what proper nouns are chosen? After all, going back to Zizek and a particular choice he made: what words has Zizek rejected when he refers to phenomena broadly covered by the label ‘Auschwitz’?
Did I somehow imply that these were not real problems?
But, despite your gloss at the end of your second paragaph, I am having trouble understanding what Zizek or Lacan-thru-a-Zizekian lens meant by “an ethics that fearlessly stands up to the latent monstrosity of being human”. It cannot mean to imply that extant ethical systems were all too weak-kneed and wussy to courageously say that mass murder was wrong. That murder is wrong, and mass murder is wrong, is quite a consistent theme of most ethics. Nor, on the other hand, can it mean that it would be shatteringly original to notice man’s inhumanity to man, because of course that had already long been lamented, and worried at, and analysed, by philosophers and poets and collators of religious texts and suchlike. So then what does it mean? On what is it congratulating its putative self? What new daring, precisely, does it claim for its putative self that none has previously had? And what does Zizek add to it, or take away from it, with his phrase “the diabolic dimension”?
Well, my immediate response to this question was to think, “No, of course not; I was only pointing out that these are indeed real problems.” After a moment’s pause, and re-consideration, I might remove the “of course not”, and add: ” . . . but in your often snarky dismissal of these terms – the way you splay them out, pinned to a wooden platter, and dissect them for all to see, with that mischevious twinkle in your eye – you risk losing sight of the problems themselves, or are simply uninterested in spending time looking at those actual problems.” As I pointed out immediately in my blomment, I think that you have identified the correct ideas behind those terms in your analysis; but you seem uninterested in, on uninvested in, going much further. For example, one point of my blomment is to suggest that there is actually a problem with the term “suicide bomber”, based in our ethical relations not just to those whom we discern as perpetrators and victims but also to our notion of humanity, and which Fox, Hitchens et al hamhandedly (and often unspeakingly) address; yet here is how you address this “real problem”:
Hardly sounds like you are taking this problem very seriously. I can agree with you, as I do, that the question of the hyphen is both interesting and important, and I can then go on to ask some other questions; is it really necessary of you to respond to the bulk of the blomment with a snarky question, as if to add questions to your blentry is a personal affront?
It is interesting that you should choose “diabolic dimension” as a phrase worth questioning, especially because I obviously left it out when quoting from that sentence again and again; I left it out because I have no bloody idea what he means by introducing the figure of Lucifer here, and initially consider it simply another reckless Zizek moment. I would risk the interpretation (as Zizek might say) that he is carried away by the gush of his own prose. But that may be unfair. Perhaps you could speculate on what that means.
As for the bulk of your questioning: I’m not sure I can answer that, much beyond my very inadequate, probably inaccurate, and clearly incomprehensible gloss. Perhaps, though, the point is this: instead of drawing upon notions of animality, monstrosity, the extra-human realms of divinity; instead of coolly pointing out a few smuggled meanings in a piece of rhetoric and moving on; instead of reducing “inhumanity” to some walled-off portion of “humanity” as something fated, destined, ancient, and adequately worried over by the Greats (Great Poets, Great Philosophers, Great Spiritualists), perhaps a sustained investigation of this inhumanity as intrinsic to humanity, as both negation and as excess of humanity, has not been accomplished.
Ah, sorry, I was forgetting that it is in principle impossible to be comic (or at least “snarky”) and serious at the same time. I will try to remember that in future.
You haven’t said what the problem actually is.
But the self-congratulatory Lacan/Zizek formula already draws upon the notion of monstrosity, the “latent monstrosity of being human”, as you quote it.
Oh, so you don’t approve of the method and theme of this blog. Sorry about that. I have chosen not to write a blog on Lacanian ethics, but would of course be interested to visit yours if you were to write one.
This is crassly unfair to Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Arendt etc etc. The point is not that they have already settled all the questions, but that the self-congratulatory Lacan/Zizek formula sneakily Unspeaks their contribution in its preening claim to be about to do something utterly new.
Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn’t: I’m still not sure what “both negation and excess” can mean.
The most self-congratulatory activity going on here is your own preening critique of Zizek’s tone (oddly unspeaking the fact that in my initial blomment I chose to point out his recklessness, which is probably a closer critique of Zizek than the mincing dismissal of “self-congratulatory”.)
Okay, I’ll fuck off then. Sorry about that!
“Human-Guided-Human-Propelled-Bomb” is my suggestion.
This would change the emphasis from the person to the bomb, which is the part people are actually worried about I suppose.
How about just “bomb” and “bomber”?
The problem with that, I suppose, would be that it doesn’t distinguish properly between the entirely virtuous bombs that we drop from a great height, and the bombs that others detonate at close range.
I’m more with Steven when he says the quote at no.4 is self-congratulating; ‘fearlessly stands up‘, like everybody before them was a coward and scared of facing the truth. Did Lacan & Zizek ever get round to making the advertised ethics? pehraps sw can tell us.
But you should be careful, Steven, with things like your comment No.10, or someone will accuse you of ‘moral equivalence’…
Ah yes, “moral equivalence”. I like the definition of it that dsquared gave here.
All of this useless drivel about what to call something is inane. You are eating the menu, rather than the food.As Rousseau says: There would be less philosophers if theyd just dig some damned ditches.
That’s a point of view.