The photograph on our list below of Islamic “martyrdom” posters decorating the courtyard of the newly formed Center for Government and International Relations in Cambridge, Mass., brings to mind that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, newly named University Professor at Columbia University, delivered an address in England in 2002 in which she described the 9/11 hijackers in such terms as to make them sound heroic and even sympathetic. The whole speech is available online, but access is restricted to subscribing libraries. The key quotation is below:
Suicide bombing–and the planes of nine-eleven were living bombs–is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism; killing oneself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object capable of destruction in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of self…. Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter which side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won’t respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.
President Bollinger’s announcement of her appointment as University Professor:
Professor Spivak’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, at the most creative levels, and a life of civic engagement–including in her native India–embodies Columbia’s mission of teaching, scholarship, and service to the broader world community. Through her new role as University Professor, I hope and expect more students will be able to experience her imaginative mind and spirit.
Yes, perhaps they will imagine themselves as suicide bombers, or learn to sympathize with the spirit of mass murderers.