Conclusion: Four Covering Principles for the Time of Terrorism

Abstract

This book has been crucially concerned with the terrorist Imaginary in contemporary fiction. How the figure of the “terrorist” recurs throughout contemporary narrative, both as a “topos,” a persistent and repeating type, and how terrorist bodies appear and are inscribed in literary writing and in other discourses, including counterterrorism studies and law, has been the principal object of study throughout the book. To the extent a tradition of contemporary theory of the political Imaginary has ties with the Lacanian Imaginary, we are speaking about body images and the “fictive direction” of the impossible-to-present wholeness of bodies, bodies which are un-representable (that is, which are Real), even as they are inscribed in a socius, the non-physical network of social relationships and significations that make up an individual’s identity. This socius, as the immaterial, but social and political (and therefore, in a Marxist sense, material) network that is the ground of an individual’s identity, encounters its technological extension in the apparatus of surveillance that was the particular emphasis of the last chapter: the bulk collection of data about all of the social interactions of everyone, everywhere, through the analysis of social networks, in the effort to identify the signature of terrorist activity; and as well, the analysis of spatial data to detect the signature of terrorist movements across the surface of the globe.