OSAMA THE SPECTANARCH

So, Osama bin Laden, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and Guy Debord walk into a bar...twenty seconds later, it explodes.

Detaching Islamic law from the grip of the nation-state and emphasizing its sacrificial nature, Osama bin Laden effectively transforms the militant's obedience of Sharia into an act of sovereignty. The law is no longer embodied in a set of institutions that must be submitted to, but manifests itself in militant acts that possess the force of law in their own right. Yet what makes these acts sovereign, more than their independence from institutional authority, is that they neither claim nor defend any interest, but rather destroy interest itself in spectacular gestures of sacrifice uniting both perpetrators and victims into a single humanity. In other words, militant acts are sovereign because they are spendthrift: deriding the protection that law normally extends to interests of various kinds and instead sacrificing life itself as the ground of all interest. In this sense, the militant act is law-making rather than law-abiding, albeit in the most anarchic of ways.

All true of course, with the slight caveat that the LAW that bin Laden is in submission to is not Sharia, but the Law of the Spectacle.  He is as much a servant of the spectacle as Rupert Murdoch. A guerrilla of separation. And his "followers" want nothing else but TO APPEAR at long last as True Muslims of the Spectacle, even if that means their erasure-in-the-world as carbon based life forms. After all, the militant is always uncertain of his status, his commitment is always in doubt, he might in his heart remain a secret, asthmatic, debauched playboy revanchist. Such things can only be settled by suicide in the eye of the camera.