A HERO FOR OUR TIME

With the new conditions that now predominate in the society crushed under the iron heel of the spectacle, one knows, for example, that a political assassination finds itself placed in another light; can in a sense be sifted. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but what is infinitely more convenient is that they can be talked about madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror that imposes such mediatic explanations. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of such explanations which should cause terror.  -- Debord, Commentaires

This doesn't happen every day: It's mythic. A Nobelist for Peace kills the arch-terrorist with a stroke of a pen. From here on out, convinced Salafists can be identified as those odd people staring wistfully out to sea. And Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance, etc.

Melville: But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis.

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.