文档介绍：CR4-3 05 12/23/04 4:44 PM Page 109
The Martyr and the Sovereign
Scenes from a Contemporary Tragic Drama, Read
through Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt
S IGRID W EIGEL
Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany
Translated by ina Paul, University of Warwick, .
In the site of a theater auditorium chosen by Chechen
terrorists as the location for their hostage-taking in Moscow, the
significance of spectacular dramatization for the current politics of suicide
attacks was symbolically condensed: the politics of violence as bloody the-
ater. Unlike partisans and resistance fighters, who operate in secret and
without recognition, in order, in targeted action, to strike the militarily
superior enemy at a sensitive spot, the underground fighters of today prefer
their actions to be played out in the full glare of the spotlights. In their mix-
ture of theatricality and violence, the television images of the suicide attacks
in Israel and Chechnya and those of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in
Afghanistan, and in Iraq have long since outstripped the Theater of Cruelty.
However, what radically separates terrorist politics from theater is that the
actions of the former do not just take place in front of a large audience; rather,
the audience itself es a target. This is the reason for the controversy
which flared up concerning the possible proximity between avant-gardes
and terrorism after September 11, sparked by Jean Clair’s statement that
● 109
CR4-3 05 12/23/04 4:44 PM Page 110
110 ● The Martyr and the Sovereign
Surrealism (for example, André Breton’s fantasy of shooting into the crowd
of passersby) was to be seen as a precursor of
For me, viewing the images of the attacks, other e to
mind. The bloody acts of public violence, staged by preference in densely
populated areas, the presentation of the victims and their dismembered
bodies, the dramatization of the suicide attackers as martyrs, and the ri