TL;DRAbstract
Political violence, of course, is not new. Nor is terrorism new. Depending on how the latter is defined, its history can be traced back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century (Burleigh 2007). What is new since September 2001 are changes in the discursive disposition of the terms adopted in the public sphere to describe terrorism and political violence. This chapter shows how the discursive lineaments of the present public reactions to terrorism have evolved since 9/11. Its purpose is not only to display the distinctiveness of the current discursive disposition but by doing so to suggest how the discursive arrangements might have been and could still be different. In this way the chapter might be seen as a form of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1993, 2003;Wodak and Meyer 2001;Widdowson 2004): its focus is on the present and the immediate past but its intention is to act — in Bauman’s phrase — ‘as a knife with the edge pressed against the future’2 (Bauman 1976;Bauman a
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Political violence, of course, is not new. Nor is terrorism new. Depending on how the latter is defined, its history can be traced back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century (Burleigh 2007). What is new since September 2001 are changes in the discursive disposition of the terms adopted in the public sphere to describe terrorism and political violence. This chapter shows how the discursive lineaments of the present public reactions to terrorism have evolved since 9/11. Its purpose is not only to display the distinctiveness of the current discursive disposition but by doing so to suggest how the discursive arrangements might have been and could still be different. In this way the chapter might be seen as a form of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1993, 2003;Wodak and Meyer 2001;Widdowson 2004): its focus is on the present and the immediate past but its intention is to act — in Bauman’s phrase — ‘as a knife with the edge pressed against the future’2 (Bauman 1976;Bauman a
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