``What appears to me unacceptable in the ``strategy''
(in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so
on) of the ``bin Laden effect'' is not only the cruelty, the disregard for
human life, the disrespect for the law, for women, the use of what is worst
in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism.
No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse _open
onto no future and, in my view, have no future_. If we are to put any faith
in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political
scene, of the ``world'' itself, then there is, it seems to me, _nothing good_
to be hoped for from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly,
is that all captialist and modern technoscientific forces be put
in the service of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the Islamic
revelation of the One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized
in even the nontheological form of sovereignty (...), none of this seems
to have any place whatsoever in the discourse ``bin Laden.'' That is why,
in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of
the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well I would. Despite
my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political
posture, about the ``international terrorist'' coalition, despite
all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy,
international law, and the very international institutions that the states of
this ``coalition'' themselves founded and supported up to a certain point,
I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law,
leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the ``political,''
democracy, international law, international institutions, and so forth.
Even if this ``in the name of'' is still merely an assertion and a purely
verbal committment. Even in its most cynical mode, such an assertion
still lets resonate within it an invincible promise. I don't hear any
such promise coming from ``bin Laden,'' at least not one in this world.''

``Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides'' _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_ p.113