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5 German L.J. 569 (2004)
Terror, Sovereignty and Law: On the Politics of Violence

handle is hein.journals/germlajo2004 and id is 585 raw text is: Terror, Sovereignty and Law: On the Politics of Violence By Saul Newman* A. Introduction This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between violence, law, and sover- eignty in the context of terrorism today. It focuses, not on normative questions about terrorist violence, but on its structural relationship to law and the sovereign state. Part of the difficulty in theorising terrorism is its heterogeneous and indeter- minate nature. For instance, if terrorism is to be characterised by a form of violence designed to inspire fear, then one can of course speak equally about state terrorism as one can about non-state terrorism. Indeed, one might recall that the very word terrorism derives from La Terreur of the post-revolutionary French Republic in the early 1790's. Saint-Just's words stand out as one of the most infamous justifications of state terrorism: What do you want, you who do not want virtue in order to be happy? What do you want, you who do not want the Terror to be used against the wicked?' That the highest ideals of the Republic were accompanied, and indeed inscribed, through a systematic, yet often indiscriminate, register of violence - that Republican virtue came to be associated with the willingness to be merciless - is more than just a vicissitude of history. It speaks perhaps to the very nature of po- litical discourse itself, unmasking the violence implicit in every political symbolisa- tion, at the base of every law, no matter how democratic. For Claude Lefort, The Terror of the French Republic was a way of masking or cover- ing over the symbolically empty place of power that was left in the wake of the Ancien Regime. In other words, the discourse of Terror was a form of dissimulation - a desperate attempt to give substance to the Revolution, to retroactively invent its foundations, to fill the gap in the place of power that would from now on remain empty. The Terror was therefore characterised by a hysterical need to find more and more enemies of the Republic, more and more insidious plots against the Revo- lution, in order to continually justify itself, to put off the traumatic realisation of the Department of Political Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley WA Australia. 1 Cited in CLAUDE LEFORT, DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL THEORY 72-73 (David Macey trans., Polity Press, 1988).

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