Bülent Diken og Carsten Bagge Laustsen: Stalking your own shadow Tell me your enemy and I will tell you who you are.
This article takes issue with the significant but often disavowed symbiotic relation between two contemporary enemies: fundamentalism and the politics of security. We start with a metaphorical twinning, showing how these two enemies create, provoke, mimic and ultimately support each other. Then, by way of a discourse analysis, we show the way religion functions in Bush’s and Bin Laden’s discourses. Our claim is not (only) that the discourse of security is as religious as Bin Laden’s, but that politics of security as such is the religion of our times. We conclude by arguing that the dyadic interdependence between the two fundamentalisms – Islamic and Securiticised – is dissolving the democratic habitus in a post-political condition, a condition devoid of self-reflexivity and awareness of guilt.
