Terrorism As An Object of Knowledge
Of course, the term non-relation comes from Jacques Lacan’s axiom that there is no relation between the sexes, although it might be better translated as there is no measure between the sexes. In other words, what I want to emphasise here is a fundamental incommensurability at the heart of the narrative: a minimal split, gap, or difference that cuts across the text, rendering it asymmetrical and incomplete. The point is that things are incommensurable with themselves inwardly, and therefore one can never obtain a perfectly self-consistent Whole. For Lacan, the One is always cut across by a non-relation—a point of internal incommensurability—which undermines its totality from within. - Martin Hare
Refugees and migrants move away from a situation, leave language and the familiar behind, which is not so different from what happens in analysis. To undertake an analysis is to go through hell, says Jacques Lacan. To be exiled or to leave what is familiar is not about adaptation, but to find a way to deal with the impossible, to accept limitations. Migration is somehow taking risks, leaving what one knows and moving towards an unknown. - Contemporary Heretic
The Forbes list of billionaires not only reveals the scale of wealth concentration as a form of economic injustice rooted in different regimes of capitalist exploitation, but also points to the political structures that facilitate such an economic system—one that benefits 3,428 billionaires who are not blessed by gods or goddesses, but by the policies of states and governments across the world. In a world of 8.3 billion people, only a tiny fraction—the 3,428 billionaires—live lives of extraordinary privilege, while the vast majority struggle to manage and survive in 2026. These numbers tell the story of the exploitation of the masses amid limitless wealth accumulation by billionaires that extends beyond the boundaries of nation-states. These billionaires are not merely wealthy individuals with corporate ownership; they are also powerful shareholders of capitalist system. - Forbes
Baghdad, March 13, 2026 (AFP) — A pro-Iranian group in Iraq warned Friday that French interests “in Iraq and the region” would be “under targeting fire” after the arrival of a French aircraft carrier. The statement on the Telegram page of the Ashab Alkahf group came as French President Emmanuel Macron announced the death of a French soldier and the injury of several others in Iraqi Kurdistan. - Kurdish Institute
Very early in life, the human being is constitutively divided, “split.” Language, culture, the insistence of the Other, bite into the being: a traumatic cut, a rip in being, experienced as an Intensity unbearably, painfully pleasurable. This is the first human experience. Lacan calls it “Jouissance”, a term which is untranslated in all English, Spanish, etc. versions of his work. The cut opens an abyss, an experience of loss of an unattainable object, a missing object which was never actually there, because before the cut there was no relationality, no subject, no object. The object of human desire is lost-as-such. - Gad Horowitz
BEIJING – China said it will donate US$200,000 (S$256,000) to the parents of students killed in what it called an “indiscriminate” missile strike on a school in Iran early in the Middle East war. - The Straights Times
The zoomers are making Araghchi fan cams on TikTok
Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas. Case was seen as major test of the first amendment and whether the US could use broad anti-terrorism statute to prosecute leftwing protesters. - The Guardan
Terrorism: it’s not mental illness – it’s politics
If Europeans & Americans Love Zionists So Much, Take Them Back to Their Frozen Shit Holes
New Ipsos polling conducted for Global News reveals 61 per cent of Canadians disapprove of the U.S. military action against Iran. - Global News
This week, it was Iran that was in control of the world oil market, not the United States, contrary to Trump’s apparent plan to seize control of Venezuelan and Iranian oil in a bid to gain a competitive advantage over China. - ABC.au
The concept of psychic diversity—the multiple ways in which subjects manage desire, language, social bonds, and unconscious conflicts—emerges from the understanding that each subject organizes their relationship with the registers of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary in a singular way, as theorized by Lacan (2005). This diversity manifests across the clinical categories of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion but transcends these structures by recognizing that each subject produces a unique response to the structural impasses of their existence (Quinet, 1991). Subjectivity, therefore, is always marked by singularity, shaped through the complex interplay between the unconscious, the Symbolic order, and the social and historical contexts that interpolate the subject (Žižek, 2006). - Anderson de Souza Sant’Anna
‘You are all worse than each other’: anti-regime Iranians turn on Trump. Mood among some in Iran shifts from hope of being rescued to dismay at destruction of infrastructure, culture and lives. - Guardian
Iranian football team members withdraw asylum requests: Report. Three more members of Iran’s women’s national football squad who sought asylum in Australia have decided to return to Iran. - AJ
I argue that that “terrorism,” as an object of knowledge, resists certain forms of expertise. This is not to say that terrorism experts do not exist---on the contrary, we are surrounded by a seemingly ever-increasing population of individual and organizational purveyors of such expertise. Rather, what I mean when I say that terrorism “resists expertise” is that “terrorism,” as currently constituted, resists attempts to purify it as an object of knowledge. Terrorism experts agree that the study of terrorism has been beleaguered by what they term the “problem of definition”: the fact that no one, not even the experts themselves, have been able to agree on how to define it (Stampnitzky 2011). I argue that this problem of definition is not incidental, but rather instrumental to the very way that “terrorism” has been constructed as an object of knowledge. “Terrorism,” as it has come to be understood in popular, political, and even to an extent in expert discourse, is best defined in either moral or political terms: as violence which we morally condemn, or as violence perpetrated by certain classes of enemies. The difficulty here is that these are inherently relational, and changeable, definitions; they cannot be held stable by attempting to define “terrorism” as the use of certain tactics, the targeting of certain victims, or in any other “objective” way. Hence, debates over terrorism are plagued by constant struggles over which acts should be included or excluded. - Lisa Stampnitzky
“During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government” to lead “to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing……To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.” - Lenin
Thousands of Chinese fishing boats have been massing in geometric formations in the East China Sea, in coordinated actions that experts believe are part of Beijing's preparations for a potential regional crisis or conflict. - France24
There are thousands of Chinese war fantasy novels on the Internet — too sensitive to be published in book form (censored), they circulate on blogs, and websites like Blood and Iron Reading. Most languish, but the more popular ones get read millions of times. As a rising China struggles to define its military aspirations, and as the country’s vast propaganda apparatus encourages citizens to define their version of President Xi Jinping’s vague slogan “Chinese Dream,” these military fantasy novels provide insight into what Chinese people’s war dreams look like…Another common theme running through the books is China — sometimes violently — forcing the world to become more harmonious. - iPolitics.ca
Terrorists post 9/11: Rather than recognizing the multiple audiences for both bin Laden's message through the attacks, and the need to address those multiple audiences in the development of a response, the Bush administration responded with a message to what it conceived as its base. The political expediency of identifying terrorism with ‘evil’ and to focus on one particular evil such as bin Laden is clear in the mobilization of political support of the home audience and much of the international audience in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The early black–white imagery of good versus evil employed by George W. Bush generated immediate elite and public support from that base in the initial stages of response. However, ignoring the political conflicts that underlay the terrorism created fissures in that wider audience over time. Refusing to consider how bin Laden's message resonated with supporters, why wealthy Saudis as well as poor Pakistanis, Indonesians, Egyptians and recent European immigrants responded to the message, lost valuable public support from the vast majority of the populations of nations around the globe…The modern media, by covering the actions of the terrorist and the reactions of the authorities and the public, transmit both terrorist and government messages to the audience. Thus, the media and their reporting are central to terrorism and counter-terrorism as political action. - Stohl
