Riot of Language: On the Performativity of Terrorism

This book poses alternative theoretical modes of understanding the terrorist act as “disclosure” through a critical appropriation of J.L.Austin’s speech act theory and a rigorous exploration of the Foucauldian revision of classical claims for the parrhesiast.This book explores terrorism’s performative inscriptions of ritualized atrocity and its invocation of an existential register of “truth telling.” Exploring the Boston Marathon Bombing as an exemplar, this work takes as its subject a contemporary terroristic pattern constituted by 1) an act of irruptive, spectacular, violence that 2) prompts (seduces) an investigation and engagement with a manifesto, and 3) results in agonistic rituals of adjudication of truth that are rarely convergent with the original intended disclosure.This phenomenon, the book argues, can be productively thought of as a failed ontological disclosure enunciated by the perpetrators.Such a failure is not the simple matter of an uncompelling rhetorical claim, or t