Terror: a speech after 9-11

• Autor(a) principal: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Mediações - Revista de Ciências Sociais
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/mediacoes/article/view/11098
• topic: Terror; Humanities; Secularism; Culture; Religion.; Terror; Humanidades; Secularismo; Cultura; Religião

This article encloses a reflection in the search for responses in face of the anxiety and the necessity of critically explaining, with help of the knowledge of the humanities, the American war on terrorism. In spite of the impossibility of a one response to war, we cannot remain silent. Thus, two questions need to be formulated: “What are some already existing responses? And, how respond in face of the impossibility of response?”. The response of the author is oriented by an understanding of “culture as its own explanations”, from which she undertakes a training into imagining the perspective of the “other” in order to enable the understanding of both the suicide bomber and the war against terrorism. The considerations of the author criticize stereotyped explanations formulated by the right and the left in the USA. Questions concerning gender, reason, religion and culture permeate her analysis, which aims at opening a space for the humanities, the universities and the intellectual to fulfill the task of understanding the “other” and, therefore, of becoming able to delineate an account of the war.