ABSTRACT
On March 29, 1892, the Paris correspondent to The Times, London, reported on the latest spate of anarchist outrages, François Ravachol’s bombing of the homes of the judge and prosecutor who had tried and sentenced May Day anarchist protestors the year before:
The crucial political agenda comes a few sentences later:
Notwithstanding the overheated rhetoric (characteristic, then as now, of the “outrage” genre of journalism), police suspicions, and contemporary fiction, no great Europe-wide anarchist conspiracy to kill off heads of state and destabilize governments actually existed. Rather, lone men like Ravachol (a petty-criminal-turned-anarchist) were most often responsible for targeted attacks avenging the death or imprisonment of comrades; they were not part of
a program of indiscriminate violence. Indeed, most anarchists were critical of bombings endangering human life, and for many the very idea of a coherent movement was a contradiction in terms.1 But the tone of the report reflected and helped to create conditions of social and political anxiety and to publicize the “war of chaos” that it sought to combat. Even the awkward syntax-“undoubtedly all anarchists are not assassins”—proposes what it ostensibly negates, and within a single sentence “anarchists” are elided with “murderers.” The mythologizing of anarchist perpetrators (as devils or martyrs, by state authorities or anarchist sympathizers, respectively) fed on this hyperbole, usually absent anything like factual evidence. In short, a symbiotic relationship developed between state power and oppositional terrorism. In this relationship, each “side” sees the other as the embodiment of oppressive violence, which must be met by an even greater punitive and spectacular violence, or violent preemptive counter-violence. This destructive symbiosis constitutes aspects of what Derrida, in a recent reflection on “9/11,” has called a structure of “autoimmunity.” The body (politic) produces antibodies that act against the defense mechanisms naturally within the body: “a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself ’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (Borradori 94). I will return to this model for thinking about the bourgeois order, law, and anarchism.
