ABSTRACT
Indeed, the very attempt to "know" how the terrorist thinks or lives can be deemed an abomination . Such a viewpoint is found not
only in newspaper editorials but in the works of prominent terrorism writers such as Conor Cruise O'Brien. When The Guardian argued that the IRA's political motivations needed to be recognized, and appealed, socratically, to "know thine enemy," O'Brien noted in The Observer,
"When we are summoned to make an effort to understand them .. .it
is a way of deflecting indignation and preparing surrender-'know thine enemy' may be a first stage in giving in to him .... It is an invitation in fact to acquiesce in legitimating terror."1 We know of no other field in which the call for tabooing knowledge in the interest of moral
indignation can be issued by a leading figure. In this chapter we will equate "terrorism" and "taboo," not only in
order to bring to the fore the antinomies of norm and anomaly, lawfulness and lawlessness, normalcy and pathology, pattern and chaos, the civilized and the barbaric-in short, the dynamics of form and formlessness-but also to reveal the extent to which transgression and terror are, in the final analysis, cultural constructions amenable to
demythification. We call particular attention to the absurdity of attributing enormous power to "terrorists" who have been mythified and then tabooed.
