ABSTRACT
This essay articulates the relation between what Jacques Derrida diagnoses as the autoimmunitary response of the United States to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the US imposition of terror, through torture, on the life of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of Guantánamo Diary, Slahi’s testimony of ‘living literally in terror’ as a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. To understand what global responses to the ‘War on Terror’ and Slahi’s experience of living in terror have in common, and what we can learn through their juxtaposition, this essay asks a series of interrelated questions: what is terror? To what degree is terror a threat to democracy? What does the ‘War on Terror’ have to do with human rights in the twenty-first century? Does terror inevitably lead to a politics of dehumanisation, and, if so, what can we learn from accounts of living in terror, like Slahi’s, about ways of preserving our humanity when it is threatened with destruction? Through such voices as Slahi’s, this essay argues, we can perhaps glimpse what freedom from dehumanisation and terror looks like, and what is required, in the name of the future, to make such freedom real.
