In States of Terror, Simpson investigates the history of the “fear-terror” complex from the multiple terms available in Homeric and Platonic Greek down to the concept of anxiety in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre and the efforts to pre-empt panic in the civil-defense writings of U.S. bureaucrats of the Cold War era.  He also shows how the deployment of terror was long understood to be not the effect of revolutionary or insurgent movements but a practice essential to the authority of the state—and undestood as such. From India and Algeria to Northern Ireland to Palestine, the official and popular rhetoric of counter-terrorism, the practice of state violence, from torture to massacre of civilian populations, and the development of a legal apparatus and a counter-insurgency doctrine, all deployed the language of terror and terrorism in ways that clearly have marked the contemporary war on terror and bridge between earlier colonial contexts and the present, particularly given the racialization of fear of the other as source of terror which went hand in hand with the development of colonial regimes.

Responding to David Simpson, G.N. Needham Endowed Chair, UC Davis, Author of States of Terror, will be UCR professors Jacques Lezra author of Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (2010) and Padma Rangarajan (UCR English), Historian of Indian and Irish Terrorism.

Refreshments will be served. The event is free, open to the public and disabled accessible.

Sponsored by: 

CHASS DEAN, CIS, Hispanic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, MEIS, MCS, History