Since Still mentioned Freud and e-dog sexiness and "Idoru" worship, I'll put in my oar and venture that a certain amount of "terrorism" is a species of odd, obsessed eroticism.
That seems like an oblique, even obscure, assertion.
The young men blasting themselves into oblivion ( heaven) do have something to live for, of course. But the ultimate ejaculation is atomizing your brain in the service of transcendence. The martyr's extreme act instantly perfects you and unites you with God.
Jacob Bronowski inveighed against believing in "transcendence" in "The Ascent of Man", a populist's, not an academic's book. Bronowski was on a mission-- he wanted to reach people.
"Transcendence" lies under the NeoCon soil, and much of the mischief, murder and malfeasance currently being promulgated by BushCo sprouts from it. The announced goal is the transcendence of greed and dictatorship and striking the newly-minted coin of "democracy and liberty" ( and "free-market" capitalism . . .)
National Socialism in Germany was similar in its transcendent goals. Only the names differed--viz, "Mein Kampf" and its vision of "racial purity." The forging of the Aryan Super-Race. With enough "Lebensraum" and a pure enough purity-- of sacrifice to society and personal perfection of mind and spirit-- transcendence was possible.
The Party in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" ( his preferred spelling of the title) is obsessed with transcendence:
O'Brien tells Winston ( while he is torturing him) that, in the Ancient World, the lesson was "thou shalt not", in the modern world, "thou shalt", but the Party takes things one step further and teaches "thou art." In the vision of the Party manipulators and propagandists, the circle is squared.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.p ... e=19980904
Transcendence is best left to literature and to art.
Super-stealthy-magical heroes.
Isabel Allende ( the niece of Salvador Allende, who would have "transformed" Chile with socialism, had the US not vigorously supported a coup, then economic sanctions, to ruin his government and make way for the installation of Pinochet . . .) has just published a novel about "Zorro."
"Superman" was a character invented by highschool boys Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the sons of Jewish immigrants.
In the 1978 "Superman" movie, actor Marlon Brando, playing Superman's father, Jor-El, tells his son Kal-El ( Superman) in mid-flight headed for Earth from the exploding planet Krypton that the Earthlings:
"Are a good people-- they mean to be-- they lack only the Light to show them the way . . ." This weird conflation of "El", an ancient Hebrew name for God, attached to both the characters' names, as well as the appropriated quotes from the New Testament-- naming Christ as the Light-- this is pure transcendence.
Superman falls from heaven to earth, there to provide the example to emulate in order to forge a new "super-race."
It is the highschool boys' dream, like other stories of heroes for adolescents-- "Zorro", for instance.
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/ ... b_main.asp
By the way, I vote for attaching Joe Shuster's and Jerry Siegel's names to this list:
http://www.jinfo.org/Thinkers.html
The fantasy of transcendence this time ( in "Zorro") is the morphing of the young prankster and dandy Diego de la Vega into the dashing "righter of wrongs" with a sword.
But what happens if Zorro, like Isabel Allende's uncle, is thwarted by the CIA?
Zlatko
cool who never gets angry anymore 