HENT DE VRIESso pick up possible announcements of things to come or learn to discern nuances of
‘‘disagreement’’ and ‘‘inner cleavages’’ (e.g., concerning the legitimacy, from the view-
point of Islam, of violence against Muslims or ‘‘noncombatant non-Muslims’’) that might
help efforts to ‘‘broaden gaps’’ within these Internet communities.^65 As with all technolog-
ical monitoring, there are structural—logical-mathematical—difficulties in doing so, even
beyond the question of allocating financial and other resources.^66
Whereas the U.S. seeks to contain the war on terror by localizing it abroad in specific
territories (first Afghanistan, then Iraq)—thereby, paradoxically, producing the very terri-
torial base for terror that, in the case of Iraq, was previously lacking—the online jihadists
dream of unleashing or at least staging a global, indeed, cosmic conflict, which would
have no geographical boundaries or concretely envisioned terms of political (let alone
diplomatic) resolution. In fact, it now seems just as unlikely that the Bush administration
will stop identifying, taking on, and thereby unintentionally creating potential geopolitical
threats against its perceived economic interests, democratic ideals, and cultural values as
it is unrealistic to assume that militant jihadhism would tone down its rhetoric (and put
down its arms) the moment that Western forces were to withdraw from Islamic holy
grounds. In the meantime, inflammatory and inflated words and gestures, along with a
brandishing of things and powers, continues unabated. There is no end to conflicts that
one does not—and, for identitarian reasons cannot—want to end or whose possible victor
one cannot realistically imagine oneself to be one day.^67
These processes, in which on all sides the ‘‘masters of war’’ (Bob Dylan) get the
upper hand, obey a relentless logic of ‘‘escalation,’’ whichLe Monde, in a telling editorial
concerning the most recent war in Lebanon, summarized as follows: ‘‘It is tempting to
believe that military logic, when it reaches a certain level of escalation, has become a
fatality. Nonetheless, nothing in this conflict is uncontrollable. Israel, like Hezbollah, acts
in a considered and determined manner, even though both might have been surprised by
the amplitude of the enemy’s reaction.’’^68 Political theology might well become the disci-
pline of studying and eventually mastering such ‘‘escalation,’’ that is, the excesses of sover-
eignty and their violence, as well as the rhetorical overdrive with which they are
accompanied, ideologically justified, and irresponsibly spiced up.
One could be tempted to follow Spinoza, who in theEthicssupplements his earlier views,
developed in theTheologico-Political Treatise, with a theory of the passions, more pre-
cisely, of the imitation of affects—of reciprocal, near-specular affect-effects (or effect-
affects)—in which individual (and, by extension, also socio-political) bodies, all of which
are composite, mimic, rival, and seek to outbid each other quasi-mechanically, quasi-
machinally, quasi-automatically. He writes: ‘‘If we image a thing like us, toward which we
have had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like
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