In Westphalia, then, the pre-modern politics of death were made abject; cast from the ordered, European interior. Now – over 350 years later - the emergence of global terrorism and suicide bombing appear to represent a disturbing return of medieval notion of death-as-politics.
In its return, however, this politics of death is transformed, upended. Rather than representing the medieval sovereign’s power over the continuing existence of the subject, the political death of a suicide bombing sees the subject – in a conscious and intentional act of self-destruction – overwhelm the sovereign state’s political power and capacity to resist.
While death-as-politics may have been an all too real prospect in the religious nomos of the res publica Christiania, suicide was a sin. In 1637, a puritan cleric by the name of John Sym described ‘self murder’ as …
