Here, the 9/11 Commission Report’s peculiar description of Al-Qaeda’s attacks as ‘an event of surpassing disproportion’ (link, p. 339) begins to make sense.
As a point of departure, the notion of the attacks as a subversion of proportionality indicates that perhaps some of the power of the terrorist act rests in its status as abject to the biopolitical governmentality of the modern state. The act of terror is a transgression of the ‘topological presuppositions of normal civilian life’, in which ‘the scale of objects and people … is a generally reliable guide to the scale of their potential effects on the points and boundaries around them.’ (link, p. 628)
In a governmental order based on the assumption that the subject’s physical ability ‘to affect the space around them is … proportional to their scale’ (ibid, p. 629), the prototypical act of terror is ‘the explosion of a bomb … an object designed to expand its scale suddenly.’ (ibid, p. 628)
For the suicide bomber, the disproportionate destruction is a result of the connections between body, weapon, and life. At the time of detonation, the bomb ‘annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others … The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in the truly ballistic sense.’ (link, p. 36) Hannah describes this as an ‘expanding point topology’, in which the ‘scale of physical impacts far exceeds the physical scale normally attributed to the agents perpetrating them.’ (link, p. 628)
