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The captured corpse of the living Saddam Hossein, paraded and publicized by the US viceroy, Paul Bremer, in Iraq on December 14, 2003, is the fear of the dead body of Arab nationalism and the exhumed cadaver of now a globalized Islamism. His heavily bearded face, disheveled hair, ignoble demeanor, demeaning oral examination, and photographic ihanah (insult)—as a Moroccan political scientist put it—is the nightmare of the body that for the fear of being thus buried alive opts to blow itself up. "Why could he not just put a bullet to his own stupid head," was the question in the crowded streets and back alleys around the Central Train Station in Rabat the following day. That ihanah haunts and humiliates the colonially desubjected body that can only restore its own agency by blowing the corpse of the captured Saddam Hossein out of the bone and flesh of the suicidal bomber. Literarily disinterred out of a tight grave, the dead body of the living Saddam Hossein cuts a frightful figure, the disturbing nightmare of a people that must (but do not) choose between a monstrous empire and a tyrannical grotesquery. Neither of those two choices are acceptable, and thus in this concluding chapter, I will look closely at the self-explosive body of the suicide bomber who has eradicated the final platform of political violence by a violence equal in its intensity, once and for all denying the state its sole surviving site of legitimacy. In this final reflection, I propose the exploded body of the suicide bomber as the excavated territory of the state where it has categorically crumbled.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137264138_8

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