The shopper and the bomber: A genealogical tale of two contemporary personalities

Abstract

Things have a very strange way of existing within human societies, they could be much ‘sought after’ entities yet could arouse a deeper ‘pathological hatred’ directed towards them. Michel Serres said that our whole life is consumed by chasing objects, in adoring them, in making a fetish out of them, in collecting and surrounding ourselves with different objects, yet it is the very reference to objectification that arouses our deeper insecurities and horror. This ambiguous relationship of humans with the things is reflected in the two most extreme expressions and interesting phenomena of our times, consumerism and suicide bombings. While consumerism denotes a fetishistic love with the objects, suicide bombing, on the other hand, reflects the apogee of destruction of the thing in the form of human body. While they have been separately analyzed from different socio-political perspectives, an attempt is being made here to show common underlying forces behind these visibly disparate phenomena. This paper will analyse consumer culture and suicide bombings through the personalities of the shopper and the bomber, to look for their underlying similarities and differences, in the process of historically situating them within a common genealogical source.