Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has led the global war on terrorism, which primarily targeted terrorists motivated by radical Islam, also known as Global Jihadists. This international military campaign caused many serious problems, such as heavy civilian casualties by the U.S.-led military actions, the expansion of Jihadist militant groups by the power vacuum in Iraq, and the overwhelming refugee influx in Europe. Many experts on international law or human rights have criticized preventive attacks, torture, and drone strikes targeting those suspected of being involved in terrorism activities as illegitimate.

Critical terrorism studies have regarded the methodological vulnerability of mainstream terrorism studies as one of the causes of this problematic counterterrorism. This article reflects on the omissions of conceptual analyses in terrorism studies as an American social science by focusing on fanaticism, which is one of the key concepts in the New Terrorism theory. The assertion is that the concept of fanaticism has distorted the recognition of the Global Jihad in academic and political contexts. Thus, this article deconstructs the binary system of reason/fanaticism, exposing the arbitrariness of the system by hidden political power.

The first section describes the process of constructing binary systems in terrorism studies: secular/religious motives and reason/fanaticism. This process is revealed by shedding light on significant works by Bruce Hoffman and Walter Laqueur. Hoffman has claimed the possibility of unprecedented attacks by religious terrorists because of the radical difference between secular motives and religious ones. He concluded that religion inspires terrorists to more destructive violence, for example, the use of weapons of mass destruction. Laqueur developed the binary system of secular/religious motives, using the term fanaticism, which means a mental illness caused by a loss of reason. He constructed the structure of reason/fanaticism in the core of his New Terrorism theory.

However, this structure is invalid because our minds cannot be transcendentally divided between reason and fanaticism. The second section of the article thus points out that the structure’s boundary has been drawn arbitrarily from the perspective of the Enlightenment and Western modernization. By reviewing the Foucault/Derrida debate about madness, the author clarifies that our minds are the mixture of truth and falsehood. This means that terrorists who seem to be absolute fanatics follow truth to some extent. As long as scholars persist in using this term, terrorism studies will naturalize the distorted understanding of Global Jihad.

Finally, the article presents some concepts in psychoanalysis or social psychology as an alternative approach to the New Terrorism theory. These studies have explained our irrational behaviors by focusing on our minds’ unconsciousness. We should reflect on the conceptual problems of existing studies from a critical perspective, paying attention to micro approaches more positively for the development of multidisciplinary terrorism studies.

　テロリズムは、非暴力的な政治制度が確立する現代で、稀少な「剝き出し」の政治的暴力である。ところが、この政治現象自体を理論的に解釈する試みは僅少である。この問題意識より、本稿は、カール・シュミット（Carl Schmitt）とエルネスト・ラクラウ（Ernesto Laclau）＝シャンタル・ムフ（Chantal Mouffe）の政治理論を糸口に、テロリズムの概念的精緻化に取り組む。第1節では、先行研究の批判的な再検討を踏まえ、テロリズムの定義付けや概念化を阻む袋小路（①存在論と認識論、②「政治的」の諸問題）を概説する。第2節では、まず、「政治的」の諸問題に応答するため、シュミットの友敵理論と敵概念の類型化を基に、テロリズムを「絶対的な敵」に対する「政治的なもの」の究極的な発現と概念化する。次に、存在論と認識論の隘路を克服するため、ラクラウ＝ムフの「敵対性」概念と言説理論を参照点に、テロリズムの中心概念である「政治的なもの」を社会構成主義的な意味で再定義する。最後に、「グローバル・ジハード」現象と関連付けつつ、本稿の理論的／概念的な考察から具体的な洞察や含意を導き出す。