This essay seeks to reframe the question of continuity (or discontinuity) between Orientalism and Islamophobia as, underlying the question, is an enduring conception of history as agentive, as a “making,” a “construction,” or a “production” (“Men make their own history …”). Turning our attention instead toward destructive power—distinct from repressive and coercive and from productive and enabling modes of power (Foucault, Said)—a distinct history, or anti-history, emerges, which necessitates a different lexicon. Political or subject formations might still be at stake, but another logic or illogic, a different politics may become visible where the main concern is not the making of world (Arendt), but its undoing; not the production of collectives or of individual subjects, but their destruction. Torture, as Jean Améry described it, is one such destruction of world. It may thus become possible to ask whether, between Orientalism and Islamophobia, the Muslims or Muselmänner of the Nazi camps were a “product,” whether they were “made” into subjects. The essay builds on earlier reflections where elements of a lexicon and analytics of destruction were considered (Heidegger, Derrida), along with preliminary answers to the question: what is destruction? Or here: is there a history of destruction?
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