is that without the political to explain or make sense of violence, and yet a need to distinguish particular actions from petty crime, violence becomes unintelligible, monstrous, and irrational and a space opens up in which the (pseudo-)psychology of radicalization comes to bear on terrorism.44
Large amounts of government capital and academic effort have been placed into outlining, detailing, and defining the process of radicalization. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, outlines two approaches to radicalization. On one end of the spectrum, proponents of radicalization almost all agree that there is no singular profile of a homegrown terrorist based on categorical schema such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or religious upbringing. On the other, as political writer Arun Kundnani also illustrates, theories of radicalization are built on the assumption that violence originates from theological ideas.45 In fact, many theories, but not all, do focus solely on jihadist violence.46 Certainly, radicalization and the practices it underwrites are not equally distributed—the Double does not usurp the other, a topic I will return to below. Here, I am interested in the conjunction of the two approaches, and suffice it to say, models of radicalization however unequally deployed do not operate on the logic of the other exclusively. This is not to say that those “less reductive” theories are any less problematic; only that their multiplicity and messiness ought to be addressed. The theories posit a process in which a plethora of cognitive, affective, and experiential factors move someone from an unremarkable state and into one of bloodthirsty violence. These factors are conceptualized as personal, social, economic, and political (or more appropriately political), from one’s views on the war on terror to one’s feelings of social alienation, from one’s familial relations to one’s socioeconomic status. Reflected in the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, in which the terrorist is often depicted as white, injected into discourses of terrorism is an idea that the threat America faces is not easily confined to particular categorical molds. Rather, threat is communicated as a distributed potential, as a dangerous element that can be triggered or put into action by the most ordinary of experiences or constellation of factors—which ultimately helps to strike out any political motive as legitimate. Sounding calls for monitoring, this narrative comes to signify not only “the rare and monstrous figure of the monomaniac … [but also] the common everyday figure of the degenerate, of the pervert, of the constitutionally unbalanced, of the immature, etc.”47 In effect, the figures are merged and the face of the foe is shown to mirror that of the citizen; the Double might materialize in the most ordinary of shapes.
The lineages that make up homegrown terrorism’s genealogy are complex lines that contain overlapping and cascading notes. The territorial shifts of the refrain (from international to domestic to homegrown); the changes in security concerns from the Communist to the jihadist and beyond; exceptional and administrative modes of depoliticizing violence—none of these divisions are absolute, and the emergence of one, much like the move from the other to the Double, does not depend on the disappearance of another. Together the lineages constitute a historical triad from which to understand the emergence of the Double in its current forms and inflections. For Sigmund Freud, the Double simultaneously embodies what is “familiar and agreeable and … that which is concealed and kept out of sight.”48 A figure that takes the most ordinary of shapes (the everyday citizen) together with the most existential of threats (the monstrous terrorist), the Double is a dissonant melody, always out of key and in constant motion. The genealogy of homegrown terrorism does not produce the shape of the Double in any deterministic sense. The Double is an amorphous and complex figure. This history simply provides a backdrop from which to begin to theorize and make sense of the ways in which the Double is constructed in contemporary security discourses.
The Double
A cultural-literary motif employed in oral and written traditions across cultures and civilizations, the Double dates back to a twelfth-century BCE ancient Egyptian story, “The Tale of the Two Brothers.” In it doubling is evident not only between the two brothers, but also in the externalization of the younger’s soul, which takes on many changing forms. Shadows, reflections, and twins—the earliest manifestations of doubling that fascinated humankind—souls, lookalikes (doppelgängers), clones, suspected imposters, complementary characters, and psychological personality splits, these are the many expressions of the Double. Oscillating in and out of fashion, late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century European literature marks the height of the Double’s popularity.49 Despite claims of its facile nature and that film had reduced its complexity, the Double has retained its peculiar draw. Notable twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers who employed it include Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Saramago, Roth, and Pamuk, to name a few.50 In intellectual circles the Double has been applied to an equally dizzying array of themes: Saussure’s theory of the sign, Christian theology, Hegel’s dialectic, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derrida’s work on language and representation, posthumanism, literary history, and the relationship of philosophy and literature more generally.51
The Double’s seemingly endless iterations and uses present the daunting but necessary task of defining how it will be used throughout this book and how it relates to homegrown terrorism. While the Double’s multiplicity has led some to describe the concept as “embarrassingly vague,” malleability and amorphousness are its essence, its constitutive anxiety found in its shifting and porous boundaries.52 The blurring of clear boundaries is precisely the core anxiety concerning incidents of Americans taking up arms against their own country and a productive force in strategies of security. Thus, the definition offered here does not reduce the multiplicity of the Double, but retains its core ambiguity. Also, since the nineteenth century—though some trace this back to Descartes’s division of cogito and res extensa—the Double has been a predominantly psychological construct marking opposing tendencies, identity crises, and man’s fundamental incompleteness.53 While this book is primarily concerned with the Double in a collective context, the psychological inflection remains consequential. Claims that a Double is lurking and loose within the collective are dependent on assertions that the group’s members are not only suspect but also susceptible to crises of identity. With these points in mind, the Double is a trope that blends the familiar and the unfamiliar by placing within the familiar an amorphous sense of otherness, strangeness, and potential danger.
The bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked;—and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if hit with a fit of the ague in fancying that they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed;—while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared—assuredly not thus—in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! And then this dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?54
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” from which the above passage is quoted, begins with a man who narrates his lifelong entanglement with his Double (who I will also refer to as “Wilson”). The Double’s likeness to the narrator is at first made evident to the reader only through their common name.55 Time and again the Double thwarts the narrator’s mischievous actions. Their story ends with a single-blow murder-suicide in which the narrator kills Wilson, and, through a mirror that subsequently takes Wilson’s place, realizes that he has mortally wounded himself. One of innumerable possible examples, Poe’s story is a richly dense source from which to illustrate my definition and introduce key aspects of the Double. These include the identity markers deployed in conjuring the Double, its tie to media and communication technologies writ broadly, and, ultimately, its function in the context of homegrown terrorism.
The above passage describes the moment in which the narrator first recognizes the face of the Double as an exact likeness
