I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly "illisible". To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form.

If you speak [ about violence against Israelis], you are in an unspeakable place, have become a Nazi or its moral equivalent (if there is a moral equivalent). It certainly terrifies, but perhaps also it is a linguistic permutation of state terrorism, an assault that stops one in one's tracks, and secures the continuing operation of the regime and its monopoly on politically intelligible speech.

Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia.

The pleasurable part of public mourning can also lead to a sense of self-sanctification that justifies in advance any war effort, whether or not the target and destruction are in any way related to the initial event.

Because Al-Qaeda has been a non-state centered organisation, many of these scenarios do not exactly apply. These are not wars between states. And yet, it seems to me that we make a mistake if we accept the view that states are fighting terrorism, since we have abundant evidence for accepting the idea of state terrorism, and what is most urgent is to track and expose how state terrorism operates under the rubric of "democracy."