To be called upon: rethinking the intimacy of the mass among Danish foreign fighters

When Danish Muslims explain what made them decide to travel to the Middle East and take up arms in the wake of the Arab Spring, they say that they were called upon. Displayed on videos on social media, women and sometimes children begged them to come to their rescue. In light of some of the responses to the Arab spring among Danish Muslims, this paper will offer some preliminary reflections on how we can understand ‘the mass’ and an ‘intimacy of the mass’ when the mass is no longer a crowd. According to Marx the mass grows quantitatively from the local to the global, but what happens to the mass if it is no longer a causal phenomenon that expands from small to big, but rather a simultaneous multitude of one to one relations that are neither local nor global? How are the one and the many related in this specific setting? Furthermore, many of the videos display dead bodies. How can we understand the mass as a collective body, if the collective effervescence is not generated by a common physical ritual, but rather by the immediacy of an actual (the displayed dead bodies) and a potential (the viewer) sacrifice?