Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Agamben 14 (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it
obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the
hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not
only non-democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that
European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new, for which we lack a
proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy. Let me begin with a concept which
seems, starting from September 2001, to have replaced any other political notion: security. As you
know, the formula for security reasons functions today in any domain, from everyday life to
international conflicts, as a codeword in order to impose measures that the people have no reason to
accept. I will try to show that the real purpose of the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed,
to prevent dangers, troubles or even catastrophes. I will be consequently obliged to make a short
genealogy of the concept of security. A Permanent State of Exception One possible way to sketch such
a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this
perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex public safety is
the highest law and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity
does not acknowledge any law, with the comits de salut publique during French revolution and finally
with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the Nazi regime. Such a
genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the
security apparatuses and measures which are familiar to us. While the state of exception was originally
conceived as a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to
restore the normal situation, the security reasons constitute today a permanent technology of
government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of
exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine
that my diagnosis would prove so accurate. The only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler
took power in February 1933, he immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of the
Weimar constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire
Third Reich can be considered as a state of exception which lasted twelve years. What is happening
today is still different. A formal state of exception is not declared and we see instead that vague non-
juridical notions like the security reasons are used to install a stable state of creeping and fictitious
emergency without any clearly identifiable danger. An example of such non-juridical notions which are
used as emergency producing factors is the concept of crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgment
in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the history of this term which, as is evident for you, comes
from the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the medical tradition, crisis means the
moment in which the doctor has to judge, to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days
in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the decisive days. In theology, crisis is the Last
Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what is essential in both traditions
is the connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is precisely this
connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement, is split from its temporal index and coincides
now with the chronological course of time, so that not only in economics and politics but in every
aspect of social life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of
government. Consequently, the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous decision-
making process decides nothing. To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that, having to face a
continuous state of exception, the government tends to take the form of a perpetual coup dtat. By the
way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in Greece as well as in Italy,
where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups dtat. Governing the Effects This is
why I think that, in order to understand the peculiar governmentality under which we live, the paradigm
of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I will therefore follow Michel Foucaults suggestion
and investigate the origin of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by Franois
Quesnais and the Physiocrates, whose influence on modern governmentality could not be
overestimated. Starting with Westphalia treaty, the great absolutist European states begin to introduce
in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of its subjects security. But
Quesnay is the first to establish security (suret) as the central notion in the theory of government
and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time
was the problem of famines. Before Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines
through the creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both these measures
had negative effects on production. Quesnays idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to
prevent famines, he decided to let them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred,
liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. To govern retains here its etymological cybernetic
meaning: a good kybernes, a good pilot cant avoid tempests, but if a tempest occures he must be able
to govern his boat, using the force of waves and winds for navigation. This is the meaning of the famous
motto laisser faire, laissez passer: it is not only the catchword of economic liberalism; it is a paradigm of
government, which conceives of security (suret, in Quesnays words) not as the prevention of troubles,
but rather as the ability to govern and guide them in the right direction once they take place. We should
not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It means an epochal transformation in the
very idea of government, which overturns the traditional hierarchical relation between causes and
effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is safer and more useful to try to govern
the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The
ancien regime aimed to rule the causes; modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom
applies to every domain, from economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal
measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to rule the
causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnays theorem makes also understandable a fact
which seems otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal
paradigm in the economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police
control. If government aims for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply
control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.
Biometric surveillance of American citizens poses a grave threat to democracy and reduces citizens to
Agamben 14 (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses, which
increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared in 18th
century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger
prints, they were obviously not meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents.
Only once a second crime has occurred, you can use the biometrical data to identify the offender.
Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time
their exclusive privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was
meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger prints. But according to a sort of fatality
or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have been invented for animals, for criminals,
strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human beings. Therefore, in the course of 20th century,
biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens, and Bertillons identification photographs and
Galtons fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship
But the extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization. The
development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only finger
prints but also the retina or the eyes iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move beyond the
police stations and immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to
students restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just
puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field, which are quickly growing, recommend that
citizens get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing,
because the European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European Security
Research Program) include among their permanent members the representatives of the big industries in
the field, which are just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System,
that have converted to the security business. It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power
that could have at its disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens. With
such a power at hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on the basis of
incomparably less efficient documentation, would have been total and incredibly swift. But I will not
dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you
concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in
security technologies. This transformation is so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the
society in which we live is still a democratic one, but also if this society can still be considered political.
Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of the conceptualization of the
political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a politicization (politisierung) of
citizenship. While until that moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of
conditions and social statuses of different kind for instance belonging to nobility or to a certain
cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc. from now on
citizenship became the main criterion of social identity. The result was a specifically Greek conception
of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional form. The
belonging to economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a
democracy considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as they devoted themselves to
a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and defined one another. Citizenship
became in that way a form of life, by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly
distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to the
private space, which was the reign of necessity. According to Meier, this specifically Greek process of
politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where citizenship remained the decisive element. The
hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this fundamental political factor has entered an
irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing de-politicization. What was in the
beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become a purely
passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred
and become indistinguishable. This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I will
not dwell on it. Rise of the State of Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the
security apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of
technologies which were conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of
the citizen. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social
personality and its recognition by others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any
relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in the double helix of
DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of social identity, which loses
therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by biological facts that in no way depend
on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of something like a political and
ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my
genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of
politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the classical
Greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the private and the public, the oikos, which is
the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems rather to
move in a zone of indifference between the private and the public, or, to quote Hobbes terms, the
physical and the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video
surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an apparatus that had been
conceived for the prisons has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a video-recorded
place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference between
the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon
that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The
primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare
life in modern states. But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity
begun with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the
normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control.
The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential
terrorist. But what is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can we
even consider it as something political? In what kind of state do we live today? You will probably know
that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collge de France, sketched
a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime, which he
calls the territorial or sovereign state and whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves
progressively into a population state and into a disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire
vivre et laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizens life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered
and manageable bodies. The state in which we live now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze
suggested to call it the tat de contrle, or control state, because what it wants is not to order and to
impose discipline but rather to manage and to control. Deleuzes definition is correct, because
management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so
clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government
did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From Politics to Policing
American political scientists who have tried to analyze the constitutional transformation involved in the
Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001 prefer to speak of a security state. But
what does security here mean? It is during the French Revolution that the notion of security suret, as
they used to say is linked to the definition of police. The laws of March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792
introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de suret (security police), which was
doomed to have a long history in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these
laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers (Brissot,
Heraut de Schelle, Gensonn) is able to define police or security by themselves. The debates focused
on the situation of the police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonn maintains that they
are two separate and distinct powers, yet, while the function of the judicial power is clear, it is
impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function
of the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the
judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines
the actions of police officer, who, in a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to
speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not really
take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judges decision. Every decision concerns the
causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by definition undecidable. The name of this
undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison dtat, or state reason. It is
rather security reasons. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police
is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called science of the police first appears in
the 18th century, the police is brought back to its etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as
such to politics. But it is surprising to see that police coincides now with the true political function,
while the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-
Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while he calls Polizei the
relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: Police is the
relationship of a state with itself. The hypothesis I would like to suggest here is that, placing itself under
the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of politics to enter a no mans land, whose
geography and whose borders are still unknown. The security state, whose name seems to refer to an
absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about the dangers it
involves for democracy, because in it political life has become impossible, while democracy means
Muller 10 (Benjamin J. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the
University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queens University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric
In exposing what he calls virtual security politics, Dillon notes the extent to which security measures
such as biometrics are not only charged with having to specify the attributes of their subjects, but also
indicate their own fallibility (Dillon 2003: 554). One could phrase this differently as follows: like all
security measures, the characteristics of the subject of security require description; however, the extent
to which the technological system itself is a potential threat must be recognized. In this political space of
biometrics where, as Dillon suggests, the physical and the virtual meet, there is a definite fortification
of biological life over political life and the further entrenchment of the biopolitical. Here, the
imposing itself as the basic principle of state activity, leading to the gradual neutralization of politics
(Agamben 2002). Underscoring the extent to which the relationship between the collected data and the
subject of that collection is markedly different from traditional analogue procedures for data collection,
this discussion of the introduction of biometric technologies as constituent of virtual security (and thus,
virtual borders), the move towards the state of exception as the rule, and the general biologization of
life, indicate a dramatic difference between digital data collection and analogue vis--vis security,
subjectivity and sovereignty. In fact, arguments insensitive to such phenomena as exemplified in the
biometrics literature, the CIC forum, and to a lesser extent the European Commission report
misleadingly focus on the policy of biometrics rather than the politics of biometrics.
The biologization of life and resulting calculability renders some fit to live and others fit to die
Dillon 5 (Michael Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life, in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life
to stuff, biopolitics must determine the quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction,
promotion and refinement may itself be continuously assessed. It follows that some life will be found to
be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other life may prove intractable to the
powers of investment and the demands it makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into evaluating the
eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be
positively inimical to the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics
continuously trades, and have to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot
otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained. Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the
biologisation of life to which biopolitics is committed, the violence of that biologisation and the
reduction of the classical political question concerning the good life (and the good death) to that of the
endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life. The good life Agamben refigures in terms of the pure - he
also says 'profane' but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.
Biometric security technologies pre-emptively combat whom the powerful deem as a threat to society
Lattimer 13 (Connor Undergraduate Scholar at the University of London, The Politics of Surveillance in
society/)
Obamas desire to continue the WoT through sophisticated surveillance technologies, such as the MQ-1
Predator drone, imposes a strategic rationale for anticipatory defence or pre-emptive security. The US at
present deploys drones beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan to anticipate the rise of future
threats, including Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, which raises questions on whether distant (both in
time and space) risks should be left to lie, or woken up by military invasion. The information collected
through pre-emptive practices drive forward this new security culture as intelligence, is harnessed to aid
creative scenario-making by civil servants in Whitehall (De Goede, 2008). The new security culture
created by surveillance technologies becomes a risk, with pre-emptive policy often boomeranging
rather than achieving the desired outcome (Daalder, 2007, 2006; Bigo, 2002). For example, Obamas
plans to create stability in the Middle East as well as new strategic options are bogged down in continual
drone operations that kill more civilians than what may be deemed as terrorists (Harris, 2012).
Clausewitzs scientific and rational, means to an end military strategy is replaced by imaginative, risk-
based scenarios, driven by the political mind. Thus, war becomes an art; a way of doing politics
culture are not bound to the Orient or so-called rogue states, but manifest themselves within banal
environments of homeland nations. CCTV has dominated Londons cityscape with the aim to manage
the unpredictable security environment. Amoore and Hall (2008) note the management of risk rests
upon identification and verification of the body, decided by security professionals who are based upon a
particular bio-politics. The body becomes the platform of political decision-making, as well as an
objectification of security practices by using technologies of risk (De Geode, 2005). Surveillance
technologies as a management of risk have significant political implications in that security professionals
and politicians view them as inevitable structural threats (Aradau et al, 2008:151). Security becomes
filtered down to the everyday through the usage of CCTV, as well as biometric borders through systems
of the state (Braverman, 2011; Foucault, 1997) (Plate 1). Security within the homeland, as well as the
Orient, relies on pre-emptive technologies that generate a priori information (Harraway, 2000).
Therefore, this new security culture is based upon a political imagination and those in positions of
power are able to re-inscribe the societal landscape by determining who and what constitutes as a
threat (not a risk). Surveillance technologies are furthering the change in a security culture towards pre-
emption and anticipatory logics within the risk-society, although such technologies have always been
and will continue to be powered by political decision-making. The security culture of pre-emption is
new, but the pre-emptive logic is not. Rooted within the environmental movements precautionary
principle, the risk-management approach was away of advancing action on climate change and
Lomborg (2001) suggests an evidence-base would take too long to collect, thus it would be too late to
deal with the risks from environmental change, and instead politicians were required to act now.
Furthermore, stamping on risks before they materialise into greater threats was also part of former
Mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giulianis order maintenance policing that dealt with petty crimes in
radical ways which was understood to prevent risks from much larger forms of crime (Morris, 2003).
Pre-emption is rooted within a political and policy-making history, but has recently been developed into
a new security culture as a result of the role surveillance technologies perform in the WoT. Lattimer
politics 1lattimer politics 2 lattimer politics 3 Necessary Surveillance Understanding the role of
surveillance technologies in the WoT implies these technologies are a necessary component in
undertaking practices for a war on terror. Developing the current theme of this paper, I argue
surveillance technologies have been necessary in fulfilling a particular political narrative casted by
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in the WoT. The risk-society marks a transformation from
military personnel commanding threats in the Cold War to politicians managing risks in the 21st Century.
Foreign Policy Nation-building has been a central part of Bushs WoT foreign policy, with the intention to
make major investments in post-conflict states and regions, both economically and politically. Secretary
of State Colin Powells once-you-break-it, you-own-it Pottery Barn Rule has become a major part of the
political narrative embedded in US Foreign Policy (Sperling, 2010). Nonetheless, the stabilisation of post-
conflict territory has a darker and cynical side to it performed through the usage of surveillance
technologies at US operated checkpoints, including the Musayyib, south of Baghdad. The Musayyib
checkpoint serves as a demarcation between north and south Baghdad, with an aim of identifying
suspicious individuals who may attempt to challenge the reconstruction of Iraq. Like Israel, Iraq has
become a state of checkpoints whereby the authority of two states becomes blurred and unclear
(Braverman, 2011:01). The Musayyib checkpoint is part of a larger policy in deploying the ultimate
panopticon, with little controversy in foreign territories. The Combat Zones That See (CTS) program aims
to network thousands of sophisticated cameras and UAVs with complex computer code located in
databases to monitor the entire City of Baghdad. The roots of the USs Foreign Policy are not concerned
with economic and political reconstruction but militarisation and reconnaissance of foreign territory in
the anticipation of future risks. Foreign policy becomes part of the broader security culture of filtering
risks through pre-emption to prevent worse-case scenarios imaged by politicians. The role of
with the aim to continuously monitor the future development of Iraq. Statesmen, such as Bush and
Obama, narrate a positive political narrative to the public, whilst using surveillance technologies to drive
forward the true purpose of reconstruction in Iraq. Shedding light on the truth of US Foreign Policy
obviously presents issues over Americas role as the World Police. The Republican senator Gary Hart
surveillance technologies as ways to practice neo-imperialism in the WoT (Hart, 2007). National Security
Surveillance technologies are necessary in fulfilling political goals through two-sided foreign policies in
the WoT. Nonetheless, technologies have also become a necessary part in the national security
narrative, most loudly spoken by Prime Minister Blair. Blair harnessed CCTV beyond its capabilities of
detecting crime, to a technology that can work on algorithmic data to pre-empt acts of terrorism before
they are committed within homeland nations (Amoore, 2009). Nonetheless, from this discussion, it will
appear that surveillance technologies only become necessary in the WoT to carry out political doctrine.
Politics drives forward these technologies and gives them a purpose; an image of necessity in combating
international terrorism. Protecting Londons economic heart is the ring of steel with over 1,500 cameras,
10% of which have facial recognition capabilities able to detect facial characteristics from up to 20
meters away (Coaffe, 2004). Similar to US Foreign Policy, UK national security strategy attempts to
control and regulate territory through the deployment of the camera. The politics emerges out of the
classification in which is established based on sex, ethnicity, and age to inform security professionals
whether a decision should be made to arrest or interrogate an individual based on the grounds of pre-
emption. Unlike its former self, the ring of steel does not act as a deterrent as it did during the
Provisional Irish Republican Army bombings, but an attempt to filter risks based on political criteria.
Facial recognition technologies operationalise the liberal project of globalization, modernity, and
identity in which the body becomes subjected to political debate and contestation of whether an
individual is a terror suspect (Reid, 2006). The role of facial recognition cameras is moving beyond the
political narratives of Blair and Bushs rhetoric on protecting the homeland, to being used as a marketing
tool to decide what kind of advertising people receive based on the systems own criteria (Booth, 2012).
The politics of risk management, with regards to surveillance technologies, has blurred national security
with the profit-motive, which inevitably leads to a failure of the liberal project. In 2003, the CIA launched
a futures market for terrorism as a way to collect intelligence on where and when a terrorist attack
would happen. The belief was that future markets had proven incredibly accurate in anticipating
elections results, thus collecting information on terrorism could aid scenario making. The market would
become the rationality for future conflict and security, rather than relying on expert opinion or the
individual analyst (Daalder, 2007, 2006). Giddens (1998) argues that the risk society makes technological
having such surveillance technologies with capabilities of pre-empting bridges the gap between the
present and the future. Dillon (1996) argues that making security and war a decision of the market
actually leads to a paradox and generates greater insecurity rather than security. This liberal way
multiplies the reasons for making war, as acts of terrorism are driven by the profit motive. In a credit
society, with more finance available, this leads to vast insecurity (ibid). Facial recognition cameras are
part of fighting the next war, but within the homeland, they aim to prevent risks from becoming threats
that cause domestic insecurity, as well as result in overseas conflict. Technological innovation makes
the perceived demands of the future determine present action which is no longer controlled by military
practices, but politics (Rasmussen, 2006:65). Technologies within the homeland extend the pre-emptive
narrative beyond the boundaries of Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing risk-management back to the
Pugliese 12 (Joseph Professor and Research Director at Macquarie University, Identity Dominance, in
Biometric templates exemplify the post-biological, in silico networking of a subject who can no longer
It is at this juncture that a disarticulation is enunciated, a disarticulation that vitiates a subjects agentic
self-recovery and governance of her or his heterogeneous body-bits and identity proxies. At this
juncture, a subjects biometric proxies may be mobilised, indeed, as agents of the biopolitical state
deployed to ensnare and convict the targeted individual. We are there, writes Levinas (2003, 67), and
there is nothing more to be done, or anything to add to this fact that we have been entirely delivered
updelivered up by our biometric proxies to the state. Malcolm Crompton (2002) has examined the
privacy implications of the biometric capture of bodily information, with a particular focus on the
manner in which a persons biometric scans can often reveal a range of medical conditions. Within the
specific context of racial profiling, as deployed by both military and police forces, I want to emphasise
that a subjects biometric body-bits may become precisely proxies for criminalisation. When being
black (or Latino or Asian [or of Middle Eastern appearance] is used as a proxy for criminality or
dangerousness in a society in which relative few are criminals, David Harris (2002, 106) notes, profiles
based on or including race will always sweep too widely. Within these political economies of biopower,
biometrics interweaves flesh with algorithms in order to freeze a subjects identity regardless of his or
her permutations. At work here are the biopolitical operations whereby, to paraphrase Levinas, the
subject is riveted to the fatality of the biological, even as the biological is transmuted in silico: The
essence of humanity is no longer in freedom but in a kind of bondage. To be truly oneself is ... to
become aware of the ineluctable bondage unique to your body ... And then, if race did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent it! (Levinas cited in Rolland 2003, 31). The re-invention of race in the
context of this biometric riveting of identity to the body is clearly enunciated in these contemporary
modalities of racial profiling and, as I discuss later, in the biometric surveillance and control of
The logic of pre-emption perversely brings threats into existence in order to eliminate them
Massumi 15 (Brian Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal, The Remains of the
Day, in Emotions, Politics and War, Ed. hll and Gregory, 2015)
This isn't just stupidity or faulty reasoning. There is a perverse logic to it. Because if you accept that it's
paramount to respond to threat, and that you have to act in response to it even if it has not yet fully
emerged, or even if it is hasn't really even begun to emerge, then you're facing a real conundrum. If you
wait for the emergence, you'll have waited too long -- too late. A terrorist threat can strike like lightning.
Like lightning it can strike anywhere and any time. But worse than lightning, it can strike anywhere at
any time in any guise. This time it might be planes crashing into buildings. Next time it might be an
improvised explosive device. Or a bomb in a subway. Or anthrax in the mail. No one knows. This only
makes the urgency of action all the more acute. Faced with urgent need to act in the face of the
unknown-unknown of a threat that has not yet emerged, there is only one reasonable thing to do: flush
it out. Poke the soft tissue. Prod the terrain. Stir things up and see what starts to emerge. Create the
conditions for the emergence of threat. Start the threat on the way to becoming a clear and present
danger, and then nip it in the bud with your superior rapid-response capabilities. Make it real so you can
really eliminate it. I'm not saying that the Bush administration consciously decided to make Iraq a
staging ground for terrorism. I'm only saying that the fact that their preemptive actions did in fact do
that fits perfectly into the logic of preemption, and says something fundamental about what that logic
implies. It is fundamental to the logic of preemption to produce what it is designed to avoid. That is the
only way to give its urgent need to "go kinetic" in response to threat something positive to attack. This is
what distinguishes preemption from the logic presiding over the previous age of conflict, the Cold War.
The logic of the Cold War was deterrence: making something not happen. The goal, faced with the clear
and present danger of nuclear Armageddon, was to hold it in potential, to make sure the threat was
never realized, precisely by refraining from preemptive attack. What was fundamental to the logic of
deterrence was the impossibility of a first strike exactly what preemption requires. Deterrence
exercises a negative power. In a way, it's logic is the inverse of the logic of preemption. Its aim is to
prevent the unthinkable from happening by transforming a clear and present danger into a threat, then
to hold the threat in abeyance, so that it continues to loom over the present indefinitely, so that it
doesn't follow any action path back to the future. The aim of deterrence aim was to suspend threat.
Preemption, by contrast, suspends the present. It puts us and our actions in that conditional time-loop
of the would have/could have. It hangs us on a thread of futurity. It does this in order to make the
the unknown-unknown into a foregone conclusion. Preemption always will have been right, because it
exercises a positive power, a reality-producing power to make things emerge. There is a word for a
reasoning that is always right regardless of the objective situation, and that always leads a foregone
conclusion in any case. The word is tautological. The logic of preemption is a tautological logic. But that's
just the half of it. The logic of preemption is a tautological logic that has the power to produce the
reality to which it responds. In spite of being tautological, or because of the particular way it is
tautological, preemption works. It operates. It operationalizes the future of threat in a way that really,
positively produces a future. It is an operative logic. I call an operative logic that is positively productive
of what will really come to be, an ontopower "onto-" meaning being. An ontopower is a power that
makes things come to be: that moves a futurity felt in the present, into a presence in the future. When
threat becomes effectively tautological, and power becomes ontopower, everything has changed. We've
entered a brave new world, a new regime of power, and a new political era And yes, the more things
change, the more they stay the same. In a recent book, Andrew Bacevich, a life-long military careerist
turned military critic, laments that "since taking office, President Obama has acted on many fronts to
adjust the way the United States exercized that leadership. Yet these adjustments have seldom risen
above the cosmetic. The global war on terror [begun by Bush has not only] continued [under Obama]
.. it has metastasized." It has turned cancerous. It has turned into a self-driving tendency that has swept
Obama up in it. The operative logic of preemption is not a logic he has it has him. It has proven itself a
self-propagating historical force, an operative historical logic whose "rightness" is still, as always, a
foregone conclusion. It has proven its ability to continue, as a tendency, across the break between
administrations and the changes on the level of explicitly stated doctrine. I will briefly go into how
Bush's 9-11-fueled-"everything-changed" is now Obama's "more off the same," despite the differences
in doctrine, the change in the cast of characters, and the obvious differences in personal quality and
leadership style. But before I do that, I want to draw out a bit more some of the implications of the
recentering of war and politics on threat. On the way, I want to respond to an objection I've left my
account open to. The example of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that was central to my argument that preemptive
power is a productive power is just one example. In many eyes it might seem a weak one, since it could
be laid to unforeseen collateral effects, and dismissed as a mere anomaly or accident, or simply a
product of a miscalculation. The point I want to make is that in the operative logic of preemption more-
or-less unforeseen effects are precisely what is and must be produced. If the situation is really one full of
then unforeseen effects will always accompany any action carried out according to any logic. That's a
corrollary of the foregone conclusion. What's particular about preemption is that makes a virtue of this.
It turns this problem into something positive as well. It turns it into a mechanism that fosters its own
continuation and proliferation. It can't make the unknown-unknown known. It can't pre-form or fore-
see the exact nature of the reality it will produce. But if it is ready with fast-adapting rapid response
capabilities, it can field the effects it brings into being, by immediately going kinetic in a follow-up
action. When it flushes out threat, it can contrive to keep the emergence within parameters it can
handle, more-or-less. There will be threat again. But if all goes well it will be in more controllable
parameters. Preemption can then re-legitimate itself affectively, and redeploy. In this way, to use the
military theory jargon, the operative logic of preemption "leverages" uncertainty. What preemptive
power must do is remain poised to go kinetic again and again, in serial response to the exercise of its
own ontopower. Every time it acts, it must already be poising itself to act again, with equal urgency. In
that way, each of its actions will contain within it the seeds of the next action, and that action, the
action after, so that the deployment of preemption cascades, bringing its affective legitimation by threat
with it, step by step. Preemptive action has become self-driving. It only stands to reason that if terrorist
threat is ever-present and proliferates in unforeseen ways, then the power mobilized against it must be
similarly ever-present and proliferating. ow could anyone argue that we shouldn't be capable of fielding
uncertainty? We must always be poised for threat. We must assume the posture -- even if the stated
doctrine has changed. If we sit on our hands, all it will take to delegitimate a government would be
another terror attack that happened on its watch. No government can afford not to be in a posture of
preemption. We must assume the posture at every moment we must be poised to go kinetic at a
moment's notice, whenever and wherever in the world that threat is felt to loom. Whenever and
wherever. The realignment on time I mentioned earlier ends up driving a a tendency for the logic set in
motion to turn space-filling. The operative logic of preemptive is not only self-driving; it is self-
expanding. We watched this happen. Iraq was in fact used as a terror training ground. Terrorist
techniques such as the improvised explosive device and suicide bombings were perfected there, then
carried to the other front, Afghanistan, where they fueled a resurgent insurgency. The preemptive
follow-up response on the part of the US was to expand the use of counter-terrorist tactics that
matched the IED attack in terms of their ability to strike by surprise with lightning speed, and to morph
themselves to the shape any kind of circumstance, taking any number of guises. The use of these
techniques by the US military exploded. Chief among them were targeted assassinations using rapidly-
deployed special operations forces, and unmanned drone attacks. This escalation began under Bush, but
was taken to new levels by Obama, who had criticized the war in Iraq and called for its winding down
only in order to shift attention to Afghanistan, which he defined as the "good war" and the right war.
The right war overflowed to the wrong side of the border, into Pakistan. The blowback from US cross-
border drone attacks and special operations in Pakistan have energized activity elsewhere in the world:
in Somalia, in Yemen. Yet another proliferation. US drone attacks and special ops have followed.
Preemptive US military intervention has expanded to yet another continent. The invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan may be winding down. But the preemptive military posture of the US has only spread. And
nowhere has terrorist threat stopped looming. Last month (July 2011) was the bloodiest for months for
US military personnel in Iraq, and terrorist attacks in Afghanistan picked up spectacularly with the
assassinations of the governor of Kandahar province and the mayor of Kandahar city. Even after the
"withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq, there will be a continuing US presence indefinitely into the future,
as Obama's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, in order to "fill the gap in Iraqi Security Force
operations." This continuing presence will be in the form of five high-tech compounds outfitted for
drone operations and housing aircraft and armored vehicles for rapid-response forays. The withdrawal
from Afghanistan will similarly leave a permanent preemption-ready presence. That presence has
unprecedented reach. According to best estimates, the US preemptive presence stretches across more
than 750 bases around the world. The less focused it becomes on outright invasion, the more spread-
out and tentacular it becomes. US special operations forces are now active in no less than 75 countries
around the world and carry out an average of 70 missions a day. The number of countries "serviced" is
slated to rise to 120. A key to advisor to General Petraeus, the commander of US troops in Iraq, then
Afghanistan, and now incoming CIA director, was recently quoted marvelling at the reach of this "almost
industrial scale killing machine". Preemption doesn't go away. It spreads its tentacles. Things change.
Boots on the ground may recede as drones advance, following the rhythms of public opinion and the
electoral cycle of politicians' engrossment in domestic affairs. Nation-building might get backgrounded
in favor of targeted assassination campaigns. But the operative logic of preemption only becomes more
widespread and insidious. The more it changes, the more it stays the same, ever-expanding. To the point
that it can be said to become the dominant operative logic of our times. Preemption octopuses on.
Ontopower rules.
Biometric technologies blur the line between wartime technology and domestic security, creating a
Muller 10 (Benjamin J. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the
University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queens University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric
We argue here that the use of biometrics for the management of the population is constitutive of
contemporary securitized (exceptional) politics, and while more apparent, the case of Fallujah is not
dissimilar to domestic homeland security initiatives and the securitization of borders and the bodies
that cross them. Moreover, it speaks to an evolving global norm of securitized identity, emphasizing the
mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy, or at the very least destabilizing
conventional notions about the separation between these spheres, regularly reified in the discourses
and disciplinary regimes/ knowledge of IR and Comparative Politics (CP). 3 Moreover, it speaks to an
management, which in turn constitutes the subject under such exceptional circumstances as
Agambens homo sacer. The chapter begins by briefly revisiting the concept of the state of exception,
and the extent to which the introduction of biometric technologies is representative of a particular
politics of exceptionalism. As the chapter title indicates, we consider these securitizing moves, namely
least, the untenable differentiation between domestic and foreign policy. In this specific case, in much
the same way that modern technology has rendered conventional articulations of space and time
anachronistic, the simultaneous use of biometric technologies as a part of both domestic homeland
security strategies and foreign policy objectives can begin to challenge articulated limits of identity and
place. We then examine the case of Fallujah, arguably an exemplar in the wider case of American
occupation practices subsequently replicated across Iraq and Afghanistan, wherein the struggle to gain
the biopolitical ascendancy of sovereign power is asserted by occupation forces in an effort to take
control of biopolitics the management of life. As a result of the destructive violence executed by
occupation forces, identity is rearticulated on the principles of biometrics and, to draw on Giorgio
Agambens work, some Iraqis are articulated as homo sacer; namely the 15 45-year-old males who
were not given the option of leaving Fallujah prior to the siege in November 2004 . In this sense, while
cognizant of the disturbing story of destruction represented in Picassos Guernica, 4 the story here is
much more about the destructiveness of reconstruction, and the struggle over sovereign power in its
biopolitical form. We conclude with some reflections on the arguments presented, and their wider
application in the Iraqi context. Homo Sacer and the State of Exception Drawing on the work of Nazi
constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, but also a Hobbesian and Weberian heritage, the revival of
deliberations over the state of exception is found in contemporary work by the Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben. Although many of those not beholden to the triumphalism found in post-1989
commentaries turned to Schmitt, some specific resonances were absent. In particular, one of the critical
points for Agamben regarding the state of exception becoming the norm sent many writers and thinkers
scrambling. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent introduction of anti-
terrorist legislation and homeland security strategies however, this contention is much less radical .
Specific pieces of anti-terrorist legislation such as Bill C-36 in Canada, the USA PATRIOT Act, the
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), or even the American Homeland
Security Act of 2002, involve at a bare minimum certain sunset clauses, if not in fact subjecting the
entire piece of legislation to such a clause. Of particular importance is the way in which sunset clauses
give certain impermanence to exceptional or emergency powers. While the sovereign might indeed, to
borrow from Schmitts dictum, decide the exception, it is not intended to be carte blanche power. If it
were, exceptional powers would no longer be exceptional but the norm, or what is termed the
permanent state of exception. Historical powers of judicial oversight, constitutionality, habeas corpus,
and so on, have placed specific checks and balances on the power of the executive. The question then, is
what gives the state of exception its permanence, and what are the implications to the members of the
political community in this normalized state of exception? On the one hand, to follow Agambens lead,
the state of exception arises at an intersection between the legal and political; a civil war, an
insurrection, an armed resistance (Agamben 2005: 1). Moreover, the state of exception is the result of a
political crisis, indicating that it should be understood in political terms and not on juridical-
constitutional grounds (Agamben 2005). For Agamben, what is particularly challenging about the state
of exception is the way in which it functions in a zone of undecidability, or what he and others have
referred to as a zone of indistinction (Agamben 1998; Edkins 2002). As the sovereign is both the law
and outside the law, with subsequent power to suspend the law, there is a sort of legal sanction to the
state of exception, which is extra-juridical. Therefore, as Agamben contends, the state of exception is
awarded a certain legal status, such as the notion of the legal civil war he explores (Agamben 2005: 2
3). Furthermore, and perhaps most important to the transformation of the state of exception becoming
the norm, is the way in which exceptional powers, or permanent states of emergency, become
important technologies of governmental control. Here, as Agamben accurately notes, the state of
emergency is not always openly declared in a technical sense, yet statutory amendments and changes
that occur in the background speak directly to the permanence of the state of exception. 5 Moreover ,
the suspension of conventional legislative and judicial powers and the concentration of power in the
hands of the core executive constitute the state of exception. The ways in which this creeps into hidden
statutes that lie in wait, ready to spring forward when required, and the general way in which this state
of exception seems to have become an effective technology of rule for contemporary governments
emphasize the permanence of the state of exception. Much of this speaks directly to Michel Foucaults
point made in the collection of his lectures entitled Society Must be Defended, that modern politics is
biopolitics, in so far as sovereign power is preoccupied to a much greater extent with the management
of life as a particularly important technology of power (Foucault 2003: 239 64). As Foucault notes:
Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at
once scientific and political, as a biological problem, as powers problem (Foucault 2003: 245). For
Agamben, what is particularly important about Foucaults thesis is the way in which one understands
the sense of this transformation towards biopolitics and the management of life. Hence, Agambens
dialogue about form-of-life and the power( s) that constitutes multiple forms of life as the form -of-
life . In other words, it seems impossible to isolate naked life from the form-of-life that is political
life (Agamben 2000: 3 14): Inasmuch as its inhabitants [of the camp] have been stripped of every
political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical
space that has ever been realized a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological
life without any mediation. (Agamben 2000: 41) In this zone of indistinction that is the political space
of the exception, homo sacer or sacred man becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. Hence, in the
same way as the zone of indistinction is exceptional extra-juridical the subjectivity of the
inhabitants is also extra-juridical, as they are deprived of rights and prerogatives to the point that
committing any act towards them no longer appears as a crime (Agamben 2000). In our analysis, if
Fallujah is indeed a space/ place of exception as in broader terms we might argue that Iraq on the
whole is subject to a state of exception, as is the domestic space of the US under conditions of the war
on terror, or more specifically the border spaces and virtual borders, which further emphasizes the
mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy then to what extent are the
inhabitants homo sacer? In considering the specifics of the Fallujah case, while not all inhabitants are
articulated as homo sacer, certainly those perceived as most threatening by occupying forces are
constructed as such. Furthermore, our analysis emphasizes the extent to which the application of
biometric technologies by US-led forces is at the very least a contributing factor to this (re) articulation
of Iraqis or in this case Fallujahns as homo sacer, or indeed might be a necessary although not sufficient
condition for this particular (re) articulation. Before discussing the specific case of Fallujah, however,
some brief words on biometric technologies and the specifics of contemporary applications in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Biometrics and the BAT Biometric technologies are discussed at length throughout this
text, but some review is worthwhile here. Simply, biometrics involves the measurement of physiological
characteristics, generally in digital form. The breadth of allegedly measurable physical characteristics
appears limitless , at least according to the industry literature. The most popular biometric applications
are face recognition vis--vis digitized facial scanning, iris scans, retinal scans and digitized fingerprinting.
These conventional biometric applications reinforce notions of the body as a solid, stable entity of which
definable and quantifiable parts can be subject to measurement. However, so called esoteric
biometrics take not only the unique aspects of the body but the actual physiology, which, for lack of a
more suitable phrase, measures the bodys output. Esoteric biometrics include: facial thermography
(the pattern of facial heat caused by the distinctive blood flow under the skin); DNA; body odor
(measuring rolatiles, the chemical substances that cause odor); gait (measuring the distinctive manner
of walking); and foot dynamics (considers not only the size of the foot, but dynamics, such as pressure
analysis relating to the shape of the foot, the foot geometric regarding timing of steps, and
dermatoglyphics, which uses the measurement of footprint ridges to measure friction) (Woodward et
al. 2003: 115 36). The reason for offering some examples of esoteric biometrics is not simply for its
shock value, but to emphasize the vision and belief in the body as password that permeates the
biometrics industry and the literature. It also exposes the industry and its advocates long-term vision ,
indicating both a belief in the sustained need for biometric technologies, and their suitably futuristic (re)
solutions of/ for these needs. The possible applications for biometrics, it would seem, are only limited by
ones imagination . Biometric technologies have generally been employed in the private sector, such as
in high security sites like financial institutions, secure nuclear or chemical facilities, or for the security of
particular products, such as the narcotics necessary for anesthesiologists. Biometric technologies are
also not strangers to the panoptic sphere of surveillance and are consistently used to track the comings
and goings of employees in large institutions. Contemporary debates over the applications of biometrics
are subject to some very particular phenomena of both the contemporary information age and the post-
9/ 11 security context. The events of September 11, 2001 definitely had an impact on the biometrics
industry, if only to open a policy window for already supportive legislators. Doing much more than
preaching to the converted, however, the advocates of biometric technologies strategically presented
them as the panacea to the security problems of the post- 9/ 11 world. Caught in the paradox between
securing borders and bodies and the imperatives of the neoliberal global economy, states were attuned
to the representation of the security problem that the biometrics industry was so quick to articulate.
Indeed, the Canada/ US Smart Border Declaration signed after the events of 9/ 11 is a case in point. The
the proliferation of programs and approaches from trusted traveler programs, to no-fly lists and
passenger prescreening lays the groundwork for the subsequent Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative
(WHTI) and the general proliferation of borders. The proposed applications of biometrics for the
purpose of securing borders and bodies are generally for biometric or biometric-ready passports, visas,
permanent resident cards, and national identity cards. The general emphasis is for machine readable
travel documents (MRTD), allegedly contributing to increased efficiency and heightened security, thus
satisfying the dual requirements of the imperative free movement of the global economy and the post-
9/ 11 supposed security imperatives. Throughout these debates , however, the (im) possibility of
securing bodies and borders generally appears to fall outside of the space of biometrics politics. As
Simon A. Cole maintains, based on its assumptions about the security of the body itself, this entire
project may in fact be misguided: Indeed, the body itself may become a rather antiquated way of
defining the individual. A wide variety of new technologies sex reassignment, cyberspace, artificial
intelligence, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation, and so on all point toward the demise of the
nineteenth century notion of the body as solid, stable entity and the advent of some new conception of
bodies as mutable and flexible We may cease to think of ourselves, or to identify ourselves, strictly as
physically unique bodies and begin to think of ourselves as somewhat more ethereal entities for whom
bodies and body parts are merely resources. (Cole 2001: 310) While there are ways in which Coles
contentions might challenge the introduction and claims of biometrics, the introduction of biometrics
might also be interpreted as a contributing factor to this rather fetishized account of the body. In other
words, if the body becomes password, does it cease to be the body? 6 On such questions and others,
the literature, government commissioned reports, and public forums generally fall silent. Following on
from arguments made by Robert Putnam and others, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach assert that
the separation between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly untenable; domestic policies
influence international affairs, and vice versa (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996: 261). To this end,
biometric strategies towards the (re) articulation of the body as password and the general
securitization/ criminalization of what Agamben refers to as bare life, or even homo sacer itself ,
appear mutually reinforcing in the spaces of both domestic and foreign policy. In the domestic space,
the new normal biopolitical relationship between the citizen and the state affords sovereign power
the ability to appropriate and register the biological life of bodies (Agamben 2004).
Urban zones of indistinction fostered by the blur between political and biological identity manifests
Jobe 14 (Kevin Scott, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University, Pre-emptive States of
Emergency: Martial Governmentality & the Crisis of Police, in Critical Legal Thinking, 12-11-14,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-
crisis-police/)
Commenting on the investigation into the police killing of Luis Rodriguez in Moore, OK in February 2014,
an attorney for the Moore, OK police department declared, In this country, it seems we are becoming
anti-police and that the tide has turned in respecting law enforcement.1 In the wake of the Michael
Brown and Eric Garner grand jury verdicts, and the lack of any formal charges in the cases of Luis
Rodriguez and so many other victims of color of police violence just this year, it is easy to see why. In
this article, I focus on the pre-emptive state of emergency declared by the Governor of Missouri in the
Michael Brown case, and link this form of martial governmentality to the apparent crisis of police in
their inability to control or suppress the revolts stemming from the Ferguson protests which seek to
shut down the normal operations of law and order. The militarization of American policing has received
much needed scrutiny in recent years by both academics and civil rights watch groups like the ACLU. In
the wake of anti-police protests from Ferguson to New York and around the globe, these analyses could
not be more timely. However with the growing unrest leading up to the Michael Brown grand jury
verdict, the state of Missouri saw something perhaps even more startling than a militarized police force:
a pre-emptive state of emergency. As Janai Nelson from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund reminds us,
governors have used their emergency police powers preemptively in the past in anticipation of eminent
natural disasters and, more recently, in the case of potential Ebola outbreaks. But the preemptive state
of emergency issued in Ferguson by Governor Nixon, for example, signals the activation of a form of
governmentality which grants carte blanche to determine what actions are required throughout the
state in the name of public safety despite the lack of any imminent threat.2 Nelson calls attention to
the preemptive declaration of emergency issued during World War Two by FDR and allowed in the
1944 Koremastu v. United States case which authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans. And
while the case of Ferguson is of a different order of magnitude, it nonetheless follows the same logic. As
Nelson writes, (I)t seems premised on the fearful notion that black people gathering in Ferguson to
protest perceived injustice is a state of emergency. But the expectation of Americans coming together to
express outrage does not justify intervention by the militia.3 The expectation that public protest in
Ferguson might require the mobilization of state military forces is precisely what seems to underwrite
the justification of Nixons executive order. The rationale for the executive order is couched in the
language of protecting peaceable assembly, protest and the protection of public safety, civil rights and
private business. However, the suspension of law to protect civil rights raises a disturbing prospect, one
that Stephen Graham highlights in his recent book Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism. As
Graham shows, there is an increasing coincidence of the discourses of policing, domestic security and
militarization in urban governance such that policing the city comes to look more and more like the
protection and organization of a military camp. Echoing Agambens thesis on the camp as internal logic
of the contemporary nomos, Graham writes, A priori incarcerations, bans, and a creeping mass
criminalization begin to puncture already precarious legal norms of due process, habeas corpus, the
right to protest, international humanitarian law and the human rights of citizenship. Increasingly, the
always fragile notions of homogenous national citizenship fray and disintegrate as different groups and
ethnicities are pre-emptively profiled, screened, and treated differently. The rights of citizenship are
disaggregated or unbundled: Law is deployed to suspend law, opening the door to more or less
permanent states of exception and emergency Systems of camps, militarized borders, and systems of
illicit, invisible movement now straddle nations and supranational blocs. The resulting transnational
archipelagos of incarceration, torture and death exhibit startling similarities to those that sustain global
geographies of tourism, finance, production, logistics, military power and the lifestyles of elites. The
enemies within, the persons adjudged risky or worthless or out of placethe African-Americans of
New Orleans, the troublesome inhabitants of Pariss banlieues , the Roma encamped in the suburbs of
Naples or Rome, the favela dwellers on the edges of Rios tourist hot spots, the undocumented
immigrants, the beggars, the homeless, the street vendors everywherebecome increasingly
disposable, assaulted, forcibly excluded.4 Indeed, to the extent that (L)aw is deployed to suspend law,
opening the door to more or less permanent states of exception and emergency Systems of camps,
[and] militarized borders, it is precisely the legal, civil and human rights that law is supposed to
protect that is suspended and replaced with the logic of camp. The suspension law in order to protect
civil rights is thus the paradigm of the logic of the exception, a disturbing situation where martial law
becomes necessary for the protection of civil rights. In this way, justifying a state of emergency by
claiming that such a state is the best means to protect civil rights therefore implies the very possibility
Graham raises: the permanent state of exception or state of emergency that claims it is necessary to
protect civil rights. In Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism, Graham documents the massive
global proliferation of deeply technophiliac state surveillance projects[which] signals the startling
militarization of civil societythe extension of military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into
the quotidian spaces of everyday life.5 Situating the massive crossover of military discourses and
technologies into the governance of urban life, Graham argues that these military-style
tech omniscience and rationality into the governance of urban civil society.6 For Graham, these
movements to militarize urban policing and governance, most notably after 9/11, also signal the blurring
of the lines between discourses of State homeland security and martial practices. Indeed for Graham,
what we are seeing is (T)he dovetailing of state domestic security and military doctrines.7 Graham
makes sense of the militarization of civil society through Foucaults thesis about the boomerang effect
of modern state governmentality, whereby colonial techniques of genocide, discipline and social control
are appropriated by the State and applied internally on their own populations. This is a central thesis of
the book. Thus for Graham, the militarization of civil society can be understood as the internal
application of colonial and post-colonial models of social control, developed also in the Global South and
in the War on Terror, internally upon the domestic population. Graham outlines five key features of the
new military urbanism. First, Graham notes the expansion of the traditional language of battlespace
from the field to the city, such that everyday urban places such as subways, supermarkets, tower blocks,
industrial districts, and public spaces become reimagined as the site of urban warfare. Indeed,
(E)veryday spaces of the city are becoming the main battlespace both at home and abroad.8 In this
way, Graham states, Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined in ways that
dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military;
distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations.9
According to Graham, the traditional understanding of legal or human rights and legal systems based
on ideas of universal citizenship is being replaced within these new battespaces with the profiling of
individuals, places, behaviors, associations, and groups.[and] assign these subjects risk categories
based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or resistance against the dominant
geographical orders sustaining global, neoliberal capitalism8 This for Graham, the profiling of
individuals with regard to their risk or dangerousness is a feature of the new military urbanism. The
second feature of the new military urbanism has to do with Foucaults Boomerang: where explicitly
colonial models of pacification, militarization and control, honed on the streets of the global South, are
spread to the cities of capitalist heartlands in the North.11 Internal colonization as mode of social
control. For Graham, the new technologies of militarization that are being deployed by local and state
government increasingly view urban areas as if they were a sort of post-colonial military camp which
needs to be protected and walled in from outside invading forces. Indeed, for Graham, such
technologies, force people to prove their legitimacy if they want to move freely. Urban theorists and
philosophers now wonder whether the city as a key space for dissent and collective mobilization within
civil society is being replacedby camps which are linked together and withdrawn from the urban
Rather than reading the resolution as a question of policy, we approach it from the political --- only our
affirmation of studious play can reclaim politics from the state of exception
Morgan 7 (Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley, Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and
Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of Pure Means, Journal Of Law And Society, volume 34, Number 1,
March,
www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_
Aesthetics_of_Pure_Means
Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception paints an ominous picture. Agamben asks whether law can
regulate its own suspension not because this is an interesting, if abstract, legal problem, but because the
state of exception has become a worldwide `paradigm of government'. According to Agamben, a global
state of exception is the only way to explain our current state of affairs, in which: law can ... be
obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that, while ignoring
international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally, nevertheless still
claims to be applying the law. The state of exception enables this contradiction since it is neither inside
nor outside law. On the one hand, it is not a `special kind of law' since it is `a suspension of the juridical
order itself'; on the other, it is not merely the absence of law, since law contains provisions for its
suspension. This topographical paradox means that law functions unusually within the state of
exception. The state of exception doesn't create chaos or anarchy; it sepa-rates the law's force from its
application. Law's purely formal applicability comes loose from its direct impact on life. As a result, acts
that are not authorized by any law can employ the force of legal action: in extreme situations `force of
law' floats as an indeterminate element that can be claimed by both the state authority ... and by a
revolutionary organization. Agamben argues that this ultimately makes law and life indistinguishable:
every action is potentially a legal action. Unfortunately, however, we can't simply return to a situation
prior to the state of exception: from the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to
return to the state of law, for at issue now are the very concepts of `state' and `law'. If we take
Agamben's claims about the reach of the state of exception seriously, we are left to grapple with the
odd solution that Agamben suggests. This solution is what I would like to interrogate here. Agamben
argues that to get beyond the state of exception we must do something more radical than modify the
law, since the exception has revealed that the normal functioning of law depends on violent force. As a
consequence, we must pursue `the only truly political action ... which severs the nexus between violence
and law'. But it is difficult to imagine how we might actually take this `truly political' action, which
Agamben calls `play': One day, humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not
in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good... . [T]his studious play
is the passage that allows us to arrive at ... justice. `Play' is a surprising answer to the problems that
Agamben has dramatically sketched: it seems simultaneously too abstract and not serious enough. But
can we take play seriously? Play might be able to counteract the law's violent application to life because
of its lack of seriousness: play suspends both instrumentality and normativity. In this sense, play
deinstrumentalizes what Agamben frequently calls the `machine' or `apparatus' of the state of
exception.
Traditional political dissent merely strengthens the security state --- we must instead expose and depose
Agamben 14 (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
Rediscovering a Form-of-Life But I would like to conclude or better to simply stop my lecture (in
philosophy, like in art, no conclusion is possible, you can only abandon your work) with something
which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most urgent political problem. If the state we have in front
of us is the security state I described, we have to think anew the traditional strategies of political
conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow? The security paradigm implies that each form
of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the order, becomes an opportunity to govern
these actions into a profitable direction. This is evident in the dialectics that tightly bind together
terrorism and state in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French Revolution, the political tradition of
modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the
pouvoir constituant, the constituent power, of a new institutional order. I think that we have to
abandon this paradigm and try to think something as a puissance destituante, a purely destituent
power, that cannot be captured in the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this sort that
Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the Critique of Violence, when he tries to define a pure violence
which could break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence, an example
of which is Sorels proletarian general strike. On the breaking of this cycle, he writes at the end of the
essay maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it
depends, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded. While a
constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power insofar as it
deposes once for all the law can open a really new historical epoch. To think such a purely destituent
power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. In
the same sense, Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four Sal masters saying to their slaves: true
anarchy is the anarchy of power. It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion
and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these
dimensions; it is so hard to think today of something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a
praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the
governmental security technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political
dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But
this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a
new figure of that political life whose memory the security state tries at any price to cancel.
Studying the law absent a transcedent objective an objective which is above the human capability
renders it inoperative and breaks its link with power and violence
Snoek 12 (Anke Ph.D. in Philosophy from Macquarie University, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding
According to Agamben, study is an important strategy for living outside the law and making it
inoperative. In what sense can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of
resistance. In 586 BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the temple
of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia.
During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were forbidden to practise their
faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated
Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and
rebuild their holy sanctuaries, 40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews
was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The
temple was not rebuilt and study has since then become the true temple of the Jews. The Jewish
religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic significance (IP,
63). Talmud means study; the original meaning of Torah is not law but instruction Mishnan, the set
of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root that has repetition as its basic meaning. The study Agamben is
aiming at does not have a predetermined goal: getting a degree and a good position in society, or
getting some valuable insight that can be used to overthrow a political structure. Just as the strategy to
close the door of the law was especially hard because the law does not prescribe anything and the task
of the Messiah is paradoxical because there is no original structure of the law to restore, so study also
lacks a transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as etymology is concerned, the word
studium is closely related to a root that indicates a coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are
closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense,
stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other, undertaken.
Here Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotles description of potentiality, which is passive on the
one hand an undergoing and active on the other an unstoppable drive to undertake something,
to do something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and undertaking converge; it
is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation between amazement and clarity, discovery
and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of undergoing and undertaking yields a kind of passive
activity, a radical passivity. Something happens without seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study
is pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the
scholar a woeful air. At first glance, the students in Kafkas works seem to be of little use or significance.
Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: Among Kafkas creations, there is
a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest
places in Kafkas works are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3 Agamben is in complete
agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary embodiment of study in our culture is not the
great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of
Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of
study that plays such an important role in the strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafkas
useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an important
characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a strange young man: He watched
silently as the man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another
book that he always picked up at lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, his face always
bent surprisingly low over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ... Youre
studying? asked Karl. Yes, yes, said the man, using the few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his
books.3 (...) And when wifi you be finished with your studies? asked Karl. Its slow going, said the
student. ... [Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for
years, out of pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent
future. 32 Karl explains his problems with Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help
him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and even advises him to remain with
Delamarche absolutely33 Karl wonders where studying had got him [or her] he [or she] had
forgotten everything again.34 The most extreme example of a student, in Agambens view, is Melvills
Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing. According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the
Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped writing or that they have lost the Schrift in the
sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the Schrift or
the Torah, but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamins genius is
apparent, according to Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their
commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead
to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does not attach any promises to study that are traditionally
attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned
around here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede
but follows its action, which it has left behind forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the
reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. At this point, study shakes off the sadness
that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the
soul (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation who have lost their house of prayer.
His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their
[u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The study of the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example
of the student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus, who happens to become
a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward
appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. ... I
recently saw a quite simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at
the lawyer as the latter, lifting his thighs high, mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble
clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ... Nowadays, as no one can deny, there
is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that Macedonia
is too narrow ... but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days Indias gates were
beyond reach, but their direction was indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows the way;
many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused.
Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse oneself in law books. Free, his
flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexanders baffle,
he reads and turns the pages of our old books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft
concludes that law is set over against myth in the name of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical
(pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39 Benjamin sees this as a serious
misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human
beings, like the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But,
according to Benjamin, what is new about this new lawyer what is new for the legal profession, is that
he does not practice law but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks
are no longer squeezed by Alexander the Greats thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his
back. The door to justice is not to employ law but to make it inoperative not by practicing law (which
would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that law is in force without significance), but by doing
nothing more than studying it. The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice.
Bucephalus strategy against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is
not practiced but only studied does not itself become justice but only the door to it. The study of the law
has no higher purpose that is why the law has become inoperative.4 That which opens the passage
to justice is not the abolishment of the law but its deactivation and inactivity that is, another use of
the law (SE, 63). This is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty.
Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is possible after its link with violence and power has been
deposed, a law that is no longer in force and applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the
man from the country makes it possible to remain living outside the law. Agamben then outlines the
following picture of the future: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused
objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good. (SE, 64)
Power separates us from our impotentiality our capacity to not do or be causing us to lose our
Snoek 12 (Anke Ph.D. in Philosophy from Macquarie University, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding
Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the laws being in force without
significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka work of this situation, Agambens praises of creatures
without work), the questions arise what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for
us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criticisms on Agambens work
that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to forumulate any explicit answer to
the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agambens close
friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a
great lack in his philosophy.2 Agambens work is often described as a radical passivity.3 This passivity
can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agambens passivity is not a regular
powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This
passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a
movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant La Lettre.
As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical
politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him a work of his own. If the human
being has no identity of his own and no activity of his own, then this also has consequences for our
traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal-
oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line
with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafkas open singing executioners or
questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its
potentiality. But Agamben states, There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of
power that does not immediately affect what humans can do their potentiality but rather their
impotentiality that is, what they cannot do, or better, cannot do (N, 43). Given that flexibility is the
primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by
society, is cut off from his impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously,
politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the
contemporary individual, No problem, I can do it comes precisely at the moment when he [one] should
instead realize that he [one] has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over
which he [one] has lost all control (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and
callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their
inability Agamben sees an example of this in Kafkas The Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death,
two men enter through Joseph Ks door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K does not
recognize them as such and thinks that they are [o]ld second-rate actors or opera singers?5 Agamben
argues that, in Kafkas world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31).
Instead of making use of our possibility of not being we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, our
fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some power of being (CC, 32). But this power we try to
exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In
Kafkas world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of
power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality.
Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist they can still not do. Those
who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to
resist (N, 45) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right Kafka
was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power,
tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with
activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of
texts written by the Tiqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes
and in 2008 their compound was raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague
belonging to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links
with Ibreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was
not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a
tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important
political value of the Tiqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non-subject. One
of the latters greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group
had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking
was the idea of non-authorship. The subject itself its identity is always formed within a power relation, a
process that Foucault termed subjectivization techniques. In Foucault, the state attempts to form the
subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it
internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault
rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long
as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot
liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben,
not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of savior or revolutionary. Rather, they begin
with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject).
In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that
are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of
Agambens position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely
with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agambens constant reply was that anyone who
poses this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask
someone what to do, what is there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed
the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with
that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing
activists present at Agambens lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law
tendencies in the writings of the Ttqqun collective, the activists present at Agambens lecture failed to
recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the
Tiqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actiona but sought
unexpected possibilities in being thus: In that same sense, Agambens analysis of Kafkas work should
not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in
which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben
shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal;
rather, they are means without end. As Kiahik pointed out, Agambens work is an attempt to make
means meet (not with their ends, but with each other)? One way to achieve this is through gestures.
The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafkas work, the shame of Joseph
K. and the as not in Kafkas On Parables show us that there are other strategies, aside from active
Our playful study of the law deactivates its instrumentality, opening it up to a new potential
Mills 8 (Catherine Associate Professor at the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University,
Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice, in South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a
disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary
potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the "temporality of history in its
pure differential and qualitative value. That is, in making present "human temporality in itself, the pure
differential margin between the once and the no longer (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from
continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true
homeland of humanity (IH, 104-5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law
has lost its use value in the realm of the politico- economic and has instead been relegated to the
profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without
significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the "once . . . no longer,
rather than within the synchrony of miniaturiza-tion. This is significant because it highlights the
ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben
argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony
by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of
rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as
an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human.
The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the
impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the
one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of
diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, "at the end of the game, the toythe privileged signifier of
absolute diachrony"turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the
game can no longer eliminate (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the
law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather
than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practico- economic
value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and
restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its
deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase "at the
end of the game used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have
an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agambens
conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he
explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more
accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately
related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben
writes in Idea of Prose, Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.17 In fact,
it is presumably the endlessness of play that allows for the noninstrumental appropriation of law and
ultimately its deactivation in play; that is, the free use of law within play exceeds the constraints of
instrumentality and gives onto a justice that Agamben identifies as akin to a condition in which the
world can no longer be appropriated by law. In this way, the noninstrumentality and interminability of
play ensure a passage to a justice that is irreducible to law. As Agamben writes, The lawno longer
practiced but studiedis not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward
justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivitythat is, another use of law (SE, 64).
One of the questions that this raises is to what extent a deposed or deactivated law remains a law. In
what sense is a deposed law still a law? Agamben suggests that it is this question of the status and
meaning of law after its messianic fulfillment that motivates Benjamins reflections on Kafka, in which
law no longer has force or application (SE, 63). However, this raises more questions than it answers,
and in particular, it leaves open what a postjuridical justice arrived at through studious play might look
like. We can be sure that what Agamben means by justice does not coincide with more standard
jurisprudential conceptions as the proper application of law. Despite his concern with questions of law,
though, the concept of justice has played a small part in Agambens work to date (at least if considered
at an explicit textual level), and there is little overt indication of what it would amount to beyond this
discussion in State of Exception. One point at which a (slightly) more extended consideration of justice
does appear is in an early fragment in which Agamben defines justice as the handing on of the
Forgotten and the transmission of oblivion (IP, 79). At first glance, this does little to clarify the
concept of justice that he employs, but it does point toward a path of elucidation.
A politics of inoperativity where the law does not work, but can be studied neither affirms nor
Agamben 14 (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, What is a destituent power?, in
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 32, p. 65-74, 2014,
6. On the concept of inoperativity. Inoperativity does not mean inertia, but names an operation that
deactivates and renders works (of economy, of religion, of language, etc) inoperative. It is a question,
that is, of going back to the problem that Aristotle fleetingly posed in the Nicomachean Ethics (1097b,
22 sqq), when, in the context of the definition of the object of episteme politike, of political science, he
wondered if, as for the flute player, the sculptor, the carpenter, and every artisan there exists a proper
work (ergon), there is also for man as such something like an ergon or if he is not instead argos, without
work, inoperative. Ergon of man means in this context not simply work, but that which defines
energeia, the activity, the being-in-act proper to man. The question concerning the work or absence of
work of man therefore has a decisive strategic importance, for on it depends not only the possibility of
assigning him [one] a proper nature and essence, but also, as we have seen, that of defining his [ones]
happiness and his politics. The problem has a wider meaning, therefore, and involves the very possibility
of identifying energeia, the being-in-act of man as man, independently and beyond the concrete social
figures that he can assume. Aristotle quickly abandons the idea of an argia, of an essential inoperativity
of man. I have sought on the contrary, reprising an ancient tradition that appears in Averroes and in
Dante, to think man [one] as the living being without work, which is to say, devoid of any specific
vocation: as a being of pure potentiality (potenza), that no identity and no work could exhaust. This
essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation of all activity, but as an activity
that consists in making human works and productions inoperative, opening them to a new possible use.
It is necessary to call into question the primacy that the leftist tradition has attributed to production and
labor and to ask whether an attempt to define the truly human activity does not entail first of all a
critique of these notions. The modern epoch, starting from Christianitywhose creator God defined
himself from the origin in opposition to the deus otiosus of the pagansis constitutively unable to think
inoperativity except in the negative form of the suspension of labor. Thus one of the ways in which
inoperativity has been thought is the feast [la festa], which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has
been conceived essentially as a temporary suspension of productive activity, of melacha. But the feast is
defined not only by what in it is not done, but primarily by the fact that what is donewhich in itself is
not unlike what one does every daybecomes undone, is rendered inoperative, liberated and
suspended from its economy, from the reasons and purposes that define it during the weekdays (and
not doing, in this sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension)/ If one eats, it is not done for the
sake of being fed; if one gets dressed, it is not done for the sake of being covered up or taking shelter
from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not done for the sake of working; if one walks, it is not done for the
sake of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not done for the sake of communicating information; if one
exchanges objects, it is not done for the sake of selling or buying. There is no feast that does not involve,
in some measure, a destitutive element, that does not begin, that is, first and foremost by rendering
inoperative the works of men. In the Sicilian feast of the dead described by Pitre, the dead (or an old
woman named Strina, from strena, the Latin name for the gifts exchanged during the festivities at the
beginning of the year) steal goods from tailors, merchants, and bakers to then bestow them on children
(something similar to this happens in every feast that involves gifts, like Halloween, in which the dead
are impersonated by children). In every carnival feast, such as the Roman saturnalia, existing social
relations are suspended or inverted: not only do slaves command their masters, but sovereignty is
placed in the hands of a mock king (saturnalicius princeps) who takes the place of the legitimate king. In
this way the feast reveals itself to be above all a deactivation of existing values and powers. There are
no ancient feasts without dance, writes Lucian, but what is dance other than the liberation of the body
from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure inoperativity? And what are
maskswhich play a role in various ways in the feasts of many peoplesif not, essentially, a
neutralization of the face? Only if it is considered in this perspective can the feast furnish a paradigm for
thinking inoperativity as a model of politics. An example will allow us to clarify how one must
understand this inoperative operation. What is a poem, in fact, if not an operation taking place in
language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its communicative and informative
function, in order to open it to a new possible use? What the poem accomplishes for the potentiality of
speaking, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting. Rendering inoperative the
biological, economic, and social operations, they show what the human body can do, opening it to a
new possible use. 7. If the fundamental ontological question today is not work but inoperativity, and if
this inoperativity can, however, be deployed only through a work, then the corresponding political
concept can no longer be that of constituent power [potere constituente], but something that could be
called destituent power [potenza destituente]. And if revolutions and insurrections correspond to
constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to think a
destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task of the
coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the
incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which makes
the law and violence that preserves it. It is a matter of a concept that is only just beginning to appear in
contemporary political reflection. Along these lines, Tronti alludes in an interview to the idea of a
potere destituente without managing in any way to define it. Coming from a tradition in which the
identification of a subjectivity was the fundamental political element, he seems to link it to the twilight
of political subjectivities. For us, who begin from that twilight, and from the putting into question of the
very concept of subjectivity, the problem presents itself in different terms. It is a destitution of this
type that Benjamin imagined in the essay Critique of Violence, trying to define a form of violence that
escaped this dialectic: on the breaking of this cycle that plays out in the sphere of the mythical form of
law, on the destitution (Entsetzung) of law with all the powers on which it depends (as they depend on
it), ultimately therefore on the destitution of state violence, a new historical epoch founds itself
(Benjamin, 1977, page 202). Now what does to destitute law mean? And what is a destituent violence
that is not only constitutive? Only a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely
neutralized. Benjamin located this destituent power in the proletarian general strike, which Sorel
opposed to the simply political strike. While the suspension of work in the political strike is violent,
conditions, the other, as pure means, is without violence (Benjamin, 1977, page 194). Indeed, this does
not entail the resumption of work following external concessions and some modifications to working
conditions, but the decision to resume only a work completely transformed and nonimposed by the
state; that is, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes (veranlasst) as realizes (vollzieht)
(page 194). The difference between veranlassen, to induce, to provoke, and vollziehn, to accomplish,
to realize, expresses the opposition between constituent power, which destroys and always recreates
new forms of law, without ever completely destituting it, and destituent power, which, in deposing law
once and for all, immediately inaugurates a new reality. It follows that the first of these operations is
lawmaking but the second anarchic (page 194). An example of a destituent strategy that is neither
destructive nor constituent is that of Paul faced with the question of law. Paul expresses the relationship
between the messiah and the law with the verb katargein, which means to render inoperative (argos), to
deactivate (Estiennes Thesaurus suggests, redo aergon et inefficacem, facio cessare ab opere suo, tollo,
aboleo). Thus Paul can write that the messiah will render inoperative (katargese) all rule (potere), all
authority, and all power (potenza) (1 Corinthians 15:24) and, at the same time, that the messiah is the
telos that is the end and fulfillment of the law (Romans 10:4): inoperativity and fulfillment coincide
here perfectly. In another passage, he says of the believers that they have been rendered inoperative
(katargethemen) with respect to the law (Romans 7:5-6). The customary translations of this verb with
to destroy, to abolish are not correct (the Vulgate expresses it more cautiously with evacuari), all the
more so because Paul in a famous passage declares to want to hold firm the law (nomon istanomen
Romans 3:31). Luther, with an intuition whose importance must not have escaped Hegel, translates
katargein with aufheben; that is, with a verb that means as much to abolish as to conserve. In any
case, it is certain that for Paul it is not a question of destroying the law, which is holy and just, but of
deactivating its action with regard to sin, because it is through the law that the people know sin and
desire: I would not have known desire, if the law had not said: do not desire: taking impulse from the
commandment, sin has made operative (kateirgasato, has activated) in me every desire (Romans 7:8).
It is this operativity of the law that the messianic faith neutralizes and renders inoperative, without
thereby abolishing the law. The law held firm is a law deprived of its power of commandthat is, it is
a law no longer of the commandments and of work (nomos ton entolonEphesians 2:15; ton ergon
Romans 3:27), but of faith (nomos pisteosRomans 3:27). And in its essence, faith is not a work, but an
experience of the word (faith from the hearing and hearing through the wordRomans 10:17). On the
other hand, Paul, in a decisive passage of 1 Corinthians 7, defines the Christian form of life through the
formula hos me (as not): But this I say, brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those
having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not
rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing
away is the figure of this world. The as not is a destitution without refusal. To live in the form of the
as-not means to deactivate every juridical and social property, without establishing a new identity. A
form-of- life is, in this sense, that which unrelentingly deposes the social conditions in which it finds
itself living, without negating them, but simply using them. If, writes Paul, in the moment of the call you
found yourself in the condition of the slave, do not worry: but if you would also be made free, use
(chresai) your condition of the slave (1 Corinthians 7:21). Use names here the deposing potentiality in
the Christian form of life, which destitutes the figure of this world (to schema tou kosmou toutou). It is
this destituent potentiality that both the anarchist tradition and 20th-century thought sought to define
without ever actually succeeding. The destruction of tradition by Heidegger, the deconstruction of the
arche, and the fracturing of the hegemonies by Schurmann, and what, on the trail of Foucault, I have
called philosophical archaeologythey are all pertinent, but insufficient, attempts to return to an
historical a priori in order to destitute it. But also a good part of the practice of the artistic avant-garde
and of the political movements of our time can be seen as the attemptso often miserably failedto
carry out a destitution of work that has ended instead with the recreation of powers even more
oppressive inasmuch as they had been deprived of any legitimacy. The destitution of power and of its
works is an arduous task, because it is first of all and only in a form-of-life that it can be carried out. Only
a form-of-life is constitutively destituent. The Latin grammarians called deponents (depositiva, or, also,
absolutive or supine) those verbs that, similar in this regard to the middle voice verbs, cannot properly
be called active or passive: sedeo, sudo, dormio, iaceo, algeo, sitio, esurio, gaudeo. What do the middle
or deponent verbs depose? They do not express an operation, rather they depose it, neutralize and
render it inoperative, and, in this way, expose it. The subject is not merely, in the words of Benveniste,
internal to the process, but, having deposed its action, it is exposed and put in question together with it.
In this sense, these verbs can offer the paradigm to think in a new way not only action and praxis, but
also the theory of the subject. 8. Benjamin once wrote that there is nothing more anarchic than the
bourgeois order. In the same sense, Pasolini makes one of the gerarchi in Salo say that the true anarchy
is that of power. If this is true, one understands then why the thought that tries to think anarchy
remains trapped in aporia and contradictions without end. Since power (arche) constitutes itself through
the inclusive exclusion (the ex-ceptio) of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy
coincides with the exhibition of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is that which becomes possible
only in the moment that we grasp and destitute the anarchy of power. The same goes for every attempt
to think anomy: it becomes accessible only through the exhibition and the deposition of the anomy that
law has captured within itself in the state of exception. This is true as well for the thought that seeks to
conceive the a-demy, the absence of a demos or people that defines democracy (here I use the term
ademy because a people that must be represented is by definition absent). Only the exhibition of the
ademy internal to democracy allows us to depose the fiction of a people that it pretends to represent. In
all of these cases, constitution coincides without remainder with destitution; positing has no other
consistency than in deposing. Defining the dispositif of the exception as a structure of the arche yields
an important consequence. Since power functions through the inclusive exclusion of anarchy, of
anomie, of inoperativity, etc, it is not possible to access these dimensions directly: it is necessary first to
exhibit the form in which they are captured in power. Something is excepted in the state and, in this
way, politicized: but, for that to happen, it is necessary that it be reduced to the state of nudity (bare
life, anarchy as war of all against all, anomy as being-in-force [vigenza] without application, ademy as
formless multitude). We know of life only bare life (seeing that the medicalization of life is an integral
part of the political dispositif), of anarchy we understand only the war of all against all, of anomy we see
only chaos and the state of exception, etc. Hence the importance of research such as that of Illich, of
Clastres, and of Sigrist, showing that there are vernacular figures of anomic communities that have a
completely different character. When one wants to recover life, anarchy, anomy, and ademy in their
truth, it is necessary therefore first to release oneself from the form that they have received in the
exception. This is not, however, only a theoretical task: it can occur only through a form-of- life. By the
term form-of-life, we mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never
possible to isolate something like a bare life. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for
which, in its way of living, what is at stake is living itself, and, in its living, what is at stake above all else is
its mode of living. What is at stake, then, is a life in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living
are never simply facts, but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potentiality
[potenza]. Tiqqun has developed this definition in three theses, stating that, (1) The human unity is not
the body or the individual, but the form-of-life, that (2) each body is affected by its form- of-life as by a
clinamen, an attraction, a taste, and that (3) my form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am
what I amP] Here it is necessary to replace the ontology of substance with an ontology of how, an
ontology of modality. The decisive problem is no longer what I am, but how I am what I am. It is
necessary, in this sense, to radicalize the Spinozan thesis according to which there is only being
(substance) and its modes or modifications. Substance is not something that precedes the modes and
exists independently from them. Being is not other than its modes, substance is only its modifications,
its own how (its own quomodo). Modal ontology makes it possible to go beyond the ontological
difference that has dominated the Western conception of being. Between being and modes the relation
is neither of identity nor of difference because the mode is at once identical and differentor, rather, it
implies the coincidencethat is, the falling together [cadere insieme]of the two terms. In this sense,
the problem of the pantheist risk is badly put: the Spinozist syntagma Deus sive (or) natura does not
mean God = nature: the sive (whether sive derives from the conditional and concessive si or the
anaphoric sic) expresses the modalization, that is, the neutralizing and the failure as much of identity as
of difference. What is divine is not being in itself, but its own sive, its own always already modifying and
naturingbeing bornin the modes. Modal ontology means rethinking from the start the problem of
the relation between potentiality and act. The modification of being is not an operation in which
something passes from potentiality to act, and realizes and exhausts itself in this. What deactivates
potentiality that manifests itself as power of not [Aristotle calls it adynamia, impotentiality, formulating
the axiom according to which all potentiality is, on the basis of the same and with respect to the same,
impotentiality (Met.1046, pages 30-31)]. The destitution of the being-in-work of the work (of its
energeia) cannot be carried out by another work, but only by a potentiality that remains as such and
shows itself as such. Aristotle (De Anima 429b, pages 9-10) wrote that thought, when it thinks in act
each of the intelligibles, remains in some way in potentiality and is thus able to think itself. It is only this
irreducible remainder of potentiality that makes the destitution of work possible. To destitute work
means in this sense to return it to the potentiality from which it originates, to exhibit in it the
impotentiality that reigns and endures there. All living beings are in a form of life, but not all are (or are
not always) a form-of-life. In the moment that the form-of-life constitutes itself, it deactivates and
renders inoperative not only all the individual forms of life, but first of all the dispositif that separates
bare life from life. It is only in living a life that a form-of-life can constitute itself as the inoperativity
immanent in every life. The constitution of a form-of-life coincides, that is, completely with the
destitution of the social and biological conditions into which it finds itself thrown. The form-of-life is, in
this sense, the revocation of all factical vocations, which deposes and puts in tension from within the
same gesture by which it is maintained and dwells in them. It is not a question of thinking a better or
more authentic form of life, a superior principle or an elsewhere, which arrives from outside the forms
of life and the factical vocations to revoke and render them inoperative. Inoperativity is not another
work that appears to works from out of nowhere to deactivate and depose them: it coincides
completely and constitutively with their destitution, with living a life. And this destitution is the coming
politics. One understands, then, the essential function that the tradition of Western philosophy has
assigned to the contemplative life (to theoria) and to inoperativity: praxis, the properly human life is
that which, rendering inoperative the specific works and functions of the living, makes them, so to
speak, spin idle [girare a vuoto], and, in this way, opens them to possibility. Contemplation and
inoperativity are, in this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which, freeing the living
being from every biological or social destiny and from every predetermined task, renders it open for that
particular absence of work that we are accustomed to calling politics and art. Politics and art are
neither tasks nor simply works: they name, rather, the dimension in which the linguistic and corporeal,
material and immaterial, biological and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as
such.