Abstract
Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Lampedusa,1 Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Florida—contemporary politics has rediscovered the lawless zones where the darker practices and fantasies of civilization are outsourced. The law’s withdrawal from all fronts coincides with the reemergence of atavistic modes of violence that once again can be freely employed without the inhibitions of conventions and rights. Sublime sovereignty, once rich with imagery and pomp, now makes way for more anonymous powers whose effects, though muted, are no less devastating. Moreover, these states of exception2 have hit home. Skirting the restrictions of civil liberties and court oversight, Western democracies systematically seek out law-free zones—where legal codes do not reach—abroad and at home. Refugees across the globe suffer from expulsion, exploitation, social injustice, genocide, state terrorism, racism, and war. Bereft of formal protections, they import their emergencies into the wealthy fortress of the Western world. Yet the leading statesmen of the First World, betraying a curious lack of imagination for the potential of the political, do not have much more than security, order, and danger on their minds. Hence, wherever we look at National Security initiatives, “super-police forces,” intelligence agencies, and military intervention troops are popping up while belligerent threats, war-like mobilizations, shadow diplomacy, and frenzied media coverage envelop the globe. We live in a state of exception that no one has decreed but to which everyone subscribes.3
Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated… Freedom and fear are at war.
—President Bush, speech to the joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001
[W]ith whom is the war I should suggest we’re fighting?… Will the war never be over as long as there is any member [or] any person who might feel that they want to attack the United States of America or the citizens of the United States of America?
—District court, January 2002, ordering that these questions be answered, in the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
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Notes
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7. Hereafter shortened as E.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses of the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.
Paul Patton, Deleuze & the Political (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Alan Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004), 15. Hereafter shortened as Mu.
Bruce Ackerman, “The Emergency Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1029.
See Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
See Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005, p. 106–23.
See also Stephen Grey, “U.S. Accused of ‘Torture Flights,’” The Sunday Times (London), November 14, 2004, p. 24.
Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001), 14. Hereafter shortened as OC. On the problematic concept of “political borders,” sovereignty and outsiders, see Etienne Balibar, “World Borders, Political Borders,” PMLA 117 (2002): 71–78.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 10–11.
See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) Hereafter shortened as R.
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).
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See Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy In A Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 ), 137–39.
Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Eavesdropping (New York: Random House, 2005).
D. Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7.
Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1–34.
Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality” in Potentialities, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 181–82.
Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches,” in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 ), 276.
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:236–52. Hereafter shortened as CV; and Walter Benjamin, “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1:245. Hereafter shortened as OG (my translation).
Walter Benjamin, “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1:245. Hereafter shortened as OG (my translation).
Carl Schmitt, Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber: Gespräch über den Neuen Raum (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 17–20.
See Peter J. Katzenstein, Introduction to The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 ), 10;
Peter J. Katzenstein and Michel Foucault, “Security, Territory, and Population,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997 ), 67–71.
Robert O’Harrow, No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society (New York: Free Press, 2005).
Robert Castel, “From Dangerousness to Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ).
Jim Newton, “Wilson: The Man Behind Community-Based Policing,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1996, p. A14.
Slavoj Žižek, “Iraq’s False Promises,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2004), http://www.lacan.com/zizek-iraq2.htm.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 8–9, 74.
See Barry Glasner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
Barry Glasner and David Altheide, Creating Fear and the Construction of Crisis (New York: Aldinede Gruyter, 2002).
Avital Ronell, “Learning from Los Angeles: Haunted TV,” Artforum (September 1992): 72.
Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,“Theory & Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 9–17.
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© 2007 Klaus Mladek
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Mladek, K. (2007). Exception Rules: Contemporary Political Theory and the Police. In: Mladek, K. (eds) Police Forces. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607477_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607477_12
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