Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations 9781138313149, 9780429457760

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Necrogeopolitics

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as “slow death,” “soft killing,” “superfluous bodies,” or “extra/ordinary” destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states. Caroline Alphin is an Instructor in the Department of English at Radford University, USA. François Debrix is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) doctoral program at Virginia Tech, USA.

Interventions Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

The series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors: • •

Jenny Edkins ([email protected]); and Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]).

“As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’ In this spirit The Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.” Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics Edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi and Erzsébet Strausz Necrogeopolitics On Death and Death-Making in International Relations Edited by Caroline Alphin and François Debrix For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ series/INT

Necrogeopolitics On Death and Death-Making in International Relations Edited by Caroline Alphin and François Debrix

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Caroline Alphin and François Debrix; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Caroline Alphin and François Debrix to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alphin, Caroline (Caroline G.), editor. | Debrix, François, editor. Title: Necrogeopolitics : on death and death-making in international relations / edited by Caroline Alphin and François Debrix. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Interventions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023503 (print) | LCCN 2019023504 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138313149 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429457760 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: International relations–Social aspects. | Death–Political aspects. Classification: LCC JZ1251 .N43 2020 (print) | LCC JZ1251 (ebook) | DDC 327.101–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023503 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023504 ISBN: 978-1-138-31314-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45776-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Necrogeopolitics and death-making

vii ix 1

CAROLINE ALPHIN AND FRANÇOIS DEBRIX

1 Not a state of exception: Weak state killing as a mode of neoliberal governmentality

15

CAROLINE ALPHIN

2 Political incompetence and death-making: An outline of unsuitable governance

34

ALEXANDER D. BARDER

3 On the loss of death: Necropolitics in the study of genocide

51

BENJAMIN MEICHES

4 The violent management of peace and beauty in Rio de Janeiro

68

FRANCINE ROSSONE DE PAULA

5 The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare and the horror of responsibility

85

GITTE DU PLESSIS

6 “Death in this country is normal”: Quiet deaths in the Global South

104

JESSICA AUCHTER

7 Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity SAM OKOTH OPONDO AND MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO

121

vi Contents 8 The kill zone: Choreographies of life at the limits of a death-world

142

ALI H. MUSLEH

9 Specters of schmaltz: Aesthetics, death, and the haunting of communist kitsch

163

STEPHEN MICHAEL CHRISTIAN AND BRENT J. STEELE

10 The earth’s dying body: On the necroeconomy of planetary collapse

183

MAURO J. CARACCIOLI

Afterword: Afterlife, afterdeath

203

KENNAN FERGUSON

Index

209

Contributors

Caroline Alphin is Instructor in the Department of English at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, and a graduate of the ASPECT program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, USA. Jessica Auchter is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. Mauro J. Caraccioli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Core faculty member in the ASPECT program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. Stephen Michael Christian is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Alexander D. Barder is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, USA. François Debrix is Director of the ASPECT program and Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. Gitte du Plessis is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu in Finland. Kennan Ferguson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, USA. Benjamin Meiches is Assistant Professor in the Division of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at the University of Washington-Tacoma, Tacoma, Washington, USA. Ali H. Musleh is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa in Honolulu. Samson Okoth Opondo is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA.

viii Contributors Francine Rossone de Paula is a Lecturer in International Relations in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University-Belfast in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Michael J. Shapiro is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa in Honolulu. Brent J. Steele is Wormuth Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support and dedication of its contributors. As editors, we are grateful to the volume’s contributors who accommodated our requests for revisions, complied with editorial and other formatting requirements, and at times provided critical input on various chapters, particularly when they were presented at annual meetings of the International Studies Association (2018 and 2019) and the Western Political Science Association (2018). As a whole, the project benefited from ideas, thoughts, comments, and suggestions by a number of people, including Clair Apodaca, Linea Cutter, Jenny Edkins, Mario Khreiche, Leigh McKagen, Tim Luke, Mary Ryan, Emma Stamm, Nick Vaughan-Williams, and Shelby Ward. Three anonymous reviewers for Routledge also provided us with useful insights and helped us to strengthen the manuscript. Our gratitude also goes to Ella Halstead, Natalja Mortensen, Nicola Parkin, and Rob Sorsby at Routledge for their support and guidance at various stages of this project.

Introduction Necrogeopolitics and death-making Caroline Alphin and François Debrix

Rethinking necropolitics and biopolitics Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower,1 Achille Mbembe has argued that sovereignty is primarily about the right to kill. Political power is often defined as the prerogative of the sovereign to dispose of human subjects and bodies as it sees fit and to decide who will live and who will die. As Mbembe puts it, “the sovereign right to kill … and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the ways all modern states function …”2 What Mbembe calls necropolitics—the politics of death and death-making—is crucial to the work of biopower. Biopower—the power over life and living bodies, the concern with the management and enhancement of a population’s life and well-being3—functions as a modality of governance and force for Mbembe, and it does so through an insistent emphasis on the part of sovereign agents or actors on death and death-making. As Foucault had intimated, in order to manage populations, maintain normal conditions of life, or maximize healthy bodies, a focus on life (on letting live as much as on putting to death) must be placed at the core of political concerns. But for Mbembe, such a focus on life and its management/enhancement can only happen through a sustained effort on the part of sovereign agents to put (some) bodies to death through an insistence on killing bodies, even if or when it is said to be for the purpose of making the life of a given population, nation, or race live.4 As others have argued, following Mbembe’s lead, necropolitics is thus crucial to biopower.5 The “subjugation of life to the power of death”6 continues to be a central modality of sovereignty as well as governmental technologies of power today. To put it somewhat differently, necropolitics facilitates a conceptual as well as a political continuum from the traditional model of centralized sovereign power (with the absolute prerogative of the sovereign to put any body to death as the sovereign wills) to a more recent biopolitical model of governance, government, or, as Foucault would have it, governmentality (Foucault 2007):7 a governmentality whereby the emphasis is to be placed on the life, health, and wealth of an entire population and individual bodies, and no longer primarily on their possible destruction at the hands of the sovereign or its agents.

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Over the last two decades or so, in political theory as well as in international relations (IR), arguments about the role and place of necropolitics in relation to biopolitics or within biopolitical perspectives have become more and more common.8 Many have shown how the “creation of death worlds”9 (to borrow Mbembe’s turn of phrase) has been central to past and present modalities of governmentality in both domestic and international politics, to the operations of neoliberal governance or late modern capitalist formations across space and time, and to a wide array of security policies, mechanisms, and practices of social control and order. Yet, most studies on necropolitics, in political theory and IR, have tended to uncritically accept Mbembe’s argument about the “making of death-worlds.” As Mbembe showcased in his oft-cited 2003 essay, concrete instances of necropolitics have often been characterized as large-scale, well-known, or extreme forms of death-making. As was the case in Mbembe’s 2003 essay, instances of necropolitical power and force have been associated with phenomena and events such as slavery, colonial violence, the apartheid, genocide, or the Holocaust. Necropolitics has also been linked in various studies to contemporary large-scale or, if not large-scale, at least extremely violent, highly visible, and spectacular scenes and sites of destruction of lives and bodies, such as terrorist attacks in the West, military operations beyond the West in the context of the Global War on Terror, or many images of intense and often graphic violence against human bodies. Put succinctly, the study and theorization of necropolitics have been placed under the heading of extreme, large-scale, and gruesomely violent or brutal death and death-making in the contemporary global polity, often in the context of the security politics and policies deployed in the wake of 9/11 (and the insecurities they have produced), as the outcome of terrorist attacks in the West, or in the context of “late modern colonial warfare,” as Mbembe would have it (Mbembe 2003).10

Necropolitics and international relations Such an approach to necropolitics or to deadly configurations of biopower has been suitable to IR and political theory. By most accounts, the study of IR, but also of politics more generally, has classically been driven by concerns with brutal, extreme, and large-scale forms of deadly violence (domestic or international), often at the hands of (other) sovereign states and their political and military apparatuses.11 An emphasis on death-making in the name of making life live (once again, a central tenet of biopolitics) thus seems to facilitate an ongoing engagement with traditional objects of analysis in IR and politics, such as the state and state power, war and violence, civilian deaths as a result of military strategies, liberal and democratic ways of responding to the threat of death and destruction, or even human rights violations and what political agents can do about them. As a way of conceptualizing (bio)political power and violence in the context of large-scale, highly visible, and often gruesome death, necropolitics has not really challenged traditional IR and political theories premised upon the centrality of

Introduction

3

sovereignty (and sovereign violence). Even in Mbembe’s use of the concept, necropolitics has provided a theoretical framework that can be compatible with more traditional political theories of power, force, violence, and deathmaking even if (via a reliance on biopower) it has been critical of the political uses made of life and bodies. This volume, Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations, seeks to go beyond analytical perspectives that suggest that necropolitics, with its emphasis on “big” or exceptional events or extreme contemporary instances of killing bodies, can offer a useful addition to more traditional IR and political theories of violence because, among other things, necropolitics turns to similar objects of analysis (sovereignty, the force and power of state violence, colonial terror and deaths, etc.) as those commonly found in more conventional political theoretical approaches. We believe that necropolitical analyses too often target extreme, exceptional, or large-scale instances of death designed to make life live and, in so doing, occlude the multiple, endless, far-too-common, and often banal or seemingly trivial operations of death-making that biopolitics or regimes of biopolitical governance regularly undertake and that, furthermore, render a wide range of bodies superfluous, unnoticed, vulnerable, and often readily subjected to various forms of destruction and disappearance. The purpose of this volume is partly to rectify a troubling trend in critical IR and political theory circles that have embarked upon the study and problematization of biopower and biopolitics. This troubling trend, to repeat, ignores the many modes of ordinary death and death-making that define but also make possible contemporary regimes of biopolitical governmentality.

Necrogeopolitics and ordinary death-making A key objective of this volume is to explore and theorize the close kinship between necropolitics and the everyday, the mundane, the banal, or the ordinary. Concepts advanced by several scholars recently such as “soft or slow killing,” “social death,” “superfluous bodies,” “precariousness,” or “extra/ordinary” living12 have informed examinations of biopolitics/biopower and critical reflections on the pervasiveness of endemic death and deathmaking that are conceptually close to what we seek to explore in our volume. In this study, we want to suggest that the range of “applications” of what we call necrogeopolitics is more diverse, more nuanced, but also (and perhaps terrifyingly so) more detailed and refined than what an emphasis on largescale deadly and violent events, even if and when they involve non-traditional political actors (such as non-sovereign states), would suggest. Thus, this volume seeks to enrich (by rendering more complex) necropolitical and biopolitical theorizing by putting it in contact with various instances of deathmaking in past and present geopolitical contexts that are far from unusual, not so uncommon, not always extreme, rarely highly visible, or not necessarily dependent on or connected to massive historical events.

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We suggest in this book that the domain of necrogeopolitics is what can be called (borrowing the concept from critical anthropologist Zoë Wool) the “extra/ordinary.”13 In her study of what has happened to the lives and bodies of US war veterans after they return “home” from recent US wars and, often, after they undergo long periods of treatment in VA medical facilities, Wool writes that the “extra/ordinary” is a “zone of life” where “the textures of ordinary life” are always already woven into the fabric of violence, war, destruction, and death, or what she calls “zones of killing.”14 Necrogeopolitics, we argue, is “extra/ordinary” in the sense developed by Wool because, far too often in global politics, violent death is very much part and parcel of daily living and being for a wide range of bodies, many of which are not granted the privilege of being considered valuable, meaningful, or even worthy of existence. For example, as Wool recounts, some veterans who have suffered life-altering emotional or physical injuries in wars must go on “living” while not knowing when their body may eventually perish or whether the life they now have left to live, having confronted death-making (sometimes, having faced the verge of their own death multiple times), is still a life worth living (or, perhaps, an already announced death in waiting). Another instance of this death-making that somehow becomes part of daily living (as discussed in one of the chapters in this book) is what happens to survivors of mass atrocities who may have been able to live on and yet have been deprived of their common social and cultural ways of life as a result of genocidal devastation. These bodies, while perhaps still alive from a physiological standpoint, nonetheless go on to experience social death, often in very mundane/ordinary ways. Thus, as Wool intimates, instances of death and death-making, while they certainly put an end to many lives, may also, and paradoxically perhaps, become geopolitical situations in and through which new modalities of ordinary living (at least, for those who remain) may be discovered or may have to be undertaken, even if life/living is no longer what it used to be. Necrogeopolitics also points to a normalcy or banality about life and death that contemporary forms of biopower or biopolitical governmentality all too often acquire and that sustain or reproduce political regimes and ideologies of neoliberal violence, destruction, disappearance, and death-making. Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together authors whose critical interventions are intent on theorizing various instances of “extra/ordinary” death-making in the context of necrogeopolitics. Geopolitics is purposefully targeted by this volume since instances of biopolitics and necropolitics never take place in abstract ways or forms. On the contrary, in quite material ways, the politics of death and death-making that biopower and necropower produce and rely on occur in very concrete spatial conditions and contexts: in war zones, in camps, in and across sovereign nations, in and across territories deemed to be outside the law, in cities, along and across borders, in airports and other transit zones, etc. Put differently, regimes of neoliberal governmentality that seek

Introduction

5

to manage populations, organize disciplined bodies, or maximize normalized forms of life do so in discrete and discriminating geographical ways and often with specific spatial and territorial effects in mind.15 Again, many studies on biopolitics and necropolitics, such as Mbembe’s 2003 essay, have identified what have been labeled (sometimes incorrectly) exceptional spaces or exceptional states as well as the creation and deployment of practices often designed to make possible the use and abuse of bodies and lives in space (for example, in certain zones or places as opposed to others). Too often, certain spaces or spatial practices, found to be characteristic of biopolitics or necropolitics, have been taken to be paradigmatic spatial configurations of biopower and necropower. Some “exceptional” locations and processes have been understood as “matrices” of power meant to enhance certain life possibilities for some bodies or populations to the detriment of others (whose lives can be made redundant and be done away with). For example, this has been a fairly well-known critique of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the camp16 and of a few other studies that have followed in his footsteps.17 We are aware of this important critique of the way space has been mobilized in studies of biopolitics and necropolitics and, to a large extent, we agree with it. Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations insists on the importance of the “geo” in necrogeopolitics in order to show that spatial concreteness and materialities are very much part and parcel of instances of extra/ordinary death-making today. In fact, just as with exceptional bio (or necro) politics, spatial arrangements are crucial to the work of slow or soft killing, to endemic precariousness, or to banal or common modalities of vulnerability. In other words, it is still within spaces, albeit mundane, commonsensical, and almost unnoticeable (because allegedly unexceptional), that forceful and lasting regimes of neoliberal governance or biopolitical governmentality take place. Moreover, death-making does not need to be situated within analytical spatial frameworks that privilege exceptional (geo)politics in order for death-making to take place and matter. Rather, the extra/ordinary death-making that characterizes necrogeopolitics is the product of vast and intricate networks, territories, or flows in contemporary global politics, and of spatial practices and operations whose seemingly normal, expected, and often accepted unfolding needs to be interrogated. Thus, as the outline of this volume below shows, the following chapters often seek to perform a double critical task. One is about biopolitics and necropolitics. While each chapter maintains its own critical theoretical focus (and often targets a particular modality of “extra/ordinary” life and/or death in contemporary international relations), each contribution seeks to push further arguments that have been advanced by scholars of biopolitics and necropolitics about death-making and the disappearance of bodies. But a second critical task, one that often goes hand in hand with the critique of biopolitics/necropolitics performed by the chapters in this volume, involves an engagement with the kind of practices or policies and

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ideologies that enable spatial configurations likely to facilitate and perpetuate mundane or non-exceptional forms of death-making.

Outline of the book The volume starts with a chapter by Caroline Alphin that serves as a theoretical anchor for the entire project. In this chapter, Alphin shows that necropolitics, as theorized by Mbembe in particular, is superfluous with regards to Foucault’s approach to biopower and, moreover, inaccurately criticizes biopolitics for its alleged failure to account for spectacular modes of killing. Instead, Alphin argues, Foucault’s biopolitics does much more than “theorize biological racism or genocide,” categories of exceptional death-making that are privileged by necropolitical perspectives (or what sometimes is referred to as the “zero-sum focus” of necropolitics). It is biopolitics then, not necropolitics, that, as Alphin puts it, has the capacity to critically draw our attention to “ordinary or taken-for-granted deaths and death-making that characterize neoliberal spaces.” Highlighting the limitations of Mbembe’s necropolitics when trying to capture “the spatiotemporality” of neoliberal governmentality, this chapter suggests that what we call necrogeopolitics in this volume would do well to pay closer attention to Foucault’s work and to the range of possibilities taken up recently by scholars like Elizabeth Povinelli, Lisa Marie Cacho, or Loic Wacquant. As these scholars note, Foucault’s biopolitics offers to make sense of “common suffering or seemingly ordinary death-making” under constant conditions of neoliberal competition. Chapter 2, authored by Alexander Barder, takes on some of the themes introduced by Alphin’s chapter (particularly, the idea of seemingly common or ordinary death-making in neoliberal contexts) to examine the notion of “political incompetence.” Incompetence, Barder argues, is a “way of letting death happen” in contemporary politics, particularly in some geographical contexts where deaths (as well as lives) are deemed to be less important than in other settings. Among some examples of spaces more prone to incompetence and ordinary death-making mentioned by Barder are Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 and 2003, respectively, New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, or Greece after austerity measures were imposed by the European Union and other international financial institutions in 2008 and 2009. Turning to literary insights derived from Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell as well as to Hannah Arendt’s work on banality and thoughtlessness, this chapter develops crucial linkages between incompetence and ordinary global violence and death by insisting on the fact that incompetence is not only to be understood as “an individual attribute” but, rather, as what Barder calls a mode of “unsuitable governance.” As a mode of unsuitable governance, the death-making that too often accompanies or results from incompetence needs to be seen as structural, omnipresent, and endemic.

Introduction

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In Chapter 3, Benjamin Meiches pursues the exploration of the commonality or everydayness of death-making in the global polity by looking at the role and place of social death in theories and analyses of genocide. Moving away from the paradigmatic view that genocide is a form of physical violence (it is about physical deaths on a mass scale), Meiches suggests that genocide needs to be understood from a social death perspective. This approach, of course, does not deny the presence and importance of physical suffering and killing. But it also claims that, crucially, genocide operates (and produces ever lasting effects) by way of what Meiches calls the “destruction of social bonds, social vitality, and social worlds.” Drawing theoretical insights from the work of Claudia Card, Meiches offers a critique of necropolitical approaches to genocide and mass atrocity that too often emphasize large-scale instances of physical destruction or annihilation of lives and bodies. This chapter shows that bringing social death into the remit of genocide studies does not undermine the attention that needs to be paid to material forms of violence, as some critiques of a social death approach have claimed. On the contrary, and turning to philosopher Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity (that, among other things, reveals the artificiality of the material life versus symbolic life distinction), Meiches explains that social death theory is premised upon the notion that “forms of social life” have very “material effects” that exceed the fact of physical death, even if and when physical death occurs on a broad scale. Francine Rossone de Paula’s chapter (Chapter 4) takes on some of the theoretical challenges offered by the previous chapters to target the mundaneness of killing and death (both social death and physical death) in the spatial context of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In her chapter, Rossone de Paula targets political discourses, urban policies, and police as well as military operations deployed in the name of pacification and beautification. She shows that efforts at aestheticizing the city of Rio de Janeiro (the “marvelous city”) have a long history steeped in the physical as well as symbolic removal of the poor populations from the urban landscape, often in the name of business and tourism. Favelas, in particular, have been the focus of aesthetic strategies of governance premised upon removal and pacification. In the name of beautification, neighborhoods, cultural spaces, and human lives have been eradicated or banned from the urban setting whereas other lives and life-styles have been privileged (and, in some cases, have thrived on the basis of the annihilation of poor areas and individuals). Crucial to the mundane death-making by way of urban politics and policies in Rio that Rossone de Paula examines is the notion of “urbicide,” a concept that allows her to place the critical focus of her study on the destruction of certain forms of life. In Chapter 5, Gitte du Plessis takes on the theme of the seemingly benign yet all-too-common mode of destruction of forms of life under neoliberalism (a theme introduced by Alphin in Chapter 1) by exploring the social

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welfare system of Scandinavian countries, and of Denmark, in particular. du Plessis shows how what she calls the “necrogeopolitics of the Danish welfare state” is dependent upon the global neoliberal economic and political system and, above all, upon the global modalities of exploitation and inequality such a system relies on (and that the Danish state/nation has benefitted from). Contrasting the exclusivist ideology of the Danish welfare system perceived by Danes as a matter of distinct national enjoyment (or what she terms, via Slavoj Žižek, the “Danish national Thing”) to Denmark’s dependence on global economics and politics, du Plessis argues that the Nordic welfare state model is necrogeopolitical because it is based upon and contributes to “suffering and death-making” both elsewhere (outside Danish borders) and within Danish society (by excluding ways of life that are deemed to be a threat to the national Thing). She concludes her chapter by suggesting that such a necrogeopolitical perspective may offer an opportunity to rethink the question of responsibility vis-à-vis the often banal or taken-for-granted suffering and death of others. Jessica Auchter, in Chapter 6, further develops the examination of everyday death and death-making by focusing on the global politics of describing and counting deaths in the Global South. Placing her study in the context of statistical measurements of deaths (mortality rates) in relation to global political concerns about human development and human security (concerns that often emanate from the Global North), Auchter seeks to problematize the creation of the notion of the “statistical individual within systems of neoliberalism.” In particular, through statistical measurement and tallying of rates of mortality in the South, Auchter suggests, deaths from certain diseases are not allowed to rise to the level of a health crisis (unless they pose a security threat to the Global North) and, furthermore, certain diseases are simply considered endemic, common, banal, or even normal (even when they kill tens of thousands of individuals in the Global South). The stories that numbers and statistics tell facilitate the deployment of a political discourse that deems a certain type of death-making outside the North or the West as ordinary and “not worthy of global attention,” thus further contributing to the production of vulnerabilities (for some populations, at least) in the context of neoliberal conditions of generalized insecurity. The question of which deaths and which forms of death-making matter under conditions of neoliberal insecurity is also key to Chapter 7, coauthored by Sam Opondo and Michael Shapiro. For them, however, the political stories and discourses (as well as policies and ideologies) that make necrogeopolitics crucial to contemporary neoliberal insecurities, both in the West and beyond the West, may be subjected to counter-discourses or, at least, may be confronted by alternative stories that perhaps can open up alternative ways of apprehending the politics of mundane death-making. Through a close reading of Russell Banks’s novel Continental Drift and of two films, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s La Promesse and Diego Quemada-Diez’s The Golden Dream, Opondo and Shapiro focus on the figure of

Introduction

9

the migrant and on the trajectories, in and across multiple spaces, that migrant lives (and deaths) trace. In a way that is reminiscent of Auchter’s argument in Chapter 6, Opondo and Shapiro suggest that the forensic work performed by international organizations to detect, track down, and study migrations provides a picture of migration and migrants that collects and produces a lot of information, but fails to account for the precarious conditions of migrant bodies and lives. Put differently, the always-on-thethreshold-of-life-and-death condition of migrants’ life trajectories and of migration’s time and space demands a counter-forensic approach that, Opondo and Shapiro suggest, cinema and fiction can offer. Thus, to place the focus on “the lives and deaths that exist below the threshold of attention and forensic detectability,” and with the support of the novel and the two films they read, they deploy a “counter-forensic commentary on the contemporary migratory condition” in a way that makes visible what they call “the racial frontiers of human encounter” that far too often normalize the necrogeopolitics of migrants’ lives and deaths. In Chapter 8, Ali H. Musleh places the normalization of death-making (and of living under conditions of always already anticipated exposure to death) at the center of his study. Focusing on what he refers to as “the nonhuman landscapes of war in Palestine,” Musleh investigates how unmanned weapons impose an always undefined and ever shifting necrogeopolitical territoriality onto Gaza and its inhabitants. This territoriality of death imposed onto Palestinians in Gaza, or what Musleh refers to as the “kill zone,” guarantees the production of subjects that, at any moment, can be destroyed by the lethal weaponry that surrounds Gaza. These Palestinian subjects of an always potential death-in-the-making are “killable bodies” that must constantly be aware that they are virtual targets of “immediate destruction.” Their lives/deaths are subjected to “machinic interpellation” on a routine basis. Indeed, every day, as they go on living their lives, Palestinians in Gaza must follow a choreography of action and movement that is always already determined by the immediate possibility of death and destruction from the nearby unmanned weaponry. Their actions and movements must abide by a pre-set script recognizable by and intelligible to the machines of death that control their existences. In Musleh’s chapter, exceptional biopolitics becomes a banal and always to be anticipated mode of death-making, whether actual killings in the “kill zone” take place or not. Chapter 9, authored by Stephen Michael Christian and Brent Steele, returns to the topic of aesthetics and death introduced by some of the previous chapters (Chapters 4 and 7, in particular) to interrogate the role of kitsch in the context of what the authors refer to as the death and deaths of communism. The deaths of communism (plural) refer to the massacres of millions of people that, historically, various experiments with communism (from Stalinism to Cambodia’s Pol Pot regime) have caused. The death of communism (singular) points to the supposed disappearance of communism as a political/social model in the late 1980s, particularly after the collapse of

10 Caroline Alphin and François Debrix the Soviet Union. Connecting their argument about kitsch and death to theories of hauntology, in political and IR theory, Christian and Steele come up with the notion of “haunted kitsch” to show how a certain aesthetic apprehension, in the spirit of kitsch, can open up the horizons of necrogeopolitical thinking. Among other possibilities, haunted kitsch can provide what they call an open-ended critique of “hegemonic world framings without having to ground such a critique into incontestable truth” (as can happen when, for example, resurrected post-communist Marxist-Leninist perspectives seek to use kitsch to revive a certain type of political and ideological critique). Mauro Caraccioli’s chapter titled “The Earth’s Dying Body” (Chapter 10) offers the volume a different take on necrogeopolitics. Not unlike the previous chapter, Caraccioli draws on Marx’s rhetoric and, in particular, on Marx’s notion of “world historical necromancy” (what Marx understood as the desperate turn to the past to “liberate the future,” but on the basis of inaccurate diagnoses about the past or history) to problematize the trope of “the earth’s dying body,” an increasingly common trope or slogan in the context of the (re)discovery by scholars (and environmental political thinkers, above all) of the notion of the anthropocene. Recent and older narratives about global environmental destruction (generally conveyed by “the earth’s dying body” image), Caraccioli suggests, are closer to the farcical uses of the past and history that Marx hinted at. These necromantic narratives about the earth’s impending if not already ongoing death take over necrogeopolitical discourses at a planetary scale, and they saturate critical possibilities. As such, Caraccioli provocatively argues, these necrogeopolitical discourses prevent one from pragmatically facing (to the extent that there is still time to do so) the many daily “structural ecological” forms of violence and death that are part and parcel of today’s neoliberal condition. We end the volume with an afterword written by Kennan Ferguson. In this afterword, appropriately titled “Afterlife, Afterdeath,” Ferguson takes stock of the critical perspectives on necrogeopolitics presented throughout the volume, not so much to provide a closing statement on the topic, but rather to offer avenues for further research. Noting that a key element of the volume is the emphasis on the way both biopolitical and necropolitical assumptions and perspectives “must of necessity denigrate other, unworthy kinds,” Ferguson highlights the importance of various critical approaches to death-making and “death-dealing” (as he puts it) for IR and global politics deployed across the chapters. He adds that, for many of the volume’s contributors, and following a necrogeopolitical perspective: attention must be paid to the transnational spatiality of human existence, to the logics of extirpation and eradication inflicted on unwilling people, and to the regimes of judgment that deem certain individuals’ bodies to be in need of transformation or renovation.

Introduction

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Ferguson concludes that, in many of the chapters, a key modality of opposition to meta-narratives of death-making is introduced: specificity. Specificity, or as Ferguson puts it, the insistence on “the particulars of individuals, places, and events,” points to a form of resistance to ways of thinking, representing, and doing that rely on regularity, generalization, aggregation, or statistical normality and that, in turn, foster regimes of ignorance. As Ferguson states, too often, ignorance enables transnational modes of deathmaking and “death-dealing” in international relations.

Notes 1 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, an Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003). 2 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1, (2003): 17. 3 See Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” and Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009). 5 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); François Debrix and Alexander Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2012). 6 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39. 7 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007). 8 See Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; Warren Montag, “Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal,” Radical Philosophy, 134 (2005); Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defense of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Debrix and Barder, Beyond Biopolitics; Steven Miller, War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Michael Dillon, Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analysis of Finitude (London: Routledge, 2015); François Debrix, Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces (London: Routledge, 2017). 9 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40. 10 Ibid. 11 See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper Perennial, 1946); Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948); Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998); Kalevi Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2006).

12 Caroline Alphin and François Debrix 12 See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015); Zoë Wool, After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 3–4. 15 See Matthew Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the Border,” Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2016): 151–180; Derek Gregory, “The Biopolitics of Baghdad: Counterinsurgency and the Counter-City,” Human Geography 1, no. 1 (2008), hugeog.com/polbagh/; Mathew Coleman and Kevin Grove, “Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 3 (2009): 480–507; Simon Springer, “Violence Sits in Places? Cultural Practice, Neoliberal Rationalism, and Virulent Imaginative Geographies,” Political Geography 30, no. 2 (2011): 90–98. 16 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 17 François Debrix, “Topologies of Vulnerability and the Proliferation of Camp Life,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 3 (2015): 444–459.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754–780. ———. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: NYU Press, 2012. Carr, Edward Hallett The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. New York: Harper Perennial, 1946. [reprinted 1964]. Coleman, Mathew and Kevin Grove. “Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 3 (2009): 489–507. Debrix, François. “Topologies of Vulnerability and the Proliferation of Camp Life.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 3 (2015): 444–459. ———. Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces. London: Routledge, 2017.

Introduction

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Debrix, François and Alexander D. Barder. Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics. London: Routledge, 2012. Dillon, Michael. Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analysis of Finitude. London: Routledge, 2015. Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid. The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. London: Routledge, 2009. Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I, an Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. ———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978. New York: Picador, 2007. Gregory, Derek. “The Biopolitics of Baghdad: Counterinsurgency and the Counter-City.” Human Geography 1, no. 1 (2008). Available at hugeog.com/polbagh/. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998. Holsti, Kalevi. Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso, 2015. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, 2nd edition, Translated by Harvey Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. ———. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Miller, Steven. War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Montag, Warren. “Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal.” Radical Philosophy 134 (Nov.–Dec. 2005): 7–17. Morgenthau, Hans. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf, 1948. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Reid, Julian. The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press, 2006. Sparke, Matthew. “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the Border.” Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2006): 151–180. Springer, Simon. “Violence Sits in Places? Cultural Practice, Neoliberal Rationalism, and Virulent Imaginative Geographies.” Political Geography 30, no. 2 (2011): 90–98.

14 Caroline Alphin and François Debrix Wacquant, Loic. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Waltz, Kenneth. Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954. Wool, Zoë. After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

1

Not a state of exception Weak state killing as a mode of neoliberal governmentality Caroline Alphin

Introduction This chapter seeks to disentangle Foucault’s work on biopolitics from Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Contrary to what Mbembe suggests, the “death-making” characteristic of neoliberal governmentalities can still be understood in terms of Foucault’s analytic of biopower. Thus, the turn to necropolitics to capture what Mbembe calls “the making of death worlds” is a superfluous gesture. Foucault’s biopolitics is often conflated with Mbembe’s necropolitics (for example, they both address genocide and concentration camps), even though Mbembe criticized Foucault’s biopower for its inability to account for the ways spectacular modes of killing function. Thus, the goal of this chapter is also to show that Foucault’s biopolitics can do more than theorize a genealogy of biological racism and genocide. Under neoliberalism, biopolitics does not eliminate populations solely through the production of biological caesuras predicated on race, and this elimination process does not primarily operate through spectacular and large-scale death-making, or as the murder function of the state, something that Mbembe insists upon. Rather, neoliberal biopolitics functions, in part, through the marketization of space and generalized conditions of competition. In these marketized spaces, when populations of individuals fail to compete (they do not accurately assess risk, they unsuccessfully maximize their human capital, or they are incapable of enduring or preventing chronic illnesses), it seems “natural” that they should deal with the consequences of their failure to compete. These consequences, whether they are slow-burning death from chronic illnesses, homelessness, physiological and emotional stress, etc., are understood as the responsibility and fault of the individual, not of the state nor of a particular political/economic/social system. Thus, if part of the goal of this volume is to highlight the ordinary/taken-forgranted deaths and death-making that characterize neoliberal spaces, disentangling Foucault’s biopolitics from the zero-sum and large-scale focus of necropolitics as Mbembe understands it is a necessary step. Put differently, biopolitics without its zero-sum focus may turn our attention to the subtle and deadly ways in which neoliberalism functions.

16 Caroline Alphin Mbembe poses several questions about the sufficiency of Foucault’s biopower as an analytic for interpreting contemporary instances of the use of murder to achieve political ends. Mbembe asks whether biopower can help us account for the ways state and sub-state forces kill (whether it is during times of war, moments of resistance, or fighting against terrorism) those they have deemed to be enemies. Mbembe’s answer is that biopower is limited in what it can tell us about the ways modern sovereignty, the political, states, and sub-states subjugate life to the power of death. This subjugation of life to the power of death is what Mbembe calls necropolitics or necropower. Necropower, for Mbembe, primarily describes the spatial and temporal ordering of contemporary colonial spaces, which involve practices such as territorial fragmentation, medieval siege warfare, and continual violence and killing.1 Mbembe offers necropower and necropolitics as correctives to what he sees as biopower’s inability to account for the irrational, excessively cruel, and spectacular forms of killing in the colonies. Furthermore, Mbembe relates Foucault’s biopower to the state of exception and the state of siege in order to show that biopower is insufficient for making sense of how the right to kill has normalized the state of exception and the relation of enmity. The suggestion here is that Foucault’s biopower cannot account for the spatial and temporal logic of modern warfare, nor can it tell us about what Mbembe sees as the domination of a politics of death, and of spectacular death at that, in modern statehood. Mbembe implies that Foucault’s notion of biopower cannot account for the connections between politics and death in systems that operate within a permanent state of emergency.2 According to Mbembe, death and power function under a different logic within the permanent state of emergency compared to the way they do within biopower. Mbembe’s essay “Necropolitics” was published in 2003, and (along with Giorgio Agamben’s and Roberto Esposito’s writings, among others) it has since been influential in shaping the way scholars have interpreted the relationship between life and death in (bio)politics. That is, biopolitics’ “make live requirement” is understood as the flipside of spectacular modes of “letting die.” Or, once again, biopolitics is an insufficient analytic for understanding strong state killing and states of exception. But necropolitics has also been criticized for its inability to see beyond biopolitics’ “zero point” (death).3 However, if, as scholars of biopolitics argue, killing certain populations is a positive condition of biopower,4 then biopower can still account for relations of enmity, modern warfare, and the irrational, excessively cruel, and spectacular forms of killing in colonies, and beyond. More importantly, if this is the case, biopolitics is also no longer an insufficient analytic for understanding ordinary suffering as a mode of weak state killing. Unlike Mbembe, I suggest in this chapter that biopower does not need a state of exception to justify killing if, by definition, biopower kills to make certain populations live. Thus, I wish to argue that we do not need a flipside or an addendum to biopower, such as necropolitics, since biopower can itself account for weak and strong modes of state killing.

Not a state of exception 17 Furthermore, while Mbembe has been useful for conceptualizing the spatio-temporality of “large-scale”5 and permanent extra-juridical killings, his necropolitics misses the paradoxical nature of biopower and overlooks the weak modes of state killing that capitalize on ordinary suffering under conditions of neoliberalism. In this chapter, I address a number of problems with Mbembe’s thinking about sovereignty, with his definition of biopower, and with his understanding of the function of racism within biopower. His criticism of biopower is predicated upon a conflation of sovereignty with biopower, and it results from a misreading of Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty. Thus, Mbembe’s necropower, although useful in thinking about the creation of death-worlds in the context of contemporary forms of warfare, including spaces of colonial violence, is limited in what it can offer to analyses of the spatio-temporalities of neoliberalism. Massive-scale or overt state killings are not the modus operandi of the biopolitics of neoliberal spatio-temporality. I begin this chapter with an analysis of Mbembe’s definition of sovereignty and his conflation of sovereignty with biopower. Then, I address the problems I find with Mbembe’s understanding of biopower and with the way Mbembe uses Foucault’s notion of racism. Finally, I point to the weaknesses of Mbembe’s necropolitics/necropower when trying to make sense of the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism.

Sovereignty, biopower, racism Mbembe begins his essay “Necropolitics” with the following point about sovereignty: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die …”6 He indicates in a footnote that his approach to the question of sovereignty builds on Foucault’s notion of sovereignty from his lecture “Society Must Be Defended.” However, Mbembe’s assumption that the ultimate expression of sovereignty lies in its power and capacity to determine “who may live” and “who must die” is not entirely consistent with Foucault’s critique of sovereignty. Foucault uses the phrases “what must live” and “what must die” when he answers the question “what is racism?” State racism is, for Foucault, a way for biopower to justify the right to kill by deciding who must die and who must live.7 But state racism and sovereignty are not the same. I will return to this point below. For Foucault, the “[s]overeign power’s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill … It is the right to take life or let live.”8 Mbembe’s position that sovereignty dictates who may live suggests a more active form of power over living. Foucault’s position is that sovereignty has an indirect power over living. Foucault writes that “the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one,”9 with letting live meaning, in part, refraining from killing. But this is not a power based on “generating forces, making them grow, and making them live.”10 The ultimate expression of sovereignty, an expression of its absolute power, would be through the sovereign’s right to

18 Caroline Alphin kill, the right of the sword, and the right to put to death. According to Foucault, this “was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign.”11 To kill, then, does not necessarily constitute the limits of sovereignty, since it is largely through killing that the sovereign exercises its power. At times, Mbembe simply conflates sovereignty with biopower. For example, Mbembe suggests that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”12 Mbembe summarizes Foucault’s biopower based on the terms he introduces at the beginning of his essay (the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death), which is for Mbembe “that domain of life over which power has taken control.”13 But in the case of Foucault, the right to kill and to allow to live refers to “sovereignty’s old right,” “the power of the sword,” or the old sovereign’s right to kill.14 The mode/system of biopower introduces a paradox in its hold over life, which is that killing or the right to kill goes against the imperative to make live and to ensure the survival of a population. Biopower’s emergence as a type of power does not mean that sovereign power completely disappears or that biopower is a new form of sovereignty. Mbembe’s use of mortality and “life as the deployment and manifestation of power” are elements of biopower, not of sovereignty. Yet, Mbembe insists that to do one is to do the other. This definition of sovereignty reads like Foucault’s definition of biopower, and specifically the beginning of Foucault’s definition of racism. When Foucault refers to mortality in “Society Must Be Defended,” he does so when explaining biopower. Biopower concerns itself with a number of processes, including mortality rates. Mbembe’s definition of biopower (that domain of life over which power has taken control) is borrowed from Foucault’s definition of racism. It is in this context that Foucault writes about “a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control”. 15 Biopower is implied in this sentence but not succinctly defined. Foucault offers a more succinct, yet slightly different, definition of biopower in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. It is different from the definition he provides in “Society Must Be Defended” because it includes both anatomo-politics, which was previously understood within the context of disciplinary power, and biopolitics as a series of techniques of biopower. In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault writes that biopower developed in two forms that are not oppositional but, instead, are entangled so that they strengthen each other even though they may at times seem to be contradictory. Anatomo-politics is: centered on the body as a machine; its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines.16 It is also individualizing in that it is concerned with discipline at the level of the individual body. The other technique of biopower is biopolitics.

Not a state of exception 19 Biopolitics is “focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and the serving as the basis of the biological process: propagation, births, mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.”17 Biopolitics is massifying in that it is concerned with humans at the level of the population. Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, Volume I that both of these techniques of power constitute biopower. Biopower’s main purpose is “no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.”18 It is the power to “make” live and “let” die.19 The biopower mode is regulatory, normalizing, and still disciplinary. Killing, then, becomes a mode of cleansing and ensuring the health of certain populations, but not the right of the sovereign to kill. Mbembe’s definition of biopower and his reading of Foucault do not do justice to the complexity of and variations in Foucault’s understanding of biopower. This may pose a problem for Mbembe’s assessment of whether biopower can sufficiently account for contemporary forms of warfare, violence, and death. Mbembe writes that biopower functions through “dividing people into those who must live and those who must die,”20 and through the “subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others.”21 Both of these processes of division once again refer primarily to what Foucault calls racism. According to Mbembe, racism is mostly a technology “aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death.’”22 It is unclear what Mbembe means here. If he is suggesting that biopower is “that old sovereign right of death,” then this is another conflation of sovereignty with biopower. In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault argues that one way a normalizing society kills is through biological racism. However, Mbembe’s definition of racism as it functions within biopower does not account for the second way racism functions. For Mbembe, the purpose of racism within biopower is to justify the right to kill and to establish a positive relation between life and death. On the other hand, for Foucault, within biopower, killing once again functions as a way to ensure that a population continues to live. That is, racism allows for the purification, health, and survival of one population by killing an inferior, degenerate, or dangerous race. The more the “good” race kills inferior races, the healthier the good race becomes. This killing is a biological relationship.23 Unlike what Mbembe seems to suggest, racism is not just about regulating the distribution of death and enabling the murder function of the state. This characterization reads too much like the old sovereign right to kill. Rather, racism is once again primarily about making a population healthier, purer, or more likely to live longer. Racism is instrumentalized by biopower as a mechanism designed to improve the health of a population. I have drawn attention to these ambiguities in order to suggest that Mbembe’s critique of biopower is located within a logic of sovereignty that misses many of the Foucaultian points about biopower. I further suggest that the logic of biopower can account for the modes of spectacular death that Mbembe addresses.

20 Caroline Alphin

Mbembe’s assessment of biopower Mbembe associates biopower with a rational and normative understanding of sovereignty, which limits how we can interpret the right to kill. This form of sovereignty misses the way contemporary forms of the right to kill have normalized the state of exception and the relation of enmity. The power that functions in this right to kill utilizes “exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy,”24 and Mbembe suggests that this power is not limited to state power. This extra note about state power is a reference to what he sees as a limitation of biopower in that it seems to be, for him, exercised within/by the state.25 It is clear to Mbembe that the sovereign right to kill and biopower are located within the functioning of the modern state, and thus are primarily constitutive of state power. For Mbembe, biopower and its ties to a sovereignty that works within the law cannot fully account for a politics of death within a state of emergency where the law has been suspended. Mbembe draws a distinction between sovereignty that is dominated by reason and the norm and a modality of sovereignty that is dominated by states of exception, terror, and extermination. In other words, for Mbembe, more recent political criticisms, including Foucault’s, have been interested in differentiating politics from war whereas Mbembe wishes to “imagine politics as a form of war.”26 But, once again, Foucault characterizes biopower as a mode of power that does not function through state power. Rather, for Foucault, biopower points to the complexities of power relations as they function in and through bodies, populations, power/knowledge regimes, and governmentalities. In other words, biopower for Foucault is not entirely understood politically in terms of macro-relations. Biopower is not primarily about clear or recognizable state actors or sub-state actors making live and letting die; it is not about top-down power. Later in his essay, Mbembe argues that the Nazi regime is one example of the many “early and late modern” conceptions of sovereignty. This again suggests that Foucault’s biopower has been limited by its application to older forms of sovereignty, as well as by its consideration of the logic of modernity, which further is rooted in Western European history and partly attributable to Hobbes. In some cases, modernity/terror is expressed for Mbembe through an ancient “passion for blood” and “notions of justice and revenge.”27 In other moments, the killing of the enemy of the state is based on what Mbembe calls more “intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty.”28 And later, Mbembe argues that any consideration for the ascendance of modern terror should be able to address slavery. Slavery is, according to Mbembe, “one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.”29 Mbembe is also critical of Foucault’s genealogy of power because its acceptance of a normative form of sovereignty ignores the basic nature of sovereignty, which is a sovereignty that “consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law and where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war

Not a state of exception 21 30

without end.’” Foucault does briefly touch on the relationship between biopower and colonization in “Society Must Be Defended.” Racism offers a way to understand colonization in terms of evolutionism. According to Foucault, racism develops “with colonization … with colonizing genocide.”31 But, for Mbembe, this does not sufficiently address the spatial and temporal realities of colonial towns, of sovereignty in colonial spaces, or of the way the right to kill may function in a permanent state of exception. Mbembe is also concerned with how the sovereign exception subjectivizes individuals in colonial spaces. Since the colonies are spaces of exception, law and order there are suspended. The subject of sovereign exception is the savage. Savage life and animal life are similar to Agamben’s bare life here in that they are recognized as the lives of “‘natural’ human beings who lack the specifically human character, the specifically human reality.”32 Therefore, they are excluded from the law and can be killed with impunity. But where Agamben considers the Nazi camp as the “fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,”33 Mbembe extends this analysis to an examination of contemporary colonial spaces. The sovereign right to kill in these colonial spaces “is not subject to any rule in the colonies,” including legal and institutional rules. However, what Mbembe considers the sovereign right to kill in Foucault’s biopower is still subject to the law. As Foucault suggests, after the emergence and function of biopolitics and anatomo-politics, sovereignty was integrated with a “juridical apparatus.”34 Part of the problem with Mbembe’s analysis of Foucault’s biopower is that Mbembe conflates killing in biopower with the sovereign right to kill. Killing, whether it is strong or weak state killing, in modes of biopower does not need to be established by the logic of the law or rights. Rather, if, as I suggested above, killing (including overt and subtle as well as state and non-state forms of killing) is a positive condition of biopower, then killing can function as a natural way of maintaining desired or even healthy populations.

Is necropolitics really about sovereign power? For Mbembe, the notion of necropolitics must be deployed because, according to him, necropolitics offers an analytic that can account for contemporary terror formations where and when irrational, excessively cruel, and spectacular forms of killing occur. Here, terror formations are the topographies that prevail in a state of exception, a state of emergency, or a state of siege. These terror formations are based on complex interactions between biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. Mbembe’s inclusion of the state of exception and the state of siege shows that he does not consider biopower sufficient in what it can explain about the sovereign right to kill in not only colonial spaces, but also in contemporary forms of resistance and terrorism. Before he offers a clearer definition of necropolitics, Mbembe examines the colony and the apartheid regime as precursory forms of necropolitical space. It is within the colonial world that we find “the first

22 Caroline Alphin syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.”35 Mbembe suggests that while Foucault does characterize war in the mode of biopower as the bloodiest yet, writing that “massacres have become vital,”36 he does not provide an analysis of the practical and material effects of war, nor does he grasp the particular character of the spatial and temporal formations of war. Mbembe’s necropolitics recognizes that “wholesale slaughter” is no longer between two “civilized” states, but rather occurs within terror formations, such as the colony, apartheid, or contemporary modalities of colonial occupation. For Mbembe, necropolitics can account for the spatialization of colonial occupation in ways that biopower cannot. However, Mbembe fails to do justice to Foucault’s analysis of colonized spaces. Foucault addresses the co-productive relationship between spaces of the colonized and the spaces of the colonizer. In “Society Must Be Defended,” expanding upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth,37 Foucault characterizes this coproductive relationship as a “boomerang effect,” which highlights the ways that techniques of colonial militarism, such as modes of hyper surveillance and often forms of colonial violence, reverberated back into western urban discourses and security practices. This point suggests that Foucault was not only interested in western imperialism independent of its colonial practices; rather, Foucault was, in part, concerned also with the ways securitization functioned as a technique of biopower. That Foucault does not address some of the necropolitical practices Mbembe examines does not mean that biopower cannot account for these spectacular modes of state and sub-state killing. Again, Foucault’s biopower is not limited to a particular form of sovereign power. Although Foucault does not offer a detailed account of the spatialities of biopower in “Society Must Be Defended,” he does consider the spatialization of disciplinary power within urban spaces. The subject of disciplinary power is made into a subject, in part through its relationship to, interactions with, and physical positioning within disciplinary spaces, such as barracks, prisons, mental hospitals, the doctor’s office, or even the home. If we consider anatomo-politics as part of biopower, then this disciplinary space does reflect a spatiality of biopower. Furthermore, Foucault makes the case in “Society Must Be Defended” that, as a technique of biopower, biopolitics does partly take its knowledge from “the effects of the environment.”38 Biopolitics is concerned with the problems that emerge out of humans living in certain spaces; that is, it accepts that humans affect their environment and that the environment has an effect on humans, and, as such, that mortality, birth rates, and the overall health of human populations are shaped by their environmental milieus. For Mbembe, biopolitics understands the relationship between humans and their physical environment only in terms of life and living, which cannot account for the politics of death around which colonial occupation is ordered. Here again, we see how such a reading of biopolitics is insufficient.

Not a state of exception 23 The town of colonial occupation is the epitome of how necropower works. Mbembe borrows from Fanon’s description of the colonial township and from his understanding of colonial space. For Fanon, the colonizer sees the town as belonging to the colonized other. In the eyes of the colonizer, these towns are places with bad reputations, especially for sexual promiscuity, and they are populated by savages, degenerates, and criminals. Because of its ill repute and savage occupants, the fact of their birth, death, and quality of life does not matter.39 The township is ordered in a way that allows the colonizer to define and dictate “who matters and who does not, and who is disposable and who is not.”40 Thus, the colonial township reflects the spatial ordering of necropower, and it shows a particular form of sovereignty. For Mbembe, this sovereignty does not align with the sovereign right to kill that intersects with biopower. Mbembe further identifies necropower as a terror formation. According to Mbembe, contemporary forms of colonial occupation, or what Mbembe calls late-modern colonial occupation, are different from earlymodern modalities of occupation because of a particular combination of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical. Mbembe examines three dominant characteristics of necropower that he sees in the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which include territorial fragmentation, vertical sovereignty, and medieval siege warfare. Through necropower, these occupied spaces are transformed into a permanent state of siege, where individuals can be killed by anyone and civil order is destroyed. Killing does not recognize the difference between internal and external enemies. In addition to late-modern colonial occupation, Mbembe addresses necropower within contemporary warfare. He alludes to Foucault’s assessment of war when he argues that contemporary wars can no longer be understood via Carl von Clausewitz’s “instrumentalism.” In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault locates war within the state. He also analyses Clausewitz’s position that war is a continuation of politics by other means, even though Foucault further clarifies that this thesis predates Clausewitz. Foucault follows this thesis to the development of the “army as institution,” and to the idea of a society “traversed by the relations of war.”41 Mbembe turns to these insights by Foucault to imply that Foucault’s understanding of war and perhaps even of how biopower functions within war is limited. Mbembe writes that: an important feature of the age of global mobility is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the “regular army” is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions … Instead, a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to rule emerges, inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties, and enclaves abound.42

24 Caroline Alphin Mbembe uses Africa as an example of this age of global mobility, and he implies that because biopower is too closely tied to the logic of state power, it cannot fully make sense of this new global order. Unlike biopower, for Mbembe, necropower can account for the role that killing and death play in global warfare because necropower considers the mobile nature of non-state military forces. For Mbembe, necropower can also recognize that the right to kill does not apply to a sovereign that is subject to its laws, but instead to forms of sovereignty that produce permanent exceptions to the laws. In addition, Mbembe positions the emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality within a new geography of the age of global mobility: the management of the multitudes. Population, as a political category in relation to the management of the multitudes, is different from population as a subject category of biopolitical governmentality. Foucault writes that he partly understands governmentality as: the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.43 For Foucault, population as a political category of biopolitical governmentality does not function outside of the state; it is intimately tied to the developments of liberalism, including late liberalism and neoliberalism. For Mbembe, the population in the governmentality of the multitudes is not biopower’s target since it is concerned with making a population live. Unlike biopolitics, Mbembe argues, necropolitics can show that the political economy of some governmentalities is “less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented as the ‘massacre.’”44 There is a generalization of insecurity. The spaces of governmentality of the multitudes are camps and zones of exception. However, I would argue here again that while making live is biopower’s primary aim, this does not occlude the necessity for killing within biopower in order to ensure that certain populations do live. Furthermore, the political economy that Mbembe describes in terms of necropolitics is very similar to the political economy of neoliberal biopolitics, since it is concerned with inscribing bodies within a maximal economy of competition.

The spatio-temporality of neoliberalism: Povinelli, Cacho, and Wacquant In this final section, I turn to the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism to show that Mbembe’s necropolitics is limited in what it can tell us about the nature of death and suffering under conditions of competition. Again, my

Not a state of exception 25 goal here is to disentangle Foucault’s biopolitics from zero sum analyses of the politics of death, such as necropolitics, in order to highlight the ways that biopolitics does capture common suffering and seemingly ordinary dying. Recent work like Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies has problematized studies that have placed biopolitics’ focus on state-theory and on “biopolitically engineered elimination.”45 For Povinelli, this focus on state engineered killing misses the modes of living that exist somewhere in between life and death (a life of struggling to exist).46 While I agree with Povinelli’s criticism of the zero sum focus of many studies in biopolitics, I do not think that this means that biopolitics cannot account for ordinary suffering or that biopolitics cannot intersect with state-theory. Seemingly ordinary suffering (whether from chronic illness, depression, drug addiction, or everyday violence) is very much a target of governmentalities that are concerned with making some populations live since part of the focus of biopolitical systems is to calculate and regulate mortality rates and maximize human capital. Thus, an analysis of neoliberal governmentalities and of some of their agents (including some state agents/agencies) can highlight some of the populations/individuals that these governmental rationalities value. In other words, governmentalities as well as states do not always kill populations through spectacular modes of killing or overt forms of death-making. Rather, “letting die” is key to contemporary governmentalities, and it can involve neglect, willful ignorance, responsibilization, or individualized riskassessment. All of this produces a spatio-temporality whereby populations of individuals struggle to exist and often are held responsible for their suffering. Povinelli writes that both Foucault’s and Mbembe’s perspectives have: focused our attention on large-scale killings. In “Society Must Be Defended,” for example, Michel Foucault outlined the complex entanglements of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms of power at play in the machinery of Nazi genocide. Achille Mbembe situated this industrialized European savagery in a history of African colonization, where colonists experimented with spectacles of irrational, excessive killing.47 But Mbembe’s politics of death does not fully capture the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism because it is primarily concerned with death in excess in latemodern colonial occupation and in African colonization. The scope of Mbembe’s necropolitics is too large-scale to recognize forms of generalized insecurity and modalities of ordinary suffering under neoliberalism. While Mbembe does not inscribe the right to kill within the state, he still continually seems to assign killing to a clear actor or agent (often, an agent of state power). Still, it is often the case within neoliberalism that state killing hides behind neoliberal values and ideologies. Thus, it can be difficult to place blame on a particular state actor or to tackle the systemic causes of necropolitics by tracing them back to a central agent/agency. Below, I further address

26 Caroline Alphin the limitations of Mbembe’s necropolitics in relation to Povinelli’s, Cacho’s, and Wacquant’s critical theories of life and death in neoliberalism. In Economies of Abandonment, Povinelli argues that “[n]eoliberalism works by colonizing the field of value—reducing all social values to one market value—exhausting alternative social projects by denying them sustenance.”48 Neoliberalism does more than reduce all social values to one market value. Value, whether social or human, is also determined by a logic of competition. In other words, whatever helps individuals to compete is good. This is consistent with Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism as extending an economic analysis into the non-economic sphere. Foucault writes in The Birth of Biopolitics that “… neo-liberalism seeks … to extend the rationality of the market, the schemas of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic.”49 Thus, human value, social value, political value, and educational value (among other forms of valuation) are all subject to the rationality of the market and the logic of competition. For Povinelli, we can understand the social distribution of death through the ways markets and state actors utilize eventfulness.50 Unlike the spectacular events that unfold in Mbembe’s critique of biopolitics and sovereign power, Povinelli is concerned with the uneventful everydayness of the slow deaths some people experience. These people have for the most part been deemed less valuable by the market. She refers, for example, to a number of indigenous spaces in Australia, writing that: [i]ndigenous communities are often cruddy, corrosive, and uneventful. An agentless slow death characterizes their mode of lethality. Quiet deaths. Slow deaths. Rotting worlds. The everyday drifts toward death: one more drink, one more sore; a bad cold, bad food; a small pain in the chest. Any claim that these forms of decay matter can be referred back to the general condition of human life.51 These deaths seem “natural” to other populations looking in, but a neoliberal or late-liberal market value actually naturalizes these experiences and locates blame within the indigenous community. Earlier in this chapter, I offered an analysis of Mbembe’s definition of sovereignty in terms of Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended.” I want to briefly return to this analysis here. I suggested that Mbembe conflates sovereign power with biopower in part because he does not clearly distinguish between sovereign power and how sovereignty functions within a mode of biopower. I want to argue, once again, that biopower does not replace sovereign power. Sovereignty and the sovereign right to kill prove insufficient in thinking about subtle forms of state killing, including generalized insecurity and ordinary suffering. Foucault’s biopower, with its focus on endemics, morbidity, and effects on the environment, can account for “slow deaths”52 as a neoliberal mode of state killing. Although slow death “occupies the temporalities of the

Not a state of exception 27 53

endemic,” biopolitical governmentalities would consider these slow deaths natural and would work towards managing and perhaps eliminating these forms of death in order to ensure the health of the general population. Not only are slow deaths natural in the context of neoliberal biopolitics, but they are also understood through neoliberal values about individual responsibility and the assumption of risk. A study focused on the biopolitical can denaturalize forms of slow death by locating unequal death trajectories, limited mobility, and the dailiness of living in the conditions of competition as a consequence, and even as a given, of neoliberalism. Biopolitics considers the forms of social existence that may be unique to neoliberalism. It is in considering forms of social existence that I use and build upon Mbembe’s notion of necropower/necropolitics to argue that what he and others call necropolitics is indeed biopolitics. Mbembe argues that necropolitics accounts for the conditions that establish the “status of living dead.”54 This is where necropower can be useful in further concretizing certain forms of governmentality, shifting forms of statehood, and problematizing the spatio-temporality of sovereignty. For example, Mbembe examines shifts in the political economy in Africa, ultimately showing how these shifts involve urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms, and state armies,55 and that all are trying to legitimize the right to kill and commit violence. Within this system, wealthier states can “lease armies to poor state[s],”56 and the war machine has emerged as a coercive, violent, and death-dealing force. Mbembe explains that these “death-worlds” are the result of a complex relationship between internal, external, and transnational networks of power. He contends that it is the presence of capital time that has transformed territories into economic enclaves that have become the “privileged spaces of war and death.”57 The temporality of these “new geographies of resource extraction”58 illustrates the ways these war machines speed up and slow down the mobility of surrounding populations, both in prohibiting movement and in forcing displacement. A new governmentality emerges that is more violent because it utilizes “technologies of destruction”59 that are “more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial.”60 Moreover, this new governmentality produces conditions of generalized insecurity. While Mbembe does offer and examine concrete examples of the spatial and temporal nature of generalized insecurity, his understanding of generalized insecurity is connected to state and non-state actors. In other words, Mbembe only articulates the condition of the living dead in the context of colonial occupation and its extensions, which are still dominated by large-scale killing. He offers a method for analyzing space and time in a logic of governing that remains dominated by overt forms of killing. As I suggested above, Mbembe’s focus on the logic of the massacre in colonial spaces, and Foucault’s analysis of Nazi death camps, are often held as exemplars of the ways studies of biopolitics and their intersections with statetheory understand death-making under neoliberalism and late-liberalism.

28 Caroline Alphin Again, I argue that biopolitics has the capacity to consider more than overtly violent forms of killing. Rather than focus on large scale, militarized state, or sub-state killing that operates through the logic of the massacre, we can turn to critiques of neoliberal governmentalities, such as critiques of systems of valuation, critiques of criminalization of surplus bodies, or critiques of neoliberal subjectivities, to only name a few, in order to highlight the less spectacular and often taken-for-granted modalities of death-making (ordinary suffering and seemingly ordinary deaths) within biopolitical systems. These critiques may do a better job of accounting for the ordinary suffering and generalized insecurity that are the modus operandi of neoliberal biopolitics. Lisa Marie Cacho offers one way of understanding forms of death-making and social existence within neoliberalism. Her concepts of “ineligible for personhood,”61 “rightless, living nonbeings,”62 or “social death”63 can all make sense of social existences within the spatio-temporality of neoliberal biopolitics. Cacho considers the outcomes of discourses and governmentalities that produce and regulate neoliberal values/morality. To be considered human, to be valued as a human, and to be recognized by the legal citizen as human, criminalized populations must earn their human status. Not everyone is encompassed within the assumption of inalienable rights since, if certain groups of people must earn their human status or rights to become human, then their rights and humanity are never a given. Furthermore, in tandem with the neoliberal values of individual responsibility and the assumption of risk, forms of morality are also “legally inflicted.”64 Good moral character is, in part, associated with following the law, which means that if certain groups of people are permanently criminalized, they can never be understood as “moral or deserving.”65 For Cacho: to be criminalized is to be prevented from being law-abiding … people who occupy legally vulnerable and criminalized statuses are not just excluded from justice; criminalized populations and the places where they live form the foundation of the U.S. legal system, imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists.66 She goes on to write that these criminalized statuses are “always already the object and target of law …”67 Cacho recognizes a relationship between a person’s legal status/personhood and the space they inhabit. This relationship is complex in several ways. First, it points to how criminalization often forces bodies into certain spaces of living death. Second, a person’s body and location in spaces like the inner city or the Global South signal their ineligibility for personhood.68 Thus, racism produces spaces where people are made permanently vulnerable by global capitalism and neoliberalism. Racism makes possible a state of rightlessness and the criminalization of people who are unprotected by the law, which is similar to the way racism functions for Foucault in biopolitics (i.e., racism normalizes and justifies the

Not a state of exception 29 death of unwanted populations). But this racism and its state of rightlessness are positive conditions of biopower too. It is not a state of exception that must be induced to justify killing or insecurity, but it is instead a condition that ensures the healthy living of certain populations (to the detriment of others). Healthy living often equates successful competition and the maximization of human capital. Cacho shows that, working along with the law, neoliberalism produces spaces of social death where the people who do not matter must struggle to live. Thus, Cacho’s social death and her analysis of racism can be useful in thinking about the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism in ways that Mbembe’s necropower cannot. Using social death to analyze the value systems of neoliberalism can denaturalize certain spaces and their conditions as just the reality and results of unmotivated, criminal, and undeserving peoples. Finally, Loïc Wacquant adds to these conceptualizations of the ways neoliberal biopolitics eliminates dangerous/threatening populations in his book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Neoliberalism’s pull back of social welfare and its increase of insecure work, such as contract work, as well as its support and further development of the punitive system, all work together to produce social insecurity. As Wacquant suggests, the “reinforcement and extension of the punitive apparatus”69 in inner cities and urban peripheries, along with precarious work and weaker social protection, produces social insecurity. Neoliberal values of individual responsibility also contribute to the social insecurity Wacquant critiques.70 Social insecurity, primarily the punitive mechanism, functions as a way to address potential threats to the good life of the normative/competitive population. Biopolitics, in Wacquant’s analysis, does not function in terms of overt state killing as it does for Mbembe. Rather, through the neoliberal state strategy of penalization, a number of undesirable and threatening populations (segments of the population that fail to compete) are deemed noncitizens and are effectively banished from the good population (segments of the population that successfully compete). For example, Wacquant writes that, through penalization: the urban nomad is labelled as a delinquent (through a municipal ordinance outlawing panhandling or lying down on the sidewalk, for instance) and finds himself treated as such; and he ceases to pertain to homelessness as soon as he is put behind bars.71 Wacquant’s social insecurity may be better positioned to make sense of neoliberal spatial restructuring and “urban dislocations.”72 Wacquant’s social insecurity is more useful when considering the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism because it can highlight its biopolitical workings. Specifically, it highlights the proliferation of new power/knowledge regimes within the city that consider its “troubles” and manage its populations as determined by the conditions of competition.73

30 Caroline Alphin

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that Mbembe argues that Foucault’s biopower cannot account for the permanent states of exception and states of siege that make up the spatial and temporal ordering of contemporary colonial occupation and the governmentality of the management of the multitudes. Furthermore, for Mbembe, the sovereign right to kill is not bound by its own laws within these colonial spaces. I have also argued that Mbembe’s focus on spectacular and excessive forms of killing may not help us much to make sense of the spatiotemporality of neoliberalism, and that perhaps we do not need much of an addendum to Foucault’s biopolitics in the form of necropolitics. If biopolitics can consider the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism, then it can also consider ordinary suffering, generalized insecurity, and other forms of death-making. My attempt at disentangling Foucault’s biopolitics from Mbembe’s necropolitics is not to diminish Mbembe’s and other postcolonial contributions to studies in biopolitics. I do not deny that Foucault’s biopolitics is in some ways limited in what it can tell us about the temporalities, spatialities, and the nature of death and destruction in colonial and postcolonial spaces. Rather, my aim is to create a conceptual bridge between biopolitics and necropolitics, to suggest that since killing is a positive condition of biopolitics it does not necessarily need an addendum or corrective. In other words, we may not need necropolitics as a way to describe what biopolitics cannot tell us about power and deathmaking, since what I have suggested throughout this chapter is that biopower, by definition, kills to make live. We can conceptualize killing or death-making as existing within a spectrum (it is not always spectacular, and it is not always ordinary). The death-making that is the modus-operandi of neoliberalism is not direct; it is sometimes indirect; it often does not appear to be death-making; it is a product of a system but cannot easily be traced back to a particular system. It is through disentangling biopolitics from necropolitics that I show first that theorizing biopolitics need not be defined by a zero-sum focus. As this volume highlights, death and killing are positive conditions of biopolitics. The sovereign does not need to suspend the law in order to eliminate certain populations. In fact, it can often appear as though neoliberal governmentality governs without agents of government governing as it spreads its subjectivity. The state does not always do the killing or letting die. Rather, neoliberal biopolitics can ensure the health of some populations through the production, regulation, and management of neoliberal subjectivities that accept, and, in some instances, celebrate an individualism that assumes risk and responsibility for successfully competing. Competing is equated with a life worth living, often with living life. If the neoliberal subject is not competing, it is not living. Neoliberal subjects that fail or struggle to compete must endure a quasi-life, not quite living and not quite dead, but certainly closer to a living death than more successful populations of individuals. What we have called necrogeopolitics in this volume seeks to capture this important reality.

Not a state of exception 31

Notes 1 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 26–29. 2 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 16. 3 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff, “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (2017): 169–185. 4 Thomas Lemke, “The Risks of Security: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Fear,” in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 68. 5 Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 134. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 255. 8 Ibid., 240. 9 Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1990), 135–136. 10 Ibid., 136. 11 Ibid., 248. 12 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 12. 13 Ibid., 12. 14 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 240. 15 Foucault, 254. 16 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 Ibid., 139. 19 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 240. 20 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 17. 21 Ibid., 17. 22 Ibid., 17. 23 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 256. 24 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 16. 25 Ibid., 16. 26 Ibid., 12. 27 Ibid., 18. 28 Ibid., 19. 29 Ibid., 21. 30 Ibid., 23. 31 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 257. 32 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 24. 33 Giorgio Agamben, “Threshold,” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181. 34 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 37. 35 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 23. 36 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137. 37 Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 7–34. 38 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 245. 39 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1991), 37. 40 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 27. 41 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 49. 42 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 32.

32 Caroline Alphin 43 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 144. 44 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 34. 45 Povinelli et al. “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli,” 169–185. 46 Ibid., 170. 47 Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 134. 48 Ibid., 134. 49 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 323. 50 Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 134. 51 Ibid., 145. 52 Elizabeth Povinelli builds upon Lauren Berlant’s phrase “slow death.” According to Lauren Berlant, slow death is “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.” See Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754. 53 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death,” 756. 54 Ibid., 40. 55 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 32. 56 Ibid., 32. 57 Ibid., 33. 58 Ibid., 34. 59 Ibid., 34. 60 Ibid., 34. 61 Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 6. 62 Ibid., 6. 63 Ibid., 6. 64 Ibid., 4. 65 Ibid., 4. 66 Ibid., 5. 67 Ibid., 5. 68 Ibid., 6. 69 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 5. 70 Ibid., 5. 71 Ibid., xxi. 72 Ibid., xxi. 73 Ibid., 31.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “Threshold.” In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754–780. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by C. Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1991.

Not a state of exception 33 Foucault, Michel. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. “Lecture 11.” In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. ———. “Lecture 8-Lecture 12.” In The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. ———. “Security, Territory, Population.” In Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Lemke, Thomas. “The Risks of Security: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Fear.” In: The Government of Life Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, 59–76. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (2017): 169–185. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, 7–34. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

2

Political incompetence and death-making An outline of unsuitable governance Alexander D. Barder

Introduction By the time of the Samarra mosque bombing on February 22, 2006, Iraq’s descent into chaos and civil war was undeniable even to the most vociferous supporters of the American war. Since the removal of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in March of 2003, the Unites States’ military faced a continuous uncertain political and military situation. And yet, by 2006, it was clear that everything the United States tried in Iraq failed to stabilize the country. What was supposed to be a “cakewalk” and a short handing over of the—muchdiminished—Iraqi state to Iraqi exiles turned into a large-scale exercise in “nation-breaking” with catastrophic consequences in human lives. A survey in the Lancet estimates that between March 2003 and June 2006 about 600,000 Iraqis died as a result of the invasion, occupation, and insurgency.1 Importantly, the authors of the survey argue that the mortality rate was significantly impacted not just by the spiraling violence, but also by more mundane factors such as “insufficient water supplies, non-functional sewage, and a restricted electricity supply … deteriorating health service with insecure access, and the flight of health professionals … .”2 The non-violent mortality rate during this period is about 45% of the total mortality rate. The failure of the American mission in Iraq was not just to secure the country and provide a modicum of human security; it was a complete failure to provide the basic necessities to a population that had suffered through a series of cataclysmic crises—IranIraq War, the Gulf War, UN sanctions—since the 1980s. There is no shortage of publications in the past 15 years or so describing the countless failures of the American occupation of Iraq.3 But what interest me, in particular, in this chapter are the inchoate allusions in many of these texts to the stunning lack of competence of the American authorities and the consequences that such incompetence had for Iraqi mortality rates. Take, for example, George Packer’s discussion in The Assassin’s Gate of the very day after the regime fell and massive looting began across the country. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously announced to the press corps that “stuff happens” and that “Freedom’s untidy … .” But as Packer recounts, no orders were given to American units who sat around

Political incompetence and death-making 35 4

witnessing the unfolding chaos. No plan seemed to have been put in place in case such an event occurred. A statement entitled the “Freedom Message” announcing the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was issued out of Qatar, but “had no discernable effect in the streets of Baghdad.”5 The result was a remarkable early loss of confidence among the Iraqi public in the American ability to manage the country after Saddam Hussein’s iron grip. Add to that the subsequent CPA orders #1 and #2 for the de-Baathification of the state and dismantling of the Iraqi army, and you have the ingredients for the emergence of a violent insurgency and the complete failure to rebuild the country. However, I do not wish to reduce incompetence simply to instances of individual actions. Many of the works cited above examine individual decision-making and how it impacted American actions in Iraq; whether or not, for example, Paul Bremer himself was responsible for the issuance of these CPA orders.6 There are many explanations for American failures put forth in the literature quoted above, and these explanations typically dwell on the inadequacies of individual actions. What interests me, instead, is how incompetence should be understood as something symptomatic of a larger flaw in the very institutions themselves. What the perpetuation of incompetence may reflect is rather a lack of suitability or sufficiency in governing adequately. Etymologically, incompetence is derived from the Latin incompetens, or insufficiency, but it can also refer to a lack of suitability. It also stems from the fourteenth-century-old French competent, which meant “sufficient, appropriate, suitable.”7 Although incompetence has come to mainly refer to a lack of ability or capacity of individuals in legal or medical cases, by focusing on this idea of insufficiency or lack of suitability, we can try to understand the limitations of institutions in their capacity to act. Lastly, as will be more evident throughout the essay, incompetence has many sources. Whether a result of ignorance, arrogance, and/or a set of affective conditions such as “fear, anxiety, or paranoia,” incompetence reflects an assortment of sources that structure individual actions. Looking at incompetence can be a way of understanding the perpetuation of death through extraordinary ignorance and carelessness. What I am interested in exploring in this chapter is the way the idea of institutional incompetence becomes another form of biopolitical “letting die.” However, this form of “letting die” does not have the same background as what Michel Foucault emphasizes in his genealogy of biopolitics. Nor is it found in Mbembe’s reformulation of biopolitical death as necropolitics. Rather, the biopolitics of incompetence and ignorance should be understood as emanating from what Ann Stoler emphasizes as the dominant modalities of colonial regimes: “anxiety, fear, and paranoia.”8 In other words, a biopolitics of incompetence lies beyond a bureaucratic rationality that renders a population legible to state control through the adaptation of statistical data, for example. Such an affective politics supports a variety of security regimes, which were especially prevalent in colonial periods. These “technologies of security,” as Stoler puts

36 Alexander D. Barder it, “forced migration or restricted movement and legitimated expulsions, manhunts, and incarceration. It is these affects that might be considered among those ‘slow violences’ that rational knowledge could not explain or wholly help us comprehend.”9 In this chapter, I wish to develop the idea of institutional incompetence and its connection to not only the spectacular racialized violence that Mbembe advances, but also, following Rob Nixon, to a “slow violence,” or a “letting die.”10 Slow violence can take the form of environmental degradation following conflict; for example, the endemic use of depleted uranium shells that Nixon focuses on and its lasting legacies for the health of the Iraqi population. But slow violence also has more routine manifestations: the inability to rebuild an electrical grid, the failure to develop an adequate school system, the complete inability to devise a functioning health system, or the total mismanagement of a global financial system. This chapter proceeds as follows. In part one, I return to Foucault and Mbembe (discussed in detail by Caroline Alphin in Chapter 1 in this volume) to show how a biopolitics of “letting die” remains incomplete to understand historical and contemporary forms of colonial violence. In Foucault’s development of biopolitics/biopower, there are two issues that I point to. As many commentators have mentioned, his genealogy of biopolitics is generally Eurocentric. But the implications of his Eurocentrism are two-fold. First, it appears to reify a Weberian bureaucratic rationality that discards an affective dimension that is essential for understanding colonial violence and security. Second, it appears to neglect a dimension of slow violence while it emphasizes spectacular forms of racialized violence. Of course, as once again was discussed in Chapter 1, we see this more forcefully in Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, which shows the distinctiveness of imperial violence, slavery, and the plantation system, something which Foucault’s Eurocentric conceptions of biopolitical/biopower occlude. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, nonetheless, neglects a significant affective dimension, which becomes clearer when one asks questions about the limitations of imperial modalities of knowledge and the incompetence of imperial forms of administration. Part two of the chapter turns to the question of ignorance and incompetence through a reading of two essays: Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Letter on Algeria” written in 1837, and George Orwell’s short story “Shooting an Elephant.” Both are separated by almost a century. However, both stories illustrate the various ways in which ignorance and incompetence structure colonial violence. Orwell’s story, in particular, reveals a dimension of individual stupidity that becomes characteristic of those officials that become easily recognizable during the Iraq occupation. Its importance is that it is a metaphor about the incompetence and inhumanity of imperial rule. I conclude this section with a discussion of Hannah Arendt’s contrast between thoughtlessness and stupidity, and the crucial difference between the two.11 Lastly, in part three, I return to the relationship between ignorance, incompetence, and slow

Political incompetence and death-making 37 violence. Nixon defines slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”12 In this section, I connect the idea of slow violence to the previous sections on ignorance and incompetence. I turn to the case of Greece and the slow violence inflicted upon it in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. The staggering social costs of policies of austerity are felt not in spectacular killings, but in the mundane social dislocations and social deaths that will continue to have ramifications beyond the austerity regime. The Greek case is instructive in that it reflects a neocolonial relationship of dependency; a long history of incompetence, arrogance, and fear that constitutes the relationship between creditor and debtor; and an imposition of violence to the social welfare of the populations that becomes a form of “letting die.” The enduring consequence of European and Greek incompetence is itself an attritional violence that constitutes a neocolonial relationship that is distinctly unsuitable for any sense of well-being.

Biopolitical reason and affective politics In the last lecture of his “Society Must be Defended,” Foucault ends his genealogy of modern sovereignty by describing the emergence of “a new technology of power” in which the old sovereignty of right mutates from “a right to take life or let live … to [a] new right … : the right to make live and let die.”13 As he describes it, this new technology of power runs “orthogonally” to the emergence of disciplines in the seventeenth century. Disciplinary power operates on the individual body through its institutionalization in various apparatuses that are themselves reflective of “a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports … .”14 However, rather than having a mechanism that individualizes through disciplinary apparatuses, this new “seizure of power” takes “man-as-species” as its primary focus. What Foucault calls biopolitics is: … a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on. It is these processes—the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity, and so on—together with a whole series of related economic and political problems … which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, become biopolitics’ first object of knowledge and the target it seeks to control.15 The development of such an object of knowledge requires the emergence of a variety of new techniques of information gathering. In particular, as Foucault mentions, the importance of statistical data on the population, observations of “birth-control practices” and what impact it may have on fertility, the need to measure endemic illnesses that affect the vitality of the population, the random or aleatory factors that influence a population over

38 Alexander D. Barder periods of time, and ultimately the development of a concept of mortality rate, all of which allows for a larger picture to emerge about the health of a population.16 In other words, what Foucault describes here is the development of a field of knowledge that then constitutes new practices of governmentality or “security mechanisms” to manage the population. Such knowledge fuses itself with the development of new bureaucratic state apparatuses to constitute the modern nation-state, even if Foucault does not elaborate on how this actually happens. What we get with Foucault’s description of the emergence of biopolitics is a rational or rationalized form of knowledge and an assumption concerning the seamless adaptation of such knowledge. As he mentions in “Society Must Be Defended,” this novel modality of power/knowledge that takes population as its object emerged in response to the inability of sovereign power to fully adapt to fundamental societal transformations. Foucault writes: “It is as though power, which used to have sovereignty as its modality or organizing schema, found itself unable to govern the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both demographic explosion and industrialization.”17 As a result, biopolitical knowledge may be construed as a rational or Enlightenment response to such societal shifts designed not only to stabilize political sovereignty, but also to assure the health and well-being of a population. To be sure, as Nikolas Rose notes, biopolitics was never a single strategy or mechanism of regulation: It was a fragmented field of contested truths, heterogeneous and often conflicting authorities, diverse practices of individual and collective subjectification, competing ways of thinking and acting, and divergent opinions about what were the most important, and most appropriate, objectives for authoritative action. Nonetheless, as Rose continues, the practice of biopower “brings into view a whole range of more or less rationalized attempts by different authorities to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence … .”18 While Foucault’s genealogical method is meant to uncover or illuminate the proliferation of conflicts, the lack of origins, or the counter-histories that coagulate to create a new technology of power, we hardly get any sense from his lecture or his discussion in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, Volume I of the possible frictions, resistances, or general inability to implement the various security mechanisms outlined.19 We do not get a sense as to whether the field of knowledge created as biopolitics actually reflected instead a representation of a constructed reality or of an imaginary imbricated within a pathos of fear and anxiety (not just of the potential for degeneracy, as Foucault mentions), or of an epistemological uncertainty about its own field of reference, more generally. Statistical data and the knowledge it creates appear to be taken at face value rather than itself being uncertain in what it actually represents.

Political incompetence and death-making 39 Where this epistemological uncertainty becomes much more evident is in the applicability of disciplinary/biopolitical knowledge in the colonial space. As Stoler argues, imperial authorities displayed: a nervous reticence about what to know; distrust of civil servants who knew too much; a bureaucratic shuffling that regularly moved officials from one region or district to the next in relatively short intervals, favoring bracketed know-how, stupefied states of ensured ignorance … and ostensibly to curb collusion and corruption with local rulers, truncated local ties and thin familiarities.20 For Stoler, this is illustrated in the case of Frans Carl Valck, a minor Dutch colonial official, who, upon assuming his duties in the Dutch Indies, was faced with a series of murders of European planters.21 Valck’s problem was that he realized that his “Europeanized” knowledge was fundamentally ill suited to unravel what had happened. Usage of terms like “vagabondage” could not capture the specific realities of mobile populations in colonial environments and was thus “an administrative misnomer for an unrecognizable social space … .”22 More importantly, as Stoler identifies, biopower as a technology of power was completely inadequate to illuminate the affective relations that constituted colonial spaces. Fears and anxieties about the loyalty of subjected populations, the degeneracy of poor whites, or the status of “mixed” children preoccupied imperial authorities in ways that could not be made intelligible or assuaged with biopolitical reason or knowledge. For Stoler, such types of knowledge: could not predict the political aspirations of those who threaten the state’s projects nor could it identify the abnormally strong and willful sentiments among them … .it could not identify those who remain reliably loyal from those whose sentiments might turn them recalcitrant, stubbornly resistant to higher command, or subversive. Put differently, as Stoler continues, “rational, scientific ways to know the world were insufficient for governance. They inadequately describe the temperament of rule, and they poorly capture how it worked.”23 There are two consequences of the limitations of biopolitical reason. First, it is here that we can start to locate the idea of incompetence as a lack of ability and as unsuitability as it emerges as a consequence of this chasm between knowledge and expectation. In other words, incompetence reflects this inability to fulfill what both the actor and the observer expect. Moreover, what defines incompetence is a set of often contradictory impulses: the prevalence of arrogance, which reflects a form of ideological superiority over different forms of knowledge; the persistence of fear from a lack of adequate knowledge that inhibits continuous control over populations; and the continuation of willful ignorance.24 Second, a direct consequence of this epistemological uncertainty

40 Alexander D. Barder about governing the colonial space is the emphasis on violence as a prophylactic. For Stoler, the fact that colonial regimes were unable to capture the “temperament of rule” and to determine the future reliance and loyalty of a population necessarily resulted in unrestrained forms of violence. As Stoler writes: It was not just the failures of reason that disrupted the coherence of colonial agents and the policies they were charged to enforce but an exuberant imaginary that produced a commitment to something else, what one might argue was a fundamental and frequent turn away from that organized spectrum of nervous, expectant, protective small and largescale instances of violence, interdictions, and gestures: infeasible blueprints for colonial projects; improbably security measures; and a continually shifting set of confinements, detentions, and displacements that were to reorder and bind the social and spatial partitions of their privileged, profitable, and insecure world and could never do so enough.25 Incompetence as infeasibility, a reflection of this “exuberant imaginary,” becomes another way of activating violence outside biopolitical frameworks. Nor, as Stoler intimates, are such forms of sovereign violence conditional upon a racialized social space, as Foucault argues, for their activation.26 What is important here is this idea of epistemological uncertainty that results from arrogance, fear, and ignorance, and that constitutes the proliferation of violence against populations deemed to remain opaque to the sovereign’s gaze. Even though Mbembe developed the idea of necropolitics as a way of illustrating the specific convergence of colonial forms of sovereignty and exposure to death of a population, what remains missing in necropolitics is this idea of uncertainty, ignorance, and incompetence, which also contributes to the emergence of colonial death-worlds.27 For Mbembe, necropolitics is the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”28 What Mbembe tends to assume by bringing in the idea of the state of siege and the state of exception in his canonical essay is the prevalence of state and nonstate forms of violence as an intentional action. And although this is a significant component in accounting for the spectacular forms of racialized violence on display in the past and the present, the emphasis on intentional action does not explain the prevalence of how “letting die” may happen under circumstances of politico-epistemological uncertainty.

Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell: on ignorance and incompetence in the colony If Mbembe presents a rather uniform idea about the propensity of sovereign violence in colonial spaces in his essay “Necropolitics,” his more recent book Critique of Black Reason emphasizes the importance of ignorance as

Political incompetence and death-making 41 a structuring principle of colonial encounters and the place of violence.29 Indeed, as Mbembe points to, Tocqueville’s 1837 “Letters on Algeria” is revealing of a larger European literature on Africa, in which Africa is treated as a fantasy object without history or civilization and thus ready for European colonization. For Jennifer Pitts, Tocqueville’s numerous writings on Algeria and empire reflect a persistent set of contradictory ideas. They present: a vague hope that European empire will civilize the rest of the world; a doubt, based on careful study of administrative records, that European governments ever in fact succeed in improving their colonial subjects; and an acknowledgement of violence as a necessary element of colonial rule.30 Still, Tocqueville is interesting here because he clearly illustrates how the willful ignorance and arrogance of the French colonial mission exacerbated violence. Tocqueville’s two letters on Algeria are the beginning of a deeper engagement with French empire building in the Mediterranean in the 1830s. Whereas the first letter mainly focuses on an orientalist description of the various local populations, it is in the second letter where Tocqueville castigates French colonial policies as rooted in arrogance and willful ignorance, leading to incompetent administration. He begins the letter with a telling example. Let us assume that the Chinese emperor conquered France, Tocqueville posits, and: having destroyed or disbanded every administrative office without inquiring into their various purposes, he finally seized all the officials, from the head of government to the rural police, the peers, the deputies, and in general, the entire governing class, and deported them at once to some distant country.31 The result of completely dismantling the state and banishing the political class is anarchy and the inability to govern by sheer force. Tocqueville’s point is that this is how the French acted in their conquest of Algeria. The French displayed an incredible amount of ignorance about the various populations that made up Algeria. “It was in ignorance of everything,” Tocqueville writes, “that we set sail, which did not prevent us from winning; for on the battlefield victory goes to the bravest and strongest and not to the most learned.”32 However, much like the Americans in Iraq 170 years later, the French came to realize that military power alone could not ensure the governance of the country. Oppression and violence, for Tocqueville, came as a result of outright ignorance of the various peoples, their customs, their interests, and their abilities to adapt to French mores. For example, unable to collect taxes like their Turkish predecessors, French authorities did so through force, thereby provoking widespread anger.33 Moreover, the French had little idea

42 Alexander D. Barder about various forms of tribal organizations that constituted the country and, “to tell the truth, they hardly bothered to learn them.”34 Instead, Tocqueville writes: The conquest was a new era, and from fear of mixing the past with the present in an irrational way, we even destroyed a large number of streets in Algiers so as to rebuild them according to our own method, and we gave French names to all those we consented to leave alone.35 The result of such willful ignorance was the descent into anarchy. As Tocqueville explains, the removal of Turkish rule resulted in the reemergence of Arab aspirations to self-governance and the eventual rebellion led by Abdel-Kader, which would itself lead to almost genocidal violence on the part of the French.36 For Mbembe, this sort of ignorance is the result of a longstanding idea that what governs relations between Europeans and Africans is violence.37 Yet Tocqueville’s argument throughout the letter is that this violence could have been avoided and that, as a result of European superiority, the peaceful transplantation of colonists would inevitably result in racial “intermixing.”38 Almost a century later, George Orwell would recount his experience as a minor colonial official in British Burma in one of his famous stories entitled “Shooting an Elephant.” The story is revealing of how a colonial regime produces incompetence through a mélange of arrogance, fear, and ignorance. Thus, Orwell’s story is not necessarily just about his own experience; rather, it is a larger metaphor about the prevalence of cruel and stupid violence that characterizes colonial regimes. Orwell recounts how he was informed that an elephant was rampaging through a village and was asked to handle it. Not sure what to do, he grabs a rifle hoping to scare it off. Along the way, he describes how he was trying to get information from locals about what had transpired, but without much success: “That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.”39 This insight is similar to Stoler’s own argument about the epistemic anxieties that characterize colonial knowledge and governance. Orwell invariably finds himself in front of the elephant, which, initially at least, appears calm in a pasture, tearing the grass, and feeding itself. Although Orwell reiterates numerous times how he does not wish to shoot the elephant, he realizes that, by the time he comes face to face with it, a crowd of almost two thousand Burmese have followed him and are waiting to see what he will do. Orwell writes: “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.”40 As Orwell explains in a key passage of the story: And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s

Political incompetence and death-making 43 dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives”, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.41 Orwell’s story is about the way an incompetent action was in response to a fear that the appearance of colonial authority and power was inadequate. As I mentioned above, Orwell’s actions were motivated by an attempt at reconciling the expectation of the crowd—for which, we, the readers, are never entirely sure what they were, and only towards the end do we realize that the Burmese were of mixed opinion—and his lack of knowledge about what to do. Orwell shot the elephant. But he did so, as he explains, in an utterly incompetent and inhumane way. Orwell’s story is then a metaphor for the incompetent and inhumane rule of empire and the injustice that it continuously produces. Violence becomes the de facto means of control in such a condition of ignorance—Orwell’s own ignorance about the Burmese and how to handle an elephant in heat—and fear and anxiety are about the way imperial actions will appear to others. Moreover, Orwell’s prose reveals a deep-seated contempt about the local Burmese, whom in their state of subjugation only recognize in the death of the elephant the opportunity to see it as a source for food, even if Orwell recognizes the evils of empire. Orwell’s own contempt for the Burmese illustrates the long-term moral degradation of both the colonized and the colonizers as a result of imperial rule. However, it is a degradation that is dissimilar to Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis about Adolf Eichmann under conditions of totalitarianism. Orwell was not thoughtless in the sense that, as was the case with Eichmann, “he never realized what he was doing.”42 He did not display a banality that was characterized by a lack of thought, which, for Arendt, is what ultimately facilitated the perpetuation of evil. Eichmann’s thoughtlessness cannot be conflated with stupidity. Rather, it reflected a self-delusion wrought by totalitarian language rules.43 Eichmann’s thoughtlessness created a gulf between his self and the other that precluded the use of his imagination to gain the other’s perspective.

44 Alexander D. Barder What Orwell illustrates is not how specific linguistic euphemisms create distances among his own thinking, actions, and their effects on others. Rather, what Orwell’s stupidity and incompetence are rooted in is a shallow concern with how he would look in front of the Burmese. Thus there is a banality about Orwell’s actions, and its motives, that may point to its significant pervasiveness in a way that Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann may not. Focusing instead on the pathologies of unsuitable or incompetent governance reveals a prevalence of not only spectacular forms of violence, but also of the banal or mundane forms of slow death or slow violence, of letting die. In the next section, I focus on the austerity regime imposed on Greece in the aftermath of the great financial crisis as an example of this relationship between incompetent governance and slow violence.

The violence of austerity: incompetence and its slow deaths In an article entitled “Greece’s health crisis: from austerity to denialism” published in Lancet, Alexander Kentikelenis et al. argue that the imposition of various economic austerity regimes resulted in substantial harm to the Greek population.44 From 2008 to 2014, the Greek economy contracted 26%, or from €242 billion to €179 billion, and suffered a recession for the better part of five years. Importantly, during this period, about 36% of the Greek population lived under the poverty line.45 The massive economic crisis that happened in Greece can be traced to, on the one hand, incompetent management and fraudulent reporting by the Greek government prior to the great financial crisis. This included the outright connivance of major Western banks to facilitate this fraudulent reporting by hiding Greek government indebtedness through various forms of financial engineering. On the other hand, it can be explained by the singularly brutal application of an austerity regime put in place by international financial organizations and the European Union as a condition of various bailout loans. The austerity imposed on the Greek state resulted in substantial cuts to public spending and in capping expenditure to 6% of GDP.46 As a consequence, a lack of access to syringes and condoms, for example: had the expected effects on the health of this vulnerable population; the number of new HIV infections among injecting drug users rose from 15 in 2009 to 484 in 2012, and preliminary data for 2013 suggest that the incidence of tuberculosis among this population has more than doubled compared with 2012.47 Moreover, Greece has witnessed the “re-emergence of locally transmitted malaria for the first time in 40 years.”48 The social and health costs of austerity, as a set of deep cuts in public expenditure, were not just felt by this extraordinarily vulnerable population. The entire population bore the brunt of such an imposition, and the result

Political incompetence and death-making 45 has been a lost decade for an entire generation of Greeks. Whether in terms of dramatically increasing the price of pharmaceutical drugs or of limiting access to basic care, especially for children, the effects of such disruptions will be felt over the long-term. As Kentikelenis et al. write: The long-term fall in infant mortality has reversed, rising by 43% between 2008 and 2014, with increases in both neonatal and post-natal deaths. Neonatal deaths suggest barriers in access to timely and effective care in pregnancy and early life, whereas postneonatal deaths point to worsening of socioeconomic circumstances.49 To be sure, the imposition of such a draconian austerity regime on Greece has significant precedents across the Global South since the 1970s, with a resulting proliferation of structural violence. As Mike Davis recounts in his Planet of Slums, “In Latin America and the Caribbean, SAP (Structural Adjustment Programs)—enforced austerity during the 1980s reduced public investment in sanitation and portable water, thus eliminating the infant survival advantage previously enjoyed by poor urban residents.”50 The glaring case of a structural adjustment program going completely awry resulting in the total collapse of a society was that of Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) in the early 1990s.51 Thus, there is a parallel to be drawn between previous forms of colonial politico-economic impositions throughout the Global South and contemporary SAPs as a mechanism of debt-collection.52 However, the Greek case is important in that it is the application of such a neocolonial economic regime reserved for the Global South to a developed nation. The characteristic harm of this austerity regime imposed on Greece cannot be said to be intentional on the part of the various international monetary organs and the European Union. The justification of the imposition of such an austerity regime reflected the desire on the part of the main actors of the Eurogroup to protect Franco-German banking interests. These banks made the lion’s share of private loans to the Greek state and to private enterprises. A Greek default would have rendered many such financial institutions insolvent and potentially would have called into question the very credit worthiness of the French state. Such an event would have unraveled the European Union as a whole. Furthermore, the imposition of such a draconian austerity regime was meant to send a message to the credit markets by reassuring investors holding Spanish or Italian debt. In other words, there were a series of political motivations for pursuing austerity that did not necessarily recognize the possible harm it could produce. However, even after its implementation and even after it became widely recognized that austerity resulted in the significant impoverishment of the Greek population, its continuation was explained by Yannis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, as the “incompetent authoritarianism that characterized the European Union’s approach to the eurozone crisis.”53 But whereas Varoufakis locates the genesis of such

46 Alexander D. Barder incompetent authoritarianism in a moralistic ideology—whereby debtors are perceived to be the equivalent of sinners and must be punished—what may explain the persistence of harm caused by austerity is an incompetence rooted in ideological arrogance, a fear that without such a form of punishment other debtor states would fall out of line. The austerity regime does not in itself address the fundamental economic problems that plague Greece and other indebted European states. As Mark Blyth explains, austerity compounds the problem by contracting the economy, thus making debt repayment even more onerous.54 In other words, the imposed austerity regime is an incompetent or unsuitable regime that does not accomplish its intended goals and instead perpetuates a slow violence against a population. It is, in effect, more in line with pathological neocolonial affective politics that continue to reward incompetent actions. The result is the perpetuation of a “letting die” that falls outside the frame of biopolitics.55

Conclusion A key implication of biopolitical reason, as Foucault described it, is that death or “letting die” does not need to be “murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply political death, expulsion, rejection.”56 Foucault located the various possibilities of “letting die” in the emergence of a novel form of governmental rationality over the course of the nineteenth century. However, Foucault’s assumption is that the Western state seamlessly reflects the applicability of this governmental rationality in its very institutions. As I have shown in the first section, “letting die” is not fully defined by governmentalized biopolitics or biopower. Colonial spaces, in particular, illustrate the very limitations of the nexus between biopolitical reason and state power. Such spaces are striated with affect–paranoia, fear, anxiety—that generates significant epistemological uncertainty about reason itself. What an examination of incompetence reveals, I believe, is the presence of a chasm between reason, knowledge, and practice, one that redefines the unfolding and intelligibility of different forms of violence. Reflecting on incompetence as a type of governmental action situated beyond the frame of the biopolitical is not meant to call into question the veracity of Foucault’s insights into the fundamental transformative elements of nineteenth century governmentality. But doing so is important in two respects. First, it is significant that the colonial space has largely been elided in much of the theorization of the biopolitical and in its historical genealogies. What a turn to incompetence as a type of “letting die” may reveal is a different way of understanding the very emergence of state practice within the West. In other words, we cannot assume that there is a bifurcation between the metropole (the site of governmentalized reason) and the colony (the space of affect) that accounts for different genealogies and state practices. Rather, we should ask whether the very processes of state-building in

Political incompetence and death-making 47 the metropole were not themselves subject to significant epistemological uncertainty as was the case for the colonized spaces. As Foucault inchoately put it in “Society Must Defended,” without following through on the thought: “A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”57 Moreover, thinking about biopolitical reason from this assumption about an ontological incongruity (its unsuitability) with processes of statebuilding, as I have argued, becomes a way of understanding different modalities of violence. Such violence does not appear within the biopolitical “frame of representability and intelligibility … .”58 Much like the violence that emanates from an austerity regime imposed on a neocolonized people, incompetent violence appears largely conceptually invisible. What a turn to incompetence may reveal is the variety of different types of “slow violence” that escape the conceptual gaze of biopolitical reason.

Notes 1 Gilbert Burnham et al., “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey” Lancet 368 (2006): 1421–1428. 2 Burnham, 1421. 3 See especially Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (New York: Penguin, 2007); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 4 With the notable exception of the Ministry of Oil, which was guarded by American troops. 5 George Packer, The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 138. 6 Perhaps the clearest example of this is Bob Woodward’s court narrative of the lead-up to the invasion in terms of the personalities present in the administration. It is in this book that he famously quotes general Tommy Franks as saying that Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and one of the architects of the war, was “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Shuster: New York, 2004), 281. 7 See Online Etymology Dictionary for competent: www.etymonline.com/word/ competent. 8 Ann Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017), 225. 9 Stoler, 225; For the idea of slow violence, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 10 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. 11 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 [1963]). 12 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2. 13 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” (New York: Picador, 2003), 241–242. 14 Foucault, 242. 15 Foucault, 243. 16 Foucault, 242–243. 17 Foucault, 249.

48 Alexander D. Barder 18 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 54. My emphasis. 19 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1990). 20 Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time, 218. 21 Stoler, 218; See also Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chapter 6. 22 Stoler, 197. 23 Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time, 220. 24 For a discussion of incompetence in relation to arrogance, fear, and ignorance, see especially Susanne Trimbath, “The Incompetence Hypothesis to Explain the Great Recession.” New Geography, www.newgeography.com/content/005009-theincompetence-hypothesis-explain-great-recession. 25 Stoler, 227; my emphasis. 26 To be sure, the significance of race in colonial settings especially cannot be overstated. My point here is that there are modalities of violence that are themselves not necessarily activated through race. 27 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 28 Mbembe, 40. 29 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 70. 30 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 206–207. 31 Alexis de Toqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 14. 32 de Toqueville, 15. 33 de Toqueville, 16. 34 de Toqueville. 35 de Toqueville, 15. 36 See, especially, Olivier Le Cours Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer: Sur La Guerre et L’État Colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 37 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 70. 38 Alexis de Toqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 25. 39 George Orwell “Shooting an Elephant” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 150. 40 Orwell, 152. 41 Orwell, 152–153. 42 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287. Emphasis in the original. 43 As Arendt writes, “He was not stupid.” Ibid. Which raises the question of what stupidity means for Arendt. 44 Alexander Kentikelenis, Mariana Karanikolos, Aaron Reeves, Martin NcKee, and David Stuckler, “Greece’s Health Crisis: From Austerity to Denialism” Lancet 383 (2004): 748–753. 45 www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gr.html 46 Kentikelenis et al. “Greece’s Health Crisis: From Austerity to Denialism”, 748. As opposed to France, for example, for which public expenditure ranges from 45–57%. https://tradingeconomics.com/france/government-spending. 47 Kentikelenis et al. “Greece’s Health Crisis: From Austerity to Denialism,” 748. 48 Kentikelenis et al. 49 Kentikelenis et al, 751. 50 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007), 148. 51 Davis, 194.

Political incompetence and death-making 49 52 See also David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Development (New York: Verso, 2006). 53 Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 40. My emphasis. 54 Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 55 For a discussion of the frames of biopolitics and what gets left outside, see Francois Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2013). 56 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 256. 57 Foucault, 103. 58 Debrix and Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror in World Politics, 6.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 [1963]. Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Burnham, Gilbert, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey.” Lancet 368, no. 9545 (2006): 1421–28, www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06) 69491-9/fulltext. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2007. de Toqueville, Alexis. Writings on Empire and Slavery. Ed. Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Debrix, François and Alexander D. Barder. Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror in World Politics. New York: Routledge, 2013. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume One. New York: Vintage, 1990. Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Development. New York: Verso, 2006, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/showdown/interviews/ armitage.html Kentikelenis, Alexander, Mariana Karanikolos, Aaron Reeves, Martin NcKee, and David Stuckler. “Greece’s Health Crisis: From Austerity to Denialism.” Lancet 383 (2004): 748–53. Le Cours Grandmaison, Olivier. Coloniser, Exterminer: Sur La Guerre et L’État Colonial. Paris: Fayard, 2005. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. ———. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Online Etymology Dictionary for competent: www.etymonline.com/word/competent. Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” In George Orwell, A Collection of Essays. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981: 148–156. Packer, George. The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

50 Alexander D. Barder Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Ricks, Thomas. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005. New York: Penguin, 2007. Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Stoler, Ann. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ———. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017. Trimbath, Susanne. “The Incompetence Hypothesis to Explain the Great Recession.” New Geography, www.newgeography.com/content/005009-the-incompetence-hypoth esis-explain-great-recession. Varoufakis, Yanis. Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Woodward, Bob. Plan of Attack. Simon and Shuster: New York, 2004.

3

On the loss of death Necropolitics in the study of genocide Benjamin Meiches

Introduction What forms of violence constitute genocide? This is perhaps the most significant conceptual question in the literature on mass atrocity. During the past decade, championed by the late philosopher Claudia Card, a new approach to the study of mass atrocity emerged that responded to this question by emphasizing “social death” as a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing how genocide affects not only individual living bodies, but a broader, vulnerable sense of a shared world.1 Advocates of the social death paradigm argue that standard definitions of mass atrocities problematically overlook cases of gratuitous violence simply because of the type of violence under consideration.2 For advocates of social death theory, the trauma of mass violence and of the disruption of lives, families, and social networks reveals how acts of violence far short of mass killing unravel the bonds that make the articulation of a social world possible. This problem, they argue, is particularly evident in the historiography of colonial and postcolonial genocides where the focus on mass killing generates a bias in the literature against studying the eradication of indigenous and colonized peoples.3 Social death theorists also contend that Raphaël Lemkin’s original goal in creating the concept of genocide was to offer a concept that articulated this singular loss of a social world.4 Unsurprisingly, the social death approach has come under attack for confusing genocide studies and blurring the line between analytically and ethically distinctive types of mass violence. The purpose of this chapter is to explore and supplement the alleged shortcomings of the social death paradigm in two ways. First, the chapter resituates social death as a problem of biopolitics and necropolitics. Second, it articulates a stronger connection between social death and what might be called the materiality of violence. By doing so, this chapter shows how many of the arguments against the social death paradigm actually illustrate why a notion of social death is critical to the study of genocide. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates that dominant challenges to social death theory subscribe to a necropolitical approach to the problem of genocide, which employs the possibility of the body’s biological death as the site for

52 Benjamin Meiches legitimating new modalities of political governance. While biological death is important for the study of mass violence, social death offers a different reading of the textures of contemporary violence, one that challenges the tacit endorsement of necropolitics. The problem of genocide has always been at the center of theoretical discussion about biopolitics and necropolitics. Michel Foucault’s first published use of the term “biopolitics” explicitly makes this connection: If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.5 Yet, Foucault’s critics persuasively argue that biopolitics must be understood in connection to contemporary formations of violence rather than the expressly racist, totalitarian states of the past. This theme animates Achille Mbembe’s powerful questions about the necropolitical: Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective … What place is given to life, death and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?6 Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics shows that some forms of life are never optimized because they are preemptively inscribed in death-worlds: “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”7 Mbembe’s analysis of the intensive mechanisms of necropolitics appears to capture the horror and violence classically associated with genocide more aptly than Foucault’s analysis of the slow operations of discipline and the optimization of life. However, the very terrain of this debate strangely avoids critically examining its central terms: life and death, bios, and necros. The philosopher Catherine Malabou has called attention to this problem in her theorization of biopolitics and necropolitics.8 For Malabou, the problem of life has always been articulated in two senses in this literature: biological and symbolic. Critiques of biopolitics and necropolitics often originate from a suspicion that biological understandings of life are inherently reductive and secretly complicit in the control over the body. Hence, contemporary theories of resistance to biopolitics appeal to various dimensions of symbolic life as an antidote to the biopolitical condition.9 In doing so, they entrench a division between the biological and the symbolic, which forecloses the possibility that the biological might resist the terms and conditions of biopolitics.

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This point is particularly relevant to the debate over social death in genocide studies because this paradigm expressly relies on the distinction between biological and social or symbolic death. The chapter argues that prioritizing social death is a means of contesting biopolitics and necropolitics and, as such, is a valuable method for conceptualizing the multiple forms of contemporary death-making that foment mass atrocities. In particular, the social death paradigm outlines something irreducible to the phenomenon of biological death at stake in the politics of genocide, namely, the capacity for social death to become materially corrosive, traumatic. However, the notion of social death only makes sense if these observations are also grounded in a materialist framework where the “symbolic” dimensions of life emerge from and imprint upon a material body.

On social death Claudia Card proposes that we understand: “genocide [as] an extreme of social death.”10 She explains: social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create context and identities that give meaning and shape to our lives … loss of social vitality comes with the loss of such connections … [social death] puts the focus instead on relationships, connections, and foundational institutions that create community and set the context that [give] meaning to careers, goals, lives and deaths.11 Card provides a number of defenses of this approach.12 Reduced to an act of mass killing, the category of genocide is redundant with war crimes and crimes against humanity.13 More importantly, Card contends that genocide involves forms of harm that go beyond biological death, which threaten the meaning generated by intergenerational and natal relationships. For her, the evil of genocide is this potential to sabotage the bonds that constitute social vitality. As Card states, “genocide not only strips individuals of the ability to participate in relationships, activities, and traditions, it aims to destroy the possibility of those particular kinds of relationships, activities, and traditions for other groups.”14 Building on the series of cultural techniques of genocide outlined by Lemkin, Card shows that genocide attacks the foundations of a social group or, put differently, the symbolic field that makes the articulation of meaning possible. Since Card’s first uses of the social death paradigm, the approach has become a useful vocabulary in critical genocide studies, and many scholars influenced by this genre of work employ similar concepts.15 The paradigm has also encouraged genocide scholars to examine the legacies of colonial violence, ecological devastation, and the complexity of mass violence.16 The rise of the social death paradigm and the renewed interest in the concept of cultural genocide have incited calls for a narrower definition of

54 Benjamin Meiches genocide and mass atrocity. The majority of these arguments hinges on the belief that biological death is a qualitatively distinctive phenomenon. Scott Straus, for example, contends that biological death is the dominant, if not exclusive, feature of genocide because it is uniquely irreversible. Without invoking these precise terms, Straus contends that death negates any possibility for action in life. In contrast, losing a limb, language, or community is not, for Straus, the same type of irreversible change since the body persists and opens the possibility of regeneration. Critical theorist Berel Lang echoes this point by arguing that biological death is ontologically distinct from any form of dehumanization since death creates an impassable barrier that extinguishes the possibility of meaning for that individual.17 Critical genocide scholars such as Dirk Moses likewise believe that killing is an indispensable element of the practice of genocide as theorized by Raphaël Lemkin. As a living being, the loss of life is the paramount problem and therefore should determine how scholars study the problem of mass violence. These arguments consistently appeal to a form of ontological realism to justify their claims. The distinction between biological life and death is real, determinable, and subject to an observable change. In contrast, sociality is transient, fluid, and, to a degree, interchangeable. Hence, biological death is an obdurate, meaningful distinction whereas social life has a hazier, unreal, or indeterminate status. In this schema, social life is paradoxically more resilient, but simultaneously less real than biological life. It is important to note that the reference point for this argument is always the life of an individual. The notion of a social world or collective modes of life is never seriously considered. Rather, rebuttals to the social death hypothesis always presuppose that the individual living body is the exclusive subject of life and death, harm and violation. This framework consequently understands mass violence as affecting an aggregate population of discrete individuals rather than a group or a mode of life. In other words, this position interprets mass atrocity through a biopolitical epistemology.

Biopolitics and the plasticity of life In his initial descriptions of biopolitics, Foucault differentiated the classical sovereign right to kill from the biopolitical optimization of life through death. “Massacres,” Foucault writes, “have become vital” to improving the health of the population, as an exercise in political rationality, and to the security of the race or populace.18 Killing thus plays a vital role in the work of separating and governing discrete forms of life. At base, this rationality assumes that the multiplicity of forms of what William E. Connolly calls the “human estate” pose a potential danger to the population.19 In earlier periods, mass atrocities certainly occurred, but the purpose of this violence was to eliminate the traces of previous sovereign regimes and to subdue potential resistance. However, the notion of exterminating a form of life in

On the loss of death 20

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biopolitical terms was absent. Put differently, violence varies across epistemes. The emergence of genocide as a technology of biopolitics explains the tendency for mass atrocities to become isomorphic in distinct historical and geographic contexts once life becomes a supreme political value.21 The series of techniques of genocide outlined by Lemkin and other scholars reveal the different mechanisms carrying out this process, separating and annihilating specific forms of life.22 The problem is that under a biopolitical regime many practices of control also become everyday techniques of population management. The normalization of these techniques tacitly opens the possibility for mass atrocities. Giorgio Agamben’s description of the problem of “bare life,” or life stripped of all political standing save for its mere, naked existence, reveals that the act of killing overshadows an insidious but fundamental biopolitical process, namely, the division of valuable from nonvaluable life.23 Indeed, strictly speaking, “bare life” is not biological life per se, but the site of a mobile decision on what constitutes the minimum threshold of existence for a living being. Understood as part of a biopolitical logic, the arguments made by Lang, Straus, and others about the irreversibility and reality of biological death appear less as obdurate claims about life and death and more like culturally sensitive, contestable epistemological propositions. Moreover, the argumentative logic employs bare life, the death of the biological or naked body, as the key analytical concept to distinguish genocide from other forms of mass violence. The arguments thus naturalize rather than problematize the political decision at stake in this division. In contrast, social death theory makes the boundaries of social or symbolic life porous, indeterminate, and differential. Life and death cannot be easily reduced to the division between bare and political life. As such, social death theory requires a more complex account of the relationship between life, death, biology, and sociality. Malabou offers a rich presentation of the relationship between biological and symbolic life in her examinations of biopolitics, plasticity, the brain, and the body.24 She challenges the articulations of biopolitics and necropolitics offered by figures such as Foucault, Agamben, and Jacques Derrida.25 The common thread in the writings of these philosophers is an appeal or defense of symbolic life against the reduction of life to mere biology.26 For Malabou, this theoretical move reinforces the distinction between the biological and the symbolic, instituting the very categories that each thinker theoretically deconstructs.27 Furthermore, Malabou counters this position by insisting that critical thought must reckon with the biological, the neurological, and the genetic as complex, critical domains. Contemporary ideologies have transformed neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and biopotentiality into a rhetoric of labor that emphasizes the flexibility, adaptability, and resilience of the human biome in order to expand capital extraction and legitimate social abandonment.28 For Malabou, this is a tremendous loss. No two brains, biomes, or genes are identical. Far from it, each facet of the biological being is not just fluid, but hetero-generative, forming and transforming itself in

56 Benjamin Meiches relation to otherness.29 These areas of scientific discovery also reveal the fragility of the body, the genome, and the brain as extended ecologically and politically sensitive networks. The existence of lesions on the brain, for instance, opens the possibility of what Malabou terms “destructive plasticity,” in which trauma may initiate a process of transformation that unmakes the subject from within.30 Far from a celebratory form of contingency, destructive plasticity harbors the potential for a subject to unwind, lose, or negate the self as accidents transform the brain. As new discoveries are made about the various ecological, nutritional, and chemical conditions that foster life, they open up new spaces for the work, transformation, and destruction of the self. Malabou’s critique does not only illustrate the point that biological and symbolic dimensions of life are interrelated or co-constituted. It also reveals how the material dimensions of genetics, the body, and the brain emerge in a generative relationship with an ecological and social environment, which changes depending on nutrition, trauma, and the imprints of linguistic and cultural socialization.31 The symbolic and biological dimensions of life are not fully separable dimensions of the human, but are rather interwoven aspects of a continuum of living being supported by a socio-biological matrix that is complex, formed, and formative. With the rise of new biological sciences, Malabou argues, it is no longer enough to defend symbolic life against the operations of biopolitics. Instead, theorists should treat the involvements of the body, brain, and epigenetics as possible sites of freedom and resistance. For too long theorists of the biopolitical have neglected the pluripotential, highly contingent character of biological life. Malabou’s argument contains important lessons for the dialogue about genocide and social death since this debate hinges on the distinction between social (symbolic) and biological life. Read in light of Malabou’s critique, social death theory has, in a certain sense, ceded terrain by refusing to sufficiently theorize the biological dimensions of life and, consequently, of death as well. In emphasizing the shared systems of meaning that found a social world, Card and other genocide theorists overlook the immediately material, biological dimensions of these connections. As a consequence, social death theory positions itself against biopolitical readings of genocide, which make the crime of genocide interchangeable with other mass atrocities by focusing on biological death as the basis for analyzing the crime. Ultimately, the problem is that the distinction between social death and biological death, social life and biological life, is unsustainable. Pax Malabou, symbolic life is material, real, and powerful. It emerges from circuits in the brain that are fragile, porous, and subject to violation. Consider, for instance, a small sampling of the techniques of violence often listed as social or cultural acts of genocide: forced transfer of highly neuroplastic children; destruction of cultural heritage sites such as libraries, monuments, or temples, which serve as common points of reference in the reproduction of social narrative; the elimination of a language and, consequently, of a syntax; the use of malnutrition, segregation, ghettoization, forced labor,

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physical displacement, or residential schools to disrupt the habits of touch, care, and intermingling that constitute a life. Each of these techniques is a historical means of executing a form of genocide that is thinkable within the social death framework. For Malabou, however, these acts of predation not only constitute social death, but also leave indelible effects on the brain, foreclosing the possibility of specific forms of life being lived. Scholars like Straus and Lang worry that including these acts in a theory of genocide would balloon the concept to unsustainable proportions. However, their appeal to ontological realism presumes that the biological body and social life are separate and that the former remains largely unchanged when confronted with social forms of violence. Put differently, they treat biological death as a qualitatively distinct event. As was previously argued, this is not a neutral epistemological position, but the adoption of a biological logic that makes the possibility of the body’s death the site for the exercise of humanitarian governance. The implicit axiom of this logic, aptly summarized by Tim Morton, is that “existing is better than any quality of existing.”32 What Malabou’s work shows is the absurdity of the uncritical ontological realism offered as a defense of this position. Symbolic injuries are material. They impact the formation of the brain, leave interminable traces on the body, and interfere with habit and, consequently, with the mode of life. Not only are these symbolic elements real, but their separation from the biological dimensions of life is epistemologically untenable. Indeed, Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity demonstrates that it is possible for the self, the subject that allegedly forfeits life in biological death, to be thoroughly and completely destroyed while persisting as a living organism. Achille Mbembe’s invocation of the necropolitics of the living dead is thus not theoretically whimsy since, for Malabou, it is entirely possible for a self to, as it were, perish within a biologically living body. Social techniques of genocide thus also participate in the elimination of the body and brain and have irreversible implications for subjectivity, eliminating what Agamben terms “form-of-life” or the singularity of life where biology and sociality become inseparable.33 The separation of death and life is thus not based on stable epistemological foundations, but on the possibility of interpreting the body, life, and death in terms amenable to biopolitical power. Genocide theorists that remain skeptical of social death theory thus limit the definition of genocide to a small set of events and openly advocate for remote intervention to protect and preserve bare life. The fact that many proposals for these interventions involve extensive programs designed to manage the livelihood of entire populations illustrates how the goal of this politics is to banish death in favor of the optimization of life while ignoring the potential for the latter to carry its own forms of violence or to produce atrocities of a different nature.34 At the same time, as a theory of genocide, social death theory lacks materiality. Meaning, language, shared context, and even territory are not just the effects of habits and practices of social interaction; they grow and

58 Benjamin Meiches flourish in ecological conditions. The movement of the river, the death of a crop, the evolution of a parasite, changes in the consumption of drugs, or sexual violation may have coercive effects on the viability of articulating a social world without any direct, identifiable targeting or assault on cultural institution and practices. The loss of a key element of social heritage, such as the disappearance of a language, has an impact beyond its importance for holding a group together because it damages the possibility of articulating novel epistemologies, insights, and expressions, in short, the ability to generate another world.35 Moreover, as real ontologically distinctive entities, these social practices shift and alter the body and brain. The ramifications of sociality extend into the materiality of the body, transforming the content of neural connections, regeneration, and patterning.36 The hills and mountains near your home, the climatic conditions that affect the dryness of your mouth, the flows of people and goods through an area will produce singular effects in the way you speak, gesture, or articulate the meaning of life and death. The vulnerability at the heart of the constitution of the subject opens many avenues for biopolitical violence to mold or eliminate forms of life without the scrutiny of international law. Unsurprisingly, long-term studies have documented that traumas of mass atrocities produce epigenetic effects, which can be transmitted across generations such that the descendants of mass violence have greater tendencies to anxiety, depression, and a variety of other conditions.37 Rather than treat the afterlives of violence as pathological, this epigenetic reproduction of trauma reveals the potential for mass violence to reverberate into the future, destroying lives in ways that are unintelligible outside of the social death paradigm. Malabou’s effort to refocus the critique of biopolitics on a vision of the biological and social as reciprocally determining, or in her terms plastic, opens a space for social forms of violence to become material and types of violence traditionally understood as material to affect the social. Fully appreciating the scope of this point requires exploring the implications for life as a pluripotent biological and social force in the study of genocide.

Genocide and the problem of death As a concept oriented around the destruction of a group, the concept of genocide offers a critique of violence not on the basis of juridical rights, humanity writ large, or the rational limits of armed conflict between sovereign entities, but of the destruction of modes or forms of life as such. If genocide has fluid boundaries with these concepts, it is because the annihilation of a form of life appears as a plausible practice within the horizon of war and other normalized formations of biopolitical violence. The fluid character of violence suggests that legal standards for assessing genocide, derived from the United Nations Genocide Convention, may have difficulty identifying or inhibiting contemporary techniques of biopolitical or necropolitical violence.38 Indeed, the point is not that the concept of genocide is

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an adequate idea in relation to biopolitics any more than ecocide is an adequate idea for climate change. Rather, as an analytical and political category, genocide produces possibilities for thinking and contesting specific terms and techniques of biopolitics because, understood as a process of social death, it refuses the reduction of life to bare life. However, in contesting biopolitical terms, social death theory often obscures the material dimensions of violence. This emphasis explains why theorists who reject social death theory appeal to ontological realism and the reversibility of death. Situating social death theory within Malabou’s reading of biopolitics illustrates, to the contrary, how social or symbolic life is intimately interwoven and, at a point, inseparable from material, biological life. For instance, social death affects the body and brain because the destruction of a social life leaves imprints on neurological, ecological, and epigenetic systems. The residues left by these forms of violence often become mechanisms for extending and distributing these traumas over time. Put differently, violent practices associated with social death such as the destruction of language or displacement from a specific place are techniques that have irreversible, real, and ontologically distinctive effects and often generate the slow destruction of a group or form of life. In this respect, biopolitical violence is inventive precisely at the threshold of death, producing practices that keep bodies alive while eliminating specific modalities or forms of life. Malabou’s description of destructive plasticity, the potential for the subject to lose any sense of itself, to exit or disappear from the world, illustrates how forms of violence other than killing may produce forms of deprivation that exceed biological death.39 The implication of this point is threefold. First, techniques of cultural genocide must be included in an analysis of genocide. Excluding these techniques not only impoverishes our understanding of the complexity of mass violence, but also renders unintelligible the way the destruction of a monument, the elimination of language, forced schooling, displacement, and other modes of biopolitical violence have the potential to target and extinguish specific forms-of-life without necessarily destroying the biological body.40 Genocide may be a technique of producing the living dead. This is perhaps the most basic point of the social death hypothesis. Biological death cannot, on its own terms, establish a value without an appeal to form-of-life. Hence, the management of mass killing frequently defaults into a nihilistic assessment of body counts, risks, and costs. The singularity of form-of-life is thus not only the impetus for creating the concept of genocide, but important for preventing the calculations and ethics of humanitarian intervention defaulting to the problematic axiom that mere existence is better than any quality of existence. Second, the concept of genocide articulates the linkages between seemingly discrete acts, forms, and techniques of violence. Contemporary international law defines genocide using the subjective intent of a genocidaire. This approach interprets violence in terms of the manageable categories of culpability and

60 Benjamin Meiches responsibility but obscures the complex agencies at work in executing intensive mass violence at scale.41 Fundamentally, this approach is a police gesture in the sense of Jacques Rancière, a gesture that defines and orders violence in order to regulate political practice.42 By doing so, dominant definitions of genocide also render many practices of mass violence ordinary and participate in what Étienne Balibar calls the “looming of cruelty” or the rise of forms of violence arguably worse than death.43 A more radical study of genocide would call into question the linkages, resonances, and feedback between these different forms of violence. It would attend to the conditions of possibility for the emergence of mass violence across different geographical, historical, and temporal contexts. The key to thinking genocide in these terms is to connect genocide to the problem of form-of-life. Understood in this way, links appear between acts of violence that are considered ordinary elements of everyday biopolitics and the extreme or spectacular violence that commands humanitarian intervention. Moreover, this connection suggests that many humanitarian technologies often participate in the production of bare life and mass violence. Agamben, for instance, has demonstrated the existence of an isomorphic structure between concentration camps and refugee centers. In doing so, he reveals how humanitarian technologies may augment, reflect, or amplify mass violence by isolating and producing specific forms-of-life.44 If genocide involves the annihilation of form-of-life, then it does not need to destroy the biological body. Rather, as a means of producing difference, genocide may ultimately be possible without the commission of homicide, a phenomenon that would be wholly unintelligible to existing international regimes, yet no less lethal in terms of its impacts on the lives in question.45 However, social death theorists have not considered the material implications of the destruction of symbolic life. In this respect, social death theory merely emphasizes social over biological life and, in doing so, offers another biopolitical discourse. A more critical analysis of genocide would, instead, understand techniques of genocide as multiple, always already biological and social, and working toward the erasure of form-of-life. At stake in this reformulation is not only a challenge to violence, but a different mode of politics that calls into question the superposition of various forms of biopolitical control that periodically crystallize into explicit mass violence. Third, the body and the symbolic are plastic. The plasticity of their connections, as Malabou shows, includes both formative potential and the deep marring, irreducible effects of formation. As life opens to new mechanisms of intervention, the techniques or modes of destroying form-of-life also change. These transformations involve both technical developments and the mutation of social discourses and subjectivity. As such, the growth of new means of intervening on the body similarly opens the horizon for new techniques of genocide. The discoveries of the neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and ecological fragility of living systems and societies generate new, unforeseen mechanisms for eliminating forms-of-life. This raises a thorny, ethical question with respect to genocide. Does the concept simply prohibit the acts of mass violence because of identity,

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implicitly prioritizing specific types or models of social life or, alternately, does the concept challenge the destruction of form-of-life as such without establishing a hierarchy between different modes of living? What is at stake in this question is not only the status of genocide studies, but the plasticity of thinking about the terms of contemporary politics. Contemporary genocide prevention efforts operate on the basis of a biopolitical logic. Social death reveals the insufficiency of this way of thinking about genocide and the need to recognize that there is never just a biological life or a social life, but a form-of-life that has been at stake in the politics of genocide since its inception. This form-of-life is plastic, molded by genetics, brain development, evolution, and social practice, and it may be the site of devastating, irreversible, yet all-too subtle violence.

Conclusion This chapter has engaged a debate about the appropriate tools for studying genocide. It has showed that social death theory offers a valuable tool for theorizing the multiple biopolitical and necropolitical technologies, which enable the commission (and omission) of genocide. Furthermore, it has demonstrated that the standards used to discredit “cultural” or “social” genocide, such as realism and the uniqueness of death, actually reveal the importance of these theories. Focusing on the interaction between biological and symbolic life exposes how acts of power affect both the individual body and the population and ultimately produce ricochet effects that may destroy a form-of-life. The reevaluation of “cultural violence” performed by social death theory is thus vital to assessing the implications of genocide and to appreciating the dangers of restricted definitions of the term. The scholarly discomfort with the expansion of the definition of genocide emerges from an embrace of an underlying biopolitical paradigm that views mass violence as meaningful only insofar as it affects the biological body. Social death theory not only corrects this oversight, but it also draws attention to the conditions that foster mass violence in multiple forms. If a series of mass violence events occur in apparently distinct contexts, this isomorphic emergence is a product of the tendencies and inclinations of biopolitics. Social death theory thus not only broadens but also qualitatively transforms the notion of genocide by reasserting the importance of the loss of a formof-life as the ultimate stake in mass violence. As such, it signals a challenge to biopolitical and necropolitical paradigms of elimination.

Notes 1 Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 63–79. 2 Elisa Novic, “Physical-Biological or Socio-Cultural ‘destruction’ in Genocide? Unravelling the Legal Underpinnings of Conflicting Interpretations,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 1 (2015): 63–82.

62 Benjamin Meiches 3 A.D. Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. 4 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944); Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Martin Crook and Damien Short, “Marx, Lemkin and the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus,” The International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014): 298–316; John Docker, “Raphaël Lemkin, Creator of the Concept of Genocide: A World History Perspective,” Humanities Research 16, no. 2 (2010): 49–74. 5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 137. 6 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (December 21, 2003): 12. 7 Ibid., 40. 8 Catherine Malabou, “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (2016): 429–438. 9 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louis Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 10 Card, Confronting Evils, 237. 11 Card, Confronting Evils, 237–238. 12 It is important to note that Card develops the term “social death” from Orlando Patterson. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 1st edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13 Some thinkers abandon even this standard. 14 Card, Confronting Evils, 265. 15 See, for instance, Mohammed Abed, “Clarifying the Concept of Genocide,” Metaphilosophy 37, no. 3–4 (2006): 308–330; Dirk Moses, “Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies,” Article, Toward-a-Theory-of-Critical-GenocideStudies (April 18, 2008), www.massviolence.org/Toward-a-Theory-of-CriticalGenocide-Studies; Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 16 Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide (London: Zed Books, 2016); Louise E. Wise, “Social Death and the Loss of a ‘World’: An Anatomy of Genocide in Sudan,” The International Journal of Human Rights (2017): 1–28; Jeff Benvenuto, “Revisiting Choctaw Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alex Laban Hinton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 208–225. 17 Berel Lang, Genocide: The Act as Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 349–375. 18 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 137. 19 William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 34. 20 Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 21 Mark Levene’s study of the global structural conditions that produce mass atrocities examines many of the salient features of biopolitics. Mark Levene,

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23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

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Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 1: The Meaning of Genocide (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79–106; Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas, trans. Douglas Andrew Town (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5–6. The philosopher Catherine Malabou’s work has expanded in a short period. These are some of the relevant publications: Catherine Malabou, “The Brain of History, Or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017): 39–53; Catherine Malabou, “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance”; Catherine Malabou, “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies,” Representation 127 (2014): 98–106; Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012); Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 145–155; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Reprint edition (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4–11. Malabou, “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance”; Catherine Malabou, “Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2016): 200–206. Malabou’s reading of this tradition is obviously contestable. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 30–45. Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 67–81. Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident, 45–56. For the development of this paradigm in history, see Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Tim Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 47. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kosko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 153–154. For an analysis of this paradigmatic change, see Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2014). For good examples of the violence of humanitarian practices, see Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? (New York: Picador, 2011). For an expansive discussion of this problem, see K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The poignancy of ecological factors is brought to light in Malabou, “The Brain of History, Or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene.” This research is still underway. Some meta-analyses have questioned these results. Nonetheless, several studies show persistent signs of transgenerational trauma. My thanks to Rachel Hershberg for guiding me to this literature. See Natan P.F. Kellermann, “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can Nightmares Be Inherited,” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50, no. 1 (2013): 33–37; Vamik D. Volkan, “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity,” Group Analysis 34, no. 1 (2001): 79–97.

64 Benjamin Meiches 38 This is a long-standing argument in genocide studies. See Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2007). 39 For a parallel analysis, François Debrix argues that the horrific entails the possibility for an exposure to the body’s potentiality for decomposition. This vulnerability opens the potential for violence to denature or deform the self. See Franҫois Debrix, Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics and the Body in Pieces (New York: Routledge, 2017), 74–77. 40 Andrew R. Basso, “Towards a Theory of Displacement Atrocities: The Cherokee Trail of Tears, The Herero Genocide, and the Pontic Greek Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10, no. 1 (2016): 5–29; Andrew Woolford, “Nodal Repair and Networks of Destruction: Residential Schools, Colonial Genocide, and Redress in Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 65–81; Helen Fein, “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan: Links between Human Rights, Health and Mass Death,” Health and Human Rights 2, no. 2 (1997): 10–45. 41 On the complex agency of mass violence, see Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). On the ambiguities of intent under international law see Katherine Goldsmith, “The Issue of Intent in the Genocide Convention and Its Effects on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Toward a Knowledge-Based Approach,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (2010): 238–257. 42 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 43 Etienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in an Era of Global Violence,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 15. 44 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 135–136. 45 Alex Hinton has done the most to illustrate how genocide is actually a means of producing and erasing difference. See Alexander Laban Hinton, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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Basso, Andrew R. “Towards a Theory of Displacement Atrocities: The Cherokee Trail of Tears, The Herero Genocide, and the Pontic Greek Genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10, no. 1 (2016): 5–29. Bauer, Yehuda. “Comparison of Genocides.” In Studies in Contemporary Genocide, edited by Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999: 31–43. Benvenuto, Jeff. “Revisiting Choctaw Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis.” In Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alex Laban Hinton, 208–25. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Card, Claudia. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 63–79. ———. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Connolly, William E. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Crook, Martin and Damien Short. “Marx, Lemkin and the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus.” The International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014): 298–316. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louis Mallet, Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Docker, John. “Raphaël Lemkin, Creator of the Concept of Genocide: A World History Perspective.” Humanities Research 16, no. 2 (2010): 49–74. Duffield, Mark. Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books, 2014. Feierstein, Daniel. Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas, Translated by Douglas Andrew Town. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Fein, Helen. “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan: Links between Human Rights, Health and Mass Death.” Health and Human Rights 2, no. 2 (1997): 10–45. Fleming, Colin M. “New or Old Wars? Debating a Clausewitzian Future.” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 2 (2009): 213–41. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978. Fujii, Lee Ann. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Goldsmith, Katherine. “The Issue of Intent in the Genocide Convention and Its Effects on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Toward a Knowledge-Based Approach.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (2010): 238–57. Harrison, K. David. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hinton, Alexander Laban. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Hinton, Alexander Laban, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (eds.) Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Johnston, Adrian and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

66 Benjamin Meiches Katz, Steven T. The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Kellermann, Natan P.F. “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can Nightmares Be Inherited.” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50, no. 1 (2013): 33–7. Lang, Berel. Genocide: The Act as Idea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Lemkin, Raphaël. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944. ———. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Levene, Mark. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 1: The Meaning of Genocide. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008. Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, translated by Carolyn Shread. Malden: Polity, 2012. ———. “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies.” Representation 127 (2014): 98–106. ———. “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.” Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (2016): 429–38. ———. “Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries.” Critical Inquiry 43 (2016): 200–06. ———. “The Brain of History, or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017): 39–53. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Morton, Tim. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Moses, A. Dirk. “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. ———. “Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies.” Article. Toward-a-Theoryof-Critical-Genocide-Studies, April 18, 2008. www.massviolence.org/Towarda-Theory-of-Critical-Genocide-Studies. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Novic, Elisa. “Physical-Biological or Socio-Cultural ‘destruction’ in Genocide? Unraveling the Legal Underpinnings of Conflicting Interpretations.” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 1 (2015): 63–82. Osiel, Mark. Making Sense of Mass Atrocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Polman, Linda. The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? New York: Picador, 2011. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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Shaw, Martin. What Is Genocide? Malden: Polity, 2007. Short, Damien. Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. London: Zed Books, 2016. Smail, Daniel L. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Straus, Scott. “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 349–75. Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Volkan, Vamik D. “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity.” Group Analysis 34, no. 1 (2001): 79–97. von Clausewitz, Carl. On War, Edited by Anatol Rapoport. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Wise, Louise E. “Social Death and the Loss of a ‘World’: An Anatomy of Genocide in Sudan.” The International Journal of Human Rights Vol. 21, no. 7 (2017): 1–28. Woolford, Andrew. “Nodal Repair and Networks of Destruction: Residential Schools, Colonial Genocide, and Redress in Canada.” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 65–81.

4

The violent management of peace and beauty in Rio de Janeiro Francine Rossone de Paula

Introduction Rio de Janeiro, branded and sold as the “marvelous city” to the visitors, is experienced in very different ways depending not only on where one is standing, but also on the particular relationship to place one embodies. As David Harvey explains, “over and beyond the mere act of identification, the assignment of place within a socio-spatial structure indicates distinctive roles, capacities for action, and access to power within the social order.”1 Urban planning and the question of what kind of city is desired are always profoundly connected not only to the question of the kinds of landscapes, buildings, and structures that will be part of the city, but also and mainly to the question of the bodies and the movements that will shape these landscapes. In other words, it is a matter of the “forms of life” that will be desired and allowed into those representations of ideal urban spaces.2 As social order becomes a condition for the thriving and reproduction of particular social lives and representations, “struggles over the meaning and manner of such representations of place and identity abound.”3 Social order is guaranteed through a complex range of practices invested in the management and the right occupation of particular spaces. Since multiplicity and heterogeneity depend on a recognition, or perception, of spatiality,4 it is at the level of space that many policies are articulated with one’s perception of what counts as “sameness” or “difference,” enabling particular assignments of roles and subjectivities with regards to the materiality of places in the city. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the relevance of an aesthetic and affective exploration of the relationship between life (or death) and urban landscapes. I also articulate the concept of urbicide as defining not only the destruction of buildings and places in the city, but also the rejection of particular forms and expressions of life. In the following sections, I analyze the violent management of beauty and peace in relation to two different policies: first, the removal, and second, the pacification of favelas in Rio de Janeiro.5 Instead of being contradictory, I argue that forced eviction and the destruction of favelas on the one end, and the militarization of those territories on the other, are inserted within

The violent management of peace and beauty 69 a larger movement of exclusion of the stigmatized and racialized poor from the urban landscape. In the history of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the representation of the poor as ugly, dirty, smelly, or dangerous has been articulated in discourses that have constituted them and their modes of life and habitation into a threat to the city, or a threat to the continuing reproduction of desired social life. The destruction or occupation of these “dangerous” and “repulsive” places is thus justified through a process that dehumanizes and renders invisible the living body who inhabits those places, whose killing is not punished, and whose disappearance or death does not take the form of an event that could be celebrated or mourned.6 In the last section, I discuss the concept of beauty as a potentially dangerous signifier when it is coupled with concepts of order and peace to justify policies of exclusion and destruction of particular places. In the conclusion, I argue for a reimagination and resignification of both peace and beauty as conditions for the recognition of life in favelas.

Making sense of life The word aistheta in Greek, broadly defined, refers to that which can be perceived by the senses.7 Aesthetics, in turn, has been traditionally associated with art, beauty, and form. When we “do” aesthetics, in the classical sense, as James Porter suggests: we are supposed to be doing a particular thing or a set of particular things: looking at a painting, listening to music, enjoying a landscape […], or, more generally, interpreting an artifact, but in a particular way, say, by an ending to its form, its formal or sensuous properties, or its emotional impact.8 Debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics have dealt with a number of themes that are not exclusively related to art, but often end up being acknowledged when framed by a limiting set of issues concerning visual and aural perception, questions of beauty and taste, and matters of emotion and meaning.9 Expectations and assumptions about what it means to “do” aesthetics, for Porter, “not only constrain the boundaries of aesthetics but also constrain and impoverish the language of aesthetic description itself.”10 Instead, one could understand aesthetics as a condition for “meaning making in relation to the world and to life as it is lived.”11 Accordingly: beauty and other aesthetic values are [seen as] derivative from pleasures we take in the world, not in art objects per se […]. Aesthetic values describe, or reference, “forms of life” and not just forms of fiction or art.12 As Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster explain, any “experimental style of reasoning has its own sensorial experiences,”13 with imagination

70 Francine Rossone de Paula itself defined as a process of linking “perception achieved through the senses with forms of understanding.”14 We do not make sense of reality by simply reasoning about it, but by translating our perceptions through our senses, and vice versa. For Sara Ahmed, the perception of something as harmful or beneficial depends upon how one is affected by it. But “whether something is beneficial or harmful involves thought and evaluation, at the same time that it is ‘felt’ by the body.”15 Hannah Arendt argues that “appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.”16 She adds that “the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all.”17 Thus, “whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream.”18 While the experience of reality is always filtered by our perceptions, our social and cultural environments condition what we see and how we look at the world we live in. This means that “aesthetics is not just about subjective judgment but also pertains to the social as the senses can be mobilized for governmental purposes.”19 On this notion of sensible experience as social experience, José Carlos Rodrigues reminds us that our aesthetic senses, our reactions to the “other,” and many other habits of perception and judgments that become so familiar and natural to our eyes are, in fact, deeply embedded social constructs. Rodrigues writes: our aesthetic senses, our reactions to violence, our feelings of fear, our ways of taking care of health, our concerns with hygiene, with time, […] did not always exist and they have behind them a rich past in details and varieties. The past is not only in the past: it constitutes our sensibilities and continues […] to be present.20 Different mechanisms have been historically mobilized in the reproduction and naturalization of habits and perceptions. In relation to Western European social and political formations, Achille Mbembe lists the “subjugation of the body, health regulations, social Darwinism, eugenics, medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race,”21 some of which are obviously embedded in the constitution and distribution of sensibilities legitimizing policies that target the racialized poor populations of Rio de Janeiro in the name of eradicating what has been represented as a threat to life (a blurred combination of poverty, filthiness, disease, disorder, criminality, and lack of discipline). These bodies become superfluous to an established order, and to be superfluous, in this case, can often mean not to belong to the world at all.22 Peg Birmingham reminds us that “banality” has the same root as abandon: bannum.23 For Arendt, “something was said to be banal when it was no longer under the jurisdiction of the lord, but instead abandoned, given over to the use of the entire community. Banality is the condition of humanity who has been forsaken, banished.”24 For Giorgio Agamben, “he who has been banned is not […] simply set outside the law and made

The violent management of peace and beauty 71 indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it.”25 It is in this uncertain position at the threshold of which life and law become indistinguishable that many favela residents find themselves in Rio. By looking closely at the processes through which territories and populations have been transformed into an inconvenience to social order, “we might wonder if there’s anything self-evident about either beauty or form.”26 The apparent cohesion of certain representations of beautiful urban landscapes, for instance, demands the persistent management of appearances, and consequently the continual disposal of bodies and places that exceed and disturb given representations. Urbicide, the eradication or the killing of places, and the abandonment of bodies that do not fit on the map become intrinsically related elements in processes of embellishing and securing the city for the sake of those bodies whose lives are judged to be more valuable. As Martin Coward suggests, “what is at stake in ‘urbicide’— the destruction of buildings which establish common/shared spaces in which plural communities live their lives—is thus the destruction of the conditions of possibility of heterogeneity.”27 Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena define “urbicide” as being mainly about the annihilation of particular forms of social life.28 In the next sections, I explore different policies and strategies geared towards urbicide, or the annihilation of parts of Rio de Janeiro, that have involved targeting specific social bodies and have depended on legitimizing discourses of fear as well as mobilizing certain aesthetic preferences.

The reproduction of social life in Rio de Janeiro In an interview to G1,29 a popular online newspaper in Brazil, the former governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio Cabral, defended abortion as a legitimate way to deal with the crisis of public order. Cabral cited a study by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner from their book Freaknomics to argue that poor women should have the right to interrupt pregnancy. We may infer from Cabral’s statements that the problem for him lies not in the undesirable reproduction of life, but more specifically in the reproduction of undesirable life. He argued that the amount of children women are having in Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Tijuca, Méier, and Copacabana (neighborhoods in Rio) could be compared to Swedish standards of reproduction of human life. But if we look at the number of children women are having in the favelas, standards would be then more comparable to Zambia’s. Cabral explicitly referred to women in the favelas as factories of marginais (marginals) that could overstretch the capacities of the State if not handled properly. In Portuguese, the word marginal (plural marginais) has a double meaning. While it is applied to designate the peripheral position of an object or subject, it is also pejoratively used to refer to subjects whose existence and/or conduct are placed outside the limits of a legal framework. Marginal and criminal, in this sense, are often used interchangeably, as Cabral’s words elucidate. Those

72 Francine Rossone de Paula living at the margins are dealt with as if they were embodied representations of potential disorder and chaos. More often than not, they are pointed out as threats to (a certain way of) life or as people whose lives are not properly lived. The marginais are at once abandoned by the law and exposed to death in a process of inclusive exclusion (as Agamben would have it)30 through which poverty becomes increasingly criminalized.31 In the history of Rio de Janeiro, the racialized poor have continuously been targeted by hygienist policies, urbanization projects, and peacemaking agendas. What these initiatives have in common is the transformation of particular groups and places into a problem against life and security that needs to be solved, erased, annihilated, destroyed, eradicated, and/or pacified. By the end of the nineteenth century, the urban population in Rio de Janeiro almost doubled within the span of a few years, reaching 556,000 people in 1890.32 In 1869, there were about 649 community houses (cortiços) with 9,641 rooms occupied by 21,929 people. About two decades later, in 1888, the number of cortiços reached 1,331, with 18,966 rooms shared by 46,680 people.33 Those community houses and buildings that received an increasing number of people from the lower-income classes in the central area of Rio started to be blamed for the looming death of the city. By 1880, outbreaks of different contagious diseases had killed more than 10,000 people.34 Hygienic policies then helped to disseminate the notion that “pushing the bodies away,” that is to say, removing the poor populations from the central area of the city, was the solution.35 Jaime Benchimol explains that the field of social medicine diagnosed “urban disorder” as the cause “for the degeneration of the physical and moral health of the population.”36 According to him, besides the natural causes related to the topography and climate conditions of the city, the main target of these specialists was collective housing, defined by them as a system and place where a “multitude of poor people agglomerated in the central area of Rio de Janeiro.”37 The problem was not about individual bodies necessarily, but about the sick “social body.” As Michel Foucault indicated, by the middle of the eighteenth century, “one of the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed” was “focused on the species-body, the body (…) serving as the basis of biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.”38 In the context of Rio, the authority for diagnoses and prescriptions was conferred to the field of “social medicine” that located the causes of the epidemics and deaths not in the human body per se, but in the environment both surrounding the poor and supposedly created by them.39 Besides detecting the disease as having originated from certain dysfunctional social bodies inhabiting the city, the “specialists” (physicians, social scientists, and others concerned with the links between medicine, society, and public health) organized themselves politically to impose appropriate measures in order to change the insalubrious situation of Rio,40 a city popularly known amongst

The violent management of peace and beauty 73 foreigners at the time as the “city of death.”41 Eradicating the poor was treated as a necessary crusade for the salvation of the city, as expressed by Agostinho Lima in 1886: One should no longer defer the realization of the crusade […] against this terrible pest denominated cortiços—that ostensibly and surreptitiously still infest this city. [Cortiços] deserve this designation for the agglomeration of people, the heterogeneous quality of the residents and their visitors, [and] the habitual disorder that reigns besides all the filth.42 As a result of this crusade against the “proliferation” of the poor in the central areas of Rio, the local authorities established the first major urban reform in the city. The then mayor Pereira Passos ordered the destruction of the cortiços located downtown, resulting in one of the greatest urbicides perpetrated in the name of preserving the health of the city. The period from 1903 to 1906, known as “bota-abaixo” (“knock it down”), “meant to transform the old colonial city in a Parisian-like modern capital.”43 The State subsidized the construction of workers’ villages as alternative “hygienic housing” for the population removed from the cortiços. However, many people could not afford the costs of living in these villages, particularly because they were often too far from where they worked or were looking for jobs. As a result, the urban poor started to occupy the hills of the city, and favelas emerged as a solution to the “housing problem.”44 Part of the population who had to leave the cortiços started to occupy what is now known as Morro da Providência, one of the areas that would later, in the 1960s, be targeted by a policy aiming at the eradication of favelas inaugurated by the governor of the state of Guanabara, Carlos Lacerda.45 The complete or partial eradication of parts of the city in the name of improvement or embellishment continued to happen throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Places and populations kept being pushed out of sight, considered ugly and/or too dangerous for the desired social order.

Favelas do not fit on the map Mario Brum highlights the fact that the issue of eradication of favelas has periodically come back in political debates and agendas, becoming stronger and more appealing during political campaigns or in periods of declared urban crisis. Often, the blame for the problems faced by the city, such as violence and insecurity, is attributed to these marginalized communities.46 From 1950 to 1960, the number of residents in favelas increased from about 170,000 to 335,000, and similar to what happened at the beginning of the twentieth century with cortiços, favelas started to be described as “infestation[s] that [were] growing out of control.”47 Spatial segregation policies in 1960 led to the forced eviction of many residents from favelas located next to some of the richer neighborhoods and to their relocation in

74 Francine Rossone de Paula previously uninhabited zones at the periphery of the city.48 In the popular newspaper Jornal do Brasil, an article published on January 15, 1966, titled Vitrina da Miséria (“misery’s showcase”), emphatically defended the need for the “extinction” of these communities: We have reached a point in which there is no other problem so urgent to be solved than the favelas […]. The extinction of favelas justify the suspension of all the other urban “upgrading/embellishment” programs in the city, because there is no better way to […] improve [the city] than the elimination of the brutal and unfair contrast between favelas on the one side and the [beautiful] landscape on the other.49 Government efforts in the 1960s to relocate the poor from the most “noble, beautiful, and richer” areas of the city of Rio to the periphery mostly failed. The declared goal of regenerating the poor by offering them a new and more appropriate place where they could be taken out of the precarious condition they lived in was not achieved. Residents of many favelas were very resistant to the idea of being relocated and did not easily accept these programs.50 For the authorities of Rio de Janeiro, improving the poor’s conditions of living in their own space was still not a viable option because the predominant thought was that, in favelas, “it [was] all doomed.”51 In 1968, Gilberto Coufal, the first coordinator of CHISAM (Coordination of Housing and Social Interest of the Metropolitan Area), claimed that a research conducted by social workers and sociologists concluded that “the urbanization of favelas was not psychologically promising, because favelados continue to think, act, and live as favelados … the son of that man who used to live in a favela will grow up mentally a favelado.”52 Since favelado is described not as a position but as a defining condition of a certain social group, the solution could not simply be to turn to beautification or improvement of the poor’s environment. Instead, favelados had to go through a more profound process of integration. The following goals were clearly expressed by CHISAM in 1971: Our goal is the economic, social, moral, and hygienic recovery of families in favelas. We also aim at the transformation of the families in favelas, from a condition of invader of alien property—with all the characteristics of marginalization (criminalization) and insecurity that surround it—to owners of their own place. As a consequence, one could achieve the total integration of these families into the community (city), mainly in relation to the forms of habitation, and of thinking, and living.53 Before it could achieve its proposed goals, CHISAM was dissolved in 1973. During its short existence, CHISAM participated actively in the removal of more than 175,000 residents of 62 favelas, relocating them in villages in the northern and western parts of the larger metropolitan area of Rio.54 In the 1980s, the property market expanded towards the west, one of the regions favela residents had

The violent management of peace and beauty 75 been sent to. As this urban expansion took place, favelados would once again become an inconvenience, particularly as the demand for land increased in the area of Barra da Tijuca.55 Even after repeated attempts at eradicating favelas, mixed with a few policies directed towards the integration of these communities through urbanization, the population in Rio’s favelas comprised 1.4 million people by 2010, or 22.2% of the entire population of the city.56 With the selection of Brazil as the host of the FIFA World Cup in 2014, and of Rio de Janeiro as the host of the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016, “public security” became a major concern to those who had to present the city as an attractive and safe place for investors and visitors. In this context, conversations about favelas started to be driven by a discourse of pacification and beautification. In preparation for the mega sports events in Rio, favelas re-emerged as a problem of public order in political debates.57 These communities were once again “stigmatized as loci of urban violence even when they experience urbanization, legalization, and securitization processes.”58 Represented as spaces of “lack” (spaces “lacking sanitation, education, security, order, etc.”),59 favelas could be seen as banned spaces or as social bodies abandoned at the “threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.”60 To this day, many favelas do not fully belong on the map of the city. In many cases, they are officially off public services maps since, in many favelas, there are no formal addresses with zip codes or numbered housing units. In December 2009, the City House announced a list of 119 favelas that would be partially or totally demolished by 2012.61 During the campaign for the 2016 Olympics, the official branding “marvelous city” would further be based on the image of “a fertile, productive” city for investors and businesses.62 This branding campaign strengthened the symbolic connection between state action and the removal from sight of any population (along with their places) that could stain the image of a wonderful and attractive city for investment and tourism. Intervention in the urban map was once again aimed at the elimination of those who are seen as a threat to the life and value of the city of Rio.63 This process was once again conducted by “specialists” and defined in highly technical terms to guarantee “the restoration of a threatened order, the reestablishment of broken harmonies, the reparation of dysfunctions, and the elaboration of solutions.”64 In 2013, it was estimated that more than 170,000 families had their housing rights violated in preparation for the World Cup of 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016.65 When criticized by residents for the unfairness of forced evictions, some public officers working directly with people removed from their houses responded to the complaints by appealing to arguments related to the residents’ cognitive capacity.66 Those living in favelas were again morally disqualified and treated as cognitively disabled, as people who do not know how to talk or communicate their discontent.67 Some officers also defended themselves from complaints by appealing to the illegality of the housing situation in favelas and claiming that people there do not have any rights

76 Francine Rossone de Paula since they do not officially own their land. The residents of these territories remained invisible and unintelligible to the state. Even though some communities successfully stopped evictions, many of these places ended up being demolished or occupied by the State without their consent and against their will. Acts of mapping, designing, and destroying spaces and places have profound effects on the lives of the people who end up being considered an inconvenience to the realization of the perfect representation of the city. Maurício Magalhães accompanied the removal of people from their homes in several favelas,68 and he witnessed representatives of the State proceeding with demolitions despite the resistance of individuals who refused to leave their communities. When they turned off electricity and water, a resident shared in a meeting with the Public Ministry that she was really intrigued by the fact that the City was treating them as if they had already left.69 This example illustrates the vulnerable condition of homines sacri, of those who are neither inside nor outside the legal order, but rather abandoned by it and always at the mercy of chance.70 In addition to the stereotypes associated with irrationality, the informality and illegality attributed to favela residents often prevent their recognition as subjects in the public sphere. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, “for any map to ‘make sense’, some areas of the city must be left out as senseless […]. Cutting out such places allows the rest to shine and bristle with meaning.”71 To the extent that a particular narrative about favelas as “places of absence” becomes a significant component in different agendas and practices geared towards the containment of life within “noble urban places,” those inhabiting these “places of absence” remain largely invisible, deprived of any political presence, and yet potentially also an all too visible and disturbing threat to the urban order when they dare to appear as “real.”

Beautification and securitization The beautification and securitization of Rio de Janeiro are two sides of a larger narrative about adding “value” to the city, transforming it into an attractive site, both for investors and tourists. In the process, thousands of people whose presence starts to be defined as a threat to an ideal image of the city are “removed,” and their places are wiped off the map. However, given the impossibility of removing the totality of the stigmatized poor populations and favelas from the city, the occupation and the militarization of favelas can be seen as complementary policies of the ban. As Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates in Tristes Tropiques, two well-known strategies for dealing with the other’s otherness have been: removal and displacement (anthropoemia); absorption and assimilation (anthropophagia). While in anthropoemia (from the Greek emein, to vomit) the other is neutralized by way of rejection, distancing, and isolation, through the anthropophagic option, the other is neutralized by way of ingestion and integration.72

The violent management of peace and beauty 77 Pacification, the term used to designate processes of occupation and integration of favelas into the urban map, has implied the conquest, the “docilization,” and the “normalization” of what is seen as rogue (or “bestialized”) territories and populations that are considered threatening to the flourishing of privileged spaces and bodies secured by “public order.” Foucault explains that “the disciplining, the optimization of the population’s capabilities, the extortion of its forces, [and] the parallel increase of its usefulness and docility” are all efforts geared towards the integration of bodies and populations into systems of efficient and economic controls.73 In this context, “it is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility.”74 Pacification becomes another element within a continuum of apparatuses (military, administrative, medical, etc.) whose functions are mainly disciplinary and regulatory. The pacification of favelas in Rio started on December 19, 2008, around the time the city was selected to host the FIFA World Cup (October 30, 2007) and the Olympics (October 2, 2009). The first Pacifying Police Unit (Unidade de Policia Pacificadora, or UPP) was established in favela Santa Marta by the Security Department of the State of Rio de Janeiro, supported and funded by the Federal government, the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro, and the private sector.75 Sebastian Saborio writes that: each pacification starts with the arrival of the Special Police Operations Squad, otherwise known as “BOPE,” supported by the military naval and air forces, and finishes with the implementation of the UPP, which ensures the constant, pervasive presence of the Military Police within the communities.76 The UPP project was officially presented as a “new model of public security” characterized by proximity between the population and the police. However, many scholars have pointed out the limitations of and challenges to this classification.77 According to Saborio, UPPs fail to meet most criteria needed for it to be an actual project designed to achieve greater proximity with the local population, and in particular in the area of “developing strong relationships with the community, ongoing consultation, dealing with concrete security issues and being proactive rather than reactive.”78 The Municipality’s Strategic Plan for 2009–2012, called Towards 2016: A More Integrated and Competitive Rio, focused on recovering urban sites that had been ghettoized.79 The exclusion of favelas from projects aimed at finding creative solutions to social problems and the abandonment of Brazilian favelados as fully involved citizens have been preconditions for these interventions designed as “territorial occupations,” with the goal of “pacifying” what is deemed to be a chaotic and uncivilized group of people. As Magalhães notes, the interventions have

78 Francine Rossone de Paula been guided by “an understanding of the need to manage ‘emergencies.’”80 It has not been framed through democratic process, with protocols, deliberations, and negotiations. Instead, occupation has been the result of treating these territories as exceptions to the domestic and legal order. To legitimize the militarization of civilian territories, favelas have been portrayed as sites of enmity, particularly in the context of the rhetoric about a “war on drugs.” At this rhetorical level, the criminalization of favela-dwellers becomes another precondition for the intervention, given the need to mobilize public opinion in acceptance of the state’s repression of both the “working and underclass” in these communities.81 The way the “war on drugs” or the crusade against the disorder and insecurity associated with lower-income classes has been framed pushes the criminalized subjects, the poor people, to the margins of legality. On October 16, 2017, president Michel Temer sanctioned bill 13.491/2017,82 a bill that transferred the judgment of military personnel deployed in civil operations to the military justice system. This means that the conduct of the national armed forces participating in missions for the “guarantee of law and order” throughout the Brazilian territory, something that has happened frequently in Rio de Janeiro in the last few years, will no longer be judged by civilian courts, but rather according to the military justice system, particularly in cases of crimes committed by authorities against the local population in the course of these missions. Unless we examine local channels of communication periodically updated by favela-dwellers themselves and other on-the-ground organizations and civil rights movements, violent deaths in these spaces are often defined as collateral damage. The stigmatized poor’s status as a “threat,” or a life that can be killed, illustrates some of the ways in which many mechanisms operate in the creation of death-worlds and are implicated in the production of “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”83 The operationalization of necrogeopolitics, as has been exposed in this chapter, is thus not solely at the hands of the sovereign, but is rather a process that has involved a complex and sometimes fragmented production and dissemination of knowledge about the inconvenient and disposable “other.” Urbanization and pacification invoke the notion that “improved” forms of life can be organized and promoted in favelas. However, investment in the control of biological life and, more broadly, modes of life, is invariably met with resistance from so-called “dangerous classes and lives” that cannot be molded in a desired way or disciplined. In some cases, according to proponents of urbanization, beautification, and pacification, the only option for those living in these spaces is to be left to die. Tied to a “culture of fear that legitimizes the historical control of peoples [and places associated with them] for the sake of purity,” Desirée Poets adds that Brazil’s “internal ‘Others’ are rooted in the country’s

The violent management of peace and beauty 79 colonial history, which has naturalized a global racial order that has dichotomized humans and non-humans.”84 The acceptance of the collateral effects of invasion and occupation of favelas, in practice, is connected to an acceptance of eradications and executions for some (for example, the death penalty for the nation’s enemies such as drug traffickers, factions, and quadrilhas)85 and an acquiescence of accidental or collateral deaths that all come as the unfortunate costs of peace, beauty, and order.

Conclusion: the democratization of beautiful forms of life In the context of this study, concepts like urban planning, urban reform, or the securitization of urban spaces are intrinsically related to processes whereby people and places are condemned as undesirable and disposable. Stigmatization has taught some people that certain representations are set in place much before they publicly appear in certain spaces, as their lives are always filtered by discriminatory and punitive modes of perception. Policies targeting certain places in the city, such as cortiços or favelas, are geared towards particular embodied forms of life that are deemed to be threats to the ideals of beautiful and productive life in the “marvelous city.” Thus, some bodies and places are not allowed to “appear” or can never be acknowledged as real. For this reason, the analysis in this chapter has connected the notion of urbicide, the total or partial destruction of the city, to the destruction of spaces of heterogeneity, and to the annihilation of encounters and relationships that are not commodified and packaged as “valuable” or “productive.” Perhaps we need to resist the “tendency […] to start with the premise that beauty is a known or knowable entity.”86 Beauty and order are concepts that are frequently mobilized together by politics and policies as naturally or obviously desirable conditions of life. The marvelous in “marvelous city” is the product of the supposedly innate power of beauty, which should start to be challenged by way of a resignification of or a critical reflection on our aesthetic preferences, something that could be done once we accept that the way we are able to perceive beauty “depends on historical accidents but nothing more.”87 In order to challenge the authority of particular forms of power over heterogeneity, processes through which urban spaces are transformed, embellished, or improved (thus, affecting the conditions of existence of a great portion of the population) need to be examined in combination with a critical exploration of the ways images of desirable order, beauty, and the self are produced, distributed, and often “marketed.” The brand “marvelous city” mobilizes our aesthetic sensibilities, but it is a representation that involves the violent management of “appearances.” Reimagining the city requires one to open one’s gaze in order to see what has always been here, in spaces and places that have never been empty.

80 Francine Rossone de Paula

Notes 1 David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imaginations,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 419. 2 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012). 3 Harvey, “Between Space and Time,” 419. 4 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 11. 5 Pacification is the term used for recent military interventions in favelas that aim at conquering back territories that have long been controlled by gangs and armed groups. 6 Since they are not apprehended as living, these bodies cannot be injured or lost. On grievability as a condition for separating life that is intelligible as life from life that cannot be recognized, and thus cannot matter, see Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), 13–15. On the unpunishability of the killing and the ban of these invisible bodies, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 73. 7 Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 34. 8 James Porter, “Beauty, Value, and the Aesthetics of Life in Kant and Aristotle,” Republic of Letters 5, no. 1 (2017): 1. 9 Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, “Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics,” Global Society 24, no. 3, (2010): 300. 10 Porter, “Beauty, Value, and the Aesthetics,” 2. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, The Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (London: Routledge, 2011), 89. 14 Aradau and Munster, The Politics of Catastrophe, 89. 15 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 6. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50. 17 Ibid., 199. 18 Ibid., 199. 19 Aradau and Munster, The Politics of Catastrophe, 87. 20 José Carlos Rodrigues, O corpo na história (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 1999), 116. 21 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 23. 22 Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 475. 23 Peg Birmingham, “Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 88. 24 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. 25 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, 28. 26 Porter, “Beauty, Value, and the Aesthetics,” 5. 27 Martin Coward, “Urbicide in Bosnia.” in Cities, War, and Terrorism, ed. Stephen Graham (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 166. 28 Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, “Colonization and the New Imperialism: On the Meaning of Urbicide Today,” Theory and Event 10, no. 2 (2007). 29 Aluizio Freire, “Cabral defende abordo contra violência no Rio de Janeiro,” Globo, accessed October 9, 2017, http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Politica/0, MUL155710-5601,00-CABRAL+DEFENDE+ABORTO+CONTRA+VIOLEN CIA+NO+RIO+DE+JANEIRO.html

The violent management of peace and beauty 81 30 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 31 Marielle Franco, “UPP – A Redução da Favela a três letras: Uma análise da Política de Segurança Pública do Estado do Rio de Janeiro” (master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2014), 16. 32 Jaime L. Benchimol, Pereira Passos: um Haussmann tropical. A renovação urbana da cidade do Rio de Janeiro no inicio do século XX (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, Turismo e Esportes, Departamento de Documentação e Informação Cultural, 1990), 178. 33 Margareth Rago, Do Cabaré ao Lar: a utopia da cidade disciplinar – Brasil 1890–1930 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985), 166. 34 Benchimol, Pereira Passos, 179. 35 Gisele Machado, “A difusão do pensamento higienista na cidade do Rio de Janeiro e suas consequências espaciais,” Anais do XXVI Simpósio Nacional de História (ANPUH). São Paulo, (2001). 36 Benchimol, Pereiro Passos, 116. 37 Ibid., 116. 38 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139. 39 Benchimol, Pereira Passos, 115. 40 Machado, Pensamento Higienista. 41 “O Rio de Janeiro: vitrine da nação,” Multirio, accessed July 7, 2018, http://mul tirio.rio.rj.gov.br/index.php/estude/historia-do-brasil/rio-de-janeiro/66-o-rio-dejaneiro-como-distrito-federal-vitrine-cartao-postal-e-palco-da-politica-nacional/ 2910-o-rio-de-janeiro-vitrine-da-nacao. 42 Agostinho Lima, “Pareceres sobre os meios de melhorar as condições das habitações destinadas as classes pobres,” Conselho Superior de Saúde Pública (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1886), (my translation). 43 Maurício Abreu, A evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1987). 44 Desirée Poets, “The Securitization of Citizenship in a ‘Segregated City’: a Reflection on Rio’s Pacifying Police Units,” Brazilian Journal of Urban Management 7, no. 2 (2015): 188. 45 Alexandre Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias: A Configuração da Ação Coletiva contra a Remoção de Favelas do Rio de Janeiro,” Dados 60, no. 1 (2017): 231. 46 Mario Brum, “Favelas e remocionismo ontem e hoje: da Ditadura de 1964 aos Grandes Eventos,” O Social em Questão XVI, no. 29 (2013): 180. 47 Brum, “Favelas e remocionismos,” 180. 48 Ibid., 180. 49 Jornal do Brasil, 1966; apud Brum, “Favelas e remocionismos,” 180 (my translation). 50 Brum, “Favelas e remocionismos,” 181. 51 Ibid., 181. 52 Jornal do Brasil, 1971, apud Brum, “Favelas e remocionismos,” 182. 53 CHISAM, Metas alcançadas e novos objetivos do programa (Rio de Janeiro: BNH/Ministério do Interior, 1971 ), 40 (my translation). 54 Janice Perlman, O mito da marginalidade: favelas e política no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1977), 242. 55 Brum, “Favelas e remocionismos,” 190. 56 IBGE, “Dia Nacional da Habitação: Brasil tem 11,4 milhões de pessoas vivendo em favelas,” August 21, 2017, accessed March 1, 2018, https://agenciadenoticias. ibge.gov.br/2012-agencia-de-noticias/noticias/15700-dados-do-censo-2010-mos tram-11-4-milhoes-de-pessoas-vivendo-em-favelas.html 57 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 209.

82 Francine Rossone de Paula 58 Sebastian Saborio, “The Pacification of the Favelas: Mega Events, Global Competitiveness, and the Neutralization of Marginality,” Socialist Studies/Études socialistes 9, no. 2 (2013): 139. 59 Poets, “The Securitization of Citizenship,” 189. 60 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 28. 61 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 209. 62 Saborio, “The Pacification of the Favelas,” 136. 63 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 231. 64 Vera Telles, A Cidade nas Fronteiras do Legal e Ilegal (Belo Horizonte: Argvmentvm, 2010), 157. 65 Saborio, “The Pacification of the Favelas,” 137. 66 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 221–222. 67 Ibid., 223. 68 Magalhães has visited over 30 favelas in Rio de Janeiro from 2009 to 2012. He experienced more closely the forced evictions in the favelas Metrô-Mangueira, Vila das Torres, Campinho, Parque Colúmbia (North zone), Estradinha-Tabajaras (South zone), Vila Recreio II, Vila Harmonia, and Vila Autódromo (West zone). 69 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 223. 70 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 86. 71 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 104. 72 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1961), 386. 73 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 74 Ibid., 144. 75 Saborio, “The pacification of the favelas,” 131. 76 Ibid., 131. 77 Antonio Barbosa, “Considerações introdutórias sobre territorialidade e mercado na conformação das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora no Rio de Janeiro,” Revista Brasileira de Segurança Pública 6 (2012); Ignácio Cano, Os donos do morro: Uma avaliação exploratória do impacto das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: LAV/UERJ and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2012); Sonia Fleury, “Militarização do social como estratégia de integração: o caso da UPP do Santa Marta,” Sociologias 14 (2012); Luiz Machado, “A Política na Pacificação dos Territórios Populares. Qual é a das UPPs?” Observatório das Metrópoles, March 13, (2010), http://observatoriodasmetropoles.net.br /wp/politica-na-pacificacao-dos-territorios-populares-qual-e-das-upps/ 78 Saborio, “The Pacification of the Favelas,” 132. 79 Ibid., 136. 80 Magalhães, “Críticas e Denúncias,” 210. 81 Saborio, “The pacification of the favelas,” 132. 82 “Lei N. 13.491,” Casa Civil: Subchefia para Assuntos Jurídicos, October 13, 2017, www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2015-2018/2017/Lei/L13491.htm 83 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 40. 84 Poets, “The Securitization of Citizenship,” 185. 85 Ibid., 184. 86 Porter, “Beauty, Value, and the Aesthetics,” 5. 87 Ibid., 4.

Bibliography Abreu, Maurício. A evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1987. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

The violent management of peace and beauty 83 Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Aradau, Claudia and Rens van Munster. The Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. London: Routledge, 2011. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barbosa, Antonio R. “Considerações introdutórias sobre territorialidade e mercado na conformação das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora no Rio de Janeiro.” Revista Brasileira de Segurança Pública 6 (2012): 256–265. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. London: Verso, 2009. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Benchimol, Jaime L. Pereira Passos: um Haussmann tropical. A renovação urbana da cidade do Rio de Janeiro no inicio do século XX. Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, Turismo e Esportes, Departamento de Documentação e Informação Cultural, 1990. Birmingham, Peg. “Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil.” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 80–103. Brum, Mario. “Favelas e remocionismo ontem e hoje: da Ditadura de 1964 aos Grandes Eventos.” O Social em Questão XVI, no. 29 (2013): 179–208. Cano, Ignácio. Os donos do morro: Uma avaliação exploratória do impacto das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: LAV/ UERJ and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2012. CHISAM. Metas alcançadas e novos objetivos do programa. Rio de Janeiro: BNH/ Ministério do Interior, 1971. Coward, Martin. “Urbicide in Bosnia.” In Cities, War, and Terrorism, edited by Stephen Graham, 154–171. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Fleury, Sonia. “Militarização do social como estratégia de integração: o caso da UPP do Santa Marta.” Sociologias 14 (2012): 194–222. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Franco, Marielle. “UPP – A Redução da Favela a três letras: Uma análise da Política de Segurança Pública do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.” MA thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2014. Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imaginations.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–434. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Kipfer, Stefan and Goonewardena Kanishka. “Colonization and the New Imperialism: On the Meaning of Urbicide Today.” Theory and Event 10, no. 2 (2007): doi:10.1353/tae.2007.0064. Leslie, Esther. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1961. Lima, Agostinho José de Souza. “Pareceres sobre os meios de melhorar as condições das habitações destinadas as classes pobres.” In Conselho Superior de Saúde Pública. Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1886. Machado, Gisele C. de Almeida. “A difusão do pensamento higienista na cidade do Rio de Janeiro e suas consequências espaciais.” In Anais do XXVI Simpósio Nacional de História (ANPUH), 1–12. São Paulo: Associação Nacional de História, 2001.

84 Francine Rossone de Paula Machado, Luiz. A. “A Política na Pacificação dos Territórios Populares. Qual é a das UPPs?” Observatório das Metrópoles, March 13, 2010, http://observatoriodasmetro poles.net.br/wp/politica-na-pacificacao-dos-territorios-populares-qual-e-das-upps/ Magalhães, Alexandre. “Críticas e Denúncias: A Configuração da Ação Coletiva contra a Remoção de Favelas do Rio de Janeiro.” Dados 60, no. 1 (2017): 209–238. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Moore, Cerwyn and Laura J. Shepherd. “Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics.” Global Society 24, no. 3 (2010): 299–309. Perlman, Janice. O mito da marginalidade: favelas e política no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1977. Poets, Desirée. “The Securitization of Citizenship in a ‘Segregated City’: A reflection on Rio’s Pacifying Police Units.” Brazilian Journal of Urban Management 7, no. 2 (2015): 182–194. Porter, James I. “Beauty, Value, and the Aesthetics of Life in Kant and Aristotle.” Republics of Letters 5, no. 1 (2017): 1–22, http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/beautyvalue-and-aesthetics-life-kant-and-aristotle Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum, 2004. Rago, Margareth. Do Cabaré ao Lar: a utopia da cidade disciplinar – Brasil 1890-1930. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985. Rodrigues, José Carlos. O corpo na história. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 1999. Russo, Antonio P. “Branding Brazilian slums through «freeware» cultural production: the case of Rio de Janeiro.” In International Place Branding Yearbook 2012: Managing Smart Growth and Sustainability, edited by Frank Go and Robert Govers, 174–186. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Saborio, Sebastian. “The Pacification of the Favelas: Mega Events, Global Competitiveness, and the Neutralization of Marginality.” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 9, no. 2 (2013): 130–145. Telles, Vera. A Cidade nas Fronteiras do Legal e Ilegal. Belo Horizonte: Argvmentvm, 2010.

5

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare and the horror of responsibility Gitte du Plessis

Introduction Under the title “Fair and realistic: an immigration policy that unites Denmark,”1 the Danish Social Democrats, long-time workers party and leftist egalitarian beacon, launched their new initiative on how Denmark should approach refugees and migrants in a world where more people than ever are displaced. The initiative declares that Danish welfare is not for everyone, and that equality is a matter of degree. According to the initiative, applications for asylum will not be received on Danish soil, and anyone arriving in Denmark shall be sent to a camp in Northern Africa, where they will stay while their case is being decided. Those who are granted asylum will be “given over” to the UN Refugee Agency to be hosted either in the country of the camp, or in a UN refugee camp elsewhere. Those who are not granted asylum in the camp will be sent back to where they came from. Denmark, meanwhile, will yearly decide on a set amount of quota refugees it is willing to receive through the UN, based on an assessment of how many people can be successfully “integrated” into the Danish welfare state. The positions in this initiative are remarkably similar to the immigration policies pursued by the center-right coalition government currently holding power in Denmark, and they underline an embrace of these sorts of policies by a large part of the Danish left as well. Even commentators in national left-wing newspapers have saluted the Social Democratic party for its new, “realistic” humanism.2 They buy the idea that this new system would end human trafficking across the Mediterranean, and that it is fairer because it helps everyone equally instead of spending most resources on the “affluent” who can make their way to Danish borders. “Realistic humanism,” then, is to offer refugees and migrants to enter a camp instead of risking drowning in the Mediterranean, as if Agamben’s state of exception was a script and not a warning.3 The infrastructures of tracking and capture that this system would require in Denmark and Europe form a fascist story in itself and, not surprisingly, states in Northern Africa have flatly rejected suggestions about asylum seeker camps.4 In conjunction with this hardline approach, the Social Democrats also more sympathetically suggest that the EU and

86 Gitte du Plessis the international community should band together to provide a “historical lift,” inspired by the Marshall plan, especially for Africa and some Middle Eastern states, by investing in infrastructure, education, and state building, and thus dismantling unfair relations between the EU and Africa in terms of taxes, trade, fish quotas, and so on. Finally, Denmark should restructure the aid it provides to double the amount it gives to humanitarian tasks and to vulnerable states by taking away aid from support projects in stable areas and resources spent on receiving refugees in Denmark. In large font “lifted out” of the surrounding text, the Social Democrats make it clear on the very first page of their initiative that these policies are necessary and legitimate because they are the only way to save Denmark, which is a priori a worthy cause. As they put it: “You are not a bad person if you don’t want to see your country fundamentally change. And you are not naïve if you want to help others to a better life.”5 The Nordic welfare states continue to be celebrated for their desirable combination of high levels of wealth, equality, and individual freedom. The much-admired Nordic Model, which produces the happiest populations in the world, consists of a strong welfare state combined with free-market capitalism. To describe the success of this setup, pictures of friendly reindeer and Vikings decorate news articles and journalistic reports in which excited commentators use terms such as “the next supermodel,”6 “northern lights,”7 or “cuddly capitalism.”8 This chapter seeks to nuance this enthusiasm by tracing the necrogeopolitics of the Danish welfare state as a privileged global player. The chapter describes how Danish welfare, reserved for the few, is dependent on suffering and death elsewhere. It shows how Denmark got rich and stays rich by taking advantage of global systems of inequality and exploitation. The chapter begins by introducing Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical concept of the “national Thing” to explain how nationalism is tied to particular fantasies and ways of enjoying. I analyze how the Danish “national Thing” produces and upholds the idea that Danes are entitled to Danish enjoyment, which conceals necrogeopolitical aspects of Danish affluence and legitimates racism. Placing Danish affluence in a global context inserts a call for taking responsibility for the suffering one causes, even from a distance. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limits of liberal universality and the trauma of this responsibility.

The Danish national Thing According to Žižek, nationalism cannot be reduced to symbolic identification. The element holding together a community is a shared relationship toward a “Thing” or toward enjoyment structured by fantasies.9 To Žižek, the social constructivist understanding that a nation is not a biological or historical fact but a social discursive construction misses the point because it overlooks “the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 87 which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency.”10 This Thing appears to be accessible only to people who belong to the community, while others are unable to grasp it even though they are said to constantly disturb it. Asked to explain what “it” is, the answer becomes an empty tautology: the Thing appears as what gives meaning and joy to the lives of people in the community, and it is simply “our way of life.” Nationalism, as it is bound in the national Thing, manifests itself in the way a community sets up festive events, arranges its language, its clothing, or various “national” artifacts, “in short, [in] all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment.”11 The existence of the Thing hinges on members of the community believing in it. More precisely, everyone must believe that everyone else also believes. The Thing “turns on the fact that ‘it means something’ to people.”12 The Danish national Thing has the welfare state at its core. Since the 1950s, the Danish welfare state has been “ideologized” to function as a total horizon for social orientation and political action.13 The welfare state is “one of the Danish community’s crown jewels.”14 Thus, the state is not perceived as the state per se, but as an “us,” a “community of identity.” In this context, we take care of each other; the welfare society is perceived as our narrative, our way of structuring society. This enjoyment does depend on people believing that everyone else also believes in it because the continuation of the welfare state is reliant on everyone working hard, contributing taxes, and only receiving benefits as needed. The “perverted,” and as we shall see “un-Danish,” way of enjoying participation in the welfare state is to lazily exploit it, thus reaping its benefits without doing any work to maintain it. Mainstream Danish history portrays the ideas of Danish national homogeneity and Danish national identity as being heavily focused on equality and solidarity, both of which are said to be historically rooted. From a multicultural kingdom expanding over vast land areas, Denmark was reduced to the mere 44,000 km2 it is today as a result of continuous land losses between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. By 1864, this context meant that the remaining Danish territory had to find a way to fulfill the idealized requirements of a nation-state (or perhaps merely the idealized requirements for an approximation of the perfect national simulacrum), with a complete overlap of state, language, and territory.15 Two main national ideologies were crucial to the task of shaping this very small, coherent country into a nation. One was the “internal front strategy,” whereby different classes had to collaborate to “bolster the defense of the nation by providing for the welfare of the population in ways that would unite it as a people—encouraging a unity that would help the nation resist future geopolitical threats should they arise.”16 These ideas eventually led to the establishment of a strong set of national institutions designed to reduce inequality and class differences.17 The second main ideology was based on

88 Gitte du Plessis the peasantry and inspired by Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), a Christian clergyman, writer, and poet.18 The “Grundtvigian movement” cut across social classes in its impetus toward the importance of individual freedom, classical liberalism, voluntarism, free association, popular education, and the development of civil society and social solidarity.19 Grundtvigian “folk schools” emphasized the teaching of Danish literature and served as key mechanisms for the spread of the Grundtvigian cultural perspective and the development of a Danish national identity. Historian Knud J. V. Jespersen writes: Although in essence the Danish model, which was developed during the twentieth century, is a system of welfare and social security, it is in fact much more than that. It actually permeates the whole of society in all its aspects, from the system of taxation to the way in which the citizens conduct themselves. It would not be an exaggeration to talk of a whole philosophy of life, tightly linked to being Danish and a particular Danish way of doing things.20 This national Danish narrative, of course, takes precedence over other possible narratives. After the 1864 war, Danish historians engaged in an “active and conscious effort in a politics of remembrance,” instigating a new version of history in which Denmark was said to have been a coherent power with a rich national history for centuries.21 Left out of the Danish national narrative with its emphasis on modesty and solidarity was, for example, Danish colonization, and wealth acquisition based on the slave trade and on sugar plantations across the Atlantic Ocean, which was at its height in the second half of the eighteenth century. Denmark sold its colony in the West Indies to the United States as late as 1917. The prevailing Danish notion that the Danish nation is a homogenous people is largely informed by this Grundtvigian legacy, particularly in its embrace of a secular Christianity, which also frames Danish enjoyment for holidays, rituals, and traditions. These are Christian events and celebrations, but they are also performed and enjoyed without any particularly deep-felt sense of spirituality. The Danish conservative folk party, which is part of the current coalition government in Denmark, stresses on its website that: Denmark is, and shall continue to be, a coherent community based on a Christian foundation. It is not enough to merely uphold Danish law, if one wishes to become part of the Danish society. A fundamental understanding of Danish history, culture and language is also necessary. This type of cohesion will in and of itself contribute to creating more mutual understanding and lessen conflicts. […] We cannot accept that foreigners come to this country to take advantage of our welfare system or commit criminal acts.22

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 89 The terms “coherent” and “cohesion” are key. The Danish word “sammenhængskraft,” which is used across the political spectrum to describe an ideal Danish society, directly translates as “cohesion-force,” and it refers to an innate force in Denmark that supposedly keeps the country united. Everything that threatens this cohesion is a threat to the Danish national Thing. The worst threat to Danish cohesion is so-called “parallel-societies,” that is to say, non-Danish groups or even societies within Denmark that may destroy the Danish unity. Ideals of humility and solidarity stretching back to the “internal front strategy” bring “Danish design” into the Danish Thing, as Danish design is linked to a Danish way of life, and it displays Danish exceptionalism as represented in various everyday objects. Minimalist and functionalist design thus becomes part of the national narrative about a population that, after losing large areas of land, turned its energies towards working with and sharing what they had. As one author puts it, “Perhaps this lack of natural resources more than anything else is what has made the Danes a designoriented society? Danish common sense certainly resulted in clean lines of design using natural materials.”23 The ethos that informs Danish architecture, clothing, interior design, and furniture, for example, is characterized by a focus on modesty, simplicity, aesthetics, and functionality. Danish enjoyment is thus linked to putting such minimalism to use in everyday life. How one dresses, what sort of bicycle one rides or what car one drives, or how one decorates one’s home are showcases of one’s Danish way of enjoying. It makes no difference for Danish “coherence” and the Danish national Thing that modestly designed furniture and clothing actually require a privileged financial status, as well as the existence of a global warehouse of outsourced resource extraction, production, and waste.

The racism of Danish freedom fantasies According to Žižek, tensions of racism and xenophobia turn on the possession of the national Thing. As Žižek puts it: We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the “excess” that pertains to this way “the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude to work.”24 In the Danish context, this tension partly revolves around a concept of superior Danish freedom secured precisely by participation in the welfare state. In Denmark, freedom is not freedom unless it is Danish. The welfare state is praised for being a social system that sets people free: free and equal

90 Gitte du Plessis access to health care and to education, a flexible job-market, and free care for the elderly. According to Danish logic, the welfare model creates the security necessary to be free to create the life one wants. As the Social Democrats state, it is “freedom for the individual—created by and in a solidary community.”25 When others do not find this freedom particularly liberating, Danes then may realize that what they unequivocally conceive as freedom-insolidarity is in fact quite selective and very particular. For example, when “others” in Denmark ask for separate swimming lessons for girls, shower curtains in schools, no pork to be served in day care centers or hospitals, circumcision for babies, or the right to wear the burqa or niqāb at work, and further “pressure” public institutions into meeting these requests, some commentators and politicians believe that Danish democracy is under threat, particularly because religious considerations have been put before Danish democratic values. Of course, what is at stake here is not Danish democracy, but rather the Danish national Thing. However, today in Denmark, as the Social Democrats add, there are areas “where freedom does not exist for everyone. Where some are not part of the Danish solidary community.”26 The Social Democrats thus call for a “new freedom fight” against “forced marriage, honor killings, violence, pressure to wear a hijab, re-education journeys, [and] prohibition against joining free-time activities.”27 And then they set the record straight: “Either they become a part of Denmark, with everything that this entails in terms of contributing to society and supporting our fundamental democratic values. Or else they find another place to live that is more in agreement with their values.”28 A recent bill passed by the sitting coalition government, with support from the Social Democrats, now makes it unlawful to cover one’s face in public. The bill asserts that fundamental democratic values do not count if the other does not wish to be “like us,” or be “Danish.” Covering one’s face in public is seen as a threat to Danish cohesion and the Danish way of life: With this bill, the government wishes to make it clear, that it, according to the government, is not compatible with the values and cohesion in the Danish society, or the respect for our community, to hide one’s face in public space. The face is the foundation for recognition between people, just as the face allows for the possibility to read other’s signals and emotions. The face plays a central role in the interaction in our society. If one chooses to cover up, it is the understanding of the government that this is an expression that one does not wish to be part of the Danish society. […] It wears on the cohesion in Denmark and can contribute to creating the setting for parallel societies with their own norms and rules.29 Having to force the other’s “freedom” onto him or her is, of course, a failure of Danish liberal ideals that were supposed to be self-evident and that everyone in their right mind would not want to reject. Making laws that

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 91 prohibit burqa or niqāb becomes an exercise of forced “cultural enlightenment” imposed onto people who are seen as falsely enlightened as a result of their own preferred ideals. The question arises, however, as to whether some people are, in fact, always-already unfit for inclusion, and whether the very production of Danish national identity is premised on the exhortation to “integrate,” while partially denying the possibility of such integration for some. It seems that the Danish national Thing embraces a myth of “successful integration,” but cannot co-exist with it in practice. Integration is presented as progress and emancipation, and will always be suspected of being superficial, imperfect, or simulated.30 As Žižek argues: The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who effectively becomes like us, while retaining its specific features.31 For Danes, it is “unbearable” for people to choose their own ways over the model of Danish freedom that has been offered to them because the Danish way of life is in fact seen as superior to others. Proper participation in the welfare state becomes a “civilizing mission” whereby “they” must learn to partake in a civilized manner in “our” superior way of structuring society. This also means that some people are a larger burden on Denmark than others. As the spokesperson on nationality for Venstre, the liberal-democratic party currently in power in Denmark, wrote in an op-ed: We are already distinguishing between different countries. It is easier to come to Denmark for an Italian than for an Indian. And it is harder for a Somali than a Swede. Now we are expanding the list of countries. The countries have been chosen based on objective and factual criteria. And those are—naturally—neither religion nor skin color. If one is from a country with a high standard of living—broadly speaking—there is a higher chance that one will settle and thrive in Denmark without problems, and there is a smaller risk that one is coming for the wrong reasons.32 Relying on the United Nations Human Development Index, Venstre suggested ranking otherness based on an assumption that people from first world countries would easily be able to integrate into Danish society whereas people from third world countries would not. As Etienne Balibar points out, contemporary racism, especially as it pertains to western European nations, is in part ideologically bound in a mode of complete incompatibility between different cultures, whereby culture functions in a naturalized way akin to biological or genetic naturalism. Thus, it is constantly “locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into

92 Gitte du Plessis a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.”33 Undesired behaviors or even aptitudes are explained by belonging to a certain culture and by an incompatibility between lifestyles and traditions.34 Of course, such explanations hide the fact that this racism is still in essence biologically informed, as are biopolitical rationales regarding who may be saved and who may be killed, sacrificed, or ignored. The fantasy of a homogenous Denmark in idealized Danish history books is, of course, homogenously white, overlooking for example the Inuit population of Greenland. By putting the often palatable idea of cultural differences front and center, racist discourse becomes politically accepted, and an argument about securing cultural diversity can become an argument for maintaining cultural distances and segregation (the primary mode of this sort of segregation is to insist on the presence of different nations).35 Similarly, Žižek describes how a new racism that actually purports to be the opposite of racism legitimizes apartheid as an endeavor to prevent racial tensions.36 He writes: “We don’t want anything foreign, we just want what rightfully belongs to us!”—a reliable sign of racism, since it claims to draw a clear line of distinction where none exists.37 For Žižek, such illusionary lines of distinction persist because both the subject and social reality are constituted by a fundamental lack: neither can ever be complete, and the subject attempts to cover these gaps through different acts of identification. The role of fantasies is to tell us how (and what) to desire, and fantasy further fills in ideological gaps by offering the subject the possibility to envision a way out of the dissatisfaction with social reality.38 Thus, as Adam Cottrel argues, “In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency that appears to fulfill the lack that constitutes social reality.”39 Fantasy operates in such a way that the impossibility of wholeness is transformed into a prohibition or difficulty only, thus leaving the subject with the illusion that the impossibility (primordial loss) can still be transgressed.40 Keeping the desire unfulfilled, the fantasy gives us an explanation for why our full enjoyment is missing: we could enjoy it, if only … Žižek’s main example of an ideological fantasy is the role played by the Jew in the Nazi regime’s narrative: What appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible.41 According to Žižek, what is actually hated is our own inner antagonism, the overlap of lack and excess in the little incomplete tastes of enjoyment we experience. Hating the other’s enjoyment is hating our own excessive, unobtainable enjoyment. In the following excerpt from a column in a conservative national Danish newspaper, the author portrays a very ambivalent attitude toward his own (Danish) enjoyment:

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 93 My own frustration causes me to feel like the veil-women. I only dwell in Denmark because of my high income and the good health care system in line with many immigrants who are only here because of early retirement and sickness leave benefits. As soon as it is possible, I run away on a long weekend or a longer vacation abroad, where the weather is better and prices are lower. My country is turning into a defensive, masochistic amoeba that accepts that everyone exploits it. The only answer seems to be xenophobia, which is as alien to me as Morten Østergaard’s naive and totalitarian acceptance of veils, children’s checks to Romanians and elimination of the Danish language.42 The message here seems to be that others have ruined this person’s belief in the Danish narrative, and thus have destroyed the Danish national Thing, leaving the country as “a defensive, masochistic amoeba that accepts that everyone exploits it.” The current situation makes this Danish commentator unable to enjoy being Danish, and instead forces him to enjoy Denmark in the same, perverse way that the immigrants allegedly do. In this sense, it is the immigrants’ fault that he hates his own enjoyment. In terms of a possible solution, the author feels trapped between xenophobia, a stance he has arguably already adopted, and opening the borders of the nation completely, thus allowing the Danish way of life to be destroyed (something that, however, seems to already have happened for him). Žižek reminds us that this logic of “theft of enjoyment” is not motivated by an immediate social reality about different ethnic communities living together. Rather, it comes from “the inner antagonism inherent in these communities.” He writes: It is too easy to dispose of this problematic by pointing out that what we have here is simply the transposition, the ideological displacement, of the effective socioeconomic antagonisms of today’s capitalism. The problem is that, while this is undoubtedly true, it is precisely through such a displacement that desire is constituted. What we gain by transposing the perception of inherent social antagonisms into the fascination with the Other (Jew, Japanese …) is the fantasy-organization of desire.43 Danish nationalism structures fantasies by organizing a desire for a coherent Danish state free of antagonisms, something that cannot be fulfilled. Žižek calls it “the fascist dream,” which emerges when a community fantasizes about being a capitalist society without any excess or structural imbalance.44 This dream is perhaps what is encapsulated in the Nordic Model: free market capitalism in a homogenous, equal society of free, happy people. The Danish fantasy, then, posits that what is prohibiting the Nordic Model from functioning without friction is the presence of foreign immigrants who do not, cannot, or will not understand and respect the

94 Gitte du Plessis Danish thing, and thus are destroying it. This fantasy covers up the friction that arises from Denmark’s desire to partake as a wealthy core country in the global neoliberal world order while at the same time wanting the nation to be for Danes only.

Denmark in the world Cuddly Danish capitalism is not so cuddly when seen from the perspective of a global structural/axial division of labor. As a core state, Denmark appropriates surplus value from periphery states, and it utilizes its power to ensure that money and goods will flow more freely across borders than labor and people. As Immanuel Wallerstein suggests, the nation becomes a claim for a position of advantage in the capitalist world economy, and the idea of peoplehood “resolves one of the basic contradictions of historical capitalism—its simultaneous thrust for theoretical equality and practical inequality.”45 The view that “the world is in many ways unfair, and Denmark’s immigration politics can’t solve the world’s injustices and poverty problems,”46 along with the Danish refrain “we want equality, but only for us!”, are not only massive relinquishments of responsibility. They also naturalize the affluence of Danish people as something that is inherent to their nationality, and not something that depends on the global division of labor. Only if one insists on viewing Denmark as a closed bubble may it seem as though the Danish model has succeeded in taming capitalism to gain only its benefits. A global perspective that acknowledges the fact that Danish affluence is dependent on cheap labor and resources in other parts of the world would suggest that struggles at the Danish borders are, in fact, class struggles between a Danish bourgeoisie and an unwelcome foreign proletariat that is viewed as a threat to the affluent lifestyles inside the nation. Denmark is not a success because of some internal miracle resulting from its national social system, but rather because it got the long end of the global neoliberal stick as industrialization and globalization catapulted Denmark into the global western elite.47 As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote: The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, […] it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.48

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 95 Marx and Engels disdained the socialist bourgeoisie for silencing the proletariat within society. In the Nordic Model, the desire for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat has been fulfilled by pushing the proletariat, and thus any radical critique or revolutionary elements, out of the nation and out of sight. Marx and Engels viewed socialism as utopic because it would not surpass class antagonisms. The Nordic welfare states could claim to have fulfilled this utopia without the step of having to abandon capitalism. But class antagonisms are not absent from the Nordic Model; they have merely been outsourced. Danish necrogeopolitics is therefore nested in complex assemblages whose causal links are conveniently invisible to many in Denmark. The Danish welfare state is dependent on a global system that includes zones where expendable and sacrificed populations are mundanely being put to death. As one worker in Apple’s Foxconn factory in China says: “It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying. Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”49 Every now and then, some of these deaths have been noticed in Denmark, as was the case with the Danish company Texman that had clothes made in the Rana Plaza factory that collapsed on April 23, 2013, killing 1,138 people.50 But tragedies are quickly forgotten in the news cycles, and exploitation continues. In 2017, for example, it was revealed that the Danish company Bestseller manufactured its clothes in factories in Bangladesh where workers who were advocating for higher pay were thrown in jail with no due process and risked the death penalty as a result. Likewise, garment workers in Cambodia, also in Bestseller factories, have fainted by the hundreds every year due to malnutrition, overheating, and stress.51 Similarly, the narrow perspective on migrants who drown in the Mediterranean overlooks the many deaths that happen long before the shores are reached, in deserts, mountains, and camps out of sight from the European media. As Martin Lemberg-Pedersen notes, pushing the handling of asylum cases to states not in the European core displaces the deaths away from the European gaze. The human trafficking industry is in fact created by a necrogeopolitical unwillingness on the part of European countries to receive asylum seekers and by the subsequent closing of legal flight and migration routes over the last 30 years.52 The Danish immigration system also produces death. In front of passengers in an Air France plane bound for Paris on November 20, 2017, an Algerian man lost consciousness after having been physically coerced for 30 minutes by three Danish police officers. He had been denied asylum and was being deported, and later died in the hospital.53 At the time of the writing of this chapter, the Danish government was still trying to contact the remaining three (out of eight) sick asylum seekers who had been deported, even though this deportation decision was in violation of a ruling by the European Human Rights Council. It is feared that these individuals presently do not have access to the medicine they need.54

96 Gitte du Plessis In a recent speech on the occasion of the Danish national holiday, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (from the Venstre party) explained that he, along with several other European leaders, is not getting any closer in his efforts to devise a new European system to receive asylum seekers based on centers (camps) in Europe itself, and arranged in quid-pro-quo deals with European countries that are not members of the European Union, thus indirectly acknowledging that such centers in North African states are not an option. Such centers would, the Prime Minister assured, be placed “in a country that is not on the list of preferred destinations for migrants or traffickers.”55 In a speech to the parliament in 2018, the Prime Minister expressed his satisfaction that elaborate ratifications of Danish immigration laws resulted in the lowest number of asylum seekers in Denmark in the past nine years.56 What we witness in these Danish immigration policies and other immigration initiatives across the Danish political spectrum is how the world to which the Danish welfare state has outsourced the excessive and destructive elements of capitalism comes back knocking on the Danish front door, as the lives of the proletariat in peripheral countries have become intolerable due to extreme inequality, oil-related conflicts, environmental devastation, and so on. The Danes are thus confronted with their own excess as a result of their borders. Rather than critical self-reflection that could lead to take responsibility, the results of this confrontation with the returning world are more racism and xenophobia, as the national fantasy of a coherent welfare state based on a shared solidarity that is allegedly irreplaceable, precious, but also always threatened is the main framework through which the confrontation is understood.

The trauma of responsibility One obvious critique of nationalism along the lines of what I have argued above would be to denounce nationalism and argue for a universal, shared struggle. Žižek writes: If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into a form of legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred. The conflict over multiculturalism already is a conflict about Leit-kultur: not a conflict between cultures, but a conflict between different visions of how different cultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practices these cultures would have to share. One should thus avoid getting caught in the liberal game of determining how much tolerance we should show the Other […] At this level, of course, we can never be tolerant enough, or else we are always already too tolerant […] The only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants.57 Such a “universal” struggle, however, runs the risk of becoming violent because of its inability to incorporate conceptions of freedom and of meaningful life that

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 97 do not fit the western liberal democratic definition. Similarly, Judith Butler encourages a new, radical form of egalitarianism framed by the term “precariousness” understood as a shared social human condition. Butler asks the left to move beyond multicultural conceptions of different (minority) identities within the framework of a nation-state in order to, instead, focus on state violence against precarious populations: Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense. Such an alliance would not require agreement on all questions of desire or belief or selfidentification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kinds of ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing such persistent and animating differences as the sign and substance of a radical democratic politics.58 Crucially, Butler leaves the door open for maintaining differences and antagonisms, hoping that underneath state-centric cultivated indifferences, we could find a fundamental, shared human condition that still would enable the differences that keep a democracy democratic. Taking a different route from Butler and Žižek, the ethical framework offered by Emmanuel Levinas has denounced universalism in favor of the singularity of each face we encounter, and of the ethical claim that this encounter makes on us. Levinas challenges liberal ideals about freedom and the sovereign subject because, if the sovereignty of the subject is more important than intersubjectivity, competition between subjects, which can turn into war, will become the governing political dynamic.59 In its emphasis on assimilation through shared belief or a shared human nature, liberalism does not remove itself far enough from the logic of war, and, according to Levinas, these internal tensions in the liberal ideals manifest themselves through the ongoing racism that pervades liberal societies.60 Liberalism neglects the ethical because the liberal subject has no room for responsibility as exposure to the other and, as such, liberalism has not sufficiently protected itself against evil, or at least against a cultivated neglect of responsibility.61 For Levinas, the responsibility towards the other always comes before the subject’s own freedom, and such a responsibility is traumatic to a liberal subject whose enjoyment and satisfaction are disrupted by the needs of the other.62 Our responsibility towards others upsets our sense of sovereignty and subjectivity, and it destabilizes our comfortable sense of self-possession, even though we have never really possessed this sovereignty and subjectivity in the first place.63 The immigration initiative of the Danish Social Democrats features only one face: the face of the party leader, Mette Frederiksen, displayed on the front cover of its key documents. This face is telling readers that they are not

98 Gitte du Plessis bad people if they want their country to stay the same. Apart from this, no other face makes any ethical claims on those who read the party’s immigration initiative, and migrants and refugees are reduced to charts and numbers. However, Levinas (and Butler as well, as I suggested above) runs into a problem of ontology. We must be careful not to turn nationalism into an ideological fantasy of its own. Put differently, we cannot presume that the Danes would suddenly care if nationalism were to be removed. Butler’s suggestion that, underneath state-centric cultivated indifferences, we could still find a fundamental, shared human condition presumes that something inherently good about people is in the current context being messed up by “bad things.” But if we could somehow strip away certain cultural constellations and convictions, we could find an unmediated humanity, which would be ontologically defined through a fundamental caring about all others. Likewise, Levinas makes an ethical claim about responsibility towards the other, although his is not anchored in ontology. Humans are fully capable of encountering others and still not responding to any ethical claim whatsoever. Thus, we cannot presume that if we just removed nationalism, everyone would start living up to their ethical responsibilities. What Levinas calls the trauma of responsibility is therefore more aptly a horror of responsibility. It is the horror that, even though we know that the other is suffering and that our privilege is premised on this very suffering, we still have no interest in living up to our ethical responsibility towards the other. As Jairus Grove puts it, moral horror, as opposed to moral tragedy or moral failure, is the “horror of the inhuman as human,” or the fact that “we live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us.”64 Nationalism is a dead end; multiculturalism is a dead end; and universalism is a dead end too because, in the end, Danes just do not care enough. Putting faces of suffering migrants and refugees all over the immigration initiative would not necessarily make readers feel the ethical pull that the initiative itself tries to avoid. It could just as easily make readers uncomfortable by being confronted with others that threaten their way of life. The absence of faces in the initiative itself suggests that an overwhelming visibility and intensity of such faces in Danish media outlets in general elicit insecurity with regards to the Danish national Thing. In her book about enchantment, Jane Bennett writes about “the effect— always indirect—that a cultural narrative has on the ethical sensibility of its bearers.”65 Bennett does not presume than an “ethics of generosity” is ontologically present under the weight of cultural baggage. Instead, the bad has to be replaced with something better: we have to be enchanted by a certain ethical sensibility. The current Danish national Thing is an affective community organized around certain expressions of exclusion, exploitation, and racism. To start living up to its global ethical responsibility, the Danish welfare state needs a different Danish national Thing that is equally inspiring to all its

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 99 participants, but ethically superior. Danish narratives about solidarity-inhomogeneity and about the welfare state as the ultimate liberator are extremely powerful fantasies and modalities of enjoyment. To dismantle and replace them is an overwhelming endeavor.

Notes 1 Socialdemokratiet, Retfærdig og realistisk. En udlændingepolitik der samler Danmark (Copenhagen, 2018). All text from Danish political parties and newspapers has been translated by the author. 2 See, for example, David Trads, “Det er klassisk socialdemokratisme: Mette Frederiksens humanisme er faktisk smuk,” Politiken, December 28, 2017. 3 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4 Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, “Om flygtningeudspillet fra S: Visionen vil indebære, at tusindvis af mennesker indfanges og tvangsdeporteres sydpå hvert år,” Politiken, February 2018. 5 Socialdemokratiet, 5. 6 “Special Report: The Nordic Countries,” The Economist, February 2, 2013. 7 Ibid. 8 Sara Miller Llana and Fabrizio Tassinari, “Nordic Cuddly Capitalism: Utopia, No. But a Global Model for Equity,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2014. 9 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (London: Verso, 1993), 201–237. 10 Ibid., 202. 11 Ibid., 201. 12 Ibid., 202. 13 Jacob Torfing, Velfærdsstatens Ideologisering, Research Papers from the Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, 1999, https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/ publications/velfærdsstatens-ideologisering, accessed July 31, 2018. 14 Lasse Koefoed, Glokale nationalismer: Globalisering, hverdagsliv og fortællinger om dansk identitet (PhD diss., Roskilde University, 2006), 140. 15 See Knud K. V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Uffe Østergaard, “Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992): 3–27; and Ove Korsgaard, The Struggle for the People; Five Hundred Years of Danish History in Short (Copenhagen: Danish School of Education Press, 2008). 16 John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, National Identity and the Varieties of Capitalism: The Danish Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 23. 17 Ibid., 23. 18 Korsgaard, The Struggle, 59. 19 Campbell and Hall, National Identity, 23. 20 Jespersen, A History, 82. 21 Korsgaard, The Struggle, 56. 22 Konservative.dk. Udlændinge og Integration, accessed March 2, 2018, https://kon servative.dk/politik/alle-emner/udlaendinge-og-integrationspolitik/. 23 Thomas Dickson, Dansk Design (London: Murdoch Books, 2008), 31. 24 Žižek, Tarrying, 203. 25 Socialdemokratiet, 29. 26 Ibid., 29.

100 Gitte du Plessis 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Socialdemokratiet, 30. 29 Regeringen, “Forslag til lov om ændring af straffeloven (Tildækningsforbud),” Justitsministeriet (February 6, 2018), 3, accessed July 31, 2018, www.justitsministeriet.dk/ sites/default/files/media/Pressemeddelelser/pdf/2018/lovforslag_tildaekningsforbud.pdf. 30 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 25. 31 Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion,” Lacan.com (2009), accessed July 31, 2018, www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454. 32 Jan E. Jørgensen, “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet,” Berlingske Tidende (August 16, 2014), accessed July 31, 2018, www.b.dk/kronikker/venstre-vil-baadeaabne-og-lukke-landet. 33 Balibar, Race, Nation, 22. 34 Ibid., 22. 35 Balibar, Race, Nation, 22–23. 36 Žižek, Tarrying, 226. 37 Žižek, Tarrying, 204. 38 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 7. 39 Adam Cottrel, “Fantasy,” in The Zˇizˇek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 90. 40 Jason Glynos, “Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter,” Political Studies 56 (2008): 679–704. 41 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), 90. 42 Henrik Day Poulsen, “Er projektet Danmark en fejl?” Berlingske Tidende (March 25, 2014), accessed July 31, 2018, www.b.dk/kommentarer/er-projektetdanmark-en-fejl. Morten Østergaard, mentioned in this quotation, is a politician from a center-left party who is known for the most tolerant politics towards immigrants. Moreover, what is referred to as “children’s checks” here are modes of government subsidy to families with children in Denmark. 43 Žižek, Tarrying, 206. 44 Ibid., 206. 45 Wallerstein, Race, Nation, 84. 46 Jørgensen, Venstre vil bade, www.b.dk/kronikker/venstre-vil-baade-aabne-oglukke-landet. 47 Lars Bo Kaspersen, Danmark i verden (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels forlag, 2008), 168–169. 48 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 81. 49 Cited in Brian Merchant, “Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city,” The Guardian, June 18, 2017. 50 Freja Thorbech, “Modebrand skifter ejer,” Detailfolk.dk (March 14, 2014), accessed March 2, 2018, http://detailfolk.dk/detailnyheder/modebrand_skifter_ejer.html; See also Clean clothes campaign, “Rana Plaza: a man-made disaster that shook the world,” (2013), accessed March 2, 2018, https://cleanclothes.org/ua/2013/rana-plaza. 51 Louise Voller, “Arbejdere hos Bestseller-leverandører I Bangladesh risikerer dødsstraf,” Danwatch (February 16, 2017), accessed March 2, 2018, https://old.dan watch.dk/nyhed/arbejdere-paa-bestseller-fabrikker-i-bangladesh-risikerer-doedsstraf/; Louise Voller and Nikolaj Houmann Mortensen, “Mass faintings afflict the women who sew our clothes,” Danwatch (2017), accessed March 2, 2018, https://danwatch. dk/en/undersoegelse/mass-faintings-afflict-the-women-who-sew-our-clothes. See also The True Cost, directed Andrew Morgan (2015; Los Angeles: Untold Creative, 2015), Documentary film.

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 101 52 Lemberg-Pedersen, “Om flygtningeudspillet fra S.” 53 Ulrik Dahlin, “Politiets magtanvendelse skal undersøges i sag om dødsfald under tvangsudsendelse,” Information, November 25, 2017. 54 Cecilie Lund Kristiansen, Anders Bæksgaard og Carl Emil Arnfred, “Ministerium mangler livstegn fra tre syge personer,” Politiken, February 20, 2018. 55 Ritzau, “Lars Løkke: Et nyt europæisk asylsystem er på vej,” Jyllands-Posten, June 5, 2018. 56 Ritzau, “Løkke om S-udspil: Teltlejre i Nordafrika er postgang for sent,” Fyens Stiftstidende, February 7, 2018. 57 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 415. 58 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2010), 32. 59 Cynthia D. Coe, Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility: The Ethical Significance of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 225. 60 Ibid., 148. 61 Ibid., 129–130. 62 Ibid., 137–139. 63 Ibid., xiii. 64 Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 65 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. London: Verso, 2010. Campbell, John L. and John A. Hall. National Identity and the Varieties of Capitalism: The Danish Experience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Clean clothes campaign. “Rana Plaza: a man-made disaster that shook the world.” 2013. Accessed March 2, 2018, https://cleanclothes.org/ua/2013/rana-plaza. Coe, Cynthia D. Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility: The Ethical Significance of Time. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Cottrel, Adam. “Fantasy.” In The Žižek Dictionary. 89–91. Ed. Rex Butler. Durham: Acumen, 2014. Dahlin, Ulrik. “Politiets magtanvendelse skal undersøges i sag om dødsfald under tvangsudsendelse.” Information. November 25, 2017. Dickson, Thomas. Dansk Design. London: Murdoch Books, 2008. Glynos, Jason. “Transgressive enjoyment as a freedom fetter.” Political Studies 56 (2008): 679–704. Grove, Jairus. Feral Reason: Geopolitics at the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, Forthcoming. Jespersen, Knud K. V. A History of Denmark. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jørgensen, Jan E., Venstre vil bade, www.b.dk/kronikker/venstre-vil-baade-aabne-oglukke-landet.

102 Gitte du Plessis Jørgensen, Jan E. “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet.” Berlingske Tidende. August 16, 2014. Accessed July 31, 2018, www.b.dk/kronikker/venstre-vil-baadeaabne-og-lukke-landet. Koefoed, Lasse. Glokale nationalismer: Globalisering, hverdagsliv og fortællinger om dansk identitet. PhD diss., Roskilde University, 2006. Kristiansen, Cecilie Lund, Anders Bæksgaard og Carl Emil Arnfred. “Ministerium mangler livstegn fra tre syge personer.” Politiken. February 20, 2018. Lemberg-Perersen, Martin. “Om flygtningeudspillet fra S: Visionen vil indebære, at tusindvis af mennesker indfanges og tvangsdeporteres sydpå hvert år.” Politiken. February, 2018. Kaspersen, Lars Bo. Danmark i verden. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels forlag, 2008. Konservative.dk. Udlændinge og Integration, Accessed March 2, 2018, https://konserva tive.dk/politik/alle-emner/udlaendinge-og-integrationspolitik/. Korsgaard, Ove. The Struggle for the People; Five Hundred Years of Danish History in Short. Copenhagen: Danish School of Education Press, 2008. Llana, Sara Miller and Fabrizio Tassinari. “Nordic cuddly capitalism: Utopia, No. but a global model for equity.” The Christian Science Monitor. May 11, 2014. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005. Merchant, Brian. “Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city.” The Guardian. June 18, 2017. Østergaard, Uffe. “Peasants and Danes: The Danish national identity and political culture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992): 3–27. Poulsen, Henrik Day. “Er projektet Danmark en fejl?” Berlingske Tidende. March 25, 2014. Accessed July 31, 2018, www.b.dk/kommentarer/er-projektet-danmark-en-fejl. Regeringen. “Forslag til lov om ændring af straffeloven (Tildækningsforbud).” Justitsministeriet. February 6, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018, www.justitsministeriet.dk/sites/ default/files/media/Pressemeddelelser/pdf/2018/lovforslag_tildaekningsforbud.pdf. Ritzau. “Lars Løkke: Et nyt europæisk asylsystem er på vej.” Jyllands-Posten. June 5, 2018. ———. “Løkke om S-udspil: Teltlejre i Nordafrika er postgang for sent” Fyens Stiftstidende. February 7, 2018. Socialdemokratiet. Retfærdig og realistisk. En udlændingepolitik der samler Danmark. Copenhagen, Denmark: Socialdemokratiet 2018. “Special report: The Nordic countries.” The Economist. February 2, 2013. The True Cost. Directed Andrew Morgan. 2015; Los Angeles: Untold Creative, 2015. Documentary film. Thorbech, Freja. “Modebrand skifter ejer.” Detailfolk.dk. March 14, 2014. Accessed March 2, 2018, http://detailfolk.dk/detailnyheder/modebrand_skifter_ejer.html. Torfing, Jacob. Velfærdsstatens Ideologisering. Research Papers from the Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, 1999. Accessed July 31, 2018, https://for skning.ruc.dk/en/publications/velfærdsstatens-ideologisering. Trads, David. “Det er klassisk socialdemokratisme: Mette Frederiksens humanisme er faktisk smuk.” Politiken. December 28, 2017. Voller, Loiuse. “Arbejdere hos Bestseller-leverandører I Bangladesh risikerer dødsstraf.” Danwatch. February 16, 2017. Accessed March 2, 2018, https://old.danwatch.dk/ nyhed/arbejdere-paa-bestseller-fabrikker-i-bangladesh-risikerer-doedsstraf/.

The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare 103 Voller, Louise and Nikolaj Houmann Mortensen. “Mass faintings afflict the women who sew our clothes.” Danwatch. 2017. Accessed March 2, 2018, https://danwatch. dk/en/undersoegelse/mass-faintings-afflict-the-women-who-sew-our-clothes. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 2001. ———. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010. ———. “Multiculturalism, the reality of an illusion.” Lacan.com. 2009. Accessed July 31, 2018, www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454. ———. Tarrying with the Negative. London: Verso, 1993.

6

“Death in this country is normal” Quiet deaths in the Global South Jessica Auchter

Introduction “Death in this country is normal,” said Dr. Bimjimba Norberto, a doctor who runs a clinic in a slum outside of Luanda, Angola, when interviewed by journalist Nicholas Kristof.1 Kristof uses this story to condemn the deaths of children as a result of the lack of attention to health care by authoritarian leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos. In doing so, he illustrates and calls attention to a phenomenon by which Westerners perceive those in the developing world as being “used to loss.”2 In this vein, the first world views the third world as always dying, and, as a result, it is “their” problem, not “ours.” Or, in other words, mortality is viewed as a problem for the poor, and on a geopolitical scale, that means it resides in the developing world rather than the developed. This chapter explores the narrative that those in the Global South are “used to death.” This often takes two forms: either those in the developing world are characterized as being accustomed to loss, experiencing less pain; or their vocal mourning practices, such as wailing, are depicted as primitive. The chapter focuses on the politics of this story of everyday death in the Global South, and what impact this has on those who die “quietly,” particularly from preventable disease. I focus on what gets assumed about death-making when mortality rates are focused on as a measure of human development and human security. The chapter then focuses specifically on disease, as a way to think about how this impacts global humanitarianism. Specifically, it analyzes the way in which preventable disease in the developing world is not conceived of as a crisis, and theorizes that much of this has to do with the way disease, and death from disease, is treated as banal in the developing world, while it is considered preventable and extraordinary in the developed world. This story of death-making renders certain deaths ordinary and deemed not worthy of global attention, while others become points of crisis. Specifically, I seek to examine how, in the neoliberal framing of death counts and mortality rates, some are made more vulnerable than others in the neoliberal production of generalized insecurity. As noted by some of the other chapters in this volume, killing is not just tied to the sovereign, and death-making thus becomes a spectrum.

“Death in this country is normal” 105 This recognition has larger political implications, not simply for ordinary deaths, but also for the way in which the bodies and lives of those in the developing world are deemed to be disposable, as in the way they can be used for cannon fodder in peacekeeping operations, where a disproportionate number of UN peacekeepers are from the developing world. Susan Sontag has also argued that, generally, the injured and dead bodies shown in photographs are from Asia and Africa, exhibiting “colonized” human beings,3 something that David Campbell has also drawn attention to in his argument that “when dead bodies do feature in the media, they are more often than not bodies of dead foreigners.”4 Though Sontag and Campbell focus specifically on the politics of visibility of the dead, this chapter seeks to explore how the visual intersects with other dimensions of representation of the dead, and it raises questions about the larger implications for the grievability and killability of particular bodies when death is deemed both ordinary and normal. I should note that while I focus on the division between the developing and the developed world, this division is not as clear as perhaps it is often articulated to be. The same logic of the poor exists in the developed world where the poor are depicted as lazy or parasitic, and there are surplus bodies throughout the developed world in the form of prisoners and other endemic deaths. In this vein, I view such examples as part and parcel of a particular logic of death worlds that has a specific function: to render particular deaths normal and thus unworthy of political intervention of any sort, whether it be global humanitarian intervention or domestic policy change. Regimes of neoliberal governance over death generate a responsibilized self through a logic of how competition is a “good,” and this logic persists regardless of context. Still, this chapter focuses specifically on how such logic plays out in regimes of global health and measurement as a means of generating an assumed normality to deaths from disease in the Global South.

Counting the dead: mortality rates and global health in “Africa” In contemporary global humanitarianism, crisis and progress are both measured via the quantification of human life. In order to justify intervention, casualty counts are invoked, and in order to argue that improvements in human security are being made, mortality rates are invoked. Beyond this, even in a domestic context, in cases such as obesity or drug abuse, advocates of policy change must justify intervention via increased casualty counts. Rottenburg and Merry have drawn attention to the way quantification promises a simplified version of knowledge that, while useful, is a specific technology of knowledge production that “encodes particular cultural understandings, political interests, and ontologies.”5 Referring specifically to global health, Vincanne Adams has drawn attention to how quantification promotes global health regimes by moving policy and encouraging funding to global problems, but that metrical forms of accountability

106 Jessica Auchter have displaced other ways of knowing and seeing.6 It is the aim of this section to examine these techniques of knowledge production in the context of global health, the way mortality rates have become taken for granted forms of knowledge, and how this impacts how death is contextualized as an everyday force. I take the quantification of mortality to be exemplary of a particular type of management that functions to normalize and securitize particular deaths. That is, I seek to articulate here and in the following sections one of the key messages of this edited volume: that there is a neoliberal partitioning of the global polity between zones where death from certain kinds of disease is largely seen as exceptional, and zones where such deaths are construed as normal life. Mortality rates, figures that stand in for human life, are the currency of international action. It is no coincidence that the United Nations Population Division’s software for demographic information is called MORTPAK, invoking the dominance that mortality rates have in demographic data gathering. Yet mortality rate, as it shifts the framing away from the focus on disease itself, is only one of the regimes of power at play here. I utilize this as one example of the increased neoliberalization of life and death in this section. That is, we are witnessing the rise of the statistical individual, whereby risk assessment means that everyone must (in an ethical and political sense) live the life and death that is the statistical mean or the numerical standard. It becomes the job of local, national, and international actors to enact this in practice: the normalization of particular ways of living and particular deaths. As Richard Rottenburg and Sally Merry note, “governance increasingly requires numerical data. Quantitative evidence is seen as essential for developing reasonable policy at local, national, and international levels.”7 This matters because, as Pezeshk and Carpenter describe, statistics continue to have policy influence even after they have been discredited, and quantitative science has a lot of political power.8 Numbers are often articulated as value-neutral, yet they contain assumptions, both methodological and ontological, about how to count and what counts. Given the way numbers act as preconditions for particular policies (to legitimize military actions or to spur humanitarian involvement by calling attention to atrocity), understanding the assumptions underpinning counting and the narratives governing its successes and failures can shed light on the story of how security takes shape and is filled with particular content. Thus, much of the focus on numbers in global politics has focused on indicators, particularly as they relate to work in the field of human rights and development, and on issues ranging from global health to global finance.9 Much of this work focuses on the way counts are aggregated, and examining the way the aggregation process is itself a political one driven by the aggregators. My interest here is not in aggregated indicators or in the literal process of counting deaths, but rather in the way a particular type of number becomes the totality of a discourse. Indeed, if, as Rottenburg and Merry argue, “only those operations which are counted and can be counted,

“Death in this country is normal” 107 10

count at all,” the invocation of quantification with regards to dead bodies has important epistemological implications for knowledge generation, ethical implications for grieving and memorializing the dead, and ontological implications for the rise of the statistical individual. In the context of the ontological implications, counting marks base assumptions underpinning the way we interact with the world around us. As Jay Aronson has noted, counting is not only “relevant to the study of social problems but it also a social problem in and of itself.”11 Rottenburg and Merry have similarly noted that measurement and quantification “influence[s] the ways we set the norms we wish to follow, the technology and instruments we regard as indispensable for organizing collective life, and the role numeric representation should play in contemporary world orders.”12 Additionally, Pezeshk and Carpenter remark that “too little critical attention has been devoted to the construction of conceptual categories these numbers populate.”13 There is clearly some consensus on the need for an approach to numbers that considers their ethnography, not just the way they become coopted into methodology. The remainder of this section traces the emergence of mortality rates as indicators of underdevelopment, arguing that one of the effects of such quantification has been to normalize deaths from disease in the Global South, and to depict homogenized regions such as “Africa” as zones where death is simply part of life, causing life to be viewed as more “primitive.” The impact of this is that particular health crises that may impact the developed world, such as Ebola, are characterized as crises, while disease more generally is depicted as “normal,” a theme that I pick up in the later sections of this chapter. It thus bears starting with the beginning of the story: a genealogy of the emergence of mortality rates. Much of the focus on mortality rates has been on methodology (how to count) or on what number to count, particularly whether infant mortality rate or mortality of children under five is an adequate measure of population health.14 Reidpath and Allotey have noted that infant mortality rates can shift the focus of health policy to a small part of the population only.15 Still, as Kenneth Hill has argued, “Child mortality, and particularly infant mortality, is often used as a broad indicator of social development or as a more specific indicator of health status.”16 The United Nations uses this indicator as well. As noted in a recent UN report, “the under five mortality rate is one of the indicators included in the Human Assets Index and is therefore one of the quantitative criteria for the identification of least developed countries within the United Nations.”17 But how did it get to be this way? As Rottenburg and Merry explore, indicators emerge via a combination of cultural understandings, political interests, and ontologies.18 In this case, mortality rate emerges via a cultural understanding about life and death that is inseparable from the notion of the autonomous political individual at the heart of Western philosophy and economics. That is, each child who died before the age of five represented a social loss, but more substantively for the prevailing paradigms, a loss of

108 Jessica Auchter economic potential. Life matters, then, because of its productive impetus in the context of modern neoliberalism, and it is this cultural understanding that underpins the emergence of this indicator, to the point now where it is rarely even justified as a measure of economic development and social well-being. Alan Desrosieres has mentioned that indicators are perceived as a means of moving towards greater justice, based on this Enlightenment philosophy, and, when combined with neoliberal economics, they fuel individualism through techniques of management.19 This is similar to Shamir and Weiss’s notion that indicators often emerge in the context of risk assessment for businesses rather than beginning with people.20 Arjun Appadurai has also called attention to the way the number “one” is the only important number, because large groups are simply viewed as aggregations of individuals, emphasizing the role that individualism plays in the contemporary politics of quantification.21 In the context of the political interests at the heart of mortality rates as an indicator, as Rottenburg and Merry note, successful indicators usually have the backing of powerful organizations, in this case the World Health Organization and the United Nations more generally, leading to their concretization at the heart of understandings about global development and its progress.22 Indeed, in the report on World Development Indicators from 2003,23 mortality rates are described as “important indicators of health status in a country.” The report goes on to state that, “because data on the incidence and prevalence of diseases (morbidity data) are frequently unavailable, mortality rates are often used to identify vulnerable populations. And they are among the indicators most frequently used to compare levels of socioeconomic development across countries.” In this vein, even when the goal of humanitarian action and development may be disease reduction, disease is not what is being encapsulated by these indicators. Instead, mortality rate operates as a proxy for disease, shifting the focus from disease prevention to economic development. One of the effects of this shift is the way in which this leads to the normalization of death in the developing world. It leads to the establishment of a norm of measurement that presents knowledge that conforms to prevailing ideas about the world, based on previously established models of information gathering, in the language of Rottenburg and Merry.24 Because of understandings about the prevalence of disease in the developing world, mortality rate becomes the norm of measurement that fits with our preconceived notions about the commonality, and then indeed banality, of death there. In this rise of the statistical individual, “indicators are typically presented as taken-for-granted facts. Yet, indicators are not neutral representations of the world, but novel epistemic objects of regulation, domination, experimentation, and critique.”25 Mortality rate, and the way it has become the totality of discourse on development, is indicative of the management impetus of modern neoliberalism, which establishes standards of normality in the context of understanding life and death as themselves issues of management.

“Death in this country is normal” 109 In terms of timing, the first emergence of indicators like the mortality rate can be seen in the early and mid-1800s, when mean age at death was first articulated as an index of health.26 In the early 1900s, accounting in business emerges in relation to business forecasting,27 where we can start to see the problem being articulated in economic terms. The emergence of indicators allows for the governance of populations, which is why Foucault has traced the emergence of biopolitics to a similar time period. Facts about the population and the ability of governments to create policy from these facts becomes associated with good governance: as Evelyn Ruppert notes, transparency, democracy, and accountability are equated with open government data.28 In the 1980s, then, we see a shift at the level of international organizations like the UN, from what has been referred to as the “traditional” approach to an approach based on “human development,” and this is the time period in which institutions focus on demographic data rather than on their “command over commodities,” or a focus on morbidity and mortality over income.29 Yet this shift also implies that human development indicators are not themselves based on a similar economic logic. Indeed, risk assessment based on morbidity and mortality is a technique of power used not only by governments, but also by businesses. This becomes a potential issue because, as Thacker et al. note: Mortality rates might not directly reflect the contribution of preventable causes of death. In 1991, McGinnis and Foege proposed the concept of ‘actual causes of death’ to emphasize the importance of the underlying (and usually preventable) risk factors that contribute to mortality. In fact, actual causes of death are more accurately characterized as measures of burden of risk.30 The point they bring up here is that mortality rates lead to a focus on death rather than on the resolution of the preventable causes of many of those deaths. In this sense, I argue that a focus on disease, if characterized through the use of mortality rates, in fact pushes away our attention on the disease itself as a cause of death. As I have noted, most discussions of mortality rate are based on methodology (how to count) rather than on whether the indicator adequately represents the phenomena in question.31 However, this implies that the only problems with quantification are methodological or mathematical, thus removing the political orientation of quantification. Adams has argued that the “act of data collection becomes always and invariably political as a form of knowledge because it claims political neutrality.”32 This can be likened to Mbembe’s notion that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”33 There is an important connection between the idea of mortality rate as indicator and the way in which death in the developing world is conceptualized. The following section focuses on a specific exemplary case

110 Jessica Auchter to illustrate this argument further. I should note here that this discussion of measurement is also fundamentally a discussion of management. As dead bodies are managed through the quantification of life and death, this also has the effect of normalizing particular deaths and securitizing other deaths. Hence, the way in which Ebola was depicted as a health crisis while other deaths from disease are not similarly rendered issues of insecurity, as I describe in the next section.

Constructing health crises: the discourse on Ebola This section briefly examines one particular health crisis as a means of theorizing the political difference between a crisis and the banal death-making of “ordinary” deaths from disease. In examining the manufacturing of the Ebola outbreak as a crisis, I illustrate how and via what discourses death becomes securitized, and under what circumstances it becomes normalized. That is, measurements of death, in some places and for some populations, are used to reinforce the apolitical dimension of everyday dying. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) called attention to an evolving Ebola outbreak in southeastern Guinea, which would become the largest Ebola outbreak recorded in history, with 11,310 deaths recorded in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea between 2014 and 2016, with a further 15 total deaths outside of the main infection zone in Mali, Nigeria, and the United States.34 In August 2014, the WHO declared that the outbreak had reached the level of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), “designated only for events with a risk of potential international spread or that require a coordinated international response.”35 PHEIC status is often colloquially referred to as the classification of a “global emergency.” In order to meet this designation: an outbreak is evaluated based on the severity of at least two of these four criteria: the significance of the public health impact and deadliness of the disease; how expected or unexpected the outbreak was; the risk of international spread; and the risk of international travel or trade restrictions.36 In this vein, the World Health Organization’s classification of global health emergencies is premised on some basic assumptions that rely on a neoliberal understanding of health. First, a crisis is an event in which international travel and trade may be impeded, thus the larger economic impact is one determining factor of a health emergency. Second, the outbreak must be unexpected to constitute a global emergency. Such a neoliberal understanding of health is primarily economic in the sense that health crises matter because they impede economic productivity, not because health is a human right. This is both shaped by and shapes the notion of so-called “normal life” and thus of which deaths are considered to be under

“Death in this country is normal” 111 normal conditions. Ebola was a crisis because it deviated in type and scope from deaths from disease that adhere to the norm, and because it had the potential to occur in developed countries that had ostensibly effective health management systems. As a result, within the neoliberal health paradigm, the developing world is simply unable to properly manage disease through public health infrastructure, meaning that death there from certain diseases is the norm, while healthy living in the developed world is depicted as one’s responsibility to ensure continuing productivity (hence, widely circulated assumptions about people who are overweight or who smoke as being drains on the health care system, and the recent emergence of health insurance plans in the United States that offer discounts for participation in programs to change lifestyle behavior, including encouraging regular exercise, and smoking cessation programs). Under such a neoliberal health paradigm, despite Ebola being less contagious than tuberculosis (which can spread through the air), less deadly than HIV/AIDS in terms of rates of death from infection, and less deadly than malaria, cholera, and diarrhea in terms of number of people killed in the same countries suffering from the Ebola outbreak, these other diseases would typically not be declared a health emergency because, “despite their annual tolls, they require a constant level of public health diligence and are rarely unexpected.”37 John Kraemer, professor of epidemiology at Georgetown University puts it best: “For diseases that are endemic, we wouldn’t think of declaring a public health emergency. An emergency response for malaria wouldn’t be helpful in the same way; you won’t see malaria spiraling out of control.”38 Yet, whether a disease is “out of control” is primarily a subjective judgment, clearly not premised on the number of people who die from it or even the infection rate. It seems to rest primarily on the criteria delineated above that the epidemic be “unexpected” and that it not be threatening to spread across borders sufficiently to impede international commerce. In this sense, HIV, malaria, and diarrhea are not unexpected, and their high death tolls are not unanticipated. Some of this is due to our scientific knowledge of the disease, but more is due to their endemic status. They are literally part of the normal condition of life in some parts of the world, and this fact drives perception that, because of this, they do not constitute a crisis. This is how 11,310 deaths from Ebola across two years can be thought of as a global health crisis, while the fact that 1.5 million children die of diarrhea in the world every year39 is not considered a global health emergency. This assumption, the very labeling of diseases as endemic, can create harmful stereotypes regarding “Africa,” as noted by Chris Blattman. Blattman’s perspective that the crisis rhetoric could create a lasting stigma for countries affected by Ebola largely remained a minority opinion in the midst of calls for faster WHO response to label Ebola a crisis.40 Blattman, who tweeted that “Ebola is the Kardashian of diseases,” also wrote that:

112 Jessica Auchter there’s this thing that doesn’t sound like it’s actually the apocalypse, but it’s being talked about like the apocalypse. It steals all the attention; that’s the point. People don’t have a lot of attention for Africa, and sometimes that attention matters.41 He sought, in a brief blog post, to draw attention to the larger health issues at play: Ebola is deadly serious but it seems to me the scaremongering is getting out of hand. Countries with even basic state capacity, such as Uganda, tend to be able to get outbreaks under control. A Western country could contain an outbreak, as could many (but not all) of Liberia or Sierra Leone’s neighbors. The reason we are seeing this explode is because, inevitably, Ebola is appearing in some of the weakest states in the world. Thus the problem is not Ebola. Ebola outbreaks are the symptom of very weak states. The world can and should help to contain the outbreak there, but not forget what the cause is. Meanwhile, malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS are already at pandemic proportions and I venture destroy more lives, more economies, and perhaps even more politics than Ebola. Something like a third of Botswana have HIV or AIDS. 25 millions (sic) Africans have it, and more than a million die a year from it. A million. This is hugely economically and politically disruptive in some of the most advanced and politically important states in Africa, especially southern Africa.42 Thus, the true global health emergency is the predominance of countries in the world with weak health infrastructure, and that can neither treat unexpected outbreaks such as Ebola nor expected diseases with large death tolls like tuberculosis or malaria. Indeed, one study showed that more than 100,000 malaria cases went untreated in Liberia from 2014–2015 as a result of diversion of resources to treat Ebola, and the fears of those with the fever symptoms of malaria that they would be quarantined with Ebola patients by mistake. Additionally, the study found that measles vaccination rates dropped by 67 percent, anti-malarial treatment fell by 61 percent, and 35 percent fewer pregnant women came in for prenatal visits.43 What is interesting in the Ebola case is that the obsession with the death toll as a symbol of its crisis status elided the fact that there are similar and higher death tolls from other diseases on a continuous basis, as I have described above. The fetish for quantification that I described in the previous section is less about the numbers themselves and more about how particular events are rendered intelligible through frameworks of quantification that then serve preordained political purposes. Deaths from tuberculosis are counted as a means to create a standard against which future death tolls can be measured, and thus to generate a “normal” standard for these deaths. Deaths from Ebola are counted as a means to paint a picture of a crisis that could impact those individuals in parts of the world who have little to no risk of contracting malaria or tuberculosis.

“Death in this country is normal” 113 One key component of the Ebola outbreak and its media coverage was that the crisis was very much situational. That is, the crisis was such not only because of the nature of the infection and its spread, but also because of its ability to spread beyond the borders of West Africa. Within West Africa, the main focus of the crisis was on how to end the outbreak with the intervention of external heath authorities. In the context of the disposal of bodies, it was characterized as a battle of science versus tradition. Victims of Ebola were depicted as observers of primitive, traditional practices, and “a complex and sacred blend of rituals,” which invoked the language of “secret societies” related to the treatment of the dead that “ring[s] of a forgotten past.”44 Science, on the other hand, was characterized as the hero that could end the Ebola outbreak if only the pesky natives would stop observing their silly rituals. Amy Maxmen details this perspective: “with so much at stake, science eclipses religion: Risky rituals must end.”45 To this extent, even the grief of family members that they would not be able to bury their loved ones was depicted as an obstacle to resolving the outbreak rather than a matter to be approached with compassion and empathy. As Fiona McLysaght, the director for Concern Worldwide in Sierra Leone noted: “People were expected to go from one end of the spectrum to the other; from washing the bodies by hand, dressing them, and holding elaborate ceremonies, to having a corpse in a body bag and no goodbye.”46 It was almost as if the laziness and irrationality of this grief was depicted as the cause of the crisis for the “rest of us”: traditional beliefs were blamed for the excessive contagion of the outbreak, the very thing that made it a global health crisis.

The politics of wailing: some conclusions Nicholas Kristof, writing of deaths from poverty in Angola, writes that “Westerners sometimes think that people in poor countries become accustomed to loss, their hearts calloused and their pain numbed. No one watching that mother beside her dead child could think that—and such wailing is the background chorus in Angola.”47 His aim is to get us to consider that these deaths are painful and that everyone who loses a child experiences the same pain and suffering. But the language of “wailing” as the background chorus may actually have the opposite effect. Such language calls on preconceived notions of how grief is expressed, specific to a certain cultural context. That is, because wailing and grieving are private in the West, the figure of the grieving mother is not typically a public one. Yet in Angola and in the developing world more broadly, news coverage of such grief on a larger scale moves this grieving to the public sphere, and cultural differences mean that grief is expressed in different ways than in the West. As a result, the figure of the wailing woman is posited and framed as a uniquely “African” one. In this vein, the wail is a senseless cry from a body that cannot control itself, invoking a particular racialized logic that draws on the notion of a more evolved public sphere.

114 Jessica Auchter Much of this is related to the shifts in mourning trends in the United States and Europe in the 20th century, primarily with the medicalization of dying. Where previously family members died in the home, with medical advances and the accompanying cultural shifts, people started to die in institutions such as hospitals much more frequently, and they were cared for by medical professionals rather than family members, both before and after they died. Still, even as death itself: moved from the private sphere to the public, grief and mourning moved in the opposite direction. Overt displays of grief, which had been championed by sections of the fourth estate in the 19th century, were derided. And by the middle of the 20th century, they were seen as a form of collective weakness.48 The transformation in mourning culture from public to private was premised on conceptions of social and indeed national strength. Thus, when the grieving of others is rendered public, whether they are at home or abroad, such public display is also a signal of weakness, with an implicit framing that such grieving, in this case public wailing, is an indicator of a society with a less advanced stage of historical development and with a weaker public management system, even as an effective system of management is a hallmark of modern neoliberalism.49 Yet there is a paradox here, because in the logic of liberal humanitarian discourse, people must perform their suffering, and allow others to take account of it, in order for their suffering to be taken seriously. Thus the problem is not, as Kristof states, that we view the poor as accustomed to loss, but rather that we view their grieving as so primitive and public that it is easy to distance ourselves from empathizing with their loss since we do not perceive ourselves as experiencing grief in the same way. “Their” grief is embodied and ordinary in its spectacular-ness, while “ours” is reasoned and extraordinary in its ordinariness. And it is in this distancing from the embodied that particular problems, such as hunger, become problems for only a segment of the world rather than for human beings more generally. Henry Giroux has argued, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, that black and poor bodies were rendered disposable: the poor not only have to fend for themselves, but they are also supposed to do so without being seen by the rest of society. They have been rendered both invisible and disposable.50 He adds that the disposable populations serve as an unwelcome reminder that the social contract no longer exists.51 Giroux focuses on the US context to argue that some lives are privileged over others. Yet he returns at the end of his essay to the failure of the social contract, thus focusing on the idea of the responsibility of a political community to care for the lives within. But the cases I have described in this chapter are less about the failure of the social contract and more about the particular success of a narrative of security that depicts certain things and events as crises and others as “normal.”

“Death in this country is normal” 115 Jenny Edkins has referred to the missing in the same way, using the example of how children starving to death in Brazil is so commonplace that the dead are not even mourned, and that some people remain invisible to our gaze.52 Yet, as she astutely argues throughout her book Missing, the question we should be asking ourselves is how our gaze is constructed. We should ask not only who is seen and who is unseen, but also who is doing the seeing. This is reinforced in the case I address here if one looks at the phrasing in many of the headlines covering the Ebola outbreak. “How grief and recovery look in West Africa” is one example.53 Edkins provocatively argues that we are all potentially missing persons,54 pushing us to bridge that distance between the other and the self. Indeed, even as news reports of various global crises focus on the normalization of death as if it is something shocking, over time the shock seems to subside. And when we are told that, in Raqqa, “seeing dead bodies is normal now,”55 we seem to accept that perspective as the status quo. Barbie Zelizer wrote of Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan’s death that there was much concern about showing her dead body on television, and as a result, most news networks showed videos or images of her facing death rather than already dead. Zelizer details how, at the time, a blogger wrote: “people like Neda owe access to their deaths so Americans can access their own humanity.”56 My point is not to argue that there is a proper way to grieve, but rather to ask who accesses the deaths of whom. Whose deaths are rendered objects of consumption, for which audience, and through what mechanisms? And what larger discourse does this perspective reinforce? What I am concerned with is the way death in the Global South becomes a taken-for-granted apolitical feature, which can be addressed by measuring and accounting for the problem. This has the effect of distancing others from these deaths by depicting them as normal, of reifying a lack of agency for residents of the Global South, and of reinforcing a framework that renders these deaths commodities to be measured and probed, and solved by others. When these deaths are normal, not only does this render them outside of being considered matters of insecurity, but they become fodder for the politics of global humanitarianism that depicts white Westerners as the saviors entitled to access the deaths of the global poor so that they can achieve their own sense of being and doing good in the world.

Notes 1 Nicholas Kristof, “Deadliest Country for Kids,” New York Times, March 19, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-deadliest-countryfor-kids.html 2 Kristof, “Deadliest Country.” 3 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 72. 4 David Campbell, “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1, (2004): 55–74, 64.

116 Jessica Auchter 5 Richard Rottenburg and Sally Merry, “A World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification,” in The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, eds. Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–33, 4. 6 Vincanne Adams, eds., Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 8–9. 7 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 1. 8 Ardeshir Pezeshk and Charli Carpenter, “Casualties of Counts? Civilian Targeting Data and the Laws of War” (presentation, International Studies Association, Atlanta, GA, 2016), 7. 9 Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Merry, eds., Governance by Indicators: Global Power Through Quantification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, eds., The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 10 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 20. 11 Jay Aronson, “The Politics of Civilian Casualty Counts,” in Counting Civilian Casualties, eds. Taylor Seybolt, Jay Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29–50, 29. 12 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 2. 13 Pezeshk and Carpenter, “Casualties of Counts,” 5. 14 Satya Pattnayak and Donna Shai, “Mortality Rates as Indicators of CrossCultural Development,” Journal of Developing Societies 11, no. 2 (1995): 252–262. 15 Reidpath, DD, and P. Allotey, “Infant Mortality Rate As An Indicator of Population Health,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 57 (2003): 344–346. 16 Kenneth Hill, “Approaches to Measurement of Child Mortality: A Comparative Review,” Population Index 57, no. 3 (1991): 368–382, 368. 17 See www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodology_sheets/health/ under_five_mortality.pdf, p. 39. 18 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 4. 19 Alan Desrosieres, “Retroaction: How Indicators Feed Back Onto Quantified Actors,” in The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, eds. Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 329–353, 329. 20 Ronen Shamir and Dana Weiss, “Semiotics of Indicators: The Case of Corporate Human Rights Responsibility,” in Governance by Indicators: Global Power Through Quantification and Rankings, eds. Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Merry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 110–131, 129. 21 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 59–60. 22 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 4. 23 Rottenburg and Merry, “World Development Indicators,” 115. 24 Rottenburg and Merry, “A World of Indicators,” 4. 25 Ibid., 5. 26 Theodore Porter, “The Flight of the Indicator,” in The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, eds. Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 34–55, 41.

“Death in this country is normal” 117 27 Porter, “Flight of the Indicator,” 49. 28 Evelyn Ruppert, “Doing the Transparent State: Open Government Data as Performance Indicators,” in The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, eds. Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, SungJoon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127–150, 129. 29 Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion, “Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 1 (1993): 133–150, 134–135. 30 Stephen Thacker, Donna F Stroup, Vilma Carande-Kulis, James S Marks, Kakoli Roy, and Julie L Gerberding, “Measuring the Public’s Health,” Public Health Report 121, no. 1 (2006): 14–22. 31 See, for example, the following UN report, which only notes methodological limitations under the subheading “limitations of the indicator,” www.un.org/esa/ sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodology_sheets/health/under_five_mortality.pdf, pp. 40–41. 32 Adams, Metrics, 9. 33 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15, no. 1, (2003): 11–40, 12. 34 www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/2014-2016-outbreak/index.html. 35 www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/2014-2016-outbreak/index.html. 36 Abby Phillip, “How Ebola is Stealing Attention from Illnesses that Kill More People,” The Washington Post, September 5, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com /news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/05/how-ebola-the-kardashian-of-diseases-isstealing-attention-from-illnesses-that-kill-more-people/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.a837a1012aba. 37 Phillip, “How Ebola.” 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Chris Blattman, “Ebola is the Kardashian of Diseases,” CHRISBLATTMAN (blog), August 26, 2014, https://chrisblattman.com/2014/08/26/ebola-kardashiandiseases/. 43 “Ebola’s Impact Reached Beyond Death Toll To Basic Health Care,” Voice of America, February 20, 2018, https://reliefweb.int/report/liberia/ebolas-impactreached-beyond-death-toll-basic-health-care. 44 Amy Maxmen, “How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions,” National Geographic, January 30, 2015, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/ 2015/01/150130-ebola-virus-outbreak-epidemic-sierra-leone-funerals/. 45 Maxmen, “How the Fight.” 46 Maxmen, “How the Fight.” 47 Kristof, “Deadliest Country.” 48 Hilda Maclean, “Public Mourning: A Brief History,” The Conversation, December 18, 2014, http://theconversation.com/public-mourning-a-brief-history-35670. 49 While this can be the case for domestic grieving rituals in the “West” as well, mass media tend to be more sensitive when victims and their families “look like us,” and when large scale public mourning rituals do occur, such as after school shootings or terrorist attacks, they are quickly coopted into larger political narratives that situate them as events of national wounding and develop prompt responses couched in terms of national defense or restoring national strength. 50 Giroux, Henry, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Politics of Disposability,” College Literature 33, no. 3 (2006): 171–196, 175. 51 Ibid., 186.

118 Jessica Auchter 52 Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 6. 53 Abby Phillip, “As Ebola’s Death Toll Surpasses 10,000, This is How Grief and Recovery Look in West Africa,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2015, www.washing tonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/13/as-ebolas-death-toll-surpasses-10000this-is-how-grief-and-recovery-look-in-west-africa/?utm_term=.698991a2c0b7. 54 Edkins, Missing, 14. 55 Priyanka Gupta, “Raqqa: Seeing Dead Bodies is Normal Now,” Al Jazeera, September 23, 2017, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/raqqa-deadbodies-normal-170923070320617.html. 56 Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.

Bibliography Adams, Vincanne, ed. Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Anand, Sudhir and Martin Ravallion. “Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 1 (1993): 133–150. Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Aronson, Jay. “The Politics of Civilian Casualty Counts.” In Counting Civilian Casualties, edited by Taylor Seybolt, Jay Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff, 29–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Blattman, Chris. “Ebola is the Kardashian of Diseases.” CHRISBLATTMANN (blog), August 26, 2014. https://chrisblattman.com/2014/08/26/ebola-kardashiandiseases/. Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media.” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 55–74. Davis, Kevin, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Merry, edited by. Governance by Indicators: Global Power Through Quantification. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Desrosieres, Alan. “Retroaction: How Indicators Feed Back Onto Quanitified Actors.” In The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, edited by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, 329–353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. “Ebola’s Impact Reached Beyond Death Toll To Basic Health Care.” Voice of America, February 20, 2018. https://reliefweb.int/report/liberia/ebolas-impact-reachedbeyond-death-toll-basic-health-care. Edkins, Jenny. Missing: Persons and Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Giroux, Henry. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Politics of Disposability.” College Literature 33, no. 3 (2006): 171–196. Gupta, Priyanka. “Raqqa: Seeing Dead Bodies is Normal Now.” Al Jazeera, September 23, 2017. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/raqqa-dead-bodiesnormal-170923070320617.html. Hill, Kenneth. “Approaches to Measurement of Child Mortality: A Comparative Review.” Population Index 57, no. 3 (1991): 368–382.

“Death in this country is normal” 119 Kristof, Nicholas. “Deadliest Country for Kids.” New York Times, March 19, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-deadliest-country-for-kids. html. Maclean, Hilda. “Public Mourning: A Brief History.” The Conversation, December 18, 2014. http://theconversation.com/public-mourning-a-brief-history-35670. Maxmen, Amy. “How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions.” National Geographic, January 30, 2015. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/ 01/150130-ebola-virus-outbreak-epidemic-sierra-leone-funerals/. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Pattnayak, Satya and Donna Shai. “Mortality Rates as Indicators of Cross-Cultural Development.” Journal of Developing Societies 11, no. 2 (1995): 252–262. Pezeshk, Ardeshir and Charli Carpenter. “Casualties of Counts? Civilian Targeting Data and the Laws of War.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association, Atlanta, GA, 2016. Phillip, Abby. “How Ebola is Stealing Attention from Illnesses that Kill More People.” The Washington Post, September 5, 2014. www.washingtonpost.com/news/ to-your-health/wp/2014/09/05/how-ebola-the-kardashian-of-diseases-is-stealingattention-from-illnesses-that-kill-more-people/?noredirect=on&utm_term=. a837a1012aba. Phillip, Abby. “As Ebola’s Death Toll Surpasses 10,000, This is How Grief and Recovery Look in West Africa.” The Washington Post, March 13, 2015. www.washingtonpost. com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/13/as-ebolas-death-toll-surpasses-10000-this-ishow-grief-and-recovery-look-in-west-africa/?utm_term=.698991a2c0b7. Porter, Theodore. “The Flight of the Indicator.” In The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, edited by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, 34–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Reidpath, Daniel D. and Pascale Allotey. “Infant Mortality Rate As An Indicator of Population Health.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 57 (2003): 344–346. Rottenburg, Richard and Sally Merry. “A World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification.” In The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, edited by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, 1–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Rottenburg, Richard, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, edited by. The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Ruppert, Evelyn. “Doing the Transparent State: Open Government Data as Performance Indicators.” In The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, edited by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, 127–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Shamir, Ronen and Dana Weiss. “Semiotics of Indicators: The Case of Corporate Human Rights Responsibility.” In Governance by Indicators: Global Power Through Quantification and Rankings, edited by Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Merry, 110–131. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

120 Jessica Auchter Thacker, Stephen B, Donna F Stroup, Vilma Carande-Kulis, James S Marks, Kakoli Roy, and Julie L Gerberding. “Measuring the Public’s Health.” Public Health Report 21, no. 1 (2006): 14–22. Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

7

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro

Prologue: on deniability In the opening pages of The International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Fatal Journeys (2016) report on the “identification and tracing of dead and missing migrants,” we encounter the story of Giuseppe Giardino, a gravedigger on the island of Lampedusa who provides a chilling summation of the condition of precarity, disposability, and the thresholds of detectability characteristic of today’s migratory condition.1 Speaking about his involvement in the burying of migrants who drowned at sea, Giardino points to the crucifixes marking the graves where numerous unidentified migrants are buried and commiserates with those whose “families don’t even know they’re dead and lying here in Lampedusa.”2 The image of the gravedigger as a kind of epistemic resource, or someone who can provide details of a crime that has hitherto remained unknown or unresolved, is not new. It is part of the archive of atrocity from which details of homicide or even war crimes are brought into the legal forum as evidence even in the absence of a living witness. In an era when the missing dead, those unknown, or even unknowable dead lie in unmarked graves, under the seas, or in deserts between states, the Fatal Journeys report acts as an indictment of the violence committed against migrants and the lack of sufficient knowledge or expert forms of counting and accounting for the missing and the dead. Pointing to the tragic difficulty of tracing and identifying the dead migrants, the report notes that, over the last two decades, “more than 60,000 migrants have died trying to reach their destinations, and this only includes deaths for which there is some record.”3 From those drowned and saved in Lampedusa to the victims of Australia’s SIEV X disaster or the more than 800 unidentified individuals believed to be migrants in Arizona’s Pima County public cemetery, the threshold of the knowable and the mournable points to the lack or desire for a witness, a theory or typology of the victim, and in most cases, the idea of a crime without a name or, where and when it is named, a crime without a criminal. It is within this context of migrant deaths that we witness the intensification of a forensic ecology where the unidentified dead migrant becomes (simultaneously) a symptom of the success and failure of numerous

122 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro forms of identification, counting, and policing. Together, these practices expose those traveling without legal documents to various forms of predation and incarceration when alive, and subject them to forensic forms of knowledge or commemoration upon their death.4 In the wake of increasing migrant deaths and the quest for the tracing and identification of the living and the dead, new regimes of knowledge emerge, each of them attempting to match the body to a place, a people, and a crime. In so doing, they generate a double criminalization complete with notions of what is proper, visible, and therefore mournable. As the report aptly puts it: Conditions of illegality hinder not only the recovery of bodies but also other aspects of identification. Ships and boats carry no passenger lists, so the missing cannot be named. When bodies are found, either on land or at sea, they often carry no identification documents. Some of those recovered from the Sonoran Desert in Arizona have “absolutely no” personal effects or physical attributes, so they may never be identified … Where migrants die at the hands of smugglers, identification is even more difficult, but it is also a prerequisite for prosecution on charges of murder or manslaughter … Reported cases include deaths of migrants locked in cabins on boats, abandoned in the desert or killed because ransoms cannot be paid … Knowledge of death in these situations is dependent on the testimony of those who escaped and identification on forensic investigation of gravesites … In all these situations, retrieval of the body, identification and tracing of families present difficult, often insuperable, challenges, which have prompted comparisons with the unknown dead in war.5 It is precisely this quest for evidence and “techniques of visuality that bring the dead body into visibility and the series of mediations that make it intelligible in terms of forensic evidence” that Joseph Pugliese engages in his reading of these emergent forensic ecologies. According to Pugliese, the forensic pathologist has become a primary mediator of the world of the “dead body in the absence of its living voice and testimony.” Acting as an intermediary “between the visual—what is visible—and the linguistic—the telling of the visible,” the pathologist generates an authoritative genre of writing in the form of an autopsy report that then comes to stand as evidence. In order to constitute an alternative “chain of custody,” and drawing on Eyal Weizman’s work on forensic architecture and the threshold of detectability—a work that engages new senses and sensing technologies to turn its counter forensic gaze to the frontiers of contemporary war—Pugliese performs an alternative “forensic analysis” that “brings to the fore the disavowed” in ways that “contaminate” the “production of this same trace evidence” and engages human and non-human entities that are subjected to the impact of explosive and slow violence.6

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 123 In this chapter, we heed the insights from the forensic evidence of violence and death and acknowledge, as Pugliese does, that a spectral slow violence, an attritional violence that exists below the threshold of attention and visibility, is intricately intertwined with the spectacular deaths rendered recognizable through forensic and other forms of expert necrography. Acknowledging that there are deaths and elements of life that escape the expert necrography, we turn to the world made visible or sensible through the cinematic apparatus as well as other genres of expression that enable us to apprehend the forms of life and violence that are dispersed across space and time. As we illustrate below, the cinematic apparatus can crystalize or bring into focus the violence of the state and predatory criminal entities while revealing the genres of man and theory of types that they are predicated upon. Given that forensics (forensis) has always exceeded the space of law and expertise, and has only been reduced to these domains by the modernization of knowledge and the demarcation of genres and genres of men, our engagement with cinema as a site for rethinking and even reinvigorating forensis takes seriously the “fields, forms, and forums” upon which new investigations, new presentations, ethical encounters, political contestations, and new aesthetic combinations can take place.7 As a counter-forensic form, cinema reverses and interrupts the forensic gaze while composing and decomposing multiple fora, forms, and frontiers. In order to draw attention to lives and deaths that exist below the threshold of attention and forensic detectability, we engage the reinscription and production of frontiers, frontiersmen, the precarity of migrant life, death, and the dramatization of desire in Russell Banks’s novel Continental Drift (1985) and two films: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s La Promesse (1996), and Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream (2013). Through their attentiveness to the precarity of migrant lives, and the ambiguity or even violence of the space of hospitality/hostage, the novel and cinematic texts explore how undocumented migrants are ruthlessly exploited and exposed to death in cities and on the road, for example traveling from Guatemala through Mexico in an attempt to make it into the United States. Through critical “counter-forensic” commentaries on the contemporary migratory condition articulated in global cinema, the chapter composes diverse migratory scenarios to render visible the national, urban, and racial frontiers of human encounter in which racialized migrant bodies experience the precarities dealt by the protective and predatory practices of official national formations and opportunistic criminal enterprises respectively. While the critically oriented media, the ethnographic work of activist anthropologists, and the more daring practitioners of photojournalism have done much to publicize precarious lives, the details of these lives remain largely hidden from view, not only because those victimized are often beyond the reach of publicity, but also because what tends to hold one’s attention are attempts to extract something positive from one’s everyday life rather than to contemplate something painful and disturbing. This aspect of

124 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro inattention is well captured in Tobias Hecht’s reflection on denial. Hecht writes: Whereas denial draws our attention to what we do not wish to see or feel, the alternative is that inward pleasures would be scarce in a world without this possibility. The thought that hundreds of thousands of children are at this very moment wasting away from kwashiorkor is incompatible with good coffee or even a few minutes of windowshopping … Denial is by turns protective and corrosive, inevitable and unforgiveable, human and inhumane. It is a failing, it would seem, that permits us some leeway in which to live without the full benefit or devastation of perception.8 In addition to the aforementioned frames of recognition and ways of living that hinder the apprehension of the pain of migrants lives and deaths, there also exist complex mechanisms of deniability through which the quest for and “use of material evidence” enable various state and nonstate actors to not only contradict the testimony of survivors, but also to “preclude the very ability of witnesses to speak to history at all.”9 This means that, beyond insistence on an absence of material evidence (“negative evidence”) of migrant deaths and suffering, we are also witnessing the emergence of discourses on the human where the spectacle of migrant suffering and precarity legitimizes the exclusion and predation that migrants experience. Here, denial does not work to efface the narrative of the suffering migrant. To the contrary, the migrant’s pain, precarity, and even death are taken as evidence of the migrant as an “inferior” form of life. With the establishment of this frontier/genre of humanity, the ethical weight of others is denied in ways that legitimize and produce various forms of manhunting and predation. These manhunts are always “accompanied by a theory of the prey,”10 such that some people are hunted to be captured, others to be excluded, and others not hunted at all. Therefore, we must interrogate the theory or genre of man that underlines the current migratory condition and the cynegetic powers that facilitate the denial of hospitality that exposes migrants to death or to various forms of precarity. In an era when migrants do not have to commit any infraction but are themselves an infraction, when bureaucratic regimes render migrants illegal through a dispositif of denial and illegalization of existence and, therefore, of exposure to manhunting, walling off, bans, trafficking, abandonment, and clandestinization, it becomes necessary to contest the actual and paper deaths arising from this dispositif.11 The granting and/or denial of papers has become one of the most potent orders of discrimination and social distinction today. As Grégoire Chamayou tells us, papers (passports or birth certificates) have become “the great social weapon by which one can kill men without any bloodshed.”12

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 125

Ethical driftings: genres and genres of man To attend to the spatial and quotidian elements of these regimes of deniability and their implications for ethical encounters, we would like to turn briefly to Russell Banks’s novel Continental Drift (1985), “an American story in the late twentieth century.”13 The novel’s dramatic narrative follows its main protagonists, Bob Dubois, an everyman leading what he regards as a dead-end life in New Hampshire, and Vanise Dorsanville, a young Haitian woman, and their subsequent moves to Miami. In Bob’s case, the move to Miami is an attempt to escape financial ruin, while Vanise comes to the same place in order to escape punishment because her nephew has stolen a ham from a wrecked truck and she faces dire consequences when the authorities close in. Once in Miami, Bob struggles to manage the exotic ethnoscape to which he is introduced, while Vanise struggles to overcome predators who abuse her and divert her travel toward Miami. She and Dubois, both with French surnames that testify to earlier migrations that took place in radically different circumstances (Continental French colonizing and settling on the American continent more or less voluntarily, Africans arriving in Haiti through the coercive apparatus of slavery), meet near the end of the novel. Although the novel features considerable dialogue, it also continually cuts away from its protagonists’ immediate perspectives with commentaries on the historical setting in which their bodies are moving together with other bodies, as Banks punctuates the dramatic narrative with instructive observations. Apart from the narrative is the novel’s “setting,” the land—and the (moving) peoplescapes—of the many bodies in motion in the 1970s. Through the setting, Banks continually calls the reader’s attention to the limitations of the character’s abilities at self- and inter-personal understanding. For example, there is a point where, once in Miami, Bob, a married man and father who had hitherto lived in the predominantly white world of New Hampshire, begins an affair with Marguerite, an African-American woman, whose habitus he knows very little about. To convey the challenge that Marguerite’s world presents to Bob, Banks intervenes in the drama with this meditation: To understand your children, you attend to the child in you … to imagine Elaine [his wife] and Doris [a former paramour] and now Marguerite, the three women who in recent years have mattered most to him, all Bob has to do is pay attention to the woman in himself. It’s harder in the case of Marguerite, but all the more interesting to him for that, because with her he has to pay attention to the black man in himself as well.14 Apart from the identity pedagogy offered here (the identity multiplicity that individuals contain), Banks instructs by offering the venerable discourse on types, which is expressed by Bob’s paramour Marguerite at a point when

126 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro Bob, afflicted by guilt, is ending the affair. She says: “You don’t know what kind of woman I am, do you? … And I guess I don’t know what kind of man you are either.”15 Here, Marguerite is relaying the question of types that is central to Banks’s story. For example, Banks begins Chapter 4 with the question “What kind of man is Bob Dubois?” We can step back from Banks’s particular migrating protagonists and give the question of types a greater historical and geopolitical context by noting the various ways it has been applied to the precarious lives of moving bodies that cross boundaries at various historical moments. To do so, we have to concern ourselves with the multiplicity of loci of judgment, for which the writer Milan Kundera supplies a useful conceptual perspective, that of “median context,” when Kundera asserts that “every people in search of itself thinks about where to locate the margin between its own home and the rest of the world.”16 However, if we heed the temporal basis of the application of such “median contexts,” their arbitrariness emerges. To privilege one’s locus of enunciation is to deny the contingencies (wellarticulated in Banks’ novel) by which a “people” is consolidated. It is to essentialize collective identities by arbitrarily freezing time, that is to say, by denying the contingencies of arrival and assemblage in order to lend positive warrant to the settled bodies resulting from some earlier flows and to disparage the newer flows of the precarious lives seeking to join settled collectives. For example, Bob’s movement attracts no obloquy while Vanise’s is disparaged, making her a much more vulnerable migrant. Ultimately, Banks’s Continental Drift demonstrates how the privileging of one’s experience, the culture of the home, and a restricted economy can render one inattentive to the suffering of proximate others if not complicit in its intensification. However, there are encounters that challenge a person’s mental inventory of types (as was the case with Banks’s Dubois), rendering one more attentive and susceptible to others who have been formerly enigmatic and dismissible. Such is the case with “Igor” in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film La Promesse (1996), to which we now turn to explore such encounters. La promesse Apart from the personal drama, La Promesse provides an ethico-politically perspicuous cinematic perspective on how economies of precarity work. Through its treatment of the “binding and unbinding” of familial, economic, gender, and friendship ties, La Promesse reveals the relationship among migrancy, hospitality/hostility, and the culture of the home.17 Like Continental Drift, the drama of “intricate interdependencies” in La Promesse unfolds against the backdrop of the ethical and identification dilemmas occasioned by encounters between workers from different parts of the world trying to survive and/or thrive. The restricted economy of various national and transnational laborers and risk-takers trying to make a living

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 127 in Antwerp, Belgium is complicated when the 15-year-old protagonist Igor (Jeremie Renier) is forced to negotiate his childhood desires, fabrication skills, and filial relations with his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), and the illegal immigrants whom his father provides with forged documents, slum housing, and precarious/illegal employment in the house he is renovating. Through a series of exchanges of “homofraternal binding” between Igor and Roger, a relationship of self-sameness predicated on ruthlessness, opportunism, and inattention to the precarity of the immigrants’ lives is fostered. As such, La Promesse effectively dramatizes the plight of migrants and the forms of attachment and inattention that intensify their precarity. This is evinced by the duo’s exploitation of the migrants through charging exorbitant rents, providing low-wage employment, and occasionally turning in the immigrants to corrupt immigration officials out to fill their quota. As part of their bonding practice, Roger insists that his son call him by his first name, give him a gold ring just like his own, and inscribe a matching tattoo on his arm as a mark of “mutual resemblance.” The family-business relationship is fostered by Roger’s reliance on Igor’s forgery skills and the bonding that takes place through professional and filial performances of the family identity. However, cracks begin developing in the paternal–filial bond, culture of the home, and the economy that it sustains when Igor makes a promise to Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), an illegal immigrant from Burkina Faso, aiding in constructing his father’s house, who is injured when he falls from the scaffolding in an attempt to hide from inspectors visiting the construction site. When Igor approaches his father to call an ambulance to take Amidou to hospital, Roger decides to cover up Amidou’s injury and eventual death, opting instead to bury him in the foundation of his house under freshly mixed cement, motivated by his awareness that the death of the illegal immigrant implicates him in the practices of human trafficking and illegal employment that he is benefiting from. This act of concealment through entombment in the home brings the father and son into a bond of secrecy predicated on complicity in the murder and cover-up of the death of the immigrant. However, Igor’s promise to Amidou from which the film gets its title becomes the spectral driver of the plot as it creates new relations and responsibilities to Amidou’s wife Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her son who arrived in Belgium shortly before Amidou’s death. While Igor’s loyalty to his father leads him to keep his knowledge of Amidou’s death secret, Assita’s quest for the truth about her husband’s whereabouts and her reliance on knowledge systems that disrupt his coverup and narrative silence create ethical and identity dilemmas for Igor and the spectators. For instance, Assita’s reading of chicken entrails, which tell her that “Amidou is not very far,” contributes to her persistent search for her husband in Antwerp and its environs amid rumors that Amidou might have run to Germany to escape his gambling debts. As translocated forms of knowledge interrupt the regimes of knowledge and visuality that both

128 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro the Western character (Igor) and the film’s spectator are complicit in, new ethical and epistemological relations emerge, each of them demanding that one pay attention to the migrant life beyond the discourses that frame it as an opportunity or a nullity. A similar interruption of the visual/voyeuristic register emerges earlier in the film when Igor, hiding in a storage room, peeps into Assita’s room with the intention of seeing her undressed body. However, his gaze (and the camera’s too) is screened by a layer of fabric that turns the viewer’s optic fantasy into a haptic encounter with objects and bodies that Assita has put to other uses: a suitcase whose lid has been inexplicably removed, a religious statuette sitting on the table, a shot of Assita sprinkling water from a Perrier bottle around the room, … a sheep and a chicken in the urban wasteland of the apartment building, … a suitcase that has become a new bed for her son.18 Like Assita’s interruption of the urban/European visual/voyeuristic way of seeing and her invitation to the spectator to take a voyage of problematization in place of voyeuristic consumption of her alterity based on curiosity about the type of woman she is, Amidou’s disappearance and the secrecy and promise surrounding his death interrupt the culture of the home as new migrations and relations emerge. Not only does Igor learn that Roger plans to take Assita to Germany where she is to be sold as a prostitute, but he is also forced to reflect on the kind of man he wants to be. In response to this ethical crisis, Igor kidnaps/rescues Assita in order to keep his promise to Amidou rather than enact his loyalty to his father. However, his promise to Amidou and the secret that he keeps still deny Assita the closure of knowing of her husband’s death while facilitating her flight and protection from Roger. Writing about the gendered violence that characterizes this protective hospitality/hostage condition, Mireille Rosello notes that: Igor takes care of Assita because of the promise he made to a dying man: ultimately his responsibility is to the husband … As for Roger, he is cynically hiding behind the cliché that women need protection to refuse her his hospitality … throughout the movie, it is as a woman that Assita is rejected by the other characters, who invoke her vulnerability and what they choose to see as her powerlessness … After killing her legitimate protector (Amidou), Roger usurps the role and his cynicism highlights the invisible link between protection and possession. When Igor takes control of the situation … theoretically … his function is not fundamentally different from his father’s; he protects her by displacing her body, by preventing her from being exchanged. Only when he tells her the truth does he give her back her freedom by treating her

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 129 like an agent whom he can share a dangerous story, that is, by offering much more than his protection.19 It is only when Igor breaks his bond of secrecy and loyalty to his father that a different order of hospitality emerges, one that breaks away from both the “homofraternal logic of selfsameness” that ties him to Roger and the conditional gesture and debt that binds him to Amidou. Through Assita’s care and insistence on life in a space that denies her and her family that possibility, the film interrogates “fraternity and filiation,” thus opening a space where encounters and even co-habitation with people with incommensurate practices of identity and knowledge is possible. As such, the cinematic encounter facilitates an ethico-political drift that undoes the order of knowledge, denial, and violence and the ideals of the home (economy) that hold both the guest and the host hostage. We suggest that La Promesse operates as a tragedy at two levels, each facilitating its dynamics of encounter. At a structural level, it participates in what G.W.F. Hegel, in his early treatise Natural Law (1795), identifies as the tragic relationships between the ethical life and the commercial life, given that, from the point of view of the ethical life, the commercial life is both necessary and destructive.20 At a narrative level, La Promesse is a family drama whose tension fits the genre of a Greek tragedy, one in which a character is torn between family attachments and the more universal codes associated with civic justice. To fully appreciate how the tragic structure of the film narrative works, we can engage what Lauren Berlant refers to as a “situation tragedy,” which, unlike mere tragedy, is “the marriage between tragedy and situation comedy where people are fated to express their flaws episodically, over and over, without learning, changing, being relieved, becoming better, or dying.”21 The two levels of tragedy are articulated through what amounts to two different carceral dynamics. At the level of the larger tragedy—the predatory exploitation of migrant labor—are Roger’s draconian methods of controlling his workforce by managing the passports and other modes of identity certification of men who are effectively enslaved both by the illegalities of their arrival and residence and by their debt of servitude. From the outset, it appears that there is a contrast between Roger’s maliciousness toward his foreign workforce and his often-affectionate solicitude toward his son Igor. But it soon becomes clear that Igor is most valuable to him as a manager of his illegally manned enterprise. So, to manage Igor, Roger uses his seemingly affectionate solicitousness to make him an emotional hostage and lashes out and beats him when Igor, who unlike Roger is afflicted by a moral conscience, develops an increasingly complex attachment to Assita. Metaphorically, another carceral dynamic is visible when Roger continually chains Igor to him, not only by his emotional manipulation, but also by controlling the temporality of Igor’s day, his mobility (he loads Igor’s moped in the van rather than allow him to hit the road on his own), and

130 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro his sexuality. Roger induces Igor’s precarity by compromising his son’s legitimate commercial apprenticeship in an auto repair garage. During the sequence when Igor flees with Assita to protect her, the metaphorical chain becomes actualized (but in reverse). When Roger discovers them in Igor’s former work space, Igor manages to chain his father to a hoist following a blow by Assita, who strikes him while he is attacking Igor. The garage in which that event occurs is but one node in the cinema’s/ city’s cartography. First, the film supplies a cartography of the global network that transcends the space of the city. It comprises the trajectories of movement of exploited working bodies and/as commodities from a variety of global venues into the Belgian city and the network of traffickers who manage the arrangements and the subsequent controls over the bodies. The other node is local and formed by the circulation of motor vehicles, which function initially to move the labor force within the city. In an early scene, the camera lingers over that function of automobility, first focusing on the interior of Roger’s van carrying new indentured workers, and then zooming out to show the van moving around in a vast network of roads that seems to define the structure of the city. It is important to note the points of conjunction, such as when Assita, a trafficked/smuggled migrant, arrives in the city in the back of a small car that is still loaded on an open car-carrying trailer, the contents of which we can only speculate. In addition to the meta-logistics of motor vehicles that punctuate the drama continually in La Promesse, we can identify two others forms of punctuation that are less obvious. First are the cigarettes, which are often exchanged (as a foil) to connote relatively trivial aspects of hospitality in situations in which the main form of exchange is coercive. For example, in an early scene, Igor offers the workers cigarettes, effectively aping Roger’s various duplicitous gestures of hospitality. Another type of object, whose appearance is subtler, are some handfuls of sand, which appear twice in radically opposed contexts. First, after Amidou dies, Roger has Igor cover the blood on the ground where Amidou had laid dying with sand. Then, in an alter scene, when Assita, accompanied by Igor, goes to an African seer to find out if Amidou is alive, the seer pours a handful of sand as part of the ritual of investigation. Like motor vehicles, which are involved in both situations of control and freedom, the sand functions as an object of cover up, discovery, and recovery, putting it on either side of the “promise” in which Igor is entrapped. In short, apart from the tragic narrative, objects function as “image facts,” which carry much of the burden of how the film thinks.22 While the interruption of Igor’s voyeuristic gaze enables us to see the foreign objects and knowledges operating in Assita’s room, scenes with Igor’s two motor vehicles (his moped and his go-cart) define his moments of freedom from Roger’s business logic and his mode of mobility. Through long camera takes of motor vehicles, the film’s object focus provides a dimension/perspective that exceeds the film narrative. As Alain RobbeGrillet notes, objects have an extra-diegetic importance in critically oriented

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 131 films because they punctuate the drama and fix the viewer’s attention as much on things as on action. Like commas and periods, “which denote transition in novels,” objects work as punctuation devices “by connecting, by inference, and by their connotative power, as they punctuate movement from one cinematic shot to the next.”23 In La Promesse, an assemblage of objects, spaces, and bodies work to highlight the various forms of movement, affects, and lives that are part of the tragic cities in which the migrants circulate.

The grammar of borders: Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream Reminiscent of a key dimension of the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse, Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream (2013) is a “road movie.” However, in contrast with some classic road films (for example, Terrence Malick’s Badlands [1973], or Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers [1994]), in which the characters on the road are the dangers (they make the lives of those they encounter precarious), the precarious lives in Quemada-Díez’s film are those of the travelers/migrants themselves. The dramatization of migrant precarity in The Golden Dream takes place against the punctuations of the train tracks and the detours, stops, and lack of terminal points for undocumented migrants who are ruthlessly exploited and exposed to death as they travel from Guatemala through Mexico in an attempt to make it to the United States.24 The train journey that the film moves through is also extra-cinematic and has been the subject of journalistic and ethnographic writing on Central American transmigration, most prominently represented in texts such as Oscar Martinez’s The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging the Narcos on the Migrant Trail, and Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother. In these texts, “The Beast/La Bestia,” the name given to the cargo trains migrants ride, serves as a trope for the long, arduous, and precarious journey Central American migrants take. Writing about Martinez’s The Beast, Maritza Cárdenas notes that the Beast (both the train and the text) “is instrumental in the formation of a Central American disembodied wound.”25 That is, it calls “attention to the experiences of the Central American undocumented trans-migrants, illuminating how they are victims of a migrant trail that encompasses multiple borders.”26 Significantly, the Beast offers a broader necrography by showing that “border violence and death are not limited to the doorstep of the global North.” This, she avers, “extends the physical and symbolic jurisdiction of borderlands.”27 Similar perils greet the young migrants in The Golden Dream. What distinguishes it from many road films—whether the travelers face dangers or are the cause of them—is the many other travelers they join as they move northward, sharing crowded space on the trains they hop. The young travelers, Samuel (Carlos Chajon), Sara (Karen Martinez), and Juan (Brandon Lopez), begin their journey in Guatemala, each having prepared for the

132 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro journey in elaborate ways. In the film’s opening scenes, we encounter Juan, an obviously urban-savvy teenager, hiding his money by sewing it into the seams of his pants, and packing his backpack, with the sense of urgency and the minimalist luggage revealing that these are the most valuable items for the trip ahead. When the camera cuts away to Sara, we observe her getting into a small bathroom where she begins changing while the camera maintains a voyeuristic gaze that resonates with Igor peeping at Assita in La Promesse. Sara is also preparing for the trip by hiding her most valuable “items”; she cuts her hair short, ties down her breast with a bandage to make herself flat-chested, wears an oversized T-shirt, and then pops a pill (probably a hormonal contraceptive) after donning a cap. Looking into the new and more masculine image reflected in the mirror, she bids her habitual self goodbye. The transformation also involves introducing herself by the name Osvaldo instead of Sara. From Sara’s preparations, it is clear that she is very aware of the gendered violence characteristic of the migratory journey, and she invests in transforming herself sartorially so as to increase her chances of survival. Shortly after leaving Guatemala, the three meet another young traveler, a Tzotzul native named Chauk (Rudolfo Dominguez), who speaks virtually no Spanish. He is welcomed by Sara who, through kind gestures and a willingness to learn a new language, or at least to initiate non-verbal communication, points to the possibility of ethical relationality beyond common language, thus dispelling the assimilationist orientation towards the otherness of migrants and indigenous peoples. However, Chauk is initially rejected by Juan who constantly refers to him as “Indian” and is opposed to the kindness Sara accords him. The theme of language and non-verbal communication is further dramatized and politicized when Samuel and Sara, in an attempt to raise some money, perform a street mime show. According to the director, this scene: represents the fight between two territories. There is a line drawn in the ground and they argue and fight over it until they both die … The film tells the story of the clash between an indigenous—and its cosmogony— and a mixed-race Guatemalan who believes in the American consumerist model.28 Shortly after the trek begins, Samuel, exhausted after he and his companions are brutalized and robbed by the police, decides to return to Guatemala. Anticipating the precarity that lies ahead, he asks his friends to go back with him, but the three decide to continue on their journey. The tension between the two cosmologies is further revealed in the initially discordant knowledge practices embodied by Chauk and Juan. But as the journey proceeds and their precarity is intensified, they find ways of effectively working together, each drawing on their practical knowledge and ethics to enable the survival of the other while at the same time being

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 133 radically transformed by the encounter. For instance, Juan, as de facto leader of the group, and owing to his urban metis, steals cowboy boots to replace those that the police has stolen from him. He also steals a chicken but cannot bring himself to kill it with a rock because he does not know how to and, in his hesitation, the chicken (which happens to be the trio’s only assurance of a meal) escapes. After a chase, Chauk manages to capture the chicken and then, in an almost apologetic fashion, pulls its neck effortlessly after whispering to it while stroking its feathers gently in what seems like an animist and more ethical way of taking a life. Later on, after the train is attacked by immigration police who scatter the migrants as they chase them through the countryside, a stranger offers the trio refuge, and in the following scene, we see them working in a sugarcane plantation. Their intense work sessions are punctuated by moments of communing, the most significant being a night of merry-making and dance. While the verbal expressions of friendship and desire for community between Chauk and Sara are stifled by a linguistic gap and by Juan’s disdain for Chauk expressed through gestures and an occasional shove to the chest, we see the possibility for a new “metalinguistic unity” emerging in the place where desire for “linguistic unity” might have led to the identification of lack or need to convert and translate difference. Accordingly, the trio’s co-presence becomes mediated by a meta-language, such as that of the rhythms of works and dance, which creates a space of expression that exceeds that of “language.”29 This new plane of bodily movement occasioned by multiple dance styles, unlike the single purpose train ride to which Juan constantly invites Sara with masculinist refrains (such as his “run, now with balls … hurry up man!”) that enable him to disavow his desire for her, ignites the intimacy between them that had hitherto been insinuated but remained largely unseen. Similarly, it is the dance and the moment when Juan and Sara are stealing away for exclusive intimacy that reveal Chauk’s jealousy. These moments of intimacy simultaneously bring to the fore the two aspects of expression that, according to Gilles Deleuze, are captured in the following formulation: “To explicate is to evolve, to involve is to implicate.”30 The dance as an expression of selves explicates and reveals the evolution of the trio towards each other, creating a stream of affect and a structure of feeling that initiate new obligations towards each other. It also reveals how the three companions have come to be involved with each other and the new substance, attributes, and modes emerging therefrom. In the next leg of their journey, after having acquired a few more supplies due to their work on the sugar plantation, the train is stopped by a group of gun-wielding gangsters who sort the migrants by gender and rob them of their belongings. While Sara initially manages to pass for a man/boy due to her ability to effectively conceal her breasts and to dress in a manner that facilitates a queering performance, one of the gangsters, owing to his predatory and heteronormative attention to the female form, identifies a “pure” form behind Sara’s sartorial covers. As an expression of his dominance, and in an evidentiary practice geared towards revealing what was hidden behind Sara’s clothes

134 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro (while he himself performs his masculine dominance over the young boys), he proceeds to grope her, revealing the bandages used to bind her breasts. Exposed, Sara is taken away to be trafficked, the gangsters’ excitement evident due to assumptions about her virginity because of her young age. When Chauk and Juan try to save Sara, they are attacked by the gangsters, with Juan receiving a deep cut on his chest that leaves him unconscious and with a gaping wound. This is the last we see of Sara, and the film narrative path now turns to Chauk and Juan. Again, Chauk’s knowledge proves useful as he manages to treat Juan’s wound and nurses him back to health using an herbal concoction that he makes from the leaves that he collects in the wild. As Juan slowly heals, his orientation towards Chauk changes their mutual assistance towards each other, enabling them to craft a world of mixed knowledges and to develop a life-world that forms a composite survival mechanism. This moment of encounter, injury, and care is not only one of expression of friendship and mutual desire, or of their obligations towards Sara whose loss they now have to come to terms with. It also, and simultaneously, conceals and expresses what Gilles Deleuze has referred to as “a life.”31 With some aesthetic and ethical insights, we could read Juan’s injury, the care Chauk gives him, and the risktaking that follows as instances of “pure immanence,” which can be considered as “a life, and nothing else.” As Deleuze puts it: No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a “Homo tantum” with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad … A singular essence, a life … But we shouldn’t enclose a life to the single moment when an individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere …32 Transformed by the care, the film treats moments of friendship, life, and emerging sodality between Juan and Chauk’s worlds. In a moment of recognition that Juan has become a different type of human being, Chauk calls Juan “brother” in Spanish. Impressed, Juan laughs as he tells him: “Brother

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 135 Chauk, you have already learnt how to speak Spanish, but I am not your brother.”33 When Juan and Chauk along with other migrants are kidnapped by the gangster Vitamina’s men, who then proceed to sort them according to nationality (so as to extort relatives in the United States), Juan makes the ultimate sacrifice to save Chauk’s life. This is after he is let go by Vitamina because he too, like Juan, is from Guatemala Zone Three and thus can identify with him. However, working against the expectation of the gang, Juan returns to redeem his friend’s life while risking his own. Telling Vitamina that Chauk will be of no value to him because he does not speak Spanish, Juan reverses the order of linguistic recognition and its regime of intelligibility while opening up to other forms of relation such that Vitamina asks him why he is so committed to saving this “Indian” and tells him to leave before he changes his mind. The polyphonic element of The Golden Dream is emphasized by the fact that Chauk’s conversations with Spanish-speaking characters like Sara and Juan remain untranslated, thus leaving a space of speculation rather than mere silence, or the registration of the unintelligible voice as noise. In addition to articulating the untranslatable/untranslated voice, the film also articulates two other sets of voices. One set contains the voices of Los Tigres del Norte singing “La Juala de Oro” (The Golden Cage, which was the film’s Spanish title), a ballad in which a character laments his US existence and paper death. The other voices in the film are those that QuemadaDíez wanted to represent by constructing “the narrative and poetics of this Odyssey from the testimony of hundreds of migrants and from the sentiments of each and every person who participated in the creative process.”34 Inspired by the ballad by Los Tigres del Norte, the film itself is a visual ballad. The poetics to which Quemada-Díez refers is achieved in part through his style of filming, with shots taken at ground level to invite the viewer into the experiences of the young migrants whose journey constitutes the film narrative. In Quemada-Díez’s terms, “In human cinema you have literally a human point of view; the lens is always right at the height of a human being.”35 These human beings are filmed on an extraordinarily precarious route, which the camera cuts away to show when it is not focused on the young travelers. That the route is precarious became evident to QuemadaDíez when he and his crew, during the research for the film, met hostile police and were almost killed by Vitamina, a drug dealer in Mazatlán who suspected them of being from another gang. As a homage to Vitamina for sparing the filmmaker’s life, the director gave him a scene in the film that dramatizes the migrant lives that gangsters like him render precarious.36

Cinematic borderscapes In addition to the epistemological breaks and ethical composition instantiated by the encounters, speech-acts, and poetics in The Golden Dream, a focus on the film drama delivers a global political economy story that is

136 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro similar to the one in La Promesse and Continental Drift. Vulnerable migrants seeking a more prosperous existence create the conditions of possibility for others to prosper. Their vulnerability, imposed by the structure of geopolitical sovereignties with their boundaries, juridical strictures, and implementing policing agencies, delivers them as economic opportunities for both corrupt policing officials at various levels and for criminal opportunists all along the route. At a micropolitical level, the film’s focus is on the strategies that the three migrants traveling with many anonymous others use to survive. The ground level filming, which emphasizes the experience of their migration, distinguishes the film from a history of border films while paying attention to the documentary form and surface narrative that informs Quemada-Díez’s filmmaking practice (which, like social realist filmmaker Ken Loach for whom Quemada-Diez did camera work, involves casting first-time non-professional actors).37 To the extent that Quemada-Díez blends the documentary with fiction, his film resonates with Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal?38 This is a film that seems to begin where The Golden Dream ends. If Quemada-Díez’s film ends without us knowing what becomes of Chauk’s body (a dead migrant whose home and story we do not know but whose journey up until the point of death we are privy to), Who Is Dayani Cristal? begins with the discovery of a dead body in Arizona’s Sonora desert and, through forensic practices and consultation with consulates, migrant communities, and authorities, manages to trace the body back to Honduras. Like The Golden Dream, the investigative camera follows the migrant trail making it possible for us to encounter migrants as they make their precarious journey north on the Beast as well as through many actual stops and detours they take. While the forensic lens in Who Is Dayani Cristal? focuses on professionals and family members who help reveal the identity and story of the dead migrant, in The Golden Dream, what is filmed are the amateur interactions among the three young migrants as they are imperiled and compose new relations on the migrant trail. True to the fictionalization of truth, Quemada-Díez notes that his film, to the extent that we see it through the perspective of these youths, is a composition of many truths: “my truth, the kids’ truth, the migrants’ truth, the real journey’s truth; the truth of real locations including the factory in the US scene.”39 Among the many truths and encounters the film dramatizes are life-affirming relations and the process of becoming. For instance, the film emphasizes the slow process through which Juan accepts the “Indian” whose presence he initially abhors. Chauk’s Indianness is shown not only in scenes of interpersonal interaction, but also with subtle camera shots, and with close-ups of his brown hand resting on things (repeated many times). This intense aesthetic focus on the body makes Juan’s slow ethical reorientation more pronounced as the somatically differentiated duo move in narrative space and through the landscape together as they both progress towards their dreams.

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 137 To capture how the film is thinking, we have to distinguish the setting of the story from the landscape given that the film’s shots are more or less exhausted by the film’s dual focus on the migrant bodies and the landscape through which they travel. As Martin Lefebvre suggests, some filmmakers “have freed the film’s setting from its service to the story.”40 In such cases, “landscape … is space freed from eventhood (e.g., war, expeditions, legends),” making it possible for it to become “a completely distinct aesthetic object.”41 Such is the case with the landscape in The Golden Dream where it appears to be a “distinct aesthetic object.” Moreover, its appearance distinguishes it from the history of border films in which the shots show the US-Mexican border from above, emphasizing a nation-state sovereignty problematique which is punctured (occasionally) by ludic practices, such as children going over the wall to get their ball and then jumping back to the Mexican side. When the camera pans for a more lateral tracking shot, we encounter tactical ventures, such as coyotes/traffickers who use a network of tunnels to traffic drugs carried across by the migrants, who in turn enlist the coyotes’ assistance for border crossing purposes. In many of the film’s sequence shots, the landscape appears as a benign setting until there are sudden appearances of violent predators in what one could call a Hitchcockian approach to the landscape. As Pascal Bonitzer points out, Hitchcock’s camera typically begins by enacting a survey of a seemingly natural scene. However, as the filming proceeds, it becomes evident that there is a perverse element sequestered in the landscape. This means that “the film’s movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event.”42 Accordingly, near the end of The Golden Dream, as Juan and Chauk get close to the US border (after being dropped off by coyotes), the camera surveys a border area landscape that looks unthreatening—until a shot rings out and we see that Chauk has hit the ground, shot dead, followed by a reverse shot of a vigilante sniper looking through his telescopic lens.

Conclusion With the proliferation of paper and other forms of death, forensic evidence of migrant deaths at sea, in the deserts, in trains, or in inner-cities remains inadequate as it acts as proof of a violence that we already know how to recognize or as evidence of deaths that already compute within consensual regimes of counting and accounting for lives. While the cinematic texts that we have engaged in this chapter highlight the condition of migrant deaths and suffering and can act as proof of an atrocious present, they also make it possible to apprehend “a life,” not only as something lost or injured in numbers that we cannot count, but as a set of ethical and aesthetic relations that exceed the identities and genres that seek to frame them.43

138 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro Beyond drawing our attention to the ethical weight of the dead (Amidou, Chauk), those who survive or arrive, and those who are just beginning their journey on the migrant trail, the road movie genre, tragedy, and reflection on the genres of man enable us to question the culture of the home and the forms of attachment, non-contamination, stasis, and action that intensify the precarity of migrant life. La Promesse and The Golden Dream present a domain of counter-action that allows us to question not only the cinema of the actionimage but also the ideal of the whole, the limit, or the people that we are often summoned to identify with. This is unlike the cinema of the action-image and its representation of a monumental history where leaders and heroic figures react to all situations in ways that restore an equilibrium owing to the Situation-Action-Situation (SAS) causal relationships (whereby the interaction between the milieu and a character’s behavior creates a modified situation or restores an equilibrium or habitus).44 Even as the characters drift towards a given destination, the multiple paths, encounters, and detours that the films showcase open up new combinations of senses and possibilities for migrant lives. Significant for us is that, even as the films highlight the precarity of migrants as a mass phenomenon, they derive their force not from documenting the mass deaths (that are implied), but rather from documenting, composing, and narrating migrant life in ways that make every life, every separation, and every death singular. In so doing, they disturb or interrupt the prevailing values and conceptions of a people in which migrant lives, deaths, and suffering are attended to only in terms of their quantitative or moral, rather than ethical, aesthetic, and qualitative elements. This being the case, cinema becomes a force that does not only incite us to think a new sense of community (less xenophobic, less fascist, more hospitable), but also one that, in remapping frontiers, imagines and composes new communities of sense.

Notes 1 Brian Tara and Laczko Frank, eds., Fatal Journeys: Identification and Tracing of Dead and Missing Migrants (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2016), https://publications.iom.int/system/files/fataljourneys_vol2.pdf. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Tara and Laczko, Fatal Journeys, 37. 5 Ibid. 6 Joseph Pugliese, “Forensic Ecologies of Occupied Zones and Geographies of Dispossession: Gaza and Occupied East Jerusalem,” Borderlands, vol. 14, no. 1 (2015): 7, www.borderlands.net.au/vol14no1_2015/pugliese_forensic.pdf. 7 For more on forensis, see Eyal Weizman, introduction to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture, 2014), 7. 8 Tobias Hecht, “Denial: A Visit in Four Ethnographic Fictions,” in Crumpled Paper Boat, ed. Anand and Stuart McLean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 131. 9 Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” e-flux Journal, vol. #64, April 2015, available at www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60861/violence-at-thethreshold-of-detectability/.

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 139 10 See Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 3. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Russell Banks, Continental Drift, 1. 14 Russell Banks, Continental Drift (New York: Harper Collins, 1985), 101. 15 Ibid., 101. 16 Milan Kundera, Encounter (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 92. 17 Laura McMahon, “Homofraternity to Hospitality: Deconstructing the Political with Derrida and the Dardennes,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 4, (2012): 510–524. 18 Joseph Mai, “Corps-Caméra: The Evocation of Touch in the Dardennes’ La Promesse (1996),” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 47, no. 3 (2007): 139. 19 Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 2002), 147–148. 20 G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). 21 Lauren Berlant, “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta,” Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 2 (2007): 287. 22 The concept of “image facts’ belongs to André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 23 The commentary on objects as the cinematic counterpart to novelistic punctuations in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film Glissements Progressif du Plaisir is well-articulated in his interview with Godelieve Mercken-Spaas, “An Interview with Alain RobbeGrillet and Lillian Dumont,” The French Review, vol. 50, no. 4 (1977): 653. 24 Maritza Cárdenas, “A Central American Wound: Remapping the U.S. Borderlands in Oscar Martinez’s The Beast,” (lecture given at The Center for Latin American Studies’ Friday lecture series, Tucson, Arizona, February 2, 2018). 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Maritza Cárdenas, “A Central American Wound.” 28 Douglas Valentine, “A Conversation with Film Director Diego Quemada-Díez,” Counter Punch, December 19, 2014, www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/a-conver sation-with-film-director-diego-quemada-diez/. 29 See Jose Gil, “The Dancer’s Body,” in A Shock to Thought: Expressions After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), 120. 30 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 16. 31 According to Deleuze, “[w]hat conceals also expresses, but what expresses still conceals.” See ibid., 53. 32 Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, and Anne Boyman, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 28–29. 33 Gil, “Dancer’s Body.” 34 See Valentine, “A Conversation with Film Director Diego Quemada-Díez.” 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Oscar Moralde, The Outsiders: Pathways of Migratory Experience in Latin American Films Reviewed Work(s): Un cuento chino (Chinese Take-Away) by Sebastián Borensztein; La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage) by Diego QuemadaDíez, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 41, no. 3, “Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America: In The Footsteps of Michael Kearney” (2014): 238.

140 Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro 39 Valentine, “A Conversation with Film Director Diego Quemada-Díez.” 40 Martin Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape,” in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2007), 28. 41 Ibid., 22–23. 42 See Pascal Bonitzer, “Hitchcockian Suspense,” in Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan … But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Zizek (NewYork: Verso, 1992), 23. 43 Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 28–29. 44 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 141–142.

Bibliography Banks, Russell. Continental Drift. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta,” Public Culture 19, no. 2 (2007): 287. Bonitzer, Pascal Bonitzer. “Hitchcockian Suspense.” In Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan … But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by Slavoj Zizek, 23. New York: Verso, 1992. Cárdenas, Maritza. “A Central American Wound: Remapping the U.S. Borderlands in Oscar Martinez’s The Beast,” Lecture, The Center for Latin American Studies’ Friday lecture series, Tucson, Arizona, February 2, 2018. Chamayou, Grégoire Chamayou. Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, John Rajchman, and Anne Boyman. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Gil, Jose. “The Dancer’s Body.” In A Shock to Thought: Expressions After Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Brian Massumi, 120. London: Routledge, 2002. Hecht, Tobias. “Denial: A Visit in Four Ethnographic Fictions.” In Crumpled Paper Boat:Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 131. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Natural Law. Translated by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Kundera, Milan. Encounter. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Lefebvre, Martin. “Between Setting and Landscape.” In Landscape and Film, edited by Martin Lefebvre, 28. New York: Routledge, 2007. Mai, Joseph. “Corps-Caméra: The Evocation of Touch in the Dardennes’ La Promesse (1996),” L’Esprit Créateur 47, no. 3 (2007): 139. McMahon, Laura. “From Homofraternity to Hospitality: Deconstructing the Political with Derrida and the Dardennes,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 66, no. 4 (2012): 510–524. Mercken-Spaas, Godelieve Mercken-Spaas. “An Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Lillian Dumont,” The French Review 50, no. 4 (1977): 653. Pugliese, Joseph. “Forensic Ecologies of Occupied Zones and Geographies of Dispossession: Gaza and Occupied East Jerusalem,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): 7, www. borderlands.net.au/vol14no1_2015/pugliese_forensic.pdf.

Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity 141 Roello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 2002. Tara, Brian and Laczko Frank, eds., Fatal Journeys: Identification and Tracing of Dead and Missing Migrants. Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2016, https://publications.iom.int/system/files/fataljourneys_vol2.pdf. Valentine, Douglas. “A Conversation with Film Director Diego Quemada-Díez,” Counter Punch. December 19, 2014, www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/a-conversa tion-with-film-director-diego-quemada-diez/. Weizman, Eyal. Introduction to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture, 2014. Weizman, Eyal. “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” e-flux Journal #64, April 2015, available on the web at: www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60861/violence-at-thethreshold-of-detectability/.

8

The kill zone Choreographies of life at the limits of a death-world Ali H. Musleh

The “more-than-human geopolitics” of siege warfare The initiating provocation for this chapter is a brief scene from a six-minute video filmed in May 2009, which documents wheat harvest season in the farmlands of the village of Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, a city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. A woman harvesting her land at the limits of Gaza can be seen gripping the grain with one hand and using a sickle to pull through and cut it with the other. She wraps up the stocks into a sheath, takes a few steps to her left and bends to place the sheath on the pile of her labor. As she stands up straight, she directs her gaze towards a cylindrical shaped concrete tower topped by a golden dome that imposes its presence on that line between the yellow wheat field and the blue grey sky where the Israeli fence extends from one side of the frame to the other. Inside that dome the flying watchtowers occupying Gaza’s skies have landed in the form of the “Roeh-Yoreh” (Sees-Fires in Hebrew), a stationary remote-controlled 0.5-caliber machine-gun equipped with autonomous capabilities. This “Sentry Tech” is controlled from a number of military bases stationed around Gaza. It is integrated with ground and airborne sensors and is deployed at intervals along the entire Israeli barrier to create 1,500-meter deep “Kill Zones” inside Gaza’s territory1 that enforce a brutal siege unparalleled in the history of colonized Palestine in its viciousness and technological implementation. By naval drone and gun boats, these zones also continue at sea, circumscribing Palestinian movement to three nautical miles from the coastal line. Two million people, overwhelmingly refugees, are enclosed within this carceral geography activated and surveilled by a variegated complex of nonhuman apparatuses rooted in the globalized weapons industry of a settler-colony “moving into the robotic era.”2 This chapter highlights the role of unmanned weapons in shaping the geography of settler colonialism in Palestine. It argues that technical apparatuses are not mere instruments extending the realm of “human” action and intention into colonized bodies and places but should be seen as active actors that alter the colonial encounter and shape the violent field of relations3 in which “life” emerges in differentially managed categories.4 At

The kill zone 143 the same time, these technical apparatuses do not operate in isolation of the contexts they inhabit as overdetermining causal forces. They should be seen as part of a “social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical assemblage at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.”5 What ways of being these technological artifacts allow and forbid are a result of their integration within mixed assemblages constituted by, amongst other things, ideologies, organizational arrangement, and operational logics.6 Understanding settler colonialism as a machinic assemblage is crucial to understanding the contemporary terror formation7 enclosing Gaza, particularly as “the increased role of high technology (as opposed to manpower)”8 is reshaping Palestinian life and the order of settler-colonial war. At its core, this chapter is an inquiry into how remote-controlled and robotic weapons enact and stabilize a “more-than-human geopolitics” of siege warfare in Gaza. It explores how a lethal regime of enclosure and movement control is exercised through the delegation of violence to nonhuman apparatuses assembled to form a “[high-tech] territorial penitentiary.”9 I focus, in particular, on the kill zone as a site of encounters that activate and produce a field of relations in which Palestinians are composed as entities reduced to their movement as besieged subjects. Although Gaza today is enclosed by a multiplicity of unmanned weapons ranging from the stratospheric to the subterranean, this project highlights the role of the Roeh-Yoreh. Since its installation in 2008, the operators of this weapon system have been responsible for almost all cases of lethal violence in the kill zone.10 Even if they are not the ones to pull the trigger—although they do in most incidents—they carry out monitoring, behavior analysis, and incrimination procedures, and thus they play an integral part in executing siege warfare. According to monthly reports published by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), 2,276 Palestinians were injured between 2009 and 2017 and more than 235 were killed, including men, women, and children. As I write this chapter, the toll is increasing by the day as Palestinians march towards the kill zone to demand their right of return and the dismantlement of the geopolitics sustaining Jewish-Israeli supremacy. I borrow the term “more-than-human geopolitics” from Ian Shaw’s scholarship on the geography of drone warfare. In his book Predator Empire, he argues that “the nonhuman landscape—populated by objects, things, tools, and technology—directly … condition[s] the spaces of everyday life, from the conduct of state violence down to our psychological dispositions.”11 Taking this formulation as his guiding framework, he views the deployment of aerial drones in the geographies of what Derek Gregory calls “the everywhere war”12 as part of a long project to enclose the human species within “technological civilization”—a project that started with the industrial revolution and the enclosure movement in Europe. Mapping its contemporary form, in Shaw’s sight is the American empire which, in transforming itself into a machineintensive project, has become a “predator empire”: a gigantic Leviathan

144 Ali H. Musleh securing the planetary policing of enclosures of Deleuzian control societies that “are neither built with walls nor bound to concrete spaces.”13 John Collins notes that “[i]n carrying out its own projects … settler colonialism [particularly the United States, Israel, and South Africa] did much to bring about a globalized world of permanent war in which there is no longer any ‘outside’ (if there ever was).”14 As the largest drone exporter in the world15 and the biggest innovator of “airborne thanato-tactics” that were tested in Gaza and scaled up by the United States in its “global war on terror,”16 Israel has played a determining role in designing strategies that render operative the boundless empire that Shaw conceptualized. However, as Gregory reminds us, the “every-where war is also always somewhere.”17 Tracing what regimes of warfare and matrices of military violence remote platforms help activate18 requires attention to the historical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of the contexts in which they operate to explore the material experiences of life in the age of drone warfare.19 In Gaza, unmanned platforms are agents of a settler colony with no declared borders deploying its remote split-location operations along the racial binary of settler nationals and a native people accumulated in ever smaller and circumscribed spaces with the goal to open greater swaths of land for colonial settlement.20 In this geographical schema, the topography that the remote-controlled weapon implies, of a “hostile environment” and a “safe one” from which it is operated,21 organizes a mode of distributing bodies as spatial units of power, the control over which establishes a particular regime of separation and domination. How those bodies are produced through the command over their movement within concrete spaces extends to the production of a drone animated geographical imaginary, which delineates a settler polity, projected as nationally coherent, against surplus bodies to be excluded from the social order and enclosed within the sphere of colonial sovereignty as besieged subjects.22 Here, the carceral geography of kill zones operates as a frontier that is coextensive with the drone frontier. It establishes an asymmetrical “border” ring, one that enables the unilateral flow of power from outside while it blocks and contains all movement from inside the isolated territorial cell. Functioning as a “demographic border,”23 this frontier is the materialization of a politics of separation enabled and conditioned by nonhuman apparatuses. It is the technological assembly of an anesthetizing form of apartheid whose logics of security are cognate with those of the drone. Bodies of population, inextricably intertwined and geographically intimate, are pulled apart by “frictionless” remote operations and made to occupy separate existential spheres in which they are subject to different sets of law and techniques of management designed to establish and maintain a hierarchy of life, of which Gaza Palestinians inhabit the very bottom.24 As with the separation wall in the West Bank, technological immunization is meant “to resolve … a surplus of presence that some see as the primary reason for conditions of unbearable suffering”25 while conditioning this protective insulation on the Other’s “experience of a permanent condition of ‘being in pain’.”26 The delinking, pain insulating mechanics of this regime

The kill zone 145 also afford immunity as impunity. Separation from Gaza is underwritten by a principle of “maximum control and minimum responsibility”27 articulated by a “risk-transfer war with a vengeance.”28 This logic of separation contaminates the micro-encounters in the nonhuman landscapes of Gaza’s kill zones and encapsulates the more-than-human geopolitics of siege. To the Israeli state, having no permanent settler presence in Gaza’s territory is meant “to dispel claims regarding Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”29 (Israel MFA 2004). How “the drone upsets the available [legal, political, ethical and ontological] categories, to the point of rendering them inapplicable”30 is thoroughly exploited to produce “structural deniability, cutouts, and juridical shadowing and blurring,”31 all condensed in the repeatedly discredited claim that the Gaza Strip is no longer occupied territory.32 Each of the techniques I will explore here base the mechanical functioning of techno-political immunology on the transfer of risk and responsibility to Palestinians. Before I start this exploration, a few notes on the role of the technical assemblages of siege are in order.

Technologies of movement and the construction of besieged subjects The kill zone as a mechanism of mass internment highlights the necropolitical use of remote platforms to restrict, incite, provoke, and produce movement. As such, it could be said that, in this assembly, unmanned weapons operate as technologies of movement wherein movement itself “appears as the material substance of political life, action, and association.”33 The main body of scholarship on drone warfare does not heed this function of remote weapons, perhaps because of the focus on the aerial type of the drone family. However, in Drone: Remote Control Warfare, Hugh Gusterson alludes to conceptions of movement in remote control warfare, which, to him, reconfigure relations of space in a manner he likens to the capitalist casting of bodies: The respatializing dynamics [in drone warfare] are profound and asymmetrical. The human targets of drone strikes feel trapped in the local, from which there may be no escape, but the targeters inhabit a space of free movement that has become stretched to global proportions. This is a little like the contemporary relationship between labor, which is trapped at the local level by lack of resources and by national boundaries, and globalized capital, which is free to move anywhere in the world with a few keystrokes.34 Before the Israeli project of separation was initiated in the early 1990s and the segregation of Gaza began, the enclave was used as a depository for cheap labor in the colonies. Joan Mandell called Gaza “Israel’s Soweto,”35 liking it to the ghetto territory of apartheid South Africa. However, under the contemporary regime of colonial occupation, Palestinians are not

146 Ali H. Musleh treated as bodies to be violently disciplined, broken in, and productivized, but rather they are isolated as surplus units slated for necropolitical performances of sovereignty. Indeed, the transformation of the Israeli regime of control from a “politics of life” to a “politics of death”36 brought forth a new relationship between subject and power, according to mobility theorist Hagar Kotef. Kotef maintains that this shift [towards necropolitics] can also be explained as a shift from politics of circulation—a liberal project, which is intertwined with disciplinary and biopowers—to a politics of halting, in which the subject of interest is no longer precisely the population, but a new entity of subjects-in-motion, which comprises single-dimensional, subject-like positions with the sole attribute of locomotion.37 In her book Ordering Freedom, Kotef examines how this ready-made unidimensional subjectivity is crystalized in the concrete complex of apparatuses in the settler-colonial frontier of the West Bank. However, her contribution also provides insights into the operation of power in the Gaza penitentiary and its kill zones. There, the construction of Gazans as subjects-in-motion takes place in staged encounters where a whole sector of techniques of remote warfare are active in the production of subjectivity, from surveillance to behavior analysis, down to targeting and threat of annihilation. A characteristic of the kill zone that enables the active role of machines in articulating space and producing movement to construct these unidimensional subjects is its undefined nature. Gaza’s kill zones are known by many names—the “No-Go Zones”; the “Sterile Zones”; the “Buffer Zones”; or, in more technical terms, the “Access Restricted Areas.” The main strategy according to one ex-general who oversaw the process of designing and implementing these spaces in the early days of the Second Palestinian Intifada was “to create areas in which anyone who entered was considered a terrorist.”38 These zones serve as templates for a project designed to “expand the geographic space in which the Israeli military transforms contact with Palestinians into a deadly encounter in a free-fire zone.”39 There, necropower is exercized to establish spatial differentiations that violently deform and reform the material conditions of life and wrap Palestinians in a state of constant upheaval due, in part, to these zones’ erratic nature. The kill zones are temporally open, but spatially ambiguous. There are no markers on the ground to delineate their bounds, nor are there any clear announcements from the occupier as to where they start. As a report titled “Within Range” by Diakonia states, a kill zone “is de facto defined via the area in which it is enforced rather than through a written order or policy or clear physical demarcation.”40 It is an elastic space activated, shaped, and expanded by, amongst other things, machine sensation and mediation, “incrimination” procedures, and the range of lethal intervention mechanisms. What characteristics it has emerged from numerous practices and the

The kill zone 147 exercised capacities of its constituent components rather than from pre-set parameters that govern its regime. Any tweaks in procedure, retooling, or change in remote-operating personnel can produce effects that modify the parameter while maintaining the one consistent function of the kill zone: the production of killable bodies. These features produce a terrain of contingency and give the techniques and tactics deployed particular efficacy in the field. One condition provided that allows for the uninterrupted exercise of this force is the practice of “clearing.” Gaza is no more than 5–12 kilometers wide and 45 kilometers long. On a regular day, the geography of lethal zonings can cover a fifth of Gaza’s territory, extending to the depths of its intimate topographies. Homes, educational institutions, spaces of worship, farmlands, and orchards are all targets in the kill zone, resulting in the total or partial ban of access to these places,41 at least to what is left of them. Based on a logic of “territorial overcharge,”42 justified by a particular conception of relations of enmity, these places are seen as platforms from which Palestinian armed groups can launch attacks on Israelis and as such are treated as legitimate targets for demolition and “clearing” by remote-controlled bulldozer and bomb. Since 2005, 996 homes were completely demolished and 371 partially destroyed to produce these lethal spacings.43 Schools, mosques, factories, as well as hundreds of water wells and chicken and sheep farms have suffered the same fate, with the agricultural sector being hit the hardest. Almost a third of Gaza’s arable land that had served as its food basket has been turned into “no-go zones”44 and has been subjected to “leveling” operations, thus supplementing Israel’s policy “to put the Palestinians on a diet.”45 Of these “clearing” and “leveling” policies, B’Tselem said that: [these terms conceal] the destructive and long-term consequences for the Palestinian residents in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of people have been made homeless and thousands have lost their sole source of income for many years to come. Israel caused this damage to people although it did not contend that they themselves were involved in attacks, or attempted attacks, against Israeli civilians or security forces.46 The Israeli military claims that establishing spaces emptied of Palestinian life and transforming the topography of the kill zone are meant to “enable optimal and continuous security operations.”47 “Security” here is, amongst other things, code for constant surveillance. Surveillance mechanisms and protocols in the kill zone are not passive. What clearing and leveling allow is the production of a visual field that operates according to what Gil Hochberg calls the “principle of surveillance,” that is to say, “a principle that guarantees maximum subjection of Palestinians to the Israeli military gaze as well as maximum visibility of this monitoring gaze to Palestinian eyes.”48 Indeed, in removing all physical obstacles between weapon and target, the

148 Ali H. Musleh landscape of the kill zone is made directly visible to Palestinians while it makes compulsory the uninterrupted physical exposure to Israeli armed panopticons. The efficacy of this visual field is ensured by the annihilatory power its agents project as an ever-looming threat, not to mention the spectacularized acts of aggression performed on a regular basis. Indiscriminate shelling and firing is often carried out in the direction of orchards and populated areas, particularly when visibility is low due to weather conditions—a practice the Israeli military calls “preventive shooting.”49 Within this visual regime, there is no dissociation of the “see/being seen dyad,” nor is there evidence of the sanitized application of surveillance internalized by Michel Foucault’s modern subject.50 In Gaza, the inmates must see that they are being looked at. Subjection is real but not “born mechanically from a fictitious relation.”51 The mechanics of “Sees-Fires” permeate the field with surplus power whereby almost nothing is left to the imagination. Indeed, weapons are brought into play in these zones without matching force to target typologies as necessitated by the logics of the “lesser evil” and to render state violence “sustainable.”52 Calculative economies of violence moderation are replaced with an economy of signs exchange facilitated by performances of violence that are meant to “look good to the Israeli audience, and look bad for the Palestinian audience.”53 This alternative economy, as Eyal Weizman explains, is governed by a punisher unleashing his wrath in the zonings of the “war of the mad” where it is precisely the use of excessive violence that is meant to send a message to a population that is either to be reconstructed or put to death.54 Here, maximum subjection and maximum visibility, guaranteed by punitive lethal force, are meant to interpellate a certain kind of subject. This is a “subject-in-motion” who, in seeing and being seen in the fabricated stages of the kill zone, must recognize that he and she have reached the limits of their world. Punitive violence, carried out against the Palestinian collective, is deepened by the impunity realized by the separation mechanics that inoculate the occupier from his crimes. Thus, in “entering” the monstrous landscape of the kill zone, Palestinians become subject to a “machinic interpellation”55 that produces them as active actors who, in order to conform to the social position assigned to them as besieged subjects, have to perform choreographies of movement that amount to embodied forms of life that will not be signaled for elimination. If Palestinians refuse this position and/or move in a manner that abuses the order of relations imposed on them, they become targets for immediate destruction. In the next sections, I highlight and explore two techniques that produce such encounters. The first is a product of the spatial ambiguity of the kill zone and is called the “invisible line.” This line is a shifting, invisible “marker” of the kill zone, which, once crossed, makes Palestinians subject to the kill zone regime. The second is the production of liminality, and it focuses on how incrimination procedures, based on behavior analysis, work

The kill zone 149 not so much to recognize what movements are “suspicious” or “innocent” to differentiate civilian from terrorist, but to produce a liminal state of being where it becomes the Palestinian’s responsibility to enact patterns of life legible to machines and their remote-operators. Each of these political techniques is crucial to the working of enclosure on multiple scales, from the immediate site of encounter to the geopolitics of siege. The status of Palestinians as besieged subjects is produced and reproduced in this space where ground tactics meet the overarching strategy of siege warfare. After completing my investigation, I close by giving an example of how Palestinians respond to this regime by enacting modes of re-embodiment that draw new modalities of subjectivation through counter-choreographies.

The invisible line Leaving the kill zones with no clear physical demarcation or written decrees that define it is part of the larger Israeli effort to manage its “signature” in Gaza’s territory to maintain the claim that the Strip is no longer occupied. This project began in 2005 with the withdrawal of settlers, those in uniform and out of uniform, and removing all signs of permanent presence, including the enduring (traditional) symbols of Israeli power—from settlements, internal checkpoints, security zonings to monuments of conquest, and so on— which were in place to signal the onward march of colonial expansion. What followed was the replacement of the rigid geography of settlement with spatializations of power that can never be complete or frozen as definite striations of the territory56 but nonetheless structure and destructure its surface to adaptively carve-out “battlespaces” or “combat zones.” These spacings are the kill zone on the move. They follow Israeli soldiers wherever they go and reconstruct space through the movement flow of force.57 As in the carceral geography of kill zones, movement restrictions apply. Whoever “enters” the zone is to “shoulder the responsibility for their encounter with the combatant and should therefore bear the consequences,”58 to quote Israeli ethicists Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin. The machine activated carceral geography of the kill zones is part of the makeup of this “deconstructed battlefield.”59 As noted earlier, it functions as a flexible frontier that allows the mobility and flow of force from outside while blocking and containing all movement from inside the besieged Strip. This it allows precisely because of its performative nature. The kill zone is made of repetitive clearing, leveling, incrimination, and shootings, and all of the practices involved in shaping and articulating its regime. It has no need for delimiting markers because what its practices collectively produce is an invisible line that ebbs and flows, leaving dead bodies and ruin in its wake. This shifting, redrawable line makes the kill zone almost impossible to delineate. Whatever map is used to capture it becomes obsolete the moment it is drawn. Only approximations of “high-risk areas” can be achieved by plotting sites of attempted and successful crimes. Based on

150 Ali H. Musleh interviews with Palestinians, human rights organizations have plotted shootings 1,500 meters from the Israeli barrier,60 which happens to be the firing range of the Roeh-Yoreh. The invisible line turns Gaza’s enclosure into an agitated sphere of performative acts of violence: “an exercise not in containing Palestinian terrorism … but in projecting and aggrandizing Israeli terror.”61 Gaza’s territory can thus be shrunk at will by acts that repeatedly animate the processes of dispossession, displacement, and concentration that made the Strip possible in the first place.62 But unlike the Nakba of 1948 when Palestinians were scattered beyond the territorial boundaries of the newly formed settler-state, these processes take place within a zone of confinement where escape and outside refuge are made impossible. Within this prison, the erratic geography of kill zones extends the ideologies of pollution and purification at the center of the Israeli polity to Gaza’s peripheries and beyond, virtualizing in the process a never-ending Nakba in the form of genocidal potential. “[W]here do we draw the line?” one Israeli officer of the Gaza Division asked. “[W]hat prevents us from destroying Gaza? If a tactical solution is involved, why don’t we turn the entire Gaza Strip into an island of ruins and finally put an end to the story?”63 In 2014, the Israeli military had a response to the officer. During the land invasion in operation “Protective Edge,” the line was extended to three kilometers inside Gaza, turning 45 percent of its territory into a “no-go zone.”64 The invisible line is the product of a desire to annihilate. There are no clear bounds to Gaza’s carceral geography precisely because it is animated by a devouring appetite for bodies to be destroyed. These bodies, once they have crossed the ever-shifting line, become temporary concretizations of the limits of the kill zone. The body of Ahmed Abu Hashish, a teenager of 18, was instrumentalized in such a grotesque manner. After being shot and killed, his body was left to rot in the kill zone for almost two months with no one being able to retrieve it or even come close to inspect the location from which the foul smell of death was emanating. When a group of volunteers tried to approach it, they were shot at. One of the volunteers reporting later on the incident said: our presence in that area that day must not have come as any surprise to [the Israelis] … They would have known where [Ahmed’s] body lay. The Israeli military never informed anyone of this. They did not pass on news of Ahmed’s murder to his family. Instead, they waited for almost two months, knowing that at some point and despite the danger, a search party might come looking for the corpse.65 During those two months, Ahmed’s body became the decaying marker of the kill zone and the organic imprint of the invisible line on the ground. In becoming so, it was also transformed into the very icon used to legitimize the siege: the terrorist body. The invisible line should be understood as

The kill zone 151 a built-in failure in the regime of movement control. It is not meant to regulate movement, but to halt and incite it in a manner that allows for the acquisition of targets. Nevertheless, to its Israeli composer, the invisible line functions as a limit which surely is only trespassed by those Palestinians who refuse the no-go command and thus, in moving in a manner that abuses it, must be “terrorists.” “In Gaza,” Lisa Bhungalia notes, “death is not something to be hidden away but rather, something to be strategically exposed.”66 In making the visual field of the kill zone, Israel made sure that vision not only creates violence but also that violence becomes a mode of visualization. This allows the armed panopticon to acquire an “icon-making” function, operating as a “prosthetic that extends ideology and visions of history into the depth of the human body.”67 The bodies it captures within its visual field are transformed by optics, data analysis, and circulation into not only targets, but also iconic, menacing figures that are enemies of Israel but also of “the rest of humanity.” In this icon-making operation, each individual body destroyed is turned into further evidence for the necessity of occupation and siege of an entire population. The Palestinian body, dead and depicted, becomes the very product of the kill zone and the alleged condition for its very continuity. The enclosure of Gaza is thus made operational on multiple scales. In the immediate site of encounter, the “trespasser” is responsible for “entering” the zone and as such shoulders the responsibility for what happened to him or her. In being killed and transformed into the iconic “terrorist” figure for Israeli consumption, trespassers become yet another example of the Palestinian responsibility for the collective punishment they must endure in retaliation for their aggression. As the invisible line ebbs and flows, it keeps this operation on repeat mode, temporally extending siege warfare due to the “misbehavior” of the interned. A loop of ideological enclosure is produced in the process whereby it is the Palestinian, and only the Palestinian, who is keeping himself or herself inside the cage.

Liminality In Times in the Shadow, Laleh Khalili writes that “[c]onquering powers create ostensibly lawless places through a conscious and deliberate legal process of temporarily and functionally setting aside one body of law and adopting another, or in rarer and more extreme instances, replacing legal procedures with administrative procedures.”68 In the kill zone, Israel toggles and shifts between sets of fabricated laws, procedures, and arbitrary killings as it wishes because of the undefined nature of the kill zone. Asked about how the kill zone and its operations are justified, one of its architects commented: When you want to use something, you have no problem finding the justification, especially when we hit those we wanted to hit when we used

152 Ali H. Musleh them at the start of the events. If at the beginning we could justify it operationally, then even if there were personnel from the Advocate General’s Office or from the prosecution, it was easy to bend them in the face of the results.69 In invoking legal procedure, the Israelis often highlight the command operation of the Roeh-Yoreh. The phallic architecture of that weapon system is an enduring symbol of the masculinized violence of the Israeli settler-colonial frontier.70 However, those who operate it are a group of all-female soldiers of the Intelligence Corps called the “Spotters.” Often nineteen and twenty-year-olds, these “lookouts” monitor video images of the kill zone and analyze the behavior of Palestinian bodies to “distinguish between who is an innocent civilian and who, by their gait and what they are carrying, might be a terrorist.”71 This process is called “incrimination.” Once the spotter makes her judgement, she calls the commanding officer in the kill-chain to seek authorization—a process that should take no more than two minutes. When given the go ahead, the soldier slews the remote-controlled machine-gun towards the target and “boom, boom,” in the words of one spotter.72 No attempts at standardization are made in regard to what constitutes “suspicious” behavior, nor is information provided on what conditions might increase risk to civilians, though the Roeh-Yoreh is deployed in places of active Palestinian presence. Instead, Palestinians are left to their own devices to figure out what movements trigger the machine. In Distinction and the Ethics of Violence, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon explore how technologies are deployed in today’s deconstructed battlefields, and they differentiate between what they call the “apparatus of distinction”—based on the legal principle of distinction, which necessitates that armed actors distinguish between civilians and combatants— and “apparatuses of surveillance, which aim to monitor, detect, and analyze specific environments as well as produce situational awareness.”73 The strategic function of the apparatus of distinction, they claim, is “to uncover and ascertain specific human targets for military purposes.”74 Its operation is not one of “recognizing” subjects and their protected status. Rather, it “transforms civilians into liminal figures of international law,”75 figures who enter a state of in-betweenness and inhabit neither the physical and legal status of the civilian nor that of the combatant. An example they give is the “human shield” who enters this threshold state the moment his or her body is framed as occupying a space between the military and its targets. In this in-between position, it becomes possible not only to deny these subjects the protections afforded to civilians by international law, but also to turn them into killable bodies outside the realm of grievability. This productive process, they note, is nothing short of the “the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law’s axiomatic figures: the civilian.”76

The kill zone 153 Taking heed of Perugini and Gordon’s contribution, the incrimination procedure of the Roeh-Yoreh can be said to function as an apparatus of distinction. However, unlike the human shield, the Palestinians within its scopic field are not located between attacking forces and civilians, but rather enter a liminal state of being once they have crossed the invisible line and have “entered” the kill zone. Here, the structural ambiguity of the kill zone regime and the state of in-betweenness the Palestinians are made to inhabit is intensified by their production as active actors who are already suspicious because of the framing of their movement as “trespass.” Even though the incrimination procedure is actively analyzing behavior and categorizing bodies, the burden of distinction is partially, if not entirely, displaced onto the Palestinian. In other words, in inhabiting a liminal state of being by entering the kill zone, it is the Palestinians who have to produce themselves as civilians in the encounter with the machine. This requires learning what behaviors and conditions may increase or decrease the possibility of death by observing patterns of targeting. A United Nations report confirms this situation. It states that civilians moving in the outskirts of Gaza “are forced to assess the risks before every entry, based on their individual and collective experience” (OCHA and WFP 2010, 15).77 Asked what factors increased the risk of being shot at, Palestinians listed: “Proximity to the fence”; “Being a man”; “Being in a small group (4–6 people)”; “Wearing a veil”; “Entering between dusk and dawn”; “Foggy weather”; and so on.78 All these factors, from the gendered, racialized, down to the technical, have to inform the construction of embodied performances of patterns of life legible to machines and their remote operators in order for the Palestinian to establish his or her protected status as a civilian. In doing so, however, Palestinians come to be locked within international law as inhabitants of the discursive space of the kill zone while they are denied the very protections and rights afforded by the law itself. Indeed, the “civilian” in this case is nothing more than the embodiment of the prison-house moving-subject. This is an entity that is not endowed with the right to move freely, but one who has learned to navigate the lethal terrains of the kill zone. Thus, in order to perform “civilian-hood” without failure, Palestinians have to conform to the theories the Israelis project unto them as beings-for-domination. To Mikko Joronen, this treatment of Palestinians reconfigures the neoliberal logics of biopolitical self-management and selfcare to produce active subjects governed by necropolitical or thanatopolitical responsibilization.79 This regime does not pretend to encourage the growth of personal autonomy to ultimately produce “resilient subjects” fit for a neoliberal world.80 Rather, responsibilization is promoted here as a condition of individuals incapable of self-regulating their movement and, as such, as the only party accountable for inhabiting a “fluid normative abyss,”81 to which they must continuously learn to adapt. In analyzing the encounter in the kill zone, what emerges is an asymmetrical landscape of behavior analysis. Palestinians map and navigate the terrain of forces with their bodies and collectively analyze the behavior of machines

154 Ali H. Musleh while remote-operators, whose bodies are located out of site, analyze the behavior of Palestinians, with one side only given the rights of protection and the use of force. In this situation, behavior analysis and the schematization of bodies are not passive acts, but rather part of a technology of movement whose ultimate goal is to produce a form of life reduced to a unidimensional entity defined by its movement. The lack of standardization produces unpredictability and makes bodies readily available for destruction while keeping Palestinians on their toes, ever trying to approximate what movements might lead to their death. The kill zone thus becomes a stage of constant physical performance, continuously producing gendered and racialized choreographies that have to be embodied by those caught within its ever-shifting lines.

Counter-choreographies In Enforcing Order, Didier Fassin notes that “[the] political subject is [the product of the] dialectical relationship of subjection and subjectification, through which the individual is assigned a place which he can either recognize as his own, or reject.”82 In my theoretical foray into the kill zone, I have tried to show how the encounters in this monstrous landscape activate, produce, and stabilize a more-than-human geopolitics of siege warfare to establish a regime of separation and domination. These encounters are of absolute asymmetry. They spatialize contingent, lethal, carceral zonings shaped and expanded by the weapon articulated gaze, “incrimination” procedures, and firepower in order to produce embodied subjects-in-motion enclosed within a death-world of Israel’s own making. In this world where war is reduced to a unilateral matter of killing, resistance—the entry into a relation where one has the ability to affect and be affected—is rendered materially impossible. Palestinians are thus presented with two choices. Once interpellated, they either recognize themselves as besieged subjects responsible for performing ever-shifting choreographies of forms of life legible to machines and their remote operators, or they refuse the position assigned to them and suffer death or injury. However, as costly as refusal can be, it bespeaks of a politics of struggle not amenable to a biopolitics of mere survival. In closing, I will show how Palestinians refuse the position imposed on them by performing modes of re-embodiment in the kill zone, drawing new modalities of subjectivation through counterchoreographies. These performances express a politics, one that articulates the problem of decolonial struggle when a person is met with such odds. Indeed, it is not whether one lives or one dies that matters; rather, it is how one lives and how one dies that defines the ethics of refusal. Under Israeli colonial occupation and siege, body and land are inextricably intertwined as intimate sites of aggression and control, which nonetheless also remain sites of Palestinian defiance.83 Every year, on March 30, acts of memorialization and dissent take place throughout Palestine to commemorate Land Day, the day when Israel killed six of its Palestinian citizens as they were protesting the government’s expropriation of their land. On

The kill zone 155 Land Day 2010, a popular committee called the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative organized a march towards the kill zone to reclaim the farmlands of the city of Beit Hanoun in the northern part of Gaza and to remember dear ones lost in this violent landscape. The late International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist Vittorio Utopia Arrigoni was the one to capture the march on video. Through his camera work, he places Palestinians within two scopic fields—that of the camera, and that of the armed panopticon— to produce a cinematic view of the event. In multiple scenes, men and women can be seen in Dabke formation performing Palestinian folkloric dance under the gaze of the Roeh-Yoreh. The choreography of the dance incorporated traditional routines with farming movements to reconnect body and land. To the viewer, dance is emphasized as an act of refusal, producing Palestinians as “aesthetic subjects” who are recomposing themselves as bodies in-process through politico-aesthetic modes of defiance.84 The movement images of Palestinian dancers within the landscape are punctuated by zoom-in shots that capture the menacing presence of the RoehYoreh in the background, placing Palestinian bodies within its uninterrupted visual field. However, in zooming out, we see that, even though Palestinians are still subjected to machinic interpellation, no one is enacting the choreographies and sets of relations it imposes on them. Rather, we see bodies extended and flowing, moving in relation to one another and in relation to the land to self-fashion and bring forth new modes of subjectivation through the counter-choreographies of dance. Admittedly, these acts of refusal and defiance do not dismantle the structure of relations imposed on the Palestinians, nor do they, in utilitarian terms, produce material conditions for resistance. Nevertheless, in these encounters, Palestinians do reclaim their bodies and spaces, and they reproduce their decolonial struggle, and bravely so, even if temporarily. The choice to perform these acts of re-embodiment on days when the entire Palestinian nation commemorates its loss of land and the catastrophes that have befallen it since Zionist colonization began extends their performative power from the immediate sites of exile to reconnect a territorially fragmented body politic under the umbrella of collective struggle. Heeding these acts of subjectivation, one can see people who know full well the impact of Israeli necropolitics on their bodies and land, but nonetheless choose to enact the very form of life it seeks to eliminate. In doing so, they refuse to fit within a world in which the role assigned to them is to disappear. To acknowledge the agency of the Palestinians in these moments is not to indulge in false optimism. Gaza’s counter-choreographies are acts of “undefeated despair,” as the late John Berger put it.85 These are acts, not of surrender, but rather acts that reveal a commitment to a politics of emancipation in spite of the occupier’s insatiable appetite to inflict pain and misery. These are choreographies of return—to body and land—as the tirelessly pursued project of liberation. That, Israel’s machinery of death could not force the Palestinians in Gaza to surrender.

156 Ali H. Musleh

Notes 1 Noah Shactman, “Robo-Snipers, ‘Auto Kill Zones’ to Protect Israeli Borders,” Wired, July 4, 2017, www.wired.com/2007/06/for-years-and-y/. 2 Charles Levinson, “Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield: Nation Forges Ahead in Deploying Unmanned Military Vehicles by Air and Land,” The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2010, www.wsj.com/articles/SB126325146524725387. 3 Lauren Wilcox, “Drone Warfare and the Making of Bodies Out of Place,” Critical Studies on Security (2015): 127–131. 4 Michael Shapiro, War Crimes, Atrocity and Justice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 58–59. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2003), 397–398. 6 Antoine Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (London: Columbia University Press, 2009), 18. 7 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture (2003). 8 Helga Tawil-Souri, “Digital Occupation: Gaza’s High-tech Enclosure,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2012): 28. 9 Ibid., 38. 10 Ansbel Pfeffer, “IDF’s Newest Heroes: Women Spotters on Gaza Border,” Haaretz, March 3, 2010, www.haaretz.com/1.5035872. 11 Ian Shaw, Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5. 12 Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” The Geographical Journal (2011): 238–250. 13 Shaw, Predator Empire, 196. 14 John Collins, “A Dream Deterred: Palestine from Total War to Total Peace,” in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 173. 15 Harriet Sherwood, “Israel is World’s Largest Drone Exporter,” The Guardian, May 20, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/20/israel-worlds-largestdrone-exporter. 16 Eyal Weizman, “Thanatotactics,” Springerin, no. 4 (2006). 17 Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” 240. 18 Derek Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” Radical Philosophy (2014): 7. 19 See Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 20 See Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 7; Noura Erakat, “Taking the Land without the People: The 1967 Story as Told by the Law,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2017): 20; Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 42. 21 Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: The New Press, 2015), 22. 22 Since the inception of Zionism in Palestine, settler national coherence has been understood as the creation of a Jewish majority on conquered territory. According to Israeli law, Palestinian survivors of waves of ethnic cleansing who remained under Israeli sovereignty in the period between 1948 and 1967 were given Israeli citizenship but are not considered Israeli nationals. This privileged category is maintained for Jews wherever they may reside, inside Palestine or in the rest of the world. Lately, this categorical division has been codified as “basic law,” making the right to self-determination unique to the Jewish nationals of the Israeli state. Drone animated geographical imaginaries project the fantasy of national coherence on conquered territory by establishing a racial dichotomy

The kill zone 157

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

between the “protected inside” and the “hostile outside” where it is precisely “Arabness” that is created as exterior to “Jewishness.” This spatial-racial configuration not only erases Palestinian presence in the 1948 territories, but it also erases the Arabness of the Mizrahi Jew who, in order to be absorbed into the body politic as a national, has to be “cleansed” of his and her oriental background and assimilated into a Euro vision of Israeli identity. Arnon Soffer, “Demographics in the Israeli-Palestinan Dispute,” The Washington Institute, March 22, 2002, www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/ demographics-in-the-israeli-palestinian-dispute. Distance here must be understood in relation to the means of violence deployed against the Palestinian. As opposed to the logics of geographical expansion that proliferate sites of “friction” and violence while splitting populations in closedoff zones of exclusion, remote platforms are deployed to manufacture distance between Palestinians and Israelis through distancing the weapon from the Israeli and making it proximate to the Palestinian. It is in this reconfiguration of the spatial relation between the weapon and the soldier that apartheid is being currently pursued in Gaza. Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity,” Radical Philosophy (2016): 23. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39. Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2006): 38–39. Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” 7. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004. Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 111. Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 19. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004. Hagar Kotef, Movement and Ordering Freedom: On Liberal Governance of Mobility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 26. Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (London: The MIT Press, 2015), 22. Joan Mandell, Middle East Research and Information Project, OctoberNovember 1985, www.merip.org/mer/mer136/gaza-israels-soweto. Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 206. Kotef, Movement and Ordering Freedom, 22. Yotam Feldman, “Collision Course,” Haaretz, December 20, 2007, www.haaretz. com/1.4968535. Khalili, Society and Space, http://societyandspace.org/2014/08/25/a-habit-ofdestruction/. Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Programme, Within Range: An Analysis of the Legality of the Land “Buffer Zone” in the Gaza Strip (Jerusalem: Diakonia Middle East Regional Office, 2011). Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Under Fire: Israel’s Enforcement of Access Restricted Areas in the Gaza Strip (Geneva: The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2014). Doron Almog, The West Bank Fence: A Vital Component in Israel’s Strategy of Defense (Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004), 21–22. Mercedes Melon, Shifting Paradigms: Israel’s Enforcement of the Buffer Zone (Ramallah: Al-Haq, 2011), 10. Ibid., 7.

158 Ali H. Musleh 45 Conal Urquhart, Gaza on Brink of Implosion as Aid Cut-Off Starts to Bite, The Guardian, April 15, 2006, www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/16/israel. 46 Policy of Destruction: House Demolition and Destruction of Agricultural Land in the Gaza Strip, B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, February 2002, www.btselem.org/publications/sum maries/200202_policy_of_destruction. 47 Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, “IDF Admits Spraying Herbicides Inside the Gaza Strip,” +972 Magazine, https://972mag.com/idf-admits-spraying-herbicidesinside-the-gaza-strip/115290/, accessed December 11, 2017. 48 Gil Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 24–25. 49 Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2006): 38–55. 50 See Gil Hochberg, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagment,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2006): 27; and Yotam Feldman, “Collision Course,” Haaretz, December 20, 2007, www.haaretz.com/1.4968535. 51 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202. 52 See Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011); and Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, “Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces,” Antipode (2017): 1385–1405. 53 Breaking the Silence, This is How We Fought in Gaza Soldiers’ Testimonies and Photographs from Operation “Protective Edge” (Tel Aviv: Breaking the Silence, 2015), 232. 54 Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 20. 55 Shaw, Predator Empire, 195. 56 Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 81. 57 Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 123. 58 Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin, “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” Journal of Military Ethics (2005): 3–32. 59 Frederic Mégrét, “War and the Vanishing Battlefield,” Loyola University Chicago International Law Review (2012). 60 Diakonia Interational Humanitarian Law Programme, Within Range: An Analysis of the Legality of the Land “Buffer Zone” in the Gaza Strip (Jerusalem: Diakonia Middle East Regional Office, 2011). 61 Gregory, “Palestine Under Siege,” 604. 62 Noura Erakat, “Taking the Land without the People: The 1967 Story as Told by the Law,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2017): 9. 63 B’Tselem, Israel’s Policy, 30. 64 Dennis Kucinich, “Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza: Is it Really a ‘Buffer Zone’-or a Bigger Plan?” The Guardian, August 5, 2014, www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/aug/05/gaza-buffer.zone-dennis-kucinich. 65 “Rotting in the ‘Buffer Zone,’” International Solidarity Movement, https://palsoli darity.org/2009/06/ism-gaza-helps-recover-body-of-gazan-farmer/, accessed November 3, 2017. 66 Bhungalia, “A Liminal Territory,” 348. 67 Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” Public Culture (1997): 24–60. 68 Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 57. 69 Feldman, “Collision Course,” www.haaretz.com/1.4968535.

The kill zone 159 70 Joseph Massad, “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism,” Middle East Journal (1995): 467–483. 71 Ansbel Pfeffer, “IDF’s Newest Heroes: Women Spotters Gaza Border,” Haaretz, March 3, 2010, www.haaretz.com/1.5035872, accessed January 23, 2018. 72 Ibid., www.haaretz.com/1.5035872. 73 Perugini and Gordon, “Distinction and the Ethics of Violence,” 1386. 74 Ibid., 1386. 75 Ibid., 1397. 76 Ibid., 1385. 77 OCHA and WFP, 2010: 15. 78 Ibid., 15. 79 Mikko Joronen, “‘Death Comes Knocking on the Roof ’: Thanatopolitics of Ethical Killing During Operation Protective Edge in Gaza,” Antipode (2016): 343–344. 80 See Brad Evans and Julien Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). 81 Allen Feldman, “Genocidal Desistance in Gaza,” Social Text, August 27, 2014, https://socialtextjournal.org/genocidal-desistance-in-gaza/, accessed March 18, 2018. 82 Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 7. 83 Lina Jamoul, “Palestine—In Search of Dignity,” Antipode (2004): 582. 84 Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method. 85 John Berger, Open Democracy, January 13, 2006, www.opendemocracy.net/con flict-vision_reflections/palestine_3176.jsp, accessed June 10, 2018.

Bibliography Al-Haq. Shifting Paradigms: Israel’s Enforcement of the Buffer Zone in the Gaza Strip. Ramallah: Al-Haq, 2011. Almog, Doron. The West Bank Fence: A Vital Component in Israel’s Strategy of Defense. Research Memorandum, Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004. Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984. Berger, John. Open Democracy. January 13, 2006. Accessed June 10, 2018. www.open democracy.net/conflict-vision_reflections/palestine_3176.jsp. Bhungalia, Lisa. “A Liminal Territory: Gaza, Executive Discretion, and Sanctions Turned Humanitarian.” GeoJournal. Vol. 75, No. 4. 2010: 347–357. Bousquet, Antoine. The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. London: Columbia University Press, 2009. Breaking the Silence. This is How We Fought in Gaza Soldiers‫ ׳‬Testimonies and Photographs from Operation “Protective Edge” (2014). Breaking the Silence, 2015. B’Tselem. Israel’s Policy of House Demolitions and Destruction of Agricultural Land in the Gaza Strip. Information sheet, Jerusalem: B’Tselem, 2002. Chamayou, Grégoire. Funambulist Magazine. 2014. Accessed July 3, 2017. https://the funambulist.net/history/the-funambulist-papers-57-schematic-bodies-notes-on-a-pat terns-genealogy-by-gregoire-chamayou. ———. A Theory of the Drone. New York: The New Press, 2015. Collins, John. “A Dream Deterred: Palestine from Total War to Total Peace.” In Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, eds. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, 169–185. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

160 Ali H. Musleh Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Programme. Within Range: An Analysis of the Legality of the Land “Buffer Zone” in the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem: Diakonia Middle East Regional Office, 2011. Erakat, Noura. “Israel Will Invade Gaza Again … The Only Question is How Soon.” JADMAG Pedagogy Publications. Vol. 4, No. 1. 2016: 9–15. ———. “Taking the Land without the People: The 1967 Story as Told by the Law.” Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 47, No. 1. 2017: 18–38. Evans, Brad and Julian Reid. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Fassin, Didier. Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Feldman, Allen. “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror.” Public Culture. Vol. 10, No. 1. 1997: 24–60. ———. Social Text. August 27, 2014. Accessed March 18, 2018. https://socialtextjour nal.org/genocidal-desistance-in-gaza/. ———. Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Feldman, Yotam. Haaretz. December 20, 2007. Accessed June 5, 2017. www.haaretz. com/1.4968535. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gordon, Neve. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Gregory, Derek. “Palestine Under Siege.” Antipode. Vol. 36, No. 4. 2004: 601–606. ———. “The Everywhere War.” The Geographical Journal. Vol. 177, No. 3. 2011: 238–250. ———. “Drone Geographies.” Radical Philosophy. Vol. 183. 2014: 7–19. Gusterson, Hugh. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. London: The MIT Press, 2015. Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. ISM-Gaza. International Solidarity Movement. June 20, 2009. Accessed November 3, 2017. https://palsolidarity.org/2009/06/ism-gaza-helps-recover-body-of-gazan-farmer/. Jamoul, Lina. “Palestine—In Search of Dignity.” Antipode. Vol. 36, No. 4. 2004: 581–595. Joronen, Mikko. ““Death Comes Knocking on the Roof”: Thanatopolitics of Ethical Killing During Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.” Antipode. Vol. 48, No. 2. 2016: 336–354. Kasher, Asa, and Amos Yadlin. “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective.” Journal of Military Ethics. Vol. 4, No. 1. 2005: 3–32. Khalili, Laleh. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. ———. Society and Space. August 25, 2014. Accessed December 3, 2017. http://socie tyandspace.org/2014/08/25/a-habit-of-destruction/. Kotef, Hagar. Movement and Ordering Freedom: On Liberal Governance of Mobility. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Kucinich, Dennis. The Guardian. August 5, 2014. Accessed May 9, 2017. www.theguar dian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/05/gaza-buffer-zone-dennis-kucinich.

The kill zone 161 Levinson, Charles. The Wall Street Journal. January 13, 2010. Accessed October 2, 2017. www.wsj.com/articles/SB126325146524725387. Li, Darryl. “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement.” Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 35, No. 2. 2006: 38–55. Mandell, Joan. Middle East Research and Information Project. November, 1985. Accessed October 7, 2017. www.merip.org/mer/mer136/gaza-israels-soweto. Massad, Joseph. “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.” Middle East Journal. Vol. 49, No. 3. 1995: 467–483. Massumi, Brian. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture. Vol. 15, No 1. 2003: 11–40. ———. “The Society of Enmity.” Radical Philosophy. Vol. 200. 2016: 23–36. Mégrét, Frederic. “War and the Vanishing Battlefield.” Loyola University Chicago International Law Review. Vol. 9, No. 1. 2012: 1–21. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Israel). “The Disengagement Plan-general Outline.” April 18, 2004. Access October 12, 2017. www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/ mfadocuments/pages/disengagement%20plan%20-%20general%20outline.aspx. Omer-Man, Michael Schaeffer. +972 Magazine. December 28, 2015. Accessed December 11, 2017. https://972mag.com/idf-admits-spraying-herbicides-inside-the-gazastrip/115290/. Parks, Lisa, and Caren Kaplan. Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Perugini, Nicola, and Neve Gordon. The Human Right to Dominate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. “Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces.” Antipode. Vol. 49, No. 5. 2017: 1385–1405. Peteet, Julie. Space and Mobility in Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Pfeffer, Anshel. Haaretz. February 12, 2002. Accessed February 4, 2018. www.haaretz. com/1.5285839. ———. Haaretz. July 2, 2010. Accessed August 25, 2017. www.haaretz.com/ 1.5143256. ———. Haaretz. March 3, 2010. Accessed January 23, 2018. www.haaretz.com/ 1.5035872. Program, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and World Food. Between the Fence and a Hard Place: The humanitarian impact of Israeli-Imposed Restrictions on Access to Land and Sea in the Gaza Strip. Special Focus Report, OCHA, 2010. Programme, Diakonia IHL. “Within Range”: An Analysis of the Legality of the Land “buffer zone” in the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem: Diakonia Middle East Regional Office, 2011. Shachtman, Noah. Wired. July 4, 2007. Accessed July 21, 2017. www.wired.com/2007/ 06/for-years-and-y/. Shapiro, Michael J. Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn. New York: Routledge, 2013. ———. War Crimes, Atrocity and Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Shaw, Ian G.R. Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

162 Ali H. Musleh Sherwood, Harriet. The Guardian. May 20, 2013. Accessed July 11, 2018. www.theguar dian.com/world/2013/may/20/israel-worlds-largest-drone-exporter. Soffer, Arnon. The Washington Institute. March 22, 2002. Accessed November 17, 2017. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/demographics-in-theisraeli-palestinian-dispute. Tawil-Souri, Helga. “Digital Occupation: Gaza’s High-tech Enclosure.” Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 41, No. 2. 2012: 27–43. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). Under Fire: Israel’s Enforcement of Access Restricted Areas in the Gaza Strip. Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2014. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; World Food Programme. Between the Fence and a Hard Place: The Humanitarian Impact of IsraelImposed Restrictions on Access to Land and Sea in the Gaza Strip. Geneva and New York: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2010. Urquhart, Conal. The Guardian. April 15, 2006. Accessed September 18, 2017. www. theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/16/israel. Weizman, Eyal. Springerin. 2006. Accessed October 2, 2017. www.springerin.at/en/ 2006/4/thanato-taktik/. ———. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. London, New York: Verso, 2011. Wilcox, Lauren. “Drone Warfare and the Making of Bodies Out of Place.” Critical Studies on Security. Vol. 3, No. 1. 2015: 127–131.

9

Specters of schmaltz Aesthetics, death, and the haunting of communist kitsch Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele

Introduction International Relations (IR) has increasingly heeded the call of the aesthetic turn, acknowledging that it is not only mere representation of the world that affects international political phenomena and how political subjects relate and react to them. The aesthetic turn recognizes that aesthetic categories are widespread and meaningful in world politics.1 However, it has not comprehensively acknowledged what concerns several art historians and theorists outside IR: the question of kitsch. Given the contentious nature of the debate over the question of kitsch, and with the merits and demerits of all sides’ arguments, IR scholars seriously should begin to consider the importance of kitsch. Kitsch can serve several roles in IR. We believe that kitsch has necrogeopolitical functions. We use the term necrogeopolitical in this chapter to signify the intersection of “the multiple, endless, far-too-common, and often banal”2 with death, and when it comes to kitsch, there is nothing more omnipresent than death. We encounter kitsch everywhere: we see it at the stores we shop at, in the magazines and catalog advertisements we read, at the cafes we drink and study at, throughout the restaurants and bars we frequent, at our workplaces, and at the political or governmental spaces we participate in. We use death to describe both the physical deaths of bodies and the symbolic or metaphorical deaths of ideologies. We draw on the concept of hauntology, especially as IR scholars have utilized it, to make sense of the politics of kitsch’s interactions with the specters of the dead. Kitsch engages death because of its often melancholic remembrances of the past. Our argument is that kitsch, interacting with the past, has a number of functions that both close off and open up spaces for participation. For many artists, connoisseurs, curators, and historians, kitsch is ideological or otherwise susceptible to authoritarian or elitist manipulation of the narcissistic masses. Indeed, when we colloquially hear the term “kitschy,” it is often not meant as a compliment. Furthermore, when it pertains to either the living or a white-washed past, kitsch can tranquilize public concerns over deaths by diverting the audience away from thinking about death’s serious and tragic

164 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele consequences and horrors. In this way, it obscures difficulties of a past and closes off interrogative thinking and action about it. But kitsch also has subversive potential and is important for resistance. As we develop the point below, when people associate kitsch with the dead, from uncritical, self-aware, sincere, or cynical perspectives, and at times despite the intentions of the producers or users of kitsch, they open up or otherwise participate in spectral spheres of power and resistance that have new dynamics, limitations, and opportunities. When specters haunt kitsch objects, they have new potentials to frighten, to make absurd, to cause introspection, or to inspire. What can be called “haunted kitsch” imbues new ironies, ambiguities, and ambivalences that can help interpret, resist, and critique hegemonic world-framings without the hubris of grounding such critique in an incontestable “truth.” Regardless of how political actors exploit haunted kitsch, the haunting continues. As a result, haunted kitsch may serve to create critical spaces in IR that reflections on the aesthetic turn have found limited.3 Political actors use kitsch to shape perceptions of the past, along with how the past can in turn reconfigure our relations with kitsch objects or can open new ways of political engagement. However, new political engagement, as much as it comes with new opportunities, has its unique hazards and weaknesses. At times, haunted kitsch can be a means to engage in forms of resistance to hegemonic discourses and ideologies and the institutions and hierarchies they buttress without (to some extent) uncritically adopting ideologies that are themselves problematic. In the contemporary Western world, there is widespread skepticism about metanarratives.4 Yet, people continue to use metanarratives to make sense of various phenomena in chaotic times. What hermeneuticists call “weak thought” (as we will explain below) is an apt name for this attitude. Weak thought allows us to appreciate how what Santiago Zabala calls “remains of Being”5 can spook, motivate, empower, tranquilize, and mobilize political agents without returning to Being (that is, without returning to a metaphysics that seeks to say what things, as they are, are rather than a metaphysics of becoming that embraces the potentialities and performative nature of things). Hermeneuticists have recently been interested in how art has played an important role in creating a dialogue that can challenge worldframings. Likewise, we wish to claim that kitsch can initiate counternarratives through the way it engages death. To illustrate these arguments, we explore the necrogeopolitics of haunted kitsch that pertains to the specters of Communism. Both the deaths of Communism and the death of Communism haunt Communist kitsch. In the case of the former, political organizations and leaders have used Marxism, Leninism, and Communism to justify actions that killed countless civilians. The latter refers to the idea, popular since the end of the Cold War, that Communism as an ideology is dead and will no longer have any political significance in world politics. In the first section, we review some of the work about the aesthetic turn in IR and the literature in art history/theory on kitsch. In the second section, we explain hauntology and weak thought, and

Specters of schmaltz 165 we bring both concepts into conversation with kitsch. We provide a cursory sketch of how the specters of Communism can appear in several Communist kitsch objects and how these specters may alter political potentialities. Communist kitsch includes images of Communist political propaganda, familiar images of Communist figures and symbols, and mundane objects that various societies have associated with Communist spaces and places. Our analysis stresses the developments, nuances, and novelties of these haunted kitsch objects.

Aesthetics and kitsch Work on aesthetics in IR has been performed for over two decades, drawing on earlier iconic studies in international political theory.6 One dictionary definition of aesthetics describes it as “a philosophical theory or idea of what is aesthetically valid at a given time and place.”7 Here, aesthetics refers to a contextualized study of the “moment” in which this creation takes place.8 Actors can never fix the activity of creation, which is thus subject to constant revision. The point is not that a corporate actor (a state, a group of individuals, a business, or corporation) is a living, breathing self like an individual human being would be. But such actors nonetheless engage in a similar practice of aesthetic self-creation. For example, a corporation or even a state can create a “brand” that is more than just the products or services it provides to a consumer or citizen. Conversely, an aesthetic of power is made possible through the psychological and emotional connections that humans make with corporate bodies (and the power they hold). Thus, aesthetics function here as they do for the individual: they make the “self” other or different from what it has been. The aesthetic also creates a construction contingent on various moments, but a construction that always remains subject to processes that make an aesthetic self vulnerable at the same time. This is because there is never such a thing as a true self because self-creation is an always ambiguous activity. Aesthetics attend to this constant flux about the self. Aesthetic self-making is a never-ending, but also open-ended, process. Roland Bleiker, in 2001, called our attention to one very basic but largely, up to that point, unnoticed maxim in IR: the “inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics.”9 Work within the aesthetic turn revealed a kind of vulnerability about global actors—and the great powers, in particular—that scholars had previously ignored. This aesthetic vulnerability brought to light states’ concerns with their own self-representation and with the way they “look” in the eyes of other states. Furthermore, the move to aesthetics expanded the space of politics.10 The aesthetic turn was thus about a sense of change that emerged with increased pace as well.11 The immediacy of images that were disseminated through various media and channels could now create the possibility of surprise and disruption at any moment for any political subject/self. For

166 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele example, Franҫois Debrix’s study demonstrated how the image of Iraq war protestor Cindy Sheehan’s “Camp Casey” disrupted in an unexpected and poignant way the narratives of the Bush administration (and of many in the US public, more broadly) regarding the meanings and purposes of the war.12 Such an expansion of space therefore discloses a far broader group of actors who participate in the politics of representation. Debrix, in his work, focused on “tabloid realists” whose anxiety over the “maps” of world politics fueled a particularly urgent construction of tabloid discourses that shaped the decade of the 2000s and the war on terror. Ty Solomon foregrounded the abilities of neoconservatives in the United States to intervene into the “malaise” of the 1970s American self, its “lack” (in a Lacanian sense), to produce fantasies and desires about a more “whole” United States in the future.13 These neoconservatives would, of course, play a key role in formulating US foreign policy in the 2000s, with a much more assertive role for the US self in that vision. And in a recent forum on “The Aesthetic Turn at 15,” a number of authors acknowledged these functions, but also some of the limits, at least for IR, of the previous approaches, claiming that these studies “directly or indirectly excluded the role and function of aesthetics outside of or against Western locations.”14 Further, they ignored the possibilities for how representations by the West of the “Other” could remain uncontested and even unengaged except for how–self-referentially—those representations influenced the insecurity of the Western neocolonial Self. Brent Steele, in particular, argued that those seeking to move the aesthetic turn onward needed to consult a wider variety of resources and thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, and, perhaps most notably, Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics. The next section of this chapter deals further with some of these possibilities, turning more directly to the notion of what actors do not see but feel via what can be called hauntology.

On kitsch Art historians have a few theories regarding the origins of kitsch. The word kitsch likely derives from the German term that signifies the act of dismissing cheap, unimpressive art.15 Scholars have also associated kitsch with romanticism because both kitsch and romanticism tend to emphasize an effect of nostalgia. While art historian Hermann Broch does not equate kitsch with romanticism, he nonetheless agrees that it is difficult to distinguish the two concepts.16 Clement Greenberg stresses that technological innovations during the Industrial Revolution made it easier to produce cheap goods to appease mass culture.17 Tomas Kulka adds that ideas of poor taste and non-art actually precede the kitsch moniker; in fact, some archeologists in Pompeii have found several “kitschy” objects that were cheap and meant to be imitative.18 However, as Kulka points out, experts tend to attribute kitsch’s unprecedented rise to modern phenomena like mass urban migration, industrial technologies, leisure time, and increasing

Specters of schmaltz 167 working-class literacy rates, all of which made it easier for businesses to produce kitsch objects and create a mass consumer market eager to purchase them.19 Crucially, there is a “highly emotionally charged” dimension to kitsch.20 Kitsch images and objects, Kulka claims, “trigger an unreflective emotional response.”21 Their function is to make observers react, but not to think. Furthermore, kitsch works by erasing any distance between the object/image and the observer. Appreciation (or disgust, or any other emotional reaction) is often immediate, and, as Kulka further states, kitsch objects/images “are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.”22 Kulka adds that kitsch does not improve observers’ “associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.”23 For example, a painting of a cute kitten is sentimental. People immediately recognize its figures and features, and the painting adds nothing meaningful to what it depicts. One key distinction between kitsch and other aesthetic objects emerges: that of the representational gap. With kitsch, this representational gap is absent. Or, rather, kitsch denies the existence of the gap by closing the distance with sentimentality. Kitsch’s denial or collapse of the representational gap occurs through its declaration that what it represents is imminently, if not immediately, appreciable as such. A consumer can always think that the kitsch object has aesthetic merit while ignoring the fact that the object’s aesthetic impression obscures the tragic, the ambiguous, the violent, or the contestable. Several authors have purposefully distinguished kitsch from art. For them, kitsch is not art but an imposture that deprives viewers of a true artistic experience. Matei Calinescu, for instance, holds that “kitsch clearly centers around … imitation, forgery, counterfeit, and … the aesthetics of deception and self-deception.”24 But Broch makes clear that someone calling kitsch “bad art” is wrong, for kitsch “forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, of which … appears alongside it.”25 Kitsch appears within a system of art. Yet it abides by its own values, and often it parasitically corrupts that system. For Broch, art is “open” insomuch as it has an ethical charge to direct observers to better themselves. But kitsch is “closed,”26 since it operates according to rules that serve aesthetics rather than ethics. Further, the imitative element in kitsch makes it, for Broch, an “element of evil,”27 one that deceptively inhabits the art system. The literature on kitsch discusses the varieties of kitsch objects. It is important to note that there is no one take on kitsch. Calinescu states that kitsch can be either generic entertainment or religious or political propaganda.28 But the varieties of kitsch objects are also a function of the media they appear through/as. Scholars will debate whether kitsch (or elements of kitsch) is in paintings, novels, poems, photographs, monuments, souvenirs, advertisements, movies, songs, plays, works of philosophy, pornography, or architecture.29 Kitsch objects can also serve different aesthetic functions. While typically relating to beauty, Eli Friedlander notes that kitsch can also be sublime when it

168 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele makes observers identify with terrifying projects.30 Likewise, while concerns over kitsch often focus on kitsch’s ideological potential to mobilize the masses, kitsch also works largely because apathetic, unthinking masses buy into it.31 Moreover, while much of kitsch is pleasant, it can also be crude or shocking.32 Hence, Milan Kundera’s clarification of what he calls “totalitarian kitsch.” Kundera writes: everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).33 Does kitsch, then, have any redeemable qualities? Kulka claims that there is a universally identifiable essence of kitsch. While kitsch can have aesthetic values, its purpose is primarily emotional. We would add to Kulka’s observation that it is this affective function that connects audiences to an ideology, whether it is explicitly ideological as in totalitarian or perhaps patriotic kitsch even, or implicitly so through ostensibly disinterested or neutral forms of kitsch. Kitsch titillates sentiments that stir people to identify with a world that an ideology often structures or plans for. Perspectives on kitsch (like Kulka’s) that affirm that kitsch has no artistic quality miss its performativity. Kulka’s interpretation of kitsch (as described above) is univocal and ahistorical. It dismisses the possibility that kitsch is always part of (and changing according to) a social context.34 Dennis Dutton argues that Kulka’s classificatory scheme thus fails to escape subjectivism and tautology since the “necessary and sufficient conditions” of kitsch “are already logically connected with evaluation of an object as kitsch.”35 Scholars who do not accept an ahistorical and univocal view of kitsch are mostly critical sociologists interested in how tastes reflect historically situated social relations. They focus instead on the historical, social, and even performative contingencies of societies that deem something to be “kitsch.” They also often explore how class, gender, race, and market competition lead to the rise of kitsch. For instance, Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts argue that the label kitsch does perform “symbolic violence”36 since it often disregards or demeans certain cultural groups’ tastes. In other words, some social groups or individuals may mock others’ tastes as “kitschy” to stigmatize them and to further buttress existing social or class hierarchies. Scholars critical of the derogatory use of kitsch point out that avant-garde elitism in conceptualizing kitsch also takes place in specific historical contexts and often through discourses of patriarchy, intense market competition, white supremacy, or colonialism.37 It is important to acknowledge the unchecked elitism, ableism, sexism, racism, Eurocentrism, or classism of a critique of kitsch that seeks to dismiss it as pathological. At the same time though, art historians note that kitsch has the potential to subvert the art/kitsch dichotomy (established by

Specters of schmaltz 169 some scholars, as we saw above). One such resistance to this dichotomy between art and kitsch is camp. “Camp,” Susan Sontag puts it, has exaggerated, artificial qualities, and displays a “sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.”38 This more comedic sensibility resists the notion of tragedy or seriousness. Camp’s appreciators ironically embrace bad taste.39 Cultural studies scholar Andrew Ross elaborates on how camp, as a form of kitsch, can challenge so-called elitist disgust for or rejection of kitsch. In his response to intellectuals who pushed forward the notion that mass culture’s audience was inactive, homogenous, unreflexive, and often base, Ross wrote: “Not only did [camp] deny the imposition, from above, or seemingly arbitrary boundaries of taste, but it also questioned the distanced contemplation, interpretive expertise, and categories of aesthetic judgment which accompanied that imposition.”40 Camp, Ross argued, reclaims what avant-garde snobs have rejected as so-called bad taste. With a postmodern creed,41 kitsch in its camp form continues to be a powerful form of resistance, particularly today, to oppression and to imposed social norms.42 Thus, the open potential for kitsch to be both subversive and complacent makes any univocal stance towards it difficult. This is why it is important to recognize kitsch’s key dimension of open-ended performativity. We cannot immediately dismiss any kitsch object in our critiques. Nor can we presume that kitsch, when it is mobilized in definitive and often hegemonic notions of what it is about or for (i.e., that it is sentimental, tacky, no more than an imitation of art, etc.), cannot ever have any deleterious effects. Kitsch very often provides comforting lies and escapist fantasies. But some spaces and uses of kitsch objects, as we saw with camp, can make one’s relation to those lies and fantasies more nuanced, ironic, layered, and subversive.

Hauntology and kitsch In this section, we wish to draw on the concept of hauntology to articulate how specters can impact kitsch objects, and vice-versa. Jacques Derrida, coining the term “hauntology,” has argued that discourses co-constitute ontology—the supposed essence of beings—with the nonliving: discourses that establish and regulate what is alive also determine what is dead. Derrida suggests that deconstruction of the life/death dichotomy can explain how that which is “alive” is not fully so.43 Hauntology, as Jessica Auchter claims, subverts ontology and demonstrates the statecraft behind the distinction between life and death. Statecrafters identify and frame the dead to construct collective identities. However, statecraft cannot totalize this discourse, as there is always, albeit often in the margins, dissent about these interpretations of life and death. This failure allows for “ghosts”—which serve as signs of the political acts behind ontological distinctions of life and death—to spook political actors. These actors often treat ghosts with mockery or malice, but such reactions serve psychosocial purposes of ameliorating one’s fear of them. Through hauntology, one may arrive at an acknowledgement of the arbitrariness of discourses on life and death and at

170 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele a willingness to explore how, through the metaphor of the ghost, this arbitrariness creates fear for individual and collective identities.44 Furthermore, hauntology is about (in)visibility, which Derrida captures with the notion of the specter. Derrida writes: The specter … is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see.45 Derrida’s notion of the specter suggests that hauntology is more than about fear (even though fear, along with mourning, is an important affect in making sense of specters and ghosts). If anything, specters are about a returning and unsettling.46 Indeed, it is the routine nature of specters that makes Derrida mention that “a specter is always a revenant.”47 In this sense, the politics of specters is a politics of time. Specters blur past and present, even when discourses seek to maintain a distinction between the two. But despite these discourses’ best efforts, the past is never just dead as it constantly seems to reappear in contemporary phenomena. Jennifer Auchter recognizes that ghosts—if we think of ghosts as specters—invite us to diligently explore materiality, but this requires challenging the presentism of our analyses. Ghosts, Auchter stresses, cannot themselves be visible, which is why they are not a matter of ontology.48 Derrida argues that the (rising) post–Cold War dominant discourse about Marx’s thinking “proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!”49 However, Derrida adds that such a discourse can never erase Marx’s thinking and the specter(s) of Communism. The specters of Marx and Communism spook the world whenever faults in the capitalist system are apparent, something that dominant discourses often overlook. Through the visibility of these faults, people sense the invisible or ghostly presence (or haunting) of Marxism and Communism. This does not mean that Marxism and Communism are back or alive again, but rather that their ghosts haunt contemporary realities, often emerging from the margins of politics and discourse.50 This view, what we could refer to as Derrida’s hauntology, has influenced Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s recent work, which turns to Communism’s specters through hermeneutic lenses to interpret neoliberal global capitalism and to try to reaffirm anti-capitalist strategies tinged with democratic and pluralistic sensibilities. For Vattimo and Zabala, the past failures of Communism do undermine Marxism as a historical metanarrative and its claims to truth. Still, postmodern perspectives can appropriate Marxism

Specters of schmaltz 171 with a critical awareness of its limitations and set up a praxis cognizant of these limits and compatible with the idea of an “open society.”51 For Vattimo and Zabala, the apparent failures of Marxist theories and Communist practices can critically challenge Marxism’s supposed objective truths, but they can also provide ethical and interpretive fodder to recognize the many problems with capitalism’s various alternatives and to envision alternative and more democratic forms of political order.52 Vattimo’s notion of “weak thought” can apply to the specters of Communism. Drawing on insights from Martin Heidegger, weak thought brings a language inherited from the Hegelian–Marxist tradition in contact with a postmodern acceptance of difference. Unlike thought that metanarratives seek to ground into an objective Truth, “first principles of Being,”53 or historicism, weak thought acknowledges contingencies and stresses the hermeneutic recognition that truth is a matter of interpretation. Weak thought, unlike metaphysical interpretations of the world, is post-metaphysical, as it embraces the chaotic, even nihilistic, state of the world. However, weak thought still recognizes that post-metaphysical situations cannot totally disregard metaphysical thinking. Postmodern denizens still utilize, if only by remembrance, metaphysical concepts and interpretations. But this remembrance occurs through what Heidegger calls Verwindung (literally, “distortion”),54 which performs an alteration or twisting of metaphysics to address particular situations. The metaphysical concept that weak thought specifically relies on is that of dialectics. While not accepting any teleological or objective truth about dialectics, weak thought still employs dialectics as a tool that can, often imperfectly, make sense of specific political issues.55 Thus, we suggest that weak thought can illuminate the way people who remain sympathetic to, or believe in, socialism manage to confront the deaths and death of Communism. With regards to the former, one can thus accept the point that these deaths were avoidable, tragic, or even gratuitous and that they can be harbingers for what happens when one reads Marxism and Communism dogmatically. Weak thought can thus make possible a sardonic yet reflexive attitude towards the deaths of Communism. As for the latter dimension (the death of Communism, singular), we can identify weak thought with people who, on the one hand, reasonably understand liberals’ and capitalists’ proclamations about the death of Communism and yet who also, on the other hand, recognize that liberals and capitalists are still drawn to their unsustainable metanarratives that cannot come to grips with the deaths and other atrocities that their own ideologies have made possible. Weak thought allows individuals, as beings who are constantly interpreting the world they inhabit and act politically within it, to reinterpret the intersection of kitsch and the death(s) of Communism. As we suggest below, when political actors or selves acknowledge the presence of the specter(s) of Communism, they can open up space for hermeneuticists to persuade a disenchanted public of the merits of weak thought and of the ethical and interpretive values of these long dead yet still haunting ideas

172 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele and thoughts. Thus, we suggest, one can also think weakly about haunted kitsch to communicate ideas and thoughts that may challenge dominant contemporary discourses, possibly subverting them without falling back onto metaphysical traditions.

The intersection of kitsch and death Scholars have already noted the close relationship between kitsch (and its nostalgic dimensions) and death. Gillo Dorfles claims that “death is often a great ally of kitsch, having for so long been a treasured ally of art.”56 Dorfles, talking about the role of kitsch in modern cemeteries and in funerals, believes that kitsch has turned death into a “candied affair,”57 whereby sentimentality makes it difficult for people to seriously contemplate death’s significance. This arguably extends to a larger aspect of kitsch: kitsch exploits the past for cheap emotional reactions from its consumers or observers. This also takes us back to camp as a possible form of kitsch. A “necrophiliac economy,” as Holliday and Potts (quoting Ross) put it, underpins camp. It seeks to bring back “deceased forms”58 in such a way that the producer of the kitsch/camp act/object and the intended audience mark it with camp sensibility. While this move may align camp’s and kitsch’s utilization of death with a form of cultural capitalism, Holliday and Potts still wish to make the claim that the recycling of dead forms as camp can be a subversive gesture that displays modes of consumerism that do not abide by dominant cultural practices.59 Further, and as we noted in the introduction to this chapter, kitsch can appease public concerns over death and deaths. Kundera described “the true function of kitsch” as “a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”60 Regardless of where on the political spectrum one may stand, kitsch’s emotional charges often act as magnets that draw audiences toward the kitsch object/sight and thus, often, steer them away from serious and real consequences of death and destruction. In this way, kitsch need not obscure the past. This is why Celeste Olalquiaga, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s work, distinguishes between “nostalgic kitsch” and “melancholic kitsch.”61 Nostalgia reduces the past to enjoyment without confronting the audience with loss or tragedy, thus allowing consumers/observers mindlessly to relate to the kitsch. Melancholic kitsch, however, is aware of the loss and tragedy, and it seeks to respect the plurality of meanings. Through melancholic kitsch, the past which, nostalgic kitsch merely symbolizes, now becomes an allegory that speaks to present existential and materials concerns. Olalquiaga sees melancholic kitsch as dialectically useful too. We would also point out that the aforementioned ironic use of kitsch implies other affective relations that can initiate critical dispositions towards ideologies or forms of political order. Melancholy can pluralize kitsch’s interpretation of the past, but so can humor.

Specters of schmaltz 173 This tightly knit relationship between kitsch and death, therefore, makes it reasonable to claim that hauntology can usefully explore the connection between kitsch objects/images and the past. To repeat, we wish to argue that the specters of the death and deaths of Communism can configure and reconfigure kitsch, and vice-versa, something that can, in turn, lead to new political opportunities. In other words, social and historical contexts as well as the standpoint of the consumers of kitsch can determine the significance and interpretation of both kitsch and the death/deaths they may obviate, highlight, fetishize, declare, or recall. These contingencies work, in part, because of the presence of ghosts that still haunt the world of the living and undermine progressive or unidirectional views about the past and present. We believe that the meaning of Communist kitsch depends on actors’ understanding of the specters of Communism, even when the (in)visibility of these specters precludes full comprehension. The interaction between Communist kitsch and its specters opens up new opportunities for reflection and resistance, precisely because they perpetuate the ghostliness of the death and deaths of Communism.62 A lot of these opportunities for self-reflection will depend on one’s interpretation of what the death of Communism and deaths of Communism perform. From the perspectives of libertarians, (neo)liberals, and free-market capitalists, the dead—dead bodies or dead ideas—may need to stay dead and thus not overwhelm the dominant political order. We can detect this in the way museums confront the death of Communism as something that needs to be kept dead so that it does not upend capitalism’s global triumph. For example, as Wanda Vrasti writes, several museums have hosted exhibits based on “Ostalgie”63 objects, a neologism reflecting the idea of a nostalgic sentiment about simpler times in the former East Germany.64 However, as Vrasti comments, the museum, along with the larger “Ostalgie” phenomenon, plays a role in declaring the death of Communism. Indeed, “Ostalgie” is: a symptom less of East German nostalgia than of ‘West German utopia.’ This [is] because it reduces the ‘cultural heritage’ of East Germany’s authoritarian past to a bundle of consumer goods that can be easily divorced from their political economic context and subsumed to the vacuous aesthetics of commodity fetishism.65 Vrasti’s point speaks to the larger role that museums play vis-à-vis the dead. More generally, Peter Sloterdijk has postulated that museums play a psychosocial role by “placating the dead,”66 and warding off the fear that the dead would come back to punish the living. Modern societies have tried to suppress this fear by reducing the dead to pedagogy, ordering these past spirits in such a way that “they may only live on inside us if they turn into material lessons or exhibitions.”67 Exhibitions of Communist kitsch have thus been the modern world’s means of synchronizing the past as a series of exploitable commodities. They refetishize these dead kitsch objects for

174 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele capitalist purposes. Still, these exhibitions do not completely suppress Communism’s specters, for commoditizing these haunted kitsch objects and thus being part of the global capitalist economy spread the past’s ghostly presence throughout society and the economy. Modern museums, Sloterdijk notes: brought superstition about the past to its highest generalized form—the universal world form. From then on, ‘past’ meant having created values that could be further exploited. ‘Past’ is only another word for the history of creation of value… Wherever values are systematically exploited, the universal standard becomes dominated by ghostliness.68 Capitalism, beyond museums, also makes it possible to spread specters of Communism through the exploitation of kitsch. Che Guevara T-shirts are a prime example of this. Che’s profitable image ironically declares capitalism’s ideological victory over Communism. However, Che’s image continues to have sentimental value for many people who still gravitate towards his message, regardless of whether they fully embrace or appreciate his philosophy and ideas. The image of Che at first appears to be a piece of nostalgia because someone wearing the image ostensibly holds on to something that symbolizes militant or revolutionary Marxism. But, to recall Olalquiaga’s point, it can also be less of a faithful symbol of Che and his ideas and more of an allegory for hope and defiance. The image of Che is a tragic image, stuck between yearning for a long-lost political movement and abandoning such a quixotic sentiment. Another perspective on haunted Communist kitsch would be the one still offered by contemporary Marxist-Leninists. They may appreciate Communist kitsch and recognize the ideological as well as discursive nature of the death of Communism narrative, and they may identify with this haunted kitsch for messianic purposes. Kitsch, from their perspective, is largely nostalgic and inspirational, not melancholic. Contemporary Marxist-Leninists may believe that Communism, while its history certainly has blemishes, can, should, and will return. Revolution is still to arrive one day. There is little ironic distancing between Marxist-Leninists and their haunted Communist kitsch. Their contemporary and historical use of images of agitational propaganda or of highly figurative and emotionally stirring paintings of socialist realism, for example, are sincere and serious attempts to convince public opinion of the need to embrace their philosophy. When ironic, the observer and producer of the haunted kitsch are ultimately taking Communism seriously while making fun of the capitalist ideology. With seriousness, the kitsch operates affectively more or less the same way as before the proclamation that Communism was/is dead: as totalitarian kitsch that eschews plurality. Such Marxist-Leninist observers and producers of kitsch prioritize sentimentality over thought. However, even this messianic, uncritical appropriation of haunted Communist kitsch, like the capitalist exploitation of it, cannot fully neutralize the past. Rather, it fetishizes Communist

Specters of schmaltz 175 kitsch, raising anxiety for nonbelievers who see the kitsch as a dishonest mode of propaganda that lies to the audience by denying, overlooking, or trivializing the deaths and death of Communism. Or, conversely, the nonbelievers will pity the Marxist-Leninists for a dogmatism that remains blind to why Communism is dead, including to the failures of centralized socialist economies along with the massive deaths associated with Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. Denying the pointlessness of Communism’s deaths, to recall Kundera’s comment on kitsch and death, immunizes Marxist-Leninists from the terrors of Communism. This ludicrous obliviousness does not expel these ghosts and instead inhibits pragmatic strategies that could challenge capitalism. Finally, there is the postmodern, weak thought informed perspective toward haunted Communist kitsch. Communist kitsch’s producers, appropriators, and consumers can open progressive, left wing alternatives that embrace dialogue with kitsch’s ideology. Here, in acknowledging that metaphysical Marxism and its application are failures, one nevertheless can play with the image and use it as an allegory or satire. The weak thought proponent may thus gravitate towards the kitsch object because, even if it is dangerously flawed, the ideology it represents always has potential. It is a potential to bring people, as Zabala claims about art, to recognize the emergencies that contemporary capitalist framings of the world ignore, such as the global environmental crisis, the disproportionate influence wealthier classes have on politics, or the growing global economic inequalities.69 Such use of Communist kitsch has an ironic, almost camp sensibility, one that is not unlike cynical and even capitalistic applications of it. However, the weak thinker neither desires to maintain the capitalist order (or, at least, the contemporary neoliberal hegemony), nor wishes to use kitsch in an unauthentic way. Weak thought sincerely, yet still ambivalently, attempts to balance Marxism’s ethical messages (equality, resistance, avoidance of opportunism) with a need to eschew totalitarian and futile attempts to embrace Marxism. The weak thinker thus twists Communist kitsch’s legacy to explicate capitalism’s faults. An example of how weak thought can operate is through a specific, usually ironic, form of kitsch called memes. People use the term meme to refer to a running image or message, usually a gag, that applies similar themes to a wide variety of contexts. Very often, internet users will create and share ideologically tinged memes, such as Communist memes from the popular Facebook page “Sassy Socialist Memes,” which consist in “[b]ringing the sassiest memes this side of the socialist revolution.”70 These memes frequently make light of current events from a socialist perspective. One such meme, an image with the British monarchs titled “UK,” is on top of an image of a Communist march with an obviously photoshopped flag of left-wing populist and Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn dressed in a clichéd Soviet uniform titled “Our K.” The image is a meme of a tendency to absurdly mock words that have syllables that invoke private property juxtaposed to alternatives that invoke Socialism and Communism. The meme’s

176 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele humor comes from the ironic disjuncture between Corbyn—a nonrevolutionary Socialist—and the Communist march. The image suggests that Corbyn is an antagonist of the ruling class—which the queen and king of the United Kingdom symbolize—and is on the side of the “people.” The meme’s observers, sharers, and producers, regardless of whether or not they are Marxist-Leninists, can find some humor in its absurd mockery of mainstream politics. Furthermore, the image communicates a hope that Corbyn can, without a revolution, achieve significant wins for capitalism’s losers. While itself not necessarily melancholic, this humorous, kitschy image demonstrates selfawareness about the death of Communism through exaggeration and absurdity. However, it also draws on the specters of Communism, not as a utopian symbol of Communism’s inevitability, but as an allegory for the people resisting against oppression and hierarchy, mingling the allegory with contemporary figures and myths like Corbyn’s.71 By evoking the specters of Communism, this meme exemplifies weak thought (and hauntology too) by emphasizing that there is something about Marxist thinking that can still make sense of political problems today. Communist and Marxist memes have also more directly engaged the death and deaths of Communism. Two such memes, both drawing on a fad of using a photoshopped dispersion effect to convey dissolution, do just that. One photo shows Joseph Stalin walking with Nikolai Yezhov, who had overseen several executions and arrests in the Soviet Union until Stalin ordered his death. After Yezhov’s death, the Soviets had censored the image by removing Yezhov from it.72 The meme offers a joke about the censorship by applying a dispersion effect on the original un-doctored photo on the image of Yezhov himself. A similar meme plays with the notion of the death of Communism with an image of the map of the Soviet Union dissolving due to a dispersion effect. Both memes bring death to the forefront for the sake of humor. While neither photo seems to engage in denial about or apologetics for the death and deaths of Communism, they create a critical distance between sympathies for Marxism and the death/deaths of Communism. Weak thinkers are obviously not the only ones who can create, share, and appreciate such memes and other ironic kitsch images and objects. Disingenuous cynics and zealous Marxist-Leninists can do so as well. This speaks to some limits of the weak thinker’s use of Communist kitsch. Those who take Communism and Marxism more seriously are not necessarily appreciating the ironic distancing of Communism. These memes might become what Dorfles calls “hyper-kitsch” or “kitsch squared.”73 This refers to camp or any other aesthetic object for that matter that initially resisted hegemonic notions of kitsch but lost its irony over time. In other words, the lost ambivalence turns into a lost reflexivity. In ironically using Communist images and linking them to other cultural sights, even weak thinkers who produce memes or other kitsch objects take the risk of contributing to a reinvigoration of Communism, testifying to and expanding its significance. Weak thought, even when critical of how capitalism approaches the ghosts

Specters of schmaltz 177 of the past as always potentially recommodifiable, can still participate in the global proliferation and fetishization of the specters of Communism and of the kitsch it haunts.

Conclusion The aesthetic turn in IR has necrogeopolitical significance. In this chapter, we have explored through the notion of Communist kitsch how kitsch and specters interact to reconfigure political spaces. In particular, weak thought can provide insightful ways of exploring postmodern uses of images. Throughout our chapter, we have theorized the limits of various strategies and explored some political actions they can facilitate. A concern we have about the potential uses of Communist kitsch is that approaches to Communist kitsch and its ghosts, by refetishizing the past, can never indefinitely put Communism’s ghosts to rest. In fact, they spread the haunting potential of Communism’s specters by circulating kitsch in an interconnected postmodern society that does not leave the past alone. Even weak thought, through its very cheeky exploitation of Communism, may contribute to Communism’s rejuvenation. This does not mean that approaches to the death(s) of Communism are futile, but that each of them is paradoxically contributing to the very contestability of these narratives. Approaching Communist kitsch through weak thought, at the very least, offers a self-awareness of the limits of the Marxist metanarrative while twisting it and anticipating contestation. This may not fully immunize the weak thinker from ghosts as other political actors embrace alternative, often irreconcilable interpretations of the death(s) of Communism, such as those of a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist variety that, we suspect, weak thinking may still tragically legitimize even as it seeks to trivialize it.

Notes 1 Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium 30, no. 3 (2001): 509–33; Roland Bleiker, “In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium 45, no. 2 (2017): 258–64; Aida A. Hozić, “Introduction: The Aesthetic Turn at 15 (Legacies, Limits and Prospects),” Millennium 45, no. 2 (2017): 201–05. 2 Alphin and Debrix, Introduction to this volume. 3 Bleiker, “In Search of Thinking Space.” 4 Jean-Franç ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Drawing on Nesbitt-Larking, we understand metanarratives as “socially embedded and broadly shared frameworks of knowledge and experience that are understood and communicated in the form of stories.” See Paul Nesbitt-Larking, “The Ideological Work of Narratives,” Political Psychology 38, no. 3 (2017): 571. 5 Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 17. 6 Most notable is the work of Wolin. See Richard Wolin, “Foucault’s Aesthetic Decisionism,” Telos 67 (1986): 71–86; and Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt: The

178 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror,” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 424–47. For a different perspective, see Jane Bennett, “‘How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?’ Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics,” Political Theory 24, no. 4 (1996): 653–72. Dictionary.com, s.v. “Aesthetics,” www.dictionary.com/browse/aesthetics. Brent J. Steele, Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 3–4. Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn,” emphasis added. Bleiker, “Aesthetic Turn,” 510. Pusca’s engagement with post-communist spaces called attention to “the radical changes in the commodification of public spaces” that, “while aesthetically enjoyed from afar,” offered a “false sense of progress.” See Anca M. Pusca, Post-Communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, Capitalism, Violence (New York: Routledge, 2015), 96. François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2007). Ty Solomon, The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). Brent J. Steele, “Recognising, and Realising, the Promise of the Aesthetic Turn,” Millennium 45, no. 2 (2017): 210. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 223. Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 53. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989). Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 14. Ibid., 13–4. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 37. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 228–29. Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 63. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 235–6. Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (New York: Universe Books, 1969); “[Discussion in Four Parts],” Salmagundi no. 85/86 (1990): 208–312. Eli Friedlander, “Some Thoughts on Kitsch,” History and Memory 9, no. 1/2 (1997): 376–92. Calinescu stresses this point and mentions that, counter-intuitively, a serious mind can be the one most susceptible to kitsch’s message, largely because such seriousness, unlike irony, forecloses a distance between oneself and the observer. See Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 260. For example, one scholar discusses the controversy around Jenny Ryan’s Soft 9/ 11 artwork—some observers would call it kitsch—that involves plush dolls resembling the World Trade Center reacting to the planes crashing into it. See C. E. Emmer, “9/11 as Schmaltz-Attractor: A Coda on the Significance of ‘Kitsch’,” in Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica Kjellman-Chapin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 200–02. Kundera, 252, emphasis added.

Specters of schmaltz 179 34 This echoes Anna Brzyski’s postulation that kitsch and art alike have “performative functions.” See Anna Brzyski, “Art, Kitsch, and Art History,” in Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica Kjellman-Chapin (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 2. 35 Dennis Dutton, Dennis Dutton on Tomas Kulka and Kitsch, www.denisdutton. com/kulka_review.htm. 36 Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts, Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste (New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 31. 37 Holliday and Potts, Kitsch!; Alexis Boylan, “Stop Using Kitsch as a Weapon: Kitsch and Racism,” in Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica KjellmanChapin (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 128–43; Tavia N’yango, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 371–91; Brzyski, “Art, Kitsch, and Art History.” 38 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell Publishing, 1966), 288, 289. 39 Ibid. 40 Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 149; Ross is specifically referring to camp as “Pop,” but for the sake of this essay we just refer to it as camp. 41 Recognizing that the term can be rather broad in both popular and academic contexts, we mean postmodern as anything that reflects, accepts, or embraces a skepticism and pessimism toward any and all ideologies, discourses, standpoints, identities, and metanarratives (that is, overarching explanations that seek to make sense of the world). 42 We mention camp, not to suggest that all subversive and ironic forms of kitsch are camp, but rather to argue that kitsch is a performative concept. 43 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 44 Jessica Auchter, The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2014). 45 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 100–01, emphasis in original. 46 We thank Caroline Alphin and François Debrix for this observation. 47 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10, emphasis in original. 48 Auchter, Politics of Haunting and Memory, 29. 49 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 51–2, emphasis in original. 50 Ibid., 51–2. 51 Vattimo and Zabala (and Vattimo in a separate work) read and go beyond Karl Popper through Martin Heidegger to critique Marxism, Platonism, Hegelianism, and American neoconservatism premised on imposing (their understanding of) Truth onto society, even violently. See Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. William McCuiag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–3 (quote on 2), and Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 26–7. 52 Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism. 53 Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 39. 54 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary of the English and German Languages, no page given. 55 Gianni Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” in Weak Thought, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, trans. Peter Carravetta (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 39–52. 56 Dorfles, Kitsch, 135. 57 Ibid, 135. 58 Holliday and Potts, Kitsch!, 127.

180 Stephen Michael Christian and Brent J. Steele 59 Ibid., 127–8. 60 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 253. 61 Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 125. 62 See Pusca, Post-Communist Aesthetics. 63 Wanda Vrasti, “Goodbye, Nostalgia!: In Memory of a Country that Never Existed as Such,” in Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR, ed. Naeem Inayatullah (New York: Routledge, 2011), 137. 64 “Ostalgie” is not solely about kitsch, and indeed it contains multifaceted and potentially troubling aspects too. Reintroducing Communist aesthetics comes with a polyvalent possibility that this re-encounter may recall the scars (literal and metaphorical) of a past that still is alive for some Germans from the former DDR. 65 Ibid., 137. 66 Peter Sloterdijk, The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art, ed. Peter Weibel, trans. Karen Margolis (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 238. 67 Ibid., 239. 68 Sloterdijk, The Aesthetic Imperative, 244. 69 Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us. 70 Sassy Socialist Memes, “About,” www.facebook.com/pg/sassysocialistmemes/ about/?ref=page_internal. 71 Sassy Socialist Memes, “Photos,” www.facebook.com/pg/sassysocialistmemes/ photos/. 72 Melissa Stanger, “6 People Who Were Literally Erased from History,” Business Insider (May 2, 2018), www.businessinsider.com/people-who-were-erased-fromhistory-2013-12#nikolai-yezhov-joseph-stalins-head-of-secret-police-1. 73 Dorfles, Kitsch, 26.

Bibliography Ades, Dawn, ed. The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Auchter, Jessica. The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations. New York: Routledge, 2014. Bennett, Jane. “‘How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?’ Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics.” Political Theory 24, no. 4 (1996): 653–72. Bleiker, Roland. “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 3 (2001): 509–33. ———. “In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 2 (2017): 258–64. Boylan, Alexis L. “Stop Using Kitsch as a Weapon.” In Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, edited by Monica Kjellman-Chapin, 128–43. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Broch, Hermann. “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch.” In Kitsch: The World of Bade Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles, 49–76. New York: Universe Books, 1969. Brzyski, Anna. “Art, Kitsch, and Art History.” In Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, edited by Monica Kjellman-Chapin. 1–18. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.

Specters of schmaltz 181 Debrix, François. Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics. New York: Routledge, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. “[Discussion in Four Parts].” Salmagundi 85/86 (1990): 208–312. Dixit, Priya. “Decolonizing Visuality in Security Studies: Reflections on the Death of Osama bin Laden.” Critical Studies on Security 2, no. 3 (2014): 337–51. Dolan, Emily I. “‘… This Little Ukulele Tells the Truth’: Indie Pop and Kitsch Authenticy.” Popular Music 29, no. 3 (2010): 457–69. Dorfles, Gillo. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Universe Books, 1969. Dutton, Dennis. (1997). Dennis Dutton on Tomas Kulka and Kitsch. Accessed January 11, 2018. www.denisdutton.com/kulka_review.htm. Emmer, C. E. “Schmaltz-Attractor: A Coda on the Significance of ‘Kitsch’.” In Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, edited by Monica Kjellman-Chapin, 184–224. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Friedlander, Eli. “Some Thoughts on Kitsch.” History and Memory 9, no. 1/2 (1997): 376–92. Goodley, Dan. Dis/Ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. New York: Routledge, 2014. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. “Review.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 56, No. 4. (1998): 410–12. Holliday, Ruth, and Tracey Potts. Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste. New York: Manchester University Press, 2012. Hozic, Aida. “Introduction: The Aesthetic Turn at 15.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 2 (2017): 201–05. Jirsa, Tomas. “Ascension of the Pop Icon: The Creativity of Kitsch (Not Only) in a Music Video by Lana Del Rey.” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 6, no. 1 (2015): 5–28. Kjellman-Chapin, Monica, ed. Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kulka, Tomáš. Kitsch and Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1984. Lugg, Catherine A. Kitsch: From Education to Public Policy. New York: Falmer Press, 1999. Lyotard, Jean-Franç ois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1979. ———. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Nesbitt-Larking, Paul. 2017. “The Ideological Work of Narratives.” Political Psychology 38, no. 3 (2017): 571–78. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 371–91. Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

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10 The earth’s dying body On the necroeconomy of planetary collapse Mauro J. Caraccioli

Introduction Stories about the end of the world are not a new occurrence. Although the literary genre of apocalyptic cataclysms—manmade or otherwise—can be traced to the early nineteenth century, the fear of the world coming to an end is as old as the writing of history itself. Early European explorers, for example, were shocked to find millenarian narratives of world destruction similar to their own among indigenous peoples of the New World. Just as Christian missionaries thought of themselves as fighting a cosmic battle against the Devil for sovereignty over the Americas, so too did the Aztec and Incan peoples see their battles over space and territory as couched in spiritual terms.1 While engaging wholly different cosmologies, both examples share a preoccupation with imminent planetary shifts. Despite the existence of fruitful avenues to investigate the ways in which death and death-making at a planetary scale are considered, why is the current day anxiety over the recurring end of the world such an intellectual (more so than political) novelty? Growing numbers of voices warn of massive changes that threaten all of human civilization at one extreme, which also bring with them the possibility of rebirth or reform at the other. The repeated source of this fixation is not simply a lack of cultural awareness concerning popular tropes of global cataclysm. Rather, the shock of contemporary visions of the earth’s collapse is tied to what exactly might be lost in the process of the planet’s irreparable downfall. Indeed, it is a commonplace in contemporary media to see images of the earth in pieces: mass animal death, poisoned oceans, and biodiversity destruction are today all featured prominently for global audiences to anxiously consume. Few of these calamities, however, are discussed as an incremental form of planetary death. Much of their treatment is as isolated phenomena—things that have never happened in a given part of the world— and therefore rare fluctuations that need not belie larger structural conditions. Extinctions are regrettable, but inevitable, sympathetic observers tell us.2 Change has always been happening, skeptics claim.3 Things live and die as part of geological cycles, scientific experts chide.4

184 Mauro J. Caraccioli Not one of the above assertions is in and of itself questionable. It is, however, their treatment as isolated variables that confounds the imagination, limiting conscientious observers from thinking through the implications of an ongoing and future terrestrial collapse. Critical responses to these platitudes abound.5 Yet despite the requisite fellow-travelling of global solidarity, a chorus of these voices of warning is situated within the industrialized West. Modern Western societies may be the source of critical awareness concerning the global transformation of nature, given that it was within their borders that the domination of nature accelerated to its current (and still growing) proportions. The question I concern myself with here, however, is whether it makes sense to remain within those conceptual confines, particularly as the global destruction of nature has been felt most furiously in further reaches. It may be high time to turn to those forgotten trenches. Since the Industrial Revolution, naturalists, moral philosophers, and political economists have lamented the disastrous extent to which social and material development have divorced members of technologically advanced societies from their counterparts in more “traditional” spheres.6 For many of the earliest critics of modernity’s unencumbered “progress,” the concern was not that such a separation was happening, but rather how the widening gulf between conceptions of human life might alter the human ability to adapt to wide-reaching change.7 This was not a negative judgment either, but rather a statement of fact. Basically, could the West’s intellectual tool kits to think about disaster keep up with our material accumulation and transformation of land, resources, and people? While critical scholars have long emphasized the economic forces at work behind the planet’s deepening ecological crisis, theorists of nature and the environment remain isolated from the broader global efforts taking on the coming “ends” of the world. If today’s scholarly conversations over the planetary challenges that humanity faces retain their current fragmentary character, many of those same scholars will continue to think of the earth’s deaths as a mere footnote in a larger evolutionary story. My bluntness does not come solely from pessimism. Rather, it emanates from the increasing difficulty to value the very beings that die in the planet, in our communities, and in our imaginations, with every passing crisis. Seen from the privileged vantage point of the Ivory Tower, the world’s many deaths are a spectacular affair, growing only gorier with every cycle. As the specter of ecological collapse intensifies, the popular tolerance and even hunger for those stories of destruction grow ever more complacent. It is in that space between a dying planet and the creative inability to think through the possible direction of those deaths that I wish to situate this chapter. More specifically, my contribution to this volume homes in on the narrative qualities surrounding the scholarly exploration of death and death-making in global environmental politics. To do this, I take on perhaps one of the largest myths in contemporary theorizations of climate change: that the end of the world is avoidable, when in fact it is already here. Along

The earth’s dying body 185 the lines of other contributions in this volume, I read contemporary forms of death and death-making as suffering from a kind of millenarian anxiety that has the double function of rendering the deaths of some as tragic, yet redemptive, while occluding the deaths of others as necessary to the continuation of a distinct biopolitical logic. While other chapters explore the latter formulation in more depth, my own intervention takes on the former precept, deploying three vignettes on the trope of the “earth’s dying body” to denote a distinct governing narrative. Taken individually, each scene illustrates the form of a narratological rendering of humanity’s different encounters with natural calamities; jointly, they piece together the disparate contents of planetary death into a thanatological critique of the present.8 The first piece considers the domestication of nature as a form of demonology, offering an account of how the notion of an unruly and unpredictable planet emerged alongside missionary writings on the study of natural history. My focus here is to trace the use of cataclysmic tropes to the spiritual encounters between Western thinkers and indigenous American peoples. In the second vignette, I look to what I call the political necroeconomy of nature to show how the planet’s ecological collapse is captured in two contemporary tragedies of disaster capitalism: one ongoing, the other more definitive. In that dichotomy I illustrate the ways in which the responsibility for so-called “natural” disasters is rendered metaphysical, while the effects both before and after disaster are fundamentally biopolitical. In the third and final vignette, I consider the implications of the coming (and recurring) death of the world on the role of political theory as a narrative of political alternatives. My goal is to invert political theory’s devotion to the “epic” and transcendent over and above the banal, yet no less otherworldly ways in which the dead persist among the living. As a whole, the fragments convey a counter-narrative to histories of ecological domination and their contemporary repercussions. Moreover, they are also an effort at scholarly reflexivity whereby I aim to place my intellectual cards on the table, so to speak, and consider what it means to take death and death-making in global politics seriously as a challenge to interpret the past, but also doing our own thinking for ourselves. Particularly damning in current-day representations of planetary crisis is a discursive strategy akin to what Karl Marx once described as “world historical necromancy”—using the past to inadequately “liberate” the future. Like Marx, my goal is to theorize how the forces of reaction have appropriated the discourses of planetary death to suit the perpetuation of business as usual. As the editors to this volume have argued, necrogeopolitical analyses must take on the “multiple, endless, far-too-common, and often banal operations of death-making that regimes of biopolitical governance regularly undertake” (see Introduction to this volume). In the process, this analytic corrective can tackle the misleading assumption that some modes of life are beyond questioning, while multiple other forms of living must be sacrificed.

186 Mauro J. Caraccioli In unpacking the trope of “the earth’s dying body” I seek to shift the genre of global environmental destruction away from tones of despair towards a political philosophy of existential and collective reckoning. Taking Marx at his word, my broader contribution is to demonstrate how so many attempts to narrate the future destruction of the planet resemble a farcical play on the past, at the expense of the affirmation needed to face down structural ecological violence as a central manifestation of the logic of neoliberal capital. Failing to address the material conditions that inform our slow decline into planetary catastrophe only serves to empower those in control of our collective action and further dispossesses the many most directly affected by that disenfranchisement. If indeed, following this logic, humanity is doomed and there is nothing to do about it, the question at hand is bleak: why not just ride our journey out in a heaping ball of flames? The question is more than rhetorical and my modest response will articulate why humanity’s worries should not be whether our final destination will be hell, but rather how we get there.

First vignette: unnatural histories Tracing the origins of global cataclysm poses several historiographical routes. One common path, documented by historians of religion, locates some of the earliest images of the end of the world in Christian sects and cults that sought to accelerate the arrival of Christ’s Second Coming.9 A second, less travelled path is through the study of natural history in the sixteenth century. As Catholic missionaries from Spain sought to cultivate the souls of indigenous peoples in the Americas, they also encountered a vibrant natural world.10 Many of the botanical, ethnographic, and climatological reports returning to Europe from the Americas came from the pens of missionary scientists who strived to make sense of the novelties of the New World.11 Yet coming face-to-face with the richness of New World nature, while exhilarating, posed profound existential problems. First, from an epistemological standpoint, how was it possible that such a massive expanse of land, people, and fantastic creatures had been missed by so many learned individuals, at least from a European standpoint? Second, and relatedly, what to make of the mistaken Aristotelian notion that anything too close to the earth’s equator—dubbed the antipodes, or “torrid” zone—would burn up in flames?12 The answers to both questions were intertwined in a unique empirical negotiation. For the first quandary, humanist scholars had to contend with challenging the conventional wisdom inherited from classical writings. That struggle would be a defining early feature of the great debate between the ancients and the moderns. The second dilemma, however, proved more difficult to take on, particularly as the first explorers of the New World’s natural richness struggled with their own preconceptions of what they had found.

The earth’s dying body 187 Before arriving at an understanding of the world’s ecologies as vast and multi-faceted, Catholic missionaries attempted to catalogue nature in the Americas along a biblical spectrum. For some, the New World represented a kind of lost Eden. Yet for others, the Americas were a kind of Satanic inversion. Both hypotheses helped to explain why the ancients had no prior knowledge of the New World.13 They also helped transform classical preconceptions over the dangers of life at the earth’s limits. In their dissemination, however, the demonological reading gained more ground than the divine. Popular among the most prominent missionaries of the early sixteenth century—from Diego Duran and Bernardino de Sahagún to José de Acosta— was the trope of the devil being the key antagonist of spiritual conquest in the New World.14 Accounting for religious differences led missionaries to frame everyday calamities and indigenous rituals under the influence of satanic forces. Franciscan missionaries, such as Sahagún, were especially keen on seeing the Devil everywhere, particularly as resistance to Catholic conversion mounted. For both Sahagún and his indigenous interlocutors, the Devil’s presence could especially be seen in the volatility of New World nature. As Sahagún notes in one of the prologues of the Florentine Codex, “the Devil neither sleeps nor has forgotten the cult that these Indian natives offered him in the past, and … he is awaiting a suitable conjecture to return to his lordship.”15 That return was time and again anticipated by the coming of inclement weather, when indigenous peoples—“deceived by the demons, enemies of humankind” as Sahagún reasoned—were especially susceptible to partake in rituals and sacrifices that missionaries associated with devil worship.16 For Franciscans such as Sahagún, the recurrence of religious ceremonies around inclement natural events only confirmed the preconception that the lands of the New World were ripe for religion conversion. As John Phelan describes, “To those of mystical temperament,” the expansion of Christianity to new lands: appeared as a vision which was so blinding and radiant that its fulfillment must inevitably foreshadow the rapidly approaching end of the world … after all the races of mankind had been converted nothing further could happen in this world; for anything else would be an anticlimax.17 The Americas thus represented a kind of “millennial kingdom” on the road to the end of the world. Diabolism has been especially useful to scholars interested in the global implications of this spiritual conquest, since the concept aided colonizers to politicize the New World and helped the colonized to learn how to resist that subjugation.18 Moreover, a so-called “shared demonological discourse” helped to convey the cultural continuities between European missionaries and indigenous peoples, as well as the links between missionary cultures from Northern and Southern Europe. For instance, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has shown, both English and Spanish settlers in

188 Mauro J. Caraccioli the Americas “felt threatened and surrounded by the devil, who allegedly attacked their polities by unleashing storms, earthquakes, and epidemics, and by loosing heretics, tyrannical royal bureaucrats, foreign enemies, and Amerindians on them.”19 The spiritual anxiety across the New World was therefore as much about conquering theological forces as it was about conquering nature. Diabolism has persisted throughout the centuries by way of moralistic preconceptions concerning the stability and volatility of nature. The reason why the Devil was especially apt at hiding from missionaries was his manipulation of the natural environment of the Americas. From Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Milton’s Paradise Lost, early modern writers saw in the natural world an inexhaustible repository of seductive and unpredictable forces. Though visions of the demonic control of nature have faded, there remains a tendency to see natural disasters as the work of divine or evil spirits. Ongoing debates over the dangers of climate change reflect this enduring moralism. Some of them even suggest an increase of such apocalyptic tropes and visions. In September 2017, for example, as Hurricane Irma barreled towards the peninsula of Florida in the United States, the Washington Post published an article documenting recent trends in the spiritualizing, or demonizing, of natural calamities.20 Examples abound of these overt spiritualist fears: numerological readings of the links between hurricanes, eclipses, and apocalyptic warnings; celebrities appealing to a Gaian conception of “the consequential rage of the sentient planet”; even a barrage of overzealous depictions of God’s anger for moral affronts from abortion to homosexuality. As the article quips: “Hurricanes for abortions” and “Judgment is coming to America” have become new buzzwords in a kind of revived demonological watchfulness.21 Whether such planetary volatility stems from sentient, spiritualist, or diabolical explanations, all positions seem to be made equal in light of the grave anxiety that natural disasters generate. For instance, the same Washington Post article quotes Jamie D. Aten, Associate Professor of Psychology and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois. A self-described “disaster psychologist,” Aten’s work “specializes in the effects of disasters on the religious mind,” a perspective that has allowed him to “[observe] a tendency in people to blame natural disasters on the supernatural … ‘because there’s no one else you can point to.’”22 Although Aten himself is agnostic about whether natural disasters have supernatural origins or not, his conclusions are indicative of a broader blind spot in the popular imagination’s perception of natural and planetary change. As anxiety over nature’s unpredictability has shifted from fearing for the safety of the moral self to fearing the destruction of property, the resurgence of “unnatural” attitudes about natural phenomena reveals much about how human beings wish to tame their interactions with nature. Nature must be subdued, no matter what it costs. The alternative is losing a lot more money, if not capitalist society itself, in the process.

The earth’s dying body 189 That this shift from spiritual to economic moralism has been deployed in the shadow of neoliberal ideology is not accidental. As I explore in the next section, the persistent overtones of penitential and even redemptory faith expressed in the face of natural disasters can be read as modalities of neoliberal individualism. Most salient in this appropriation of millenarian thinking is the evacuation of mass politics or collective struggle in favor of individualized forms of suffering and ever slippery logics of technological fixes to the planet’s unraveling. As geographer Neil Smith once claimed in regard to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, “There is no such thing as a natural disaster, and the supposed naturalness of the market is the last place to look for a solution to … disastrous havoc.”23 Yet perhaps naturalization is precisely where to begin. Just as sixteenth-century missionaries were tempted to see nature as a repository of diabolism—indeed, as the very means through which the Devil could do his work—neoliberal ideology today disperses the meanings of nature. It is a site of reverence for well-off, “planet-conscious” crusaders as much as a continued space of unending extraction for the “profitmongers” of late capitalism. Whereas the feeling of impotence towards natural volatility could once be linked to the supernatural, it is today the product of a sensibility that judges some places as worthy of saving, while leaving others to die. That both of those judgments rest on the assessment of future revenues—whether a place, people, or entire region is worth more preserved or destroyed—illustrates how neoliberal governance adapts to the rhetorical challenges coming from conventional environmentalisms. I do not raise these tensions in order to dismiss their relevance on the ground and in everyday politics, but do so rather to track the enduring ideological ethos that uses the specter of nature to mediate conflict between classes and groups of people, as opposed to rendering it into a space for face-to-face political confrontation.

Second vignette: the political necroeconomy of nature I write these words as Hurricane Irma has just narrowly sideswiped South Florida and Miami Dade County, where most of my family resides. After wrapping around the peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico, the hurricane made landfall on Sunday, September 10, 2017, in Marco Island, northwest of Everglades National Park. A direct-hit on the east coast would have been catastrophic, experts say.24 Indeed, the fear of the storm touching down in Miami was so palpable that Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency on September 4, 2017, prompting a massive evacuation of the Southern half of the state. Although more than 6 million Floridians were ordered to evacuate, the results of that effort were mixed at best and embarrassing at worst. Three of the state’s primary Interstate Highways were backed-up for days; approximately half of Miami-Dade County’s gas stations were depleted by the morning of September 6, three days before the expected

190 Mauro J. Caraccioli landfall; price-gouging of airline tickets and supplies was rampant; and untold millions of people—elderly, sick, and of course, the poor—rode out the storm in a city on the edge. Almost in unison, several confessional, sensational, and cautionary popular articles emerged in the lead-up and aftermath of Irma. Many of these were concerned with how ill-equipped Florida’s communities were to face the increased intensity of natural phenomena like hurricanes. Most of these pieces, however, tended to focus on how nature’s awe-inspiring destruction serves as a reminder of our frail and precarious humanity, instead of what we should be lamenting: our addiction to growth.25 Florida is an especially apt example of what unfettered economic development can do when buttressed by the ideological domination of nature. The massive concentration of people along Florida’s coasts is a living testament to what human ingenuity can achieve, in spite of the evident risks reminding residents of the Sunshine State that their homes should not exist. As Michael Grunwald commented in one such piece, “it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won.”26 The source of Florida’s ecological unpleasantness—as well as today’s greatest natural threats—has been water. Water has historically made the state too muddy for development; too infested by critters from mosquitoes to alligators; too frustrating to create safe disposal of human and agricultural waste.27 And in spite of the recurring subjugation of this elemental enemy via drainage, water increasingly continues to threaten citizens of Florida, but now more and more from the outside. Some of the trouble with hurricanes is unavoidable as storms can move trillions of gallons of water in just a couple of days. Yet larger issues stem from faulty infrastructure and an unwillingness to pay for improved reclamation systems. The literal “shit-storm” that Irma prompted in its wake raises a dilemma that seems historically far more common to societies of the Global South than those of the Global North. Who pays for natural disasters—the state or the market? Juxtapose here, for example, the experience of nearby US colonial possession Puerto Rico. Quick on the heels of Irma, Hurricane Maria developed into a Category 5 hurricane on September 18, 2017 and made landfall on the small Caribbean island as a Category 4 storm on September 20. The results truly were cataclysmic: 1 million people without power; anywhere between $15.9 and $95 million in financial losses; thousands mired in flooded streets without access to potable water, resources, medical assistance, or external communication; and eight months after the storm, a renewed scandal over the federal government’s underestimation of storm-caused deaths, which were initially under 100 and now range to as much as 4,645.28 The political response on the island quickly became frantic, as the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, even sparked a feud with President Donald Trump over Washington’s tepid response to provide relief to the territory’s over 3 million American citizens.29 An old adage now seems apropos: so close to Florida and yet so far from help.

The earth’s dying body 191 What does this juxtaposition of environmental calamities show us about the political necroeconomy of nature? Perhaps Georges Monbiot put it best in an editorial published on September 13, 2017, when he reminds audiences that: “The sigh of relief from insurers and financiers when Hurricane Irma, whose intensity is likely to have been enhanced by global heating, changed course at the last minute could be heard around the world.”30 A long-time critic of neoliberal schemes and quick-fixes to environmental crises, Monbiot reminds us of the unconventional wisdom that market solutions are really only solutions for the powerful. More than that, however, what he highlights is the nearly mystical power that such narratives hold over our collective imaginations: The environmental crisis is an inevitable result not just of neoliberalism—the most extreme variety of capitalism—but of capitalism itself. Even the social democratic (Keynesian) kind depends on perpetual growth on a finite planet: a formula for eventual collapse. But the peculiar contribution of neoliberalism is to deny that action is necessary: to insist that the system … is inherently self-regulating. The myth of the self-regulating market accelerates the destruction of the self-regulating Earth.31 In that acceleration lies the puzzle at the heart of this vignette: what is to be gained from the “destruction of the self-regulating Earth”? Clearly one answer, for a few, is a significant amount of money. What is also gained, however, is the creation of tropes aimed at divorcing us from the past and each other, all while our mutual fates are wrapped up in a collective ecological suicide. Places like Florida and Puerto Rico literally become the living-dead spaces where our anxieties about capitalist consumption can be reassured and later revived on the one hand (Florida) and deflected from view, accused of irresponsibility, and even dispossessed of self-reliance on the other (Puerto Rico). Here, Marx’s words in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte concerning the “world-historical necromancy” that all revolutions attempt to take part in bears some relevance. For Marx, conjuring up and awakening the dead should aim at “glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given tasks in imagination, not of taking flight from their solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk again.”32 The weight of the dead and what their experiences can tell us was more than a useful metaphor to get us to do our own transformational thinking. The symbolism of necromancy was also a reminder of the mistakes so often made when we presume that simply communicating with, or channeling, the past can by itself provide suitable direction. Yet in these times of neoliberalism, necromancy becomes a form of necropolitics: the fight over how many died in Puerto Rico, or how many could die in Florida when the next big storm comes, is a fight over who

192 Mauro J. Caraccioli deserves to live and die. At stake is literally whose memory will be worth reviving again and again in the face of slowing down the domination of nature, or accelerating it to unrecognizable proportions. The critique of necromancy is a critique of the way we use the dead to live in the past, rather than to work our way into new futures. Whether employed in the historical fashion Marx does in The 18th Brumaire, or in the necroeconomic vein I use here, both are instances of occlusion and erasure: occlusion of the past’s failings; erasure of the future’s own possibilities. Marx describes the implications more forcefully when he says: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.33 For Marx, necromancy was about the specter of failed revolutions arresting the ones to come. I take necromancy to be about the deaths of the present being treated as the price to pay for allegedly greater progress and profits. The necromancy of neoliberalism, moreover, uses the potential deaths of the future to offer solutions that recognize risk and catastrophe, but nevertheless continue to prop up the cause of revenue generation like space colonization, or climate doomsday bunkers.34 As with Florida and Puerto Rico, Monbiot’s words ring loudly: “There is no environmental rescue plan: to admit the need for one would be to admit that the economic system is based on a series of delusions.”35 The tyranny of the market is not simply the tired dissemination of homo economicus, but of the narrative devices that stipulate that there are no alternate endings; no choose your own adventure; and, ultimately, no way out of the maze but by going deeper still. Yet, to acknowledge the effects of all these delusions is also to see more clearly that the dying world around us is more than just a trope. More frightening still, the earth remains a living entity that will see humanity go down before it ceases to breathe and serve as our stage. The most powerful themselves already understand this and are hard at work preserving their gains.36 Whether through debates about geoengineering, or in the ethics of having children in the face of catastrophic climate change, there is a new calculus using the planet to pit the living against the dead.37 That this logic is shaped by neoliberal dispossession is evident. But dispossession of what? As I have illustrated throughout this vignette, at play are the very means through which individuals can talk, think, or dream of the politics of future life. This is a kind of “back to the future” narrative, however, for it is precisely the kind of necropolitical domination at work in today’s unfolding of

The earth’s dying body 193 climate catastrophe that racial and imperial capitalisms have practiced in the Global South for much longer than what we in the Global North are now encountering. Yet what differentiates the North’s predicament from the South’s is not the seemingly uneven distribution of who lives and who dies. More provocatively still, it is that such a question is now being asked.

Third vignette: telling stories while we wait In the February 1999 issue of Political Theory, Leslie Paul Thiele ends his article, “Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics,” with the following injunction: In the midst of an ocean of time and space, human beings have developed complex minds that accelerate learning and demand meaning. Humans exist under the biological imperative of self-reflection. Hence we tell ourselves stories that make sense of our journeys—however fleeting and fugitive these journeys may be. The evolutionary narrative is the grandest (nonteleological) story at our disposal. It is appropriate that we co-opt it for moral instruction.38 For Thiele, the dawn of the new millennium represented an unprecedented opportunity. Environmentalism had become more than the marginal expression of one among many social movements clamoring for recognition. Far from being a self-fulfilling prophecy, ecological thought had arrived at the sober realization that the crises the planet faced were making humanity’s stories of mastery obsolete. Grand narratives of human ingenuity had begun to plateau, insofar as greater awareness of our species’ efforts in shaping all life on the planet had now come under a far more critical scrutiny. The evolutionary calculus of planetary imbalance was now readily being applied to our own survival. Yet, for Thiele, the inversion of that story had its perks. Indeed, he argued: “Like all tragic stories, the evolutionary narrative cultivates wisdom, that is to say, a prudential understanding and unresentful acceptance of the inevitable limits of the human condition … It is the sine qua non of moral education in an ecological age.”39 The real wager, he concluded, rests on our capacity to cultivate a new narrative ethic. Similarly, the historian Bill Cronon once observed that at the heart of any society’s stories about nature lies a negotiation of human morals. The kinds of tales people have told about the natural world, he maintained, show that “what we care the most about nature is its meaning for human beings … Human interests and conflicts create values in nature that in turn provide the moral center of our stories.”40 My goal at this point has been to highlight the contentious ways in which distinct moral centers about the end of the world have infused particular attitudes about planetary crisis and the politics of those narratives. I also seek to demonstrate here how these

194 Mauro J. Caraccioli respective dispositions serve as a challenge to contemporary political theory and its engagement with dystopian or apocalyptic thinking. In this final section, I aim to furnish a narrative counterpart to what Thiele sees as humanity’s evolving moral resilience. The focus of my own narrative endeavor, however, rests on the chastened, yet no less hopeful, imperative to face the coming end of the world with determination, rather than anxiety. As the twenty-first century kicks off, there is no dearth of defeatist, alarmist, or heedless narratives about what is to be done concerning climate change. For the last two decades, films, books, and popular articles have contributed to the tragic chorus of our inevitable demise at the hands of nature.41 Few of these examples, however, posit a palpable political urgency to our present condition, beyond the spectacular threat of utter destruction. That is to say, only a handful of these narratives attempt to grapple with the political stakes of taking one or another stance on the prospects of a dying world. In even simpler terms, no one is asking “who benefits?” from the current ideological and political state of climate cataclysm. The attempt to sift through the great variety of stories that take global destruction as their point of departure is one way in which the political impasse at work in the United States, as well as other loci of global capital, can be disturbed. Popular and scientific sources certainly seem to view their own depictions of planetary collapse—and the missed opportunities for correction—as one such avenue for expressing their dissent at the status quo.42 That no concrete policy, reformist, or, for that matter, cultural response has taken flight from their efforts reveals a terrifying conclusion from the climate standoff: those who can do something about it will not do so willingly. Without a wholesale and dramatically collective transformation of the material, but also pervasively ideological, conditions that give rise to the climate crisis, the question of “what is to be done?” bottlenecks alongside the supposedly more vital “how will I live on?” This is a false choice. Rather than taking the high road of what evolutionary narratives can do to bring us back on the rails, perhaps it is more effective to consider what precisely going off the rails would look like. From the millenarian milieu of sixteenth century Mexico to the necroeconomic transformation of precarious cities, states, and peoples, the motivation I have attempted to cultivate can be read as an exercise in dystopian thinking. Though political theorists have long flirted with cataclysm and disaster as modes of narrative form, few have taken the contents of dystopia as the source of renewed political motivations.43 Not unlike contemporary accelerationist readings of the need for a reappropriation of the future away from capitalist and neoliberal visions, I see a vital link between technology, affect, and the symbolic aspirations of what human community should look like in the face of global catastrophe.44 Unlike these same readings, however, the context and distribution of those links show us that the race towards the end of the world is not run on a level field. For many across the Global South, the conflict between planet versus

The earth’s dying body 195 profit is centuries old and only getting worse. The difference between them and those of us in the Global North is that they do not dream of grand solutions; they only live nightmares. In a recent Op-Ed published in The New York Times, the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman takes on this sense of dystopian dismay with characteristic eloquence. He describes how his native Chile—from which he was exiled in 1973—is tragically poised to be one of the first casualties on the frontlines of the coming end of the world. He writes how pollution, wildfires, mass animal death, and drought have left Chileans feeling “as if we had been cursed with a plague.”45 That his language borders on the cataclysmic is far from accidental, for he notes that the people of the Global South have faced such calamities ever since they were first interred into the drama of history in the aftermath of European conquest and colonization. Nevertheless, for my purposes, Dorfman offers a compelling vocabulary to speak of the coming end of the world: It is hardly strange … that Chile does not close its eyes to what is happening to our water, forests and coastline. Everyone here—and I mean everyone, from extreme right to extreme left—understands that in this land, whose name comes from the Aymara language for the place where the earth ends, we are witnessing a cataclysm of epic proportions that presages another sort of end, the end of the world as we know it. And so we all are conscious that something just as epic must be done to change course before it is too late.46 Indeed, a veritable dispatch from the frontlines of climate change. We should not confuse Dorfman’s closing exhortation “What is truly intolerable, what enrages and saddens me … is what is transpiring simultaneously in the remote United States”47 as merely a call for the vindication of centuries worth of exploitation, extraction, and domination from the Global North on the Global South. That story is fast becoming archaic. Instead, we should draw from Dorfman’s warning the solace that although it is tempting to wish for epic change on the human-made side of the climate crisis to look like a complete cessation, if not reversal, of the planet’s downward ecological spiral, deep down we know that the apocalypse has long been invited into our homes. The qualifier “epic” should therefore not entail pretensions of the heroic, but rather, as its etymology (i.e., epos, eipein) suggests, what we can “say” about the state of our world, what new “song”—or more fittingly, “story”—we can craft for those who will be left among us in the coming ruins. For many of the world’s most marginalized people, the slow erosion of our delicate natural balance has not only been long in the making, but has also been made trite and banal by the mediatic obsession with the end of the world, at least as we know it. Do our prophets of technological salvation or financial atonement think all those millions of people on its margins will simply disappear? Though many of those same people are the first to

196 Mauro J. Caraccioli die with each disaster, do their voices and legacies not go on in the hearts and minds of others who fight on? Perhaps, then, the true fear of so many in the Global North about what the climate disaster will bring is the end of capitalism as we know it.48 Much of the dour outlook that shades this chapter may at times border on throwing our hands up in the air in despair, or calling for a more satisfying form of destructive expression, riding our blue marble into oblivion for all its worth. At times, perhaps. Yet my goal has not been to defend bitter cynicism or naïve optimism. Rather, I have intended to craft a path on the underside of catastrophe that shows how life has been measured throughout recurring apocalypses and how some lives will be judged through the coming climate wars. I am confident that humanity will continue to see many more tragedies, but also that it will garner epic lessons from the future world historical transformations to come. Will this be a more chastened humanity? Probably not. Will it experience contrition in far more destructive ways? Absolutely, and particularly if penance is treated as merely making amends, rather than stemming from a collective desire to be truly forgiven.

Notes 1 A revival of interest in Native American thought in the United States has begun wrestling with the often-ignored question of how indigenous peoples engage with nature. One particular theme that typically stands out is the attention to the reciprocal nature of life and death on earth. See Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); see also the Reflections Symposium on Political Science and American Indians in Perspectives on Politics, Volume 14, no. 4 (Dec. 2016): 1029–1053. 2 See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2014). 3 See Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (New York: Overlook Press, 2008). 4 See G. Dedrick Robinson, Global Warming-Alarmists, Skeptics and Deniers: A Geoscientist Looks at the Science of Climate Change (Moonshine Cove Publishing, 2012). 5 Objections can be found in traditional disciplinary homes such as political theory, geography, and the ecological and climate sciences. See, for example, Leslie Paul Thiele, Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Noel Castree, Making Sense of Nature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); and Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For more interdisciplinary engagements, see Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) and William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Critical International Relations scholarship remains without a comprehensive statement on the global character of survivalist and cataclysmic narratives of the contemporary climate crisis. For one useful contribution, however, see Carl Death ed., Critical Environmental Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

The earth’s dying body 197 6 See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 7 See Anthony Pagden, “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983): 32–45. 8 The connection with Sigmund Freud’s “death-drive” is not accidental. However, I do not employ the term “thanatology” with the same scope of implications as Freud or subsequent observers do, but rather as an alternative lens to study the logic of death and death-making outside of conventional international political theory. For Freud’s views, see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 139–244; see also Sally Weintrobe, Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012). 9 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, [1957] 1970). 10 See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); see also Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005). 11 See Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011). 12 The Jesuit philosopher and missionary José de Acosta’s own famous recollection of his first voyage to the New World is noteworthy here: “As I had read the exaggerations of the philosophers and poets, I was convinced that when I reached the equator I would not be able to bear the dreadful heat; but the reality was so different that at the very time I was crossing I felt such cold … I will confess here that I laughed and jeered at Aristotle’s meteorological theories and his philosophy, seeing that in the very place where, according to his rules, everything must be burning and on fire, I and all my companions were cold.” See José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 88–89. See also Mauro J. Caraccioli, “The Learned Man of Good Judgment: Nature, Narrative, and Wonder in José de Acosta’s Natural Philosophy,” History of Political Thought, 38, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 44–63. 13 See Anthony Pagden, “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas”, Representations, 33, Special Issue: The New World (1991): 147–162. 14 See Mauro J. Caraccioli, “A Problem From Hell: Natural History, Empire, and the Devil in the New World,” Contemporary Political Theory, 17, no. 4 (2018): 437–458. 15 Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, ed. Angel Ma. Garibay (México City: Porrúa, 1985), 2: 704–705. 16 Sahagún, Historia General, 1:33. 17 John Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 18. 18 See Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Space (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 19 See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 31. 20 See Avi Selk, “Earth’s Revenge and Demons in the Wind: The Most Baffling Theories about Hurricane Irma”, The Washington Post, September 10, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/09/10/theres-no-one-elseyou-can-point-to-how-disasters-elicit-talk-of-gods-wrath-and-end-times/. 21 Ibid.

198 Mauro J. Caraccioli 22 Ibid. 23 Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from The Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Essay Forum, June 11, 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/. 24 See Brad Plumer, “Why Hurricane Irma Could Hurt, a Lot: Much Lies in Harm’s Way”, The New York Times, September 7, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/ 09/07/climate/florida-hurricane-irma-damage.html. 25 For one such example of the “purifying” effects of hurricanes, see Maria de los Angeles, “Confronting the Emotional Toll of Hurricane Irma,” Miami New Times, September 8, 2017. Online: www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/hurricane-irmabrings-emotional-turmoil-to-south-florida-9654028. For a less sanguine reading, see Michael Grunwald, “A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been,” Politico, September 8, 2017, www.politico.com/magazine/ story/2017/09/08/hurricane-irma-florida-215586. 26 Michael Grunwald, “A Requiem for Florida,” www.politico.com/magazine/story/ 2017/09/08/hurricane-irma-florida-215586. 27 According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), this was only heightened in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma with “more than 28 million gallons of treated and untreated sewage released in 22 counties.” See Emily Atkin, “The Poop Problem Hurricane Irma Left Behind,” Slate, September 14, 2017, www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/09/ hurricane_irma_left_a_poop_problem_in_its_wake.html. 28 See Nishant Kishore et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria,” The New England Journal of Medicine (May 29, 2018): DOI: 10.1056/ NEJMsa1803972, www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1803972. 29 See Samantha Schmidt and Daniel Cassady, “‘If Anyone Can Hear us … Help.’ Puerto Rico’s Mayors Describe Widespread Devastation from Hurricane Maria,” The Washington Post, September 23, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/ national/if-anyone-can-hear-us–help-puerto-ricos-mayors-describe-widespreaddevastation-from-hurricane-maria/2017/09/23/7ef5f6c4-a069-11e7-8ea1-ed 975285475e_story.html. 30 Georges Monbiot, “A Lesson from Hurricane Irma: Capitalism Can’t Save the Planet – It Can Only Destroy It,” The Guardian, September 13, 2017, www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/13/hurricane-irma-capitalism-growth-eco nomics-environment-financial-crisis. 31 Ibid. 32 Karl Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 596. 33 Ibid., 595. 34 See Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-thesuper-rich. 35 Monbiot, “A Lesson from Hurricane Irma,” www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2017/sep/13/hurricane-irma-capitalism-growth-economics-environmentfinancial-crisis. 36 See Douglas Rushkoff, “How Tech’s Richest Plan to Save Themselves after the Apocalypse,” The Guardian, July 24, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity. 37 See Maggie Astor, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It,” The New York Times, February 5, 2018, www.nytimes.com/ 2018/02/05/climate/climate-change-children.html. 38 Leslie Paul Thiele, “Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics,” Political Theory, 27, no. 1 (February 1999): 34.

The earth’s dying body 199 39 Ibid., 34. 40 William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of American History, 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1369. 41 A complete accounting of references seems daunting here. However, exemplary popular and scholarly sources include: The Day After Tomorrow (20th Century Fox, 2004); The Last Winter (IFC Films, 2006); Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros., 2015); David Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (New York: Ecco, 2017). 42 See Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” The New York Times, August 1, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html. 43 Utopias and dystopias are staples of Western political thought, particularly in the revival of Greco-Roman ideals of the early modern period. Yet few historians of political and environmental thought have attempted to trace the narrative models of utopia and dystopia to present concerns. For some examples, see Clarence C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1976); Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); and more recently, Alison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 44 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, for instance, critique the notion of “folkthinking” or “folk politics” in contemporary left thought as the source of impotence against neoliberalism’s hegemony. See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (New York: Verso, 2015), 17–27. 45 Ariel Dorfman, “A Message From the End of the World”, The New York Times, March 31, 2017, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opinion/a-mes sage-from-the-end-of-the-world.html. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 See Nafeez Ahmed, “Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise,” Motherboard, August 27, 2018, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/art icle/43pek3/scientists-warn-the-un-of-capitalisms-imminent-demise.

Bibliography Ahmed, Nafeez. “Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise.” Motherboard. August 27, 2018, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pek3/scien tists-warn-the-un-of-capitalisms-imminent-demise. Astor, Maggie. “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It.” The New York Times. February 5, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/cli mate/climate-change-children.html. Atkin, Emily. “The Poop Problem Hurricane Irma Left Behind.” Slate. September 14, 2017, www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/09/hurricane_ir ma_left_a_poop_problem_in_its_wake.html. Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

200 Mauro J. Caraccioli Brannen, Peter. The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. New York: Ecco, 2017. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. Caraccioli, Mauro J. “The Learned Man of Good Judgment: Nature, Narrative, and Wonder in José de Acosta’s Natural Philosophy.” History of Political Thought, vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 44–63. Castree, Noel. Making Sense of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Cervantes, Fernando. The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Space. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press, [1957] 1970. Connolly, William E. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Cronon, William. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” The Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347–1376. de Acosta, José. The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Death, Carl, ed. Critical Environmental Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. de Los Angeles, Maria. “Confronting the Emotional Toll of Hurricane Irma.” Miami New Times. September 8, 2017, www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/hurricane-irmabrings-emotional-turmoil-to-south-florida-9654028. de Sahagún, Bernardino. Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España. ed. Angel Ma. Garibay. México City: Porrúa, 1985. Dorfman, Ariel. “A Message From the End of the World.” The New York Times. March 31, 2017, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opinion/a-message-fromthe-end-of-the-world.html. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Glacken, Clarence C. Traces on the Rhodian Shore Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkley: University of California Press, 1976. Grunwald, Michael. “A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been.” Politico. September 8, 2017, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/ hurricane-irma-florida-215586. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton. Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Kishore, Nishant. et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.” The New England Journal of Medicine. May 29, 2018, www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056 /NEJMsa1803972. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2014. Lawson, Nigel. An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. New York: Overlook Press, 2008.

The earth’s dying body 201 Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Marx, Karl. “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982. Monbiot, Georges. “A Lesson from Hurricane Irma: Capitalism Can’t Save the Planet – It Can Only Destroy It.” The Guardian. September 13, 2017, www.theguar dian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/13/hurricane-irma-capitalism-growth-economicsenvironment-financial-crisis. Orr, David. Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich.” The New Yorker. January 30, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-superrich. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 13 (1983): 32–45. ———. “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Representations, vol. 33, Special Issue: The New World (1991): 147–162. Parr, Adrian. The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Phelan, John. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Plumer, Brad. “Why Hurricane Irma Could Hurt, a Lot: Much Lies in Harm’s Way.” The New York Times. September 7, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/climate/flor ida-hurricane-irma-damage.html. Prieto, Andrés I. Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011. Reflections Symposium on Political Science and American Indians in Perspectives on Politics, Volume 14, no. 4 (Dec. 2016). Rich, Nathaniel. “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” The New York Times. August 1, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/ magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html. Robinson, G. Dedrick. Global Warming-Alarmists, Skeptics and Deniers: A Geoscientist Looks at the Science of Climate Change. Abbeville, SC: Moonshine Cove Publishing, 2012. Rushkoff, Douglas. “How Tech’s Richest Plan to Save Themselves after the Apocalypse.” The Guardian. July 24, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/ tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity. Schmidt, Samantha and Daniel Cassady. “‘If Anyone Can Hear Us … Help.’ Puerto Rico’s Mayors Describe Widespread Devastation from Hurricane Maria.” The Washington Post. September 23, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com /national/if-anyone-can-hear-us–help-puerto-ricos-mayors-describe-widespreaddevastation-from-hurricane-maria/2017/09/23/7ef5f6c4-a069-11e7-8ea1-ed 975285475e_story.html. Selk, Avi. “Earth’s Revenge and Demons in the Wind: The Most Baffling Theories about Hurricane Irma.” The Washington Post. September 10, 2017, www.washington

202 Mauro J. Caraccioli post.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/09/10/theres-no-one-else-you-can-point-to-howdisasters-elicit-talk-of-gods-wrath-and-end-times/. Smith, Neil. “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from The Social Sciences. Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Essay Forum, June 11, 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/. Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. New York: Verso, 2015. Thiele, Leslie Paul. “Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics.” Political Theory, vol. 27, no. 1 (February 1999): 6–38. ———. Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Weintrobe, Sally. Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Afterword Afterlife, afterdeath Kennan Ferguson

The archetypal work of international necrogeopolitics was published in 1941. Six years after Hitler’s Mein Kampf, two years after the events known as Kristallnacht, and as the German “Final Solution”—the extermination of all people with Jewish ancestry—was being actualized and institutionalized, an American by the name of Theodore M. Kaufman self-published a barely hundred-word book already proposing a model for the postwar victory over Germany. Kaufman’s diagnosis was a simple one: the Germans, responsible for the worst brutalities of the 20th Century, and fundamentally warlike as a people, could not continue to destroy the world. Entitled Germany Must Perish! (the exclamation point evidently necessary, lest readers miss the emphasis), the book argued that Germans had forfeited their claim to continue on the face of the earth.1 Likening Germany’s attacks on its neighbors to murder, the only proper punishment according to Kaufman was Germans’ own elimination. Kaufman, not wishing to be tarred as brutal, argued that mass sterilization would suffice: the German lands could be turned over to neighboring countries, and they would slowly depopulate as the remaining people worked to recompense the peoples they had attacked. Kaufman’s text is remembered today mainly amongst anti-Semites and Nazi apologists, who see in its plan a confirmation of Jewish antipathy to German civilization and a justification for German anti-Jewish attitudes (then and now). But its motivation and structure—its raison d’être—prove far more interesting than its specific proposals, regardless of their purported fame or infamy. For Kaufman, all the corruptions of Germany, be they those perpetrated by the state, by Hitler or Wilhelm II, or by fascism and racialized nationalism were all attributable to an inherent collective identity, to an identification with German-ness. Eliminate Germany, and those traits could be eradicated from the human condition. It is too simple merely to note the parallels between what Germans were doing to Jews and what Kaufman proposed doing to the Germans. But they are clearly present. What makes Kaufman’s thesis work, at least on its own terms, are three interlinked assumptions. First, Kaufman attributes a kind of being to a kind of person, thus generalizing a historical self-identity into and

204 Kennan Ferguson affixed set of attributes. Second, he identifies the solution to the presumed problem as the disappearance of those people, thereby harnessing technology to the progress and ability of history to achieve a new absence. Finally, he absolves himself by asserting the importance, even necessity, of the project via the inevitability of the result (Germans are irredeemable) and the liberality of the implementation (no one will be murdered). All three of these conditions work together in the chapters making up this collection. The essays that Alphin and Debrix have collected note the prevalence of necropolitics in transnational and subnational contexts, tracing multiple lines of meaning in determining how particular “zones of dying” are built into our contemporary political orders. Making-die operates at many levels amongst contemporary state relations, and takes on many forms. From the disappearance of the poor to the dehydration of the migrant to the disease of the inaccessible, the modes of death that are dealt by transnationally powerful organizations are often rhetorical, aesthetic, and/or conceptual.2 Real people die, but neither they nor their demises are rendered insignificant or unavoidable. The editors and the authors draw the concept of necropolitics from Achille Mbembe, who transformed Foucault’s analysis (and coinage) of biopower into an analytic encompassing slavery, colonialism, and European conquest. (This summary will prove familiar to anyone who has already read this book, but may prove useful for those who read an afterword first, or who skip around.) Foucault famously positioned biopower as one antithesis to the common misunderstanding of power as the ability to prohibit.3 Authority, Foucault held, proves far more powerful when it acts positively, when it produces rather than merely forbids. Thus, the promotion of certain forms of human life (e.g., treating citizens as populations, thus stimulating certain kinds of biological reproduction) should be considered the groundwork of modern politics, one that operates through modes of reinforcement and protection rather than through proscription. Welfare policies, health resources, psychologized norms, social education: all are more widespread than (and less recognizable as political as) law and police action. For Mbembe, these insights were insufficient to describe the political world he saw. For, alongside the promotion of life, he noted the continuation and perpetuation of death. The history of the people of the African continent, especially since its engagement with the brutality of Europeans, told of a different relationship to the perpetuation of lives. Mbembe was unconvinced by Foucault’s division between prohibition and production. For Africans and other people subjugated by Western powers, attention to populations was often oriented more toward their destruction or enervation than their promotion. If biopolitics emphasized the promotion of forms of life, what of those that were deracinated? The structures of colonialism, then and now, led to the “creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring on them the status of living dead.”4 These lives were rendered

Afterword 205 meaningless, their reproduction was a problem to be managed, and these populations’ bodies and movements were a potential threat as much as a resource. Not “were rendered meaningless,” but rather “are rendered meaningless.” For the authors in this volume, along with Mbembe, note that necropolitics did not disappear into the distant past. Indeed, they note that slavery, colonialism, and resource extraction have continued apace into the present, joined by a vast array of medical, legal, and military options unavailable to previous generations. The power to make die, to transform active, thinking, feeling, yearning humans into “living dead” who only react and threaten: that is the power not only of the aesthetic, discursive, political regimes of the modern world, but also the kind of power abetted and supported by states, by capital, and by the production and distribution of knowledge that we see today. Yet, as much as those who oppose the move from the biopolitical to the necropolitical may at first appear unconvinced, the approach taken by the contributors to this volume shows how each reinforces and underpins the other. In order to promote certain kinds of life, biopower and biopolitical assumptions must of necessity denigrate other, unworthy kinds. Likewise, in order to deal death and immiserate entire peoples, nations and organizations do so in the name of another, positionally superior, conception of being. For “civilization” to flourish, the barbarians must be attacked; for health and beauty to prevail, the ill and the ugly must be eliminated; for some lives to count, others must be discounted. At this volume’s conclusion, it is the unremitting co-existence of biopower and necropower, as well as their continuous co-creation, that haunts the world’s political organization. This connects to the importance, in these essays, of the field of International Relations (IR): what makes IR so suitable for the explorations of necropolitics? Some of the contributions here dig deeply into what many consider the “domestic” sphere of politics—the intrastate domains of Rio’s favelas or of the Danish welfare state, for example. Others seem above the state system itself, attending to transnational film, art, and climate changes. But all these critiques operate along lines best understood by terms emerging from the study of the relationships of transnational politics. For the relationship between, for example, the poor and those who act to “beautify” a city is one based in a global circulation of tourism, academic expertise, international aid, and transnational experiential aesthetics. The “kill zone” of Gaza and the “elimination of forms of living” to which genocide aspires are each about a relationship: the determination of power between an assumed collectivity (be it a state or a people) and those deemed other, unworthy, and menacing. A migrant threatens a state only because there exists a national outside, with kinds of life alien, dangerous, and invasive. These presumptions are brought to bear on the physical body—the concrete and particular life—of the person attempting to move across geopolitical space; the state’s own insecurities and contradictions are inscribed on a human life.5

206 Kennan Ferguson So attention must be paid to the transnational spatiality of human existence, to the logics of extirpation and eradication inflicted on unwilling people, to the regimes of judgment that deem certain individuals’ bodies to be in need of transformation and renovation. Many of the authors in the volume have noted a strange and productive contradiction: inherent to the politics of deciding which deaths “count,” the apparatuses of decisionmaking must already be imbricated in the processes of death-dealing. (Academia proves just as—if not more—guilty as other regimes.) The measurement of lives has its own rationalities and irrationalities. Approaches that intend to avoid death inevitably slide into questions of whose deaths are avoidable. Attempts to rectify disease and destruction often, in their own turn, reinforce prejudices about the diseased and the destructive. The incompetence (in Alex Barder’s terminology) of allowing deaths to happen, and the “competence” of environmental, medical, and military technologies collectively reinforce a network of evaluation. One other contrast with genocide proves central for thinking through necropolitics’ relationship to the nation-state and international law: intentionality. As many of the contributors here note, contemporary legal traditions recognize only one form of necropolitical action, namely that of genocide. And the traditional response to genocide is, as Meiches points out, to determine the “intentionality” of those specific individuals who design and carry out the program of genocide. It is here that the logics of necropolitics diverge most dramatically from Kaufman’s dream of a Germany-free world, and of the Germanlessness such a move would entail. For in Kaufman’s plans, people would still be moving toward a system of extermination, of which they, themselves, would be aware. Alongside Foucaultian biopolitics, the power and persistence of Mbembean necropolitics often arises from its pure unthinkingness. Its practices do not have to be committed knowingly or directionally; indeed, they often operate better when done for reasons that obscure the outcome. “Racial uplift,” or “freeing the natives from their tribal identities,” or “international health outcomes” can not only serve necropolitics, but can also gather considerable resources, time, and energy from those who never doubt the value of their own intentions. Perhaps the most contentious claim implied in this volume—and one this conclusion has referred to repeatedly—concerns one of the most unintentional and un-self-critical modes by which these biopolitical and necropolitical powers operate: the aesthetic. From the novel and films used by Opondo and Shapiro to the kitsch investigated by Christian and Steele to the imposition of beauty analyzed by Rossone de Paula, the processes of necropolitics differentiate the appealing and the repulsive. Along with other essays, these call for an examination of the attractions and reconsiderations that a critical attitude toward judgment should entail. Each finds hidden lures and dangers in such engagements. Beauty and kitsch and representation easily hide power; they narrate the continuity and wholeness necessary to

Afterword 207 violence and conquest. But they, too, allow for contradiction and realization, whether through the haunting of objects or the emergence of particular characters’ lives. They also lead to one potential though as of yet under-theorized point of resistance to (and disengagement with) the logics of necropolitics. How best to oppose the metanarratives of unified nation-statism, urban renewal, technological governance, apocalyptic cataclysm? This volume’s authors imply many strategies but overlap on one: specificity. Against the traditions and demands of political science and international relations as disciplines that aim toward regularity, mensuration, and statistical significance, these essays point instead to the particulars of individuals, places, and events. Consideration of one migrant experience, even a fictional one, contradicts the agglomeration of “migrants.” The specifics of one community—its language, its stories, its relationalities—undercut the idea of its replacement. A Gazan life, an Angolan’s grief, a drowned coast. Ignorance allows necropolitics, but so does generalization and aggregation. To systems that make certain kinds of personhood ineligible for humanity, it is necessary to develop responsiveness and receptivity to the particularities of each life, to each community experience. Perhaps this means an end to international relations as the conflicting interests of indefinite general wills, or to international studies as statistical investigation, or to political science as a replicable science. If so, these—and only these—are deaths worth hastening.

Notes 1 Theodore N. Kaufman, Germany Must Perish! (Newark: Argyle Press, 1941). Although the book seemed to have the imprint of a real publisher, Argyle was owned by Kaufman who never published another book. 2 See, similarly, Natasha Lushetic (ed), The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018). 3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1971). See also his “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); and his Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New Yaork: Picador, 2007). 4 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15, no. 1 (2003), 34. 5 Gilberto Rosas, “Necro-subjection: On Borders, Asylum, and Making Dead to Let Live,” Theory & Event 22, no. 2 (2019).

Bibliography Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1971. ———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

208 Kennan Ferguson ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977—1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007. Kaufman, Theodore N. Germany Must Perish! Newark: Argyle Press, 1941. Lushetic, Natasha, ed. The Aesthetics of Necropolitics. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 34. Rosas, Gilberto.“Necro-subjection: On Borders, Asylum, and Making Dead to Let Live.” Theory & Event 22, no. 2 (2019): 303–324.

Index

acceleration/accelerationism 186, 191–194 Acosta, José de 187, 197 aesthetics 7, 9–10, 68–71, 79, 89, 123, 134, 136–138, 155, 163, 165, 167–169, 173, 176–178, 204–206; and international relations (IR) 163–166 affect 35–37, 39, 46, 68, 98, 131, 133, 168, 170–172, 174, 194 Africa 24–25, 27, 41–42, 85–86, 96, 105, 107, 111–113, 115, 125 Agamben, Giorgio 5, 16, 21, 55, 57, 60, 70, 72, 85 Agha-Soltan, Neda 115 Algeria 36, 41, 95 Alphin, Caroline 6, 177, 204 Angola 104, 113, 207 apartheid 2, 21–22, 92, 144–145, 157 Appadurai, Arjun 108 Arendt, Hannah 6, 36, 43–45, 48, 70 Auchter, Jessica 169–170 austerity 6, 37, 44–47 Balibar, Etienne 60, 91 banality 3–6, 8–9, 43–44, 70, 104, 108, 110, 163, 185, 195 Banks, Russell 123, 125–126 Bauman, Zygmunt 76 beautification/beauty 7, 68–69, 74–79, 167, 205–206 behavior analysis 143, 146, 148, 152–154 Bennett, Jane 98 Berlant, Lauren 32, 129 biopolitics/biopower 1–6, 10, 15–30, 35–40, 46–47, 49, 51–62, 92, 109, 146, 153–154, 185, 204–206 Blattman, Chris 111 Bleiker, Roland 165 Blyth, Mark 46

body/bodies 1, 4, 10, 18–19, 28, 37–38, 52–61, 64, 69–70, 72, 92, 113, 115, 122, 128, 136, 150–155, 157, 186, 205; and choreography of movement 9, 142, 148–149, 154–155; and embodiment 68, 79, 131, 148–149, 153–155; killable 9, 147, 152; precarious 3, 5, 9, 97, 123, 126, 131 Brazil 7, 71, 75, 78, 115 Broch, Hermann 166–167 Burma 42 Butler, Judith 97–98 Cacho, Lisa Marie 6, 26, 28–29 Calinescu, Matei 167, 178 camp (style) 169, 172, 175–176, 179 camp, the 4–5, 15, 21, 24, 27, 60, 85, 95–96, 166 Campbell, David 105 capitalism 28, 86, 93–96, 145, 170–176, 185, 188–189, 193–194, 196 Card, Claudia 7, 51, 53, 56, 62 Chamayou, Gregoire 124 Chile 195 choreography 9, 148–149, 154–155 cinema 9, 123, 126, 129–131, 135, 137–139, 155 city, the 7, 28–29, 68–69, 71–79, 130, 205 civilians 147, 152–153, 164 Clausewitz, Carl von 23 colonialism/coloniality 2–3, 17, 22, 25, 27, 35–37, 40–43, 45–47, 51, 53, 73, 79, 145, 149, 154–155, 166, 168, 190, 204–205; and colonial space 16, 21–23, 27, 30, 39–40, 46, 48; as settler colonialism 142–146, 152 Communism 9–10, 164–165, 170–171, 173–178, 180

210 Index competition 6, 15, 24, 26–27, 29, 97, 105, 168 Connolly, William 54 Continental Drift 8, 123, 125–126, 136 Corbyn, Jeremy 175–176 cortiço 72–73, 79 crisis 43, 71, 73, 128, 192; environmental/ climate 175, 184–185, 191, 193–196; financial 37, 44–45; health 8, 104–105, 110–113 Cronon, William 193 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc 8, 123, 126, 131 Davis, Mike 45 death: accidental 79; and aesthetics 9, 163, 172–173, 176; and Communism 9, 164, 171–177; and death counts 106, 110–112, 121, 206; and death-making 1–11, 15, 19–20, 25–26, 30, 35, 53, 69, 104, 183–185, 197, 205–206; and death-worlds 2, 15–20, 22–24, 27, 40, 52, 78, 105, 148, 154, 204; and migrants 121–122, 124, 127–128, 131, 136–138; and mortality rate 8, 45, 104–106, 109; and the city 72–73, 123; as “making die” 6, 17–18, 25, 46, 155; as object of consumption 115; as ordinary/taken-for-granted 3–6, 8, 15, 28, 78, 95, 104–106, 110, 115, 163; biological 51–57, 59; exposure to 72, 77; machinery of 155; normalization of 9, 107–111, 115; planetary 183–185, 195–196; slow 3, 15, 26–27, 32, 44; social 3–4, 7, 26, 28–29, 37, 51–62 Debrix, François 49, 64, 166, 177 Deleuze, Gilles 133–134, 139 democracy 90, 97, 109; social 85–86, 90, 97, 191 demonology 183, 185, 187–189 denial 44, 124, 129, 167, 176 Denmark 8, 85–96, 100 Derrida, Jacques 55, 169–170 devil/diabolism, see demonology Dorfles, Gillo 172, 176 Dorfman, Ariel 195 earth, the 10, 183–187, 191–192, 196 Ebola 107, 110–113, 115 ecology 10, 53, 56, 58–60, 121–122, 184–187, 190–191, 193, 195 Edkins, Jenny 115 Engels, Friedrich 94–95

equality 85–87, 94, 175 Esposito, Roberto 16 European Union (EU), the 6, 44–45, 85–86, 96 extra/ordinary, the 3–5 Fanon, Frantz 22–23, 166 fantasy 41, 86, 89, 92–94, 96, 98–99, 128, 156, 166, 169 Fassin, Didier 154 favela(s) 7, 68–69, 71, 73–80, 82, 205 FIFA World Cup 75, 77 Florida 188–192, 198 forced eviction 68, 73, 75–76, 82 forensics 9, 121–123, 136–137 Foucault, Michel 1, 6, 15–30, 35–38, 40, 46–47, 52, 54–55, 72, 77, 109, 148, 204, 206 freedom 34–35, 56, 86, 88–91, 96–97, 130 Freud, Sygmund 197 Gaza 9, 23, 142–155, 157, 205, 207 genocide 2, 6–7, 15, 21, 51–61, 64, 205–206; cultural 53, 56, 59, 61 geopolitics 3–5, 87, 104, 126, 136, 143–145, 205; as necro-geopolitics 3–6, 8–10, 30, 78, 86, 95, 163–164, 177, 185, 203; more-than-human 149, 154 Germany 45, 127–128, 166, 203, 206; as East Germany (or DDR) 173, 180 Giroux, Henry 114 global emergency 16, 20, 110–112, 189 Global South, the 8, 28, 45, 104–105, 107, 115, 190, 193–195 Global War on Terror 2, 144, 166 governance 1–3, 5, 7, 41–42, 52, 57, 105–106, 109, 185, 189, 207; unsuitable 6, 39, 44 governmentality 1, 24, 38; biopolitical 2–5, 24, 27, 46; neoliberal 4, 6, 30 Greece 6, 37, 44–46 Gregory, Derek 143–144 Guatemala 123, 131–132, 135 Guevara, Che 174 Gusterson, Hugh 145 Harvey, David 68 hauntology/haunting 10, 163–166, 169–177, 207 health 1, 8, 19, 22, 27, 29–30, 34, 36, 38, 44, 54, 70, 72–73, 90, 104–113, 204–206 Hecht, Tobias 124

Index Hegel, G.F.W. 129, 171 Heidegger, Martin 171, 179 Hitler, Adolf 203 HIV/AIDS 44, 111–112 horror 52, 64, 98, 164 human capital 15, 25, 29 human development 8, 106, 108–109 Hurricane Irma 188–191, 198 Hurricane Katrina 6, 114, 189 Hurricane Maria 190 illegality 75–76, 122, 124, 127, 129 immigration 85, 93–96, 98, 100, 127, 133; and refugees 60, 85–86, 98, 142 incompetence 6, 34–37, 39–48, 206 incrimination 143, 146, 148–149, 152–154 international relations (IR) 2–3, 5, 10–11, 163–166, 177, 196, 205, 207 interpellation 9, 148, 154–155 Iraq 6, 34–36, 41, 166 Israel 142–157 Jews 92, 143, 156–157, 203 Kaufman, Theodore M. 203, 206–207 Khalili, Laleh 151 killing 1, 4, 7, 9, 16–30, 52, 54–55, 59, 69, 71, 78, 80, 90, 92, 104–105, 111, 124, 135, 143, 147, 150, 152, 154, 164; and the Kill-Zone 9, 142–155, 205; as strong state killing 3, 16, 21, 27, 29; as weak state killing 3, 5, 7, 16–17, 26, 28; on a massive-scale 17, 25, 27, 30, 51–54, 59; spectacular 6, 15–17, 21, 25, 37 kitsch 9–10, 163–170, 172–180, 206 Kotef, Hagar 146 Kristof, Nicholas 104, 113–114 Kulka, Tomas 166–168 Kundera, Milan 126, 168, 172, 175 La Promesse 8, 123, 126–132, 138 Lampedusa 121 Lemkin, Raphaël 51, 53–55 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 76 Levinas, Emmanuel 97–98 liberalism 24, 86, 88, 90–91, 97–98, 146, 170–171 Liberia 110, 112 life 1–9, 16–19, 21–23, 25–26, 29, 40, 43, 52–61, 68–72, 75–80, 86–87, 89–93, 96, 98, 105–111, 123, 125, 128–129, 133–135, 137–138, 142–149, 153–154,

211

168–169, 184–185, 187, 192–193, 196, 204–205, 207; and making live 2–3, 17, 37; as form-of-life 7, 52, 54, 57–61, 68–69, 79, 124, 148, 154–155; bare 21, 40, 55, 57, 59–60, 78; ordinary 4–5; symbolic 52, 55–56, 59–61 Malabou, Catherine 7, 52, 55–60, 63 marginais 71–72 Marx, Karl 10, 94–95, 170–171, 174–176, 185–186, 191–192 Mbembe, Achille 1–3, 5–6, 15–30, 35–36, 40–42, 52, 57, 70, 109, 166, 204–206 melancholy 163, 172, 174, 176 memes 175–176 Mexico 123, 131, 137, 194 migrant bodies/lives 9, 121–124, 126–133, 135–138, 204–205, 207 millenarianism 183, 185, 189, 194 militarization 68, 76, 78 Monbiot, George 191–192 mortality rate 8, 18, 22, 25, 34, 37–38, 104–109 Morton, Tim 57 mourning 69, 104, 114–115, 117, 122, 170 narrative(s) 10–11, 56, 76, 88–89, 92–93, 98–99, 104, 106, 114, 125, 129–130, 134–136, 164, 170–171, 174, 177, 183–185, 191–194, 196, 207 nationality 135, 144–145, 156–157, 203, 205; and the “national Thing” 8, 86–94, 96, 98 necromancy 10, 185, 191–192 necropolitics/necropower 1–6, 10, 15–17, 21–27, 29–30, 35–36, 40, 51–53, 57–58, 61, 145–146, 153, 155, 166, 191–192, 204–207 neoliberalism 2, 4–8, 10, 15, 17, 24–30, 94, 104–106, 108, 110–111, 114, 153, 170, 175, 186, 189, 191–192 Nixon, Rob 36–37 Nordic Model, the 8, 86, 93, 95 Olaquiaga, Celeste 172 Olympic Games, the 75, 77 ontological realism 54, 57–59 Orwell, George 6, 36, 42–44 Ostalgie 173, 180 pacification 7, 68, 75, 77–78, 80 Palestine 9, 142–157

212 Index performance 127, 133, 146, 149–150, 153–155, 164, 168–169, 179 plasticity 7, 55–58, 60–61; destructive 56–57, 59 political theory 2–3, 165, 185, 194, 197 politics: anatomo 18, 21–22; disciplinary 18, 22–23, 25, 37, 146; environmental 10, 184, 193, 199 population, the 1, 7, 18–21, 24–27, 29–30, 35–41, 44–46, 52, 57, 72–73, 75–79, 87, 89, 107, 109, 114, 144, 146, 148, 204–205; management of 1, 5, 19, 24, 37–38, 55 Porter, James 69 postmodernism 169–171, 175, 177, 179 Povinelli, Elizabeth 6, 25–26, 32 precarity 5, 29, 74, 97, 121, 123–124, 126–127, 131–132, 135–136, 190 Puerto Rico 190–192 Pugliese, Joseph 122–123 quantification 105–112 Quemada-Díez, Diego 8, 123, 131, 135–136 racism 6, 9, 15, 17–19, 21, 28–29, 36, 40, 52, 70, 79, 86, 89, 91–92, 96–98, 113, 123, 144, 153, 156–157, 168, 193, 203, 206 responsibility 8, 15, 25, 27–30, 60, 86, 94, 96–98, 105, 111, 114, 145, 149, 151, 153–154, 185 Rio de Janeiro 7, 68–78, 205 risk 15, 25, 27–28, 30, 59, 106, 108–110, 112–113, 134, 145, 149, 152–153, 190, 192 Robbe Grillet, Alain 130 Rodrigues, José Carlos 70 Roeh-Yoreh (Sees-Fires) 142–143, 150, 152–153, 155 Rose, Nikolas 38 Ross, Andrew 169 Rumsfeld, Donald 34 Sahagún, Bernardino de 187 security 2, 8, 22, 24, 35–36, 38, 40, 54, 72, 75, 77, 90, 106, 114, 144, 147–149; and insecurity 2, 24–30, 73–74, 78, 98, 104, 110, 115, 166, 205; and securitization 22, 75–76, 79, 106, 110; human 8, 34, 104–105 segregation 56, 73, 92, 145

Shaw, Ian 143–144 siege, state of 16, 21, 23, 30, 40, 142–145, 149–151, 154 Sierra Leone 110, 112–113 slavery 2, 20, 36, 88, 125, 204–205 Sloterdijk, Peter 173–174 Smith, Neil 189 Solomon, Ty 166 Sonora desert 122, 136 Sontag, Susan 105, 169 sovereignty 1–4, 16–27, 30, 37–38, 40, 54, 77–78, 97, 104, 109, 136–137, 146, 156, 183 spatiality 4–7, 10, 16, 22–23, 29–30, 68, 73, 125, 144–146, 149, 154, 157, 206 specificity 11, 207 specter(s), see hauntology/haunting Stalin, Joseph 175–176 state of exception 5–6, 16, 20–21, 24, 29–30, 40, 78, 85, 106 statistics 8, 11, 35, 37–38, 106–108, 207 Steele, Brent 166 Stoler, Ann 35, 39–40, 42 subjectivity 30, 57, 60, 97, 34, 146 surveillance 22, 37, 142, 146–148, 152 The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 191–192 The Golden Dream 8, 123, 131–138 Thiele, Leslie Paul 193–194 thoughtlessness 6, 36, 43 Tocqueville, Alexis de 6, 36, 41–42 trauma 51, 53, 56–59, 63, 86, 97–98 United Nations (UN), the 34, 91, 106–108, 153 universalism 86, 96–98, 168, 174 urbanization 72, 74–75, 78 urbicide 7, 68, 71, 73, 79 Varoufakis, Yannis 45 Vattimo, Gianni 170–171, 179 Verwindung 171 violence 2–4, 6, 16, 19, 25, 27–28, 34–35, 40–42, 44–47, 51–52, 54–61, 64, 68, 78–79, 90, 96–97, 121, 123, 128–129, 131, 137, 142–144, 146, 148, 150–152, 155, 157, 167–168, 207; colonial 2, 17, 22, 36, 40–41, 53; ecological 10, 186; gendered 128, 132, 152; mass 51–55, 58–61; materiality of 7, 51, 58; racial 36, 48; slow 36–37, 44, 46–47, 122–123; urban 73, 75

Index visual field, the 147–148, 151, 155 Vrasti, Wanda 173 Wacquant, Loïc 6, 26, 29 wailing 104, 113–114 Wallerstein, Immanuel 94 war 2, 4, 9, 16–17, 19–20, 22–27, 34, 47, 52–53, 58, 88, 97, 121–122, 143–144, 148–149, 151, 154, 166, 196, 203; and lethal weaponry 143–145; colonial 2, 143; on drugs 78; veterans 4 weak thought 164, 171, 175–177

213

Weizman, Eyal 122, 148 welfare state, the 8, 85–89, 91, 95–96, 98–99, 205 Woodward, Bob 47 Wool, Zoe 4 World Health Organization (WHO), the 108, 110 Zabala, Santiago 164, 170–171, 175, 179 Zelizer, Barbie 115 Žižek, Slavoj 8, 86, 89, 91–93, 96–97