Carsten Bagge Laustsen

In Defence of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects for Securitization:

It is a widely shared assumption that since the end of the Cold war, conflicts and wars are less driven by political-ideological systems. Also they are not much caused by economic motives or even the classical ones of territory and power as an aim in themselves. The roots of conflicts are increasingly related to culture and identity, be it the wide-spread labeling of conflicts as ‘ethnic’ or the macrointerpretation of global politics in terms of a ‘clash of civilisations’. To Samuel Huntington, civilisations are ultimately defined to a large extent by religions. Furthermore, he argues, one of the trends of the post-Cold War period is a ‘revitalisation of religion throughout much of the world’ which reinforces cultural difference. Since the 1970s, the hope and fear of a ‘withering away of religion’ started to be defied. Not because of a lack of modernisation, but because one of the unexpected side-effects of modernisation was a ‘revenge of God’, an ‘unsecularization of the world’. In the area of international security, this has most keenly been felt in the form of an alleged threat from ‘fundamentalism’. This has meant primarily Islamic fundamentalism, but the increasing influence of evangelic fundamentalism on US

Becoming Abject - Rape as a Weapon of War

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.

Zones of Indistinction Security, Terror, and Bare Life

Since the late 1970s, the focus on the “urban question” has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to “postpolitical” risk management. In this context, the city is increasingly transformed into a “network city”: fragmented space held together by technologies of mobility and flexible forms of power. The transition from “disciplinary society” to “societies of control” is decisive. It is increasingly evident that post-politics, based on technologies of control, is not a peaceful social order and brings with it new forms of violence: terror. The article elaborates on the relationship between these three successive forms of power (discipline, control, and terror) by focusing on their common denominator, that is, the creation of spaces of “indistinction.” With Agamben, it is argued that the “camp,” the logic that combines discipline, control, and terror, is becoming the biopolitical paradigm of todays societies.

Sea, sun, sex and the discontents of pleasure

This article focuses on party tourism as a kind of hedonism enjoyed on a massive scale in which the citizen is transformed into a ‘party animal’, a reduction which is experienced as a liberation from the daily routine of the ‘city’ or civilization, and in which the pursuit of unlimited enjoyment creates an exceptional zone where the body as an object of desire and as abject become indistinguishable. In this process, sociality tends to be reformed in the image of a ‘mass’ rather than ‘society’ and transgression/enjoyment paradoxically becomes the law. The article elaborates on this paradoxical notion of ‘forced enjoyment’ by reading Kant and Sade together: Sade (re)formulates Kant’s categorical imperative by universalizing transgression while, on the other hand, Kant illuminates Sade by stressing that the universal maxim and the particular tendencies always conflict.

Enjoy Your Fight! - Fight Club as a Symptom of the Network Society

Focusing on the film Fight Club (Fincher 1999), the article deals with how microfascism persists in the network society in spite of its public denial. Considering microfascism as a line of flight with respect to the social bond, it asks what happens to the project of subversion when power itself goes nomadic and when the idea of transgression is solicited by the new “spirit of capitalism”. It is argued that every social order has an obscene supplement that serves as the positive condition of its possibility, and that increasing reflexivity today is accompanied by (re)emerging nonsymbolic forms of authority. In this context, the article deals with the question of violence and relates this to the problematics of critique, flight and act(ion) in contemporary societies.

In Defense of Religion

It is a widely shared assumption that since the end of the Cold War, conflicts and wars are less driven by political-ideological systems. Also they are not much caused by economic motives or even the classical ones of territory and power as an aim in themselves. The roots of conflicts are increasingly related to culture and identity, be it the widespread labeling of conflicts as “ethnic” or the macro-interpretation of global politics in terms of a “clash of civilizations.”1 To Samuel Huntington, civilizations are ultimately defined to a large extent by religions.2 Furthermore, he argues, one of the trends of the post-Cold War period is a “revitalization of religion throughout much of the world,” which reinforces cultural difference.3 Since the 1970s, the hope or fear of a “withering away of religion” started to be defied-not because of a lack of modernization, but because one of the unexpected side effects of modernization was a “revenge of God,” an “unsecularization of the world.”4

The Camera as a Weapon: On Abu Ghraib and Related Matters

When time has erased all details and ambiguities concerning the Iraq war the Abu Ghraib pictures will still be remembered, for two interrelated reasons. First, the pictures may be seen as part of a particularly cruel form of torture, in which the act of exposure multiply the feeling of shame. The significance of the pictures rests not in what they depict but in the fact that they were taken at all. The sexual nature of the torture, the use of the camera to multiply the feeling of shame, and the fact that the soldiers through their inclusions in the frame show no shame constitute their truly shocking nature. Second, the pictures provoked significant debate. They were used as forms of resistance against the “coalition of the willing”, with the Bush government afterwards trying to exercise damage control. The reason that the pictures had such impact was not the event itself — the fact that torture was applied. Most people know that such acts occur in wars. However, the various photographs, especially the hooded man in the “Jesus Christ pose” with wires attached to his limbs, had iconic potential. On a more fundamental level the perverse practices known from the prison worked as a secret and disavowed basis of American power, which was brought to light. Suddenly, American ideals appeared on the same plane as their constitutive exceptions. This left the administration with the choice of either denying the existence of this “downside” or in generalizing the exception (legalizing torture etc.). It was in fact by not choosing one of the strategies, but playing both cards simultaneously, that the Bush government lost so much prestige.

The ghost of Auschwitz

The article deals with the “riddle” of testimony in the context of Auschwitz. Trying to move beyond the reliance on “experience” on the one hand and the danger of “trivializing” the Holocaust on the other, we focus on the intermediary space in between the two approaches to the Holocaust, and discuss the possibility of an ethics that takes point of departure in Muselmann’s naked body. In this context we read Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful together to render visible the (im)possibilities of representing the “unspeakable”. The Holocaust is that which resists archivation for it escapes both the appropriating memory and the willed forgetting. But then, how can we keep alive the aporia, the tension between speech and naked life, between the traumatized testimony and the appropriating forgetfulness, and thus “mediate” between the past and the present? How can one represent the impossibility of depicting horror? We argue that the Holocaust cannot be represented in its horror and all its essence for this essence precisely consists in making testimony impossible. The horror of the camp can be depicted only indirectly. “The spirit of Auschwitz” is thus neither incarnated in those who died of gassing nor in those who survived, but in the bond that exists between them. We are all descendants of Auschwitz, and we are all obliged to bear testimony.

From War to War: Lord of the Flies as the Sociology of Spite

A reading of Goldings Lord of the Flies as an allegory of a biopolitical or postpolitical society that elevates “security” to the most sacred principle of organization as a permanent state of exception and attempts to combine it with consumerism. It is in this context that spite, an impotent and self-sacrificial violence, reemerges as a postpolitical strategy.

“We two will never twin”: Fundamentalism and the politics of security

Tell me your enemy and I will tell you who you are. This article takes issue with the significant but often disavowed symbiotic relation between two contemporary enemies: fundamentalism and the politics of security. We start with a metaphorical twinning, showing how these two enemies create, provoke, mimic and ultimately support each other. Then, by way of a discourse analysis, we show the way religion functions in Bushs and Bin Ladens discourses. Our claim is not (only) that the discourse of security is as religious as Bin Ladens but that politics of security as such is the religion of our times. We conclude by arguing that the dyadic interdependence between the two fundamentalisms—Islamic and securiticised—is dissolving the democratic habitus in a post-political condition, a condition devoid of self-reflexivity.