Leonie Ansems de Vries

(The War On) Terrorism: Destruction, Collapse, Mixture, Re-Enforcement, Construction

Thinking back on the globally televised images of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center, one aircraft hit the Pentagon in Washington, and another one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, the questions “whose suicide?” and “the collapse of what?” appear unmistakably straightforward. Nineteen Islamic suicide bombers turned their deaths into weapons, causing the collapse of the World Trade Center. However, taking a broader perspective, it is much less clear who committed suicide and what collapsed on September 11, 2001. This article addresses the question of whether the attacks were a sign of strength, or rather a symptom of ultimate despair. The article first engages with and develops a critique of Baudrillard’s contention that the dominant Western order, which is based on the extrapolation of Good and the fostering of life, cannot survive an attack by radicals who utilize death as a weapon and turn Western globalization against itself. Secondly, the idea that the September 11 attacks are, conversely, a desperate attempt to escape structural crisis, signaling the prelude of Islamic neofundamentalist violence, will be assessed. It will be argued that, rather than the self-inflicted death of the global liberal order by means of irrational destructive terrorism, or the imminent collapse of Islamic fundamentalism, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent war on terror exhibit the tensions between a global order characterized by “destructive construction” and the “constructive destruction” that mark contemporary terrorist violence. Their mutual complex interrelations, their reciprocal fascination for one another and the intricate interconnections with processes of globalization – that prevent the death of either one – present a conflict that is of, against, within, and eluding the grasp of the dominant order in a continuous play of antagonism, destruction, mixture, tension, translation, and fissure.

Politics of (In)visibility: Governance-Resistance and the Constitution of Refugee Subjectivities in Malaysia

This article explores the relationality of governance and resistance in the context of the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia. Whilst recognising their precarity, the article moves away from conceiving of refugees merely as victims subjected to violence and control, and to contribute to an emerging body of literature on migrant resistance. Its contribution lies in examining practices of resistance, and the specific context in which they emerge, without conceptualising power-resistance as a binary, and without conceiving of refugees as preconstituted subjects. Rather, drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault, the article examines how refugee subjectivities come into being through a play of governance-resistance, of practices and strategies that may be simultaneously affirmative, subversive, exclusionary, and oppressive. The relationality and mobility of this play is illustrated through an examination of practices surrounding UNHCR identity cards, community organisations, and education. Secondly, governance-resistance is conceptualised as a play of visibility and invisibility, understood both visually and in terms of knowledge production. What I refer to as the politics of (in)visibility indicates that refugee subjectivities are both constituted and become other than ‘the refugee’ through a continuous play of coming into being, becoming governable, claiming a presence, blending in and remaining invisible.

Hobbes, War, Movement

While informed by Foucaults understanding of power in terms of war and circulation, this article challenges Foucaults static reading of Hobbes. Contextualising Hobbess political thought within the scientific ideas that he was inspired by, this article reveals that there is more to Hobbes than the static, depoliticising image of the contract. Hobbess political thought is premised upon an ontology of movement; that is, his account of political order pivots on a double movement in which war constitutes the very possibility of social and political relations as well as of their continued reproduction via circulation. It is this conceptualisation of order that makes Hobbess liberal political thought genealogically significant. And it is the model of a play of (re)productive movements—in certain respects close to Foucaults own conception of power—that can be used productively for thinking about governance and resistance today.

Opposing the opposition? Binarity and complexity in political resistance

This article explores dimensions of political action that transgress the limitations of traditionally modern, opposition-focused conceptualisations. While there has been a turn to new non-oppositional ontologies in the last decades, there has been less exploration of what this could mean concretely for a political activism that aims to go beyond mere ‘micropolitical’ transformation. To address this lack, this article examines the tensions between binarity and complexity through an engagement with political resistance against genetically modified organisms. This brings to light that the ontology of complexity pursued by some anti-genetically modified organism activists is ultimately grounded in a binarisation of both politics (one is either ‘for’ or ‘against’ genetically modified organisms) and life (which is either ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’). Whilst problematic, this binarisation also informs the success of anti-genetically modified organism activism. An engagement with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, especially through the notion of the ‘encounter’, brings out this paradox and serves to radicalise the ontology of complexity argued for by anti-genetically modified organism activists in order to open up different avenues for thinking about and ‘doing’ political resistance.