Michael G. Dillon

Biopolitics of security in the 21st century: an introduction

This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de securit e and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

Global liberal governance:biopolitics, security and war

Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms of power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy of power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’. Foucault called this kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of power that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics. We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent

State of emergency

THE QUESTION concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies. The 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors for this Special Section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis. The contributions are engaged with investigating questions such as the critical social significance of state and military institutions, with law and political order, the implications of terror and violence, and for whose political objectives the State of Emergency is planned. The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency (Armitage,

Foucault on politics, security and war

Introduction M.Dillon& A.W.Neal PART I: SITUATING FOUCAULT Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur S.Elden PART II: POLITICS, SOVEREIGNTY, VIOLENCE Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism A.W.Neal Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault J.Reid Security: A Field Left Fallow D.Bigo Revisiting Francos Death: Life and Death and Bio-Political Governmentality P.Palladino PART III: BIOS, NOMOS, RACE Law Versus History: Foucaults Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty M.Valverde The Politics of Death: Race War, Bio-Power and AIDS in the Post-Apartheid D.Fassin Security, Race, and War M.Dillon

Intelligence Incarnate: Martial Corporeality in the Digital Age

This article considers martial corporeality in light of the revolution in military affairs and the transformation of strategic discourse wrought by the confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions whose ontology is that of code. It deconstructs contemporary strategic desires to make the military body intelligence incarnate through mastery of code. That desire is an ancient one. The article therefore proceeds by taking military strategic discourse’s invocation of Athena seriously, and re-reads the myth of Athena in terms of a primordial war of the sign to master the undecidablity of the sign. Conflict over the sign’s un-masterable power of engendering is typically played out in sexualized terms. The will to martial corporeality as intelligence incarnate is characterized as a modern replay of this war As military embodiment pursues the intelligence incarnate offered by the information and molecular revolutions, power over life becomes allied with power over death in a complex convergence of sovereign geopolitics with a global biopolitics gone digital. Populated by martial bodies that have long been cyborgs, the digital way of war witnesses the emergence of a libidinality in thrall to Athena-the-wise as digital dominatrix.

A Passion for the (Im)possible Jacques Rancière, Equality, Pedagogy and the Messianic

This article first locates Jacques Rancière’s account of politics in the context of French thinking in the second half of the 20th century. It then summarizes how Rancière defines politics in terms of an originary equality that supports all orders of command and obedience. For Rancière, also, the world as a ‘whole’ does not add up. It is characterized by ‘paradoxical magnitude’. Paradoxical magnitude means that every regime of politics will nonetheless also be a miscount, a ‘wrong’ that will in particular fail to satisfy the originary equality that is supposed by all ‘partitions of the sensible’. Since there is no metric by reference to which the ‘whole’ of the world can be made to add up, politics cannot be an epistemological question. For Rancière it is a matter of the polemical practices by which equality is verified through emancipation. The complex ‘taking place’ of emancipation is the theme of teaching what we do not know that preoccupies Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Here, the article argues, emancipation also finds a distinctly messianic expression. The aporetic difficulty of teaching what we do not know as an emancipatory practice is explored by reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster with and against Stanley Rosen’s reading of Plato’s Statesman, which poses the same problem but resolves it differently. The article concludes by asking what is at stake in this messianic expression of emancipation.

Security, Race and War

Race first figures as central to Foucault’s analytic of modern power and politics during the course of a series of lectures that he gave in the mid- 1970s; specifically in “Society Must Be Defended”, the first lecture course in the series. That analytic of power preoccupied the work of the 1970s. The lectures coincide, for example, with the publication of Surveiller et Punir (February, 1975) and La Volonte de Savoir (October, 1977) (Elden, 2006; Marks, 2000). Stuart Elden has also noted that they were contemporaneous in addition with the publication of Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. “Society Must Be Defended” ran from January to March while The History of Sexuality appeared in December of 1976. As Elden concludes, ‘the published volume being an overview of the projected six part series … Volume 1 was in part a summary of lectures that must surely have been written by the time the book was delivered to Gallimard’ (Elden, 2002: n.127). Some of the key analytical themes broached in 1976 are also pursued throughout the succeeding lecture courses, Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2004b [1977–8]) and The Birth of Biopower (Foucault, 2004a [1978–9]).

Afterlife: Living Death to Political Spirituality

This article provides a prolegomena to a discussion of what Michel Foucault meant by ‘political spirituality’ and ‘the courage of truth (parrhesia)’, terms which preoccupied his last lectures at the Collège de France and through which he continued to pursue his lifelong concern with the politics of truth and the history of the present. The article approaches these issues through the fate of the three strategic figures - God, Man and Life - that have traditionally problematised western rules of truth and truths of rule. It then proceeds to explore the living death, or afterlife, of Man and Life, which calls for a new courage of truth, and to which ‘political spirituality’ has been one response.

Politics of Truth and Pious Economies

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the changing character of Christian pastoral power after the Reformation and of the contribution it made to ‘development’ both through European colonial exploitation from the late 17th century and the recruitment of so-called faith-based organizations (FBOs) by global liberal government from the late 20th century onwards. The particular focus for the one is the evangelical Lutheran Franke Foundation instituted in Brandenburg-Prussia in the late 17th century and, for the second, the Churches so closely implicated in U.S. and British development-security complexes from the late 20th century.

Political Spirituality: Parrhesia, Truth and Factical Finitude

This chapter adapts Foucault’s “analytic of finitude” to provide an analytical framework. It does so by first drawing a distinction between soteriological finitude, in which things are encountered sub specie aeternitatis, and modern factical finitude in which things are posited ad infinitum. If modern philosophy seeks to give concrete epistemic form to factical finitude, modern politics seeks to give it concrete political form via the application of positive knowledge. Encountering factical finitude’s order of things ad infinitum, modern rule becomes committed to the infinite government of finitely knowable things. The problematic of truth and rule continues, nonetheless, to contest the hegemony that positive knowledge and rule has attempted to exercise in modern times: for “the manifestation of truth is much more than making known” (Government of the Living: 77). The chapter goes on to adapt Foucault’s later preoccupation with political spirituality and the courage of truth, largely but not exclusively focused on the classical world, to an analytic of the intersection of modern truth, rule and spectacle. Given Foucault’s proscription of it, why, and how, spectacle? Because no truth teller has ever claimed that truth is transparent. As Foucault therefore also notes, truth telling requires, “ways of making truth itself appear against the background of the unknown, the hidden, the invisible and unrepresentable” (Government of the Living: 6).