Nicholas Michelsen

Addressing the Schizophrenia of Global Jihad

This paper deploys Deleuze and Guattaris AntiOedipus to critique discourses on radicalisation that call for a ‘public diplomacy’ to challenge a Jihadi meta-narrative or core identity. It argues that the Global Jihad should be reconceptualised as schizophrenic inasmuch as it is made up of a multiplicity of groups, aims, values, rationales and identities. The paper seeks to develop the utility of Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy for bridging critical and traditional terrorism studies by arguing that their schizoanalysis is a helpful aid to reassessing dominant identitarian conceptual frameworks for Jihad, and offers directions for reformulating our responses to radicalisation.

The Political Subject of Self-immolation

Abstract This article examines the political practice of protest by self-burning. Focussing on Mohammed Bouazizis self-burning in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in 2010, I explore the intellectual background for, and implications of, conceptualising such acts as ‘self-sacrifices’ or ‘self-immolations’. I argue that the use of the concept of sacrifice to define the politics of the act, given the difficulties in determining intentionality, is to focus only on its retrospective interpretation or semiotic capture. The result is that the self-annihilating subject is bypassed altogether, and his or her distinctively suicidal politicality is ignored. I argue that these subjects do not occupy political space due to a myth-making appeal to transcendence, heroic urge to sovereignty or assumed desire for community. Rather, drawing on Walter Benjamin, I argue that in such acts we bear witness to the shattering of sovereign order by a reminder to a politically constitutive excess.

Liberalism, Political Theology and Suicide Bombing

This article sets out to interrogate the relationship between Liberalism and suicide bombing. It maps and critically examines accounts of suicide bombing as a practice diametrically opposed to the secular logics of liberal governance, or as the direct expression of the traces of sovereign exceptionalism that haunt the global operation of Liberal biopower. I argue that a uniquely liberal analytic of human finitude establishes conditions of political intelligibility for suicide bombings today. As such, the contemporary politics of suicide may be understood as in critical communication with liberal political theologies of immanent governance over the human qua mortal, rather than as structurally deriving from political theologies of sovereign power.

On the genealogy of strategies: resilience in the revolution

Abstract This article examines what it means to write a genealogy of the strategy of ‘resilience’. The paper notes that scholars writing critically about resilience tend to operate under the influence of Foucauldian method. It begins by asking to what degree genealogy forms the coherent method or set of methods in three Foucauldian analyses of resilience thinking. Identifying some questions for the literature in this context, the paper examines the place of strategies in Foucault’s work, and how this relates to the genealogical method. Having suggested that genealogy must not ignore the history of strategies of confrontation, I illustrate my argument by looking at the role of resilience thinking in revolutionary strategy. This paper argues that lack of clarity about genealogy’s key methodological principles has meant that reification is a recurrent problem in Foucauldian scholarship in this specific context, and has constrained study of the radical political potentialities of resilience.

Deleuze and Fascism

Introduction: Fascism in All its Forms Brad Evans & Julian Reid 1. Desire and Ideology in Fascism Todd May 2. Anti-Fascist Aesthetics Michael J. Shapiro 3. Oppression Desired: Fascism & the Security Imperative Brad Evans 4. Movement and Human Logistics: Pre-emption, Technology and Fascism Geoffrey Whitehall 5. A People of Seers: The Political Aesthetics of Postwar Cinema Revisited Julian Reid 6. Waltzing the Limit Erin Manning 7. Politics on the Line Leonie Ansems de Vries 8. Fascist lines of the tokkotai Nicholas Michelsen 9. Fascism, France and Film: Inside-Out -Territorializing Aesthetics in The Raven (Le Corbeau) and Hidden (Cache) Ruth Kitchen

Introduction: on resilience and solidarity

Abstract In this introduction to the special section on Resilience and Solidarity, Vrasti and Michelsen explore the ambiguous and mobile relationship between these concepts, drawing on resources from political theory, before setting out the challenges that arise out of our current and apparently post-political moment. They argue that thinking through the relationship between resilience and solidarity constitutes a space for interrogation into political possibilities under the contemporary condition. The introduction then reviews and charts how this line of thought runs through the four papers that make up the section.

On resilience, or acceleration as political value

Zebrowski makes an important contribution to knowledge and understanding of the history of Resilience thinking. His excellent book adds substantially to an existing body of scholarship which views Resilience as a ‘correlate of an emerging order of Liberal government’, but it is much more methodologically rigorous than other works that have developed this argument, and develops new empirical specifics in the UK context and far greater nuance as a consequence. Genealogy is deployed, in the sense that Foucault and Nietzsche suggested it should be, to emphasise how Resilience appears as a value only through its capture and mobilisation by contingent social forces. Resilience, Zebrowski argues very convincingly, is not natural. Resilience thinking cannot, therefore, be understood as the product of scientific progress in our understanding of the nature of nature after the complexity turn. Rather, the value assigned to Resilience and to Resilience thinking is the product of a history of struggle, of lost events and strange inconsistencies. As a good genealogist, Zebrowski refuses to paint over the contingency involved in any process of value formation. For this reason, Zebrowski’s repeatedly refuses to reduce resilience to being a creature of Neoliberalism, but rather seeks to examine how multiple understandings of resilience are bound into a becoming-Neoliberal, which is neither predetermined nor necessary in the UK context. This leaves open the possibility of becomings-otherwise to which Resilience may be, or perhaps must be, subjected. This clearly means that engaging in the study of the ‘Value of Resilience’ has multiple implications for Zebrowski, referencing its problematising ‘value’ for security discourse, its peculiar ‘valuation’ as a biopolitical register, and the possibility of alternate political ‘valuations’ gestured towards in the conclusion. It is this latter possibility that we ought to be most interested in. Zebrowski examines the origins of Resilience thinking in anti-strike policy machineries in the UK, which he deems designed to ensure the perpetuation of vital flows in society. His argument is that population-life is newly problematised as manageable and technically amenable to government under the UK Civil Contingencies apparatus. The promise of nuclear destruction offers a further strand to the becoming of Resilience in the UK context, as does the decline of understandings of social insurance, changing assumptions about mass behaviour around panic, and the transnational logics of the Revolution in Military Affairs. Zebrowski very effectively demonstrates, through a number of fields, how a sense of the inadequacies of the protective ‘security’ model accompanied the rise of Neoliberal understanding of the state, and contends that biopolitical logics are quite self-evidently at work in Resilience thinking. The concept of a ‘resilient population’ enunciates a way of thinking and being that

Introduction: International Relations and the ‘Death of God’

Friedrich Nietzsche�s proclamation of the �Death of God� has come to function as something akin to a heuristic device in International Relations (IR) signifying the shattering of metaphysical and ontological certainty in European (post)modernity. According to Chris Brown, Nietzsche�s declaration is commonly believed to signify a �crisis in thought� which constitutes a �genuine danger� insofar as it risks �the collapse of the foundations of the old world order�.1 Roland Bleiker notes that such a crisis is deemed by many to be symptomatic of the loss �of a generally accepted worldview that provided a stable ground from which it was possible to assess nature, knowledge, common values, truth, politics � in short, life itself�.2 This forum seeks to interrogate the substance and consequences of the claim that �God is Dead� in the context of global politics, and specifically its implications for IR theory, contemporary political violence, and questions of ethics and responsibility.3 Before providing an overview of the points of synergy, agonism and divergence in the papers, this introduction will offer some contextualising remarks relating to the metaphysical, conceptual and historical parameters of the �Death of God�, marking its emergence in European political thought and provisionally mapping the terrain of its pertinence to contemporary IR. While the claim that �God is Dead� can be traced to Hegel,4 as F. Thomas Trotter notes the �striking � and problematic � shape of the term belongs, of course, to Nietzsche, who gave [it] extended expression.�5 He explains that the claim represents not a singular moment of rupture with a recent God-fearing past, but rather the culmination of an increasing scepticism towards revealed religion in Europe. God, he suggests, had been �attacked� and �out-flanked� in Europe over the course of several centuries, from Copernicus, through the Philosophes, culminating �