The biopolitics of the war on terror
Life struggles, liberal modernity and the
defence of logistical societies
Julian Reid
Manchester University Press, Reappraising the Political Series (Jon
Simons and Simon Tormey eds.)
December 2006
The War on Terror is widely represented as a conflict between regimes tasked with achieving security for human life against an enemy dedicated to the destruction of the social and political conditions necessary for the flourishing of human life. Not simply an enemy that is motivated against the interests of common humanity, but an enemy which in being so driven, is ready to resort to subhuman tactics, and which therefore requires, paradoxically, a less than human response in defence of the integrity of human life. Hence the declaration by liberal regimes and the mobilisation of their societies for a war of fundamentally illiberal proportions and dimensions. A war deemed to require the permanent mobilisation of entire societies against an enemy said to threaten their security from within. A war against an enemy which like a parasite living off its human host, breeds in the most vulnerable areas of liberal societies, waiting for the moment to release a pathological violence upon its otherwise oblivious prey. A war which requires the development of new and evermore intensive techniques with which to monitor the movements and dispositions of the life of liberal societies themselves because it is there that the enemy festers and will emerge to such devastating effect.
In a challenge to such broadly disseminated understandings this book offers a biopolitical analysis of the War on Terror. Examining this war biopolitically means attempting to think more rigorously about the actuality of relations between the problems of life and politics which are constitutive of it. In developing this analysis the book critiques the claim firstly that liberal regimes do indeed exist for the security and promotion of human life, and secondly that the terrorists now targeting liberal societies are themselves devoid of human causes and aspirations. It demonstrates why this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life, but is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test, if not rejected outright. It is certainly true that the future of humanity is at stake in this conflict, but only in the sense that any resolution of it will depend on our abilities to move beyond the limits of existing
understandings of what constitutes human life and its political potentialities. Building on the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Negri, this book examines the possibilities for such a movement. What forms does life take, it asks, when liberal understandings of humanity are no longer understood as horizons to strive for, but impositions against which life must struggle in order to restore its integrity? What forms does life assume when war against liberal regimes becomes the determinate condition of its possibility? Answers to such questions are pressing, this book argues, if we earnestly desire an escape from the current impasses of a war on terror.
Contents
Preface
1 War and liberal modernity: a biopolitical critique
2 Logistical life: war, discipline, and the martial origins of liberal societies
3 Nomadic life: war, sovereignty, and resistance to the biopolitical imperium
4 Defiant life: the seductions of Terror amid the tyranny of the human
5 Circulatory life: 9/11 as architectural catastrophe and the
hypermodernity of Terror
6 Biopolitical life: the 'war against war' of the multitude
Epilogue
0-7190-7405-3 The biopolitics of the war on terror
Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London
234x156mm 192pp
http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/0719074053/ref=s9_asin_image_2/202-0831944-1599805
http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/information_areas/subjects/politics/ReappraisingthePolitical.htm
–
Dr Julian Reid
Lecturer in International Relations
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of War Studies
King's College London
Strand
London
United Kingdom
WC2R 2LS
www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/ws/staff/jr.html
Email: julian.reid@kcl.ac.uk
Telephone: 0044 (0)20 7848 1249
