these various disciplines can be brought together is to insist upon an inclusive understanding of liberalism that factors in both its political and economic dimensions. How else could we assess whether the ideal matches reality? Such a “political economy” perspective will be resisted in many quarters, especially since it implies a need to show how the tremendous political power and moral suasion (that liberalism wields on a planetary scale) rests upon the power of economy. What is more, if we take a political economy perspective, liberal rationality is revealed as primarily driven by biopolitical imperatives, which, in turn, force us to acknowledge that notions of sovereignty/law are merely one generative principle of liberal formation. We can simultaneously appreciate that the juridical/emancipation story, with its definitive sense of grounding, assumes secondary importance behind the biopolitical task of making life live in productively compliant ways.
Looking at this from a global perspective, it could then be argued that the “nomos as camp” hypothesis, with its impending “states of exception,” makes no conceptual sense, especially given the collapse of those neat demarcations that once permitted the Schmittean decision. Foregrounding instead the internal problem of emergence — with emergence here associated with the propagation of all types of circulations — liberalism replaces the state of exception paradigm with an internal state of unending emergency, capable of leaving life “bare” within the remit of law. Not, then, the camp as nomos, which even some liberals have been glad to announce, but a nomos of circulation.
If we accept this new biopolitical security architecture, then it inevitably follows that the sovereignty over life becomes purely contingent. For not only are territorial integrities irrelevant when the political destinies of life are at stake, but, given the highly complex and adaptive strategic situation, there can be no universal value systems or grand blueprints to follow. This is especially acute in zones of instability, when not only is life subject to the forces of biopolitical experimentation, but the liberal commitment to democratic regimes and political rights becomes subject to contingent factors as well. There have been, for example, many occasions when the most sacred of rights (that to life) has been cast aside for the most speculative utilitarian calculations. What once was the surest litmus test of one’s democratic credentials — election victories — has in recent times had liberals scrambling for new methods of de-legitimation. My personal favorite here is the story of the “democratic coup.”
A logical corollary of this is the mixture of the strategic fields you mention. It is no coincidence today to find renewed priority being afforded to the insurgent. The RAND Corporation, for instance, has, for some time now, been calling for a more comprehensive and nuanced strategic paradigm that incorporates counterinsurgency into the wider remit of the Global War on Terror. I am reminded of a wonderful observation Foucault makes in a few incisive pages of Society Must Be Defended in which he identifies the three key figures that make up the modern condition: barbarians, savages, and the civilized. Barbarians, he argues, are a function of sovereign power. Existing beyond the constitutional pale, although sometimes penetrating with purely destructive intent, they represent those lives that show no respect for the constitutional order and, hence, have and should be afforded no moral or political value. Savages, on the other hand, are a function of biopolitical power; open to remedy and demanding engagement, they represent those lives which are capable of being redeemed. No great conceptual leap of imagination is required here to draw out meaningful connections between barbarians/terrorists and savages/insurgents. Indeed, in the theaters of war today, one can write of that all-too-familiar historical tendency of waging war by getting savages to fight barbarians in order to prove their civilizing credentials. Even here, however, the lines in the sand have been blurred. Terrorists no longer occupy a place of exteriority to the political realm; they are fully included within the biopolitical order. What is more, the ability to set out clear parameters between the terrorist and the insurgent has proved rather elusive. This is compounded even further by a realization that terrorists are no longer simply intent upon wanton destruction but have shown a willingness to actually cross over to become insurgents, posing a much wider social problem. This approach is clearly evidenced in the recent United Kingdom CONTEST II National Security Strategy (2009). What is particularly striking about this document is the style in which these threats are presented. Terrorists are now presented in a manner which is biopolitically fitting: like some cancerous cell, not only are they seen to be capable of damaging a vital organ within the body politic, but they also now hold the potential to infect the wider bodily terrain. The significance of this sovereign/biopolitical merger can be read in two ways. First, through this coming together, it is possible to detect a certain reprioritization of affairs in which the once familiar problem of the sovereign encounter can now be dealt with biopolitically. And second, given that the biopolitical is now tainted by the specter of terror, then the biopolitical becomes truly moralized in that the war to redeem savages is equally a war to expel evil.
MICHAEL HARDT: I find intriguing and very productive your translation of barbarian to terrorist and savage to insurgent, along with the correlate that, from the standpoint of the sovereign, the latter couple has the potential to be civilized or redeemed whereas the formal couple does not. It strikes me that what is at play here, in part, are two relations to the body. In the first years of the new millennium, at the inception of the “War on Terror,” I recognized in much of US military theorizing a fascinating doubling and inversion regarding the body of the terrorist and the body of the US soldier. On the one side stood the horrifying, barbaric figure of the terrorist, defined by not only its power to destroy others but also its acceptance of corporeal self-destruction, characterized paradigmatically by the absolute negation of the body in the act of suicide bombing. On the other side stood the body of the US soldier that, it was thought, could be kept at a safe distance from all danger by technological innovations and new military strategies associated with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Precise missiles, drone airplanes, and other devices could aid a military strategy aimed at no soldiers lost — at least, no US soldiers. So, I was interested in the way that these two figures — the barbaric body guaranteed destruction and the civilized body guaranteed preservation — arose at roughly the same time and seemed to be bound together in dialectical negation.
You are right that the insurgent body occupies an entirely different position. It does not threaten self-destruction or corporeal annihilation. The insurgent must be transformed through the mechanisms of biopower just as the savage must be redeemed and civilized. It is interesting, in fact, that at the same time (in the military and security discourses) there has been a shift from the barbaric terrorist to the savage insurgent, as you say, there has been a parallel move away from the dreams of bodiless military actions and the strategic principles of the RMA. Anti-insurgency biopower is aimed at the transformable body. This gives us another level, I suppose, to the relation between war, biopower, and liberalism that you were insisting on earlier.
BRAD EVANS: Exploring the relations you identify between war, biopower, and the transformable body is one of the most important critical tasks we face today, especially since these relations force us to directly confront the legitimacy of liberal interventionism. Military interventions can, of course, be rather easily assigned imperial ascriptions. The scene becomes more complicated, though, when we encounter humanitarian interventions, which tend to be presented in an altogether more benevolent light. And yet, if the history of civilizing missions teaches us anything, then surely war is taking place there, too, albeit on different terms. We can see this reflected today in the way violence is understood. Barbarian violence is always subject to the neat them/us, outside/inside, evil/good, unreasonable/reasonable marks of absolute differentiation. Theirs is a violence that by its very nature is always unjust. Savage violence, in contrast, is seen to be an internal problem that is subject to a progressive/regressive imaginary. It is the product of local conditions of underdevelopment. Hence, unlike barbarian violence, which offers no possibility to remedy the cause (aside from outright elimination), savage violence is marked out by modes of relative differentiation, in which the source of the problem can be identified and, with enough resource allocation, the causes of conflict alleviated. Clearly, each of these different problematizations has its own unique relationship to power. For instance, given that resistance/insurgent violence is the surest indicator of a local population’s capacities for their own (un)making,
