What is needed is the ability to turn regressive violent economies into more productive and profitable local conditions of possibility. That people may be resisting liberal forms of biopower and its “wars by other means” (the “other” having a figurative as well as strategic use) is never entertained.
As you mentioned, something different is taking place here than with the RMA’s terms of engagement. Displacing the full spectrum spatial doctrine, which sought to dominate land, sea, air, and space, primacy now tends towards a life-centric full spectral doctrine which aims to capture the more complex terrain of hearts, minds, bodies, and souls (the latter referring not only to what a body is, but what a body is capable of becoming). Invariably, in order for such a war to be successful, it is necessary, as Colonel Rupert Smith argues in his book The Utility of Force, to wage “war among the people.” The concept of zero casualties thus becomes a misnomer, since warfare can no longer be fought at a distance; instead, military leadership relies upon the most intimate micro-specific knowledge — what the anthro-military establishments now term “mapping the human terrain.” Ironically, then, this more humane liberal approach does not translate into a lessening of the war effort in order to secure the global peace, pacifying all non-liberal elements; instead, war becomes a normalized biopolitical condition in which the attempted closure of geopolitical space merely proves to be an initial experiment at setting out the all-embracing political terrain. Importantly, within such terrains, not only does the inside/outside lose its strategic primacy, but the meaningful distinctions which once set out the citizen from the soldier also enter into a zone of indistinction. Everybody becomes part of the liberal war effort. I, therefore, agree with the claims you made in Multitude that “war has become a regime of biopower,” which is intimately aligned with the task of “producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.” Indeed, with global liberal rule shown to be shaped by a commitment to war (globally and locally), unending or permanent war become a very real condition.
So, as you suggest, the relations between war and the body provide us with another (perhaps the most incisive) opportunity to challenge that formidable school of liberal thought. Indeed, once we begin to recognize that the ultimate object for liberal war is the productive/transformable body, it then becomes possible to begin questioning the transcendental or divine principle which allows liberalism to draw out such an unreserved global will to rule.
I want to turn to a crucial aspect of your work in Empire. You single out Kant and Hegel for particular critical attention. While I share your anti-Hegelian sentiments (especially regarding the dialectical method’s suffocation of political difference), it is the intellectual heritage set by Kant that really troubles me. Zygmunt Bauman is correct to observe, in Society under Siege, that “These days, it is a hard task to find a learned study of our most recent history that would not quote Kant’s Universal History as a supreme authority and source of inspiration for all debate of world citizenship.” One could even go further to argue that if there is a modern “image of thought” (to invoke Deleuzian conceptual vocabulary), then it is a Kantian image of thought, which, as you have indicated, not only demands that one needs metaphysics in order to think, but also, given that the world is reduced to ideal forms of representation, it exorcises any possibility of immanent political and ethical relations.
Despite these problems, Kant’s notion of “perpetual peace” has become a sort of manifesto for liberal internationalists and cosmopolitan theorists who advocate a shift towards a bounded/inclusive humanity. Whilst this notion of a bounded humanity is itself enough cause for political concern — not least since certain politicians have now made it their task to begin speaking on behalf of an endangered humanity, a formidable power which serves to provide humanity with an authentic voice — what worries me here is the strategy of deception that is taking place. For even though Kantian-inspired liberals continue to use transcendental humanitarian notions of universality in order to justify their global ambitions, a more critical eye would note how humanity has always been misplaced in this script. Humanity has never been the unifying transcendental principle for liberal theorists and practitioners since humanity is always assumed to be flawed. Why else would you require the continuous juridical watch if not to keep an omnipresent eye on the pious subject? Indeed, as Kant himself taught, given that the negative lacuna of juridical power alone is insufficient to ensure that life does not side with the unreasonable, then something beyond juridical power is also required.
Kant takes up this challenge in his essay on perpetual peace. In a part of the essay that contemporary liberals tend to ignore, Kant notes how ending conflict depends upon setting in place the right economic system. Thus, invoking what he termed “the spirit of commerce” (a phrase which Agamben recently notes has obvious theological connotations), for Kant, the task of settling conflict by reaching the highest stage of political development also rests upon the productive power of economy — something which clearly represents more than mere economic transaction and exchange. What Kant implied with his positive cosmopolitan ethic can be said to appear today in its full theological and economizing glory. Existing above and beyond the law, the unifying driver for liberal practitioners is not the humanitarian principle but the pure regulatory principle governing this flawed humanity. What then constitutes the divine principle for liberal practitioners is not the divine endowment of a universal freedom of rights or individual reason but the regulative and productive economy of life itself. When Tony Blair therefore remarked, in a very Kantian way, that the wars of the 21st century are global wars for the very politics of life itself, he was revealing more about the contemporary nature of liberal power than is readily accepted. For today, not only is the nature of threat being extended to give priority to the wider political problem of globally insurgent populations, but since this is also matched by a broadening of the security agenda (which is increasingly drawing into the same strategic framework non-political accidents), the productive economy of liberalism now begins to appear in all its divine earthly light.
MICHAEL HARDT: It might be interesting to set the liberal paradigm you are challenging back in relation to Carl Schmitt since, in a way, the movement we are tracing in the nature of warfare in the last few years might be understood in terms of a shift from Schmitt to Kant or, really, from transcendent forms of power and domination to transcendental ones. For Schmitt, the political has the same form as warfare since both are defined by the friend-enemy distinction. That is why, he insists, there is no relation between the economic and the political: in the economic realm (or at least in the capitalist market), one has no enemies, only competitors. Similarly, for Schmitt, the sovereign decision stands outside the constitution and the legal realm. In the liberal paradigm you articulate and identify with Kant, however, these terms are all scrambled. Liberal war is no longer separated from but rather identified with both economic life and the legal sphere. This is where I find useful the Kantian distinction between the transcendent and the transcendental — used a bit against the grain. The ground for politics and war is not located in the transcendent position of the sovereign but rather in the transcendental position of capital and the law. These are the dominant forces today that primarily determine the conditions of possibility of social life. And, as you point out, this liberal configuration of politics and war is perhaps just as theological as the sovereign, transcendent one, focusing now on the constant action required to limit the negative effects of and govern a humanity characterized by its imperfections. This theological-political difference might even be understood as separating Schmitt’s Catholicism from Kant Protestantism.
Aside from the pleasures of mapping out such correspondences, what are the political and theoretical consequences of this analysis of the liberal war paradigm along with the claim that it has become dominant today? One important consequence, from my perspective, is that it poses a limit to the utility of understanding politics today in terms of sovereignty. For the last decade, the concept of sovereignty has played an important and expanding role in political theory and focused attention on transcendent forms of power that stand outside the social and legal constitution, ruling over states of exception. The sovereignty paradigm has even led many theorists to decry new forms of fascism. The George W. Bush administration and its “War on Terror” certainly did provide numerous “exceptional” instances — such as the functioning of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, the officially sanctioned use of torture, the establishment
