Queer Terror

Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony

C. Heike Schotten

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547284
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush declared, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Bush's assertion was not simply jingoist bravado—it encapsulates the civilizationalist moralism that has motivated and defined the United States since its beginning, linking the War on Terror to the nation's settlement and founding.

In Queer Terror, C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to situate Bush's either/or moralism and reframe the concept of terrorism. The categories of the War on Terror exemplify the moralizing politics that insulate U.S. empire from critique, render its victims deserving of its abuses, and delegitimize resistance to it as unthinkable and perverse. Schotten provides an anatomy of this moralism, arguing for a new interpretation of biopolitics that is focused on sovereignty and desire rather than racism and biology. This rethinking of biopolitics puts critical political theory of empire in dialogue with the insights of both native studies and queer theory. Building on queer theory's refusal of sanctity, propriety, and moralisms of all sorts, Schotten ultimately contends that the answer to Bush's ultimatum is clear: dissidents must reject the false choice he presents and stand decisively against "us," rejecting its moralism and the sanctity of its "life," in order to further a truly emancipatory, decolonizing queer politics.

1

THE BIOPOLITICS OF EMPIRE

Slavery and “the Muslim”

The life of a slave testified daily to the fact that “life is slavery.”

—Hannah Arendt1

As the people that refuses to be integrated into the national political body, … the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way.

—Giorgio Agamben2

The lesson of Auschwitz remains at the center of post-9/11 discussions in American society.

—Mahmood Mamdani3

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was nothing short of an event in the US academy.4 Due, in part, to its coincidental arrival with the George W. Bush era, the swift ascension of this text owed much to its seemingly uncanny ability to anticipate Bush’s then-unprecedented expansion of presidential power and explain so many of his administration’s bloody crimes and outlandish lies. Bolstered by the publication in 2005 of State of Exception, which discusses both the USA Patriot Act and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Agamben’s rendition of the “state of exception” appeared to make sense of the otherwise seemingly senseless horror chambers of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and CIA “black sites” around the globe, explaining them via recourse to a biopolitical sovereign decisionism that seemed amply illustrated by Bush’s outrageous new doctrines, all of which were components of this “War on Terror”: preemptive warfare, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping, and authorized torture of “enemy combatants.” The widespread sampling, application, and outright adoption of this text’s central thesis, particularly in cultural studies and dissident feminist and political theory seeking to analyze the development of the “War on Terror” after 9/11, is a conspicuous feature of scholarship in the late 2000s. Many even took Agamben at his word that, as he put it, today “we are all virtually homines sacri.”5

The widespread uptake of this text is even more noteworthy given that it staked its oppositional posture on the resurrection of a familiar if then rather unfashionable term of our political vocabularies—sovereignty—and reinvigorated critical positions “against” it, positions of which we might, in less distressing times, have been more skeptical.6 To take only one prominent example of this, Judith Butler revised Foucault’s thesis regarding the demise of sovereignty based on her astonishment at Bush’s complete suspension of law in the capture and imprisonment of “detainees” at Guantánamo Bay, who were to be tried by administrative, noncourt “military tribunals.” Drawing explicitly on Agamben, Butler argued that one could only make sense of these outrageous abuses of power by seeing them as “a contemporary version of sovereignty, animated by an aggressive nostalgia that seeks to do away with the separation of powers.” Attempting to reconcile this seeming reassertion of sovereignty with Foucault’s characterization of modern power as governmentality, Butler wrote, “we have to consider the act of suspending the law as a performative one which brings a contemporary configuration of sovereignty into being or, more precisely, reanimates a spectral sovereignty within the field of governmentality.”7 In short, Homo Sacer was so influential that it seemed to call into question an entire line of Foucauldian research in history and political thought that had become a de facto point of departure in any number of academic fields.

However compelling Homo Sacer may have been in those fraught and distressing days of heightened US aggression (an aggression that, to be sure, has by no means abated), my argument in this chapter is that this text actually perpetuates the very War on Terror of which it was so widely taken to be critical. I make this claim not simply in order to “go back” and correct an error, however widespread it may have been. Rather, I pursue it given the importance of Homo Sacer to the ever-expanding field of biopolitics, itself a privileged site for critical theory of US empire and the War on Terror, neither of which shows signs of waning in the post-Obama era. Agamben opens Homo Sacer with his announcement that Foucault’s thesis regarding biopolitics needs to be corrected, and the Agamben–Foucault dispute has become virtually canonized as one prominent genealogy of the field of biopolitics. Given this, if Homo Sacer is foundational to biopolitical theory, then its complicity with the War on Terror is of urgent political and theoretical importance to the field and must be reckoned with as such.

My suggestion is that Agamben’s complicity with the War on Terror is due to his largely overlooked philosophical debt to Hannah Arendt, whose work must consequently be acknowledged as integral to the field of biopolitics and, therefore, any biopolitical analysis of US empire.8 Agamben’s bifurcated understanding of life in terms of bios and zoē is effectively a reiteration of Arendt’s distinction between labor and action in The Human Condition, the difference being that Agamben situates biopolitics in the realm of sovereignty, which he characterizes as essentially arbitrary and oppressive, while Arendt situates biopolitics in the domain of embodiment, which she characterizes as fundamentally imprisoning. Both nevertheless rely on a tiered determination of life whose base or biological level signals a degraded stratum of existence. In Arendt’s case, this biological life is ultimately the site of slavery, an unfortunate if inevitable fact of human life and the necessary price of political freedom. In Agamben’s case, this bare or biological life is a strangely hypostasized figure of an abjected 1940s European Jewry, who achieve their utmost “sacredness” or instantiation of bare life when they become “Muslim,” a specific type of degraded being in the Nazi death camps. Agamben’s argument is potentially more liberatory than Arendt’s insofar as he heroizes the domain of bare life she views as inherently abject, holding sovereignty to blame for its abjection rather than its innately imprisoning character as such. Whether it is praised or censured, however, the “bare life” of embodiment (in Arendt) or sovereign exceptionalism (in Agamben) remains tethered to an essentialist biologization of life that both thinkers seek to flee or leave behind. It is this bare or biological body that threatens the integrity of the political, which means that both thinkers are committed to the existence of some biological domain that is, by definition, not political. “Biopolitics” is thus a misleading moniker for the political theory of life being advanced by both Agamben and Arendt, since it is precisely life “itself” that each views as threatening, undermining, or contaminating politics.

This repudiation of life “itself” is more precisely stated as their normative commitment to the hierarchical valuation of some (forms of) life over others. In Arendt, this commitment takes the form of a racist civilizationalism that also embraces an unmitigated misogyny and hatred of the poor. In Agamben, it takes the form of a biopolitics that exceptionalizes European suffering and intra-European crime as its moral and political anchor in a form of Eurocentrism I call Holocaust Exceptionalism, itself a crucial if undertheorized ideological plank of the War on Terror. While Arendt’s failings in these areas are by now well known (if only grudgingly acknowledged), less well established are the ways that Agamben’s biopolitics, fundamentally indebted to Arendtian premises, perpetuates the War on Terror in the pious guise of grieving the irretrievable loss of the properly political and human life in the grotesque crimes of Auschwitz. Such failed premises demand a new articulation of biopolitics that is free of the hierarchical valuation of some life over others and, consequently, the degraded rejection of life “itself.”

THE HUMAN CONDITION: SLAVERY

Agamben stages his widely cited Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life as, in part, a disagreement with Foucault. Citing the end of volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Agamben notes that for Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” is reached when politics becomes biopolitics—when power exercises control not simply over the bodies of living beings, but also, in fact, regulates, monitors, and manufactures the very life and life processes of those living beings.9 Agamben agrees with Foucault that modern politics is biopolitics, but disagrees that biopolitics is distinctly modern. Instead, Agamben argues that biopolitics is as old as politics itself, because politics—at least in its Western version—is effectively a politics of sovereignty, and sovereignty, in Agamben’s view, is inherently biopolitical.

Agamben attributes his disagreement with Foucault in part to what he sees as Foucault’s surprising failure to engage Hannah Arendt, Foucault’s near-contemporary and someone who, although having meditated extensively on modern biopolitics in The Human Condition, herself neglected to apply these same insights to her The Origins of Totalitarianism. What both thinkers neglect to account for, in Agamben’s view, is not the emergence of biopolitics (“which is, in itself, absolutely ancient”),10 but rather “the politicization of bare life as such,” which Agamben names the truly “decisive moment of modernity.”11 According to this introductory setup, then, a reconciliation of these two thinkers’ biopolitical theory in service to understanding the decisive moment of modernity is the task of Homo Sacer. Presenting himself as the third corner of this philosophical triangle, Agamben installs Homo Sacer as the place wherein Arendt’s and Foucault’s insights will be adequately fused so as to better diagnose our current moment, venturing that “The concept of ‘bare life’ or ‘sacred life’ is the focal lens through which we shall try to make their points of view converge.”12

However compelling all this might sound, it is not exactly what Agamben accomplishes in Homo Sacer. Indeed, Foucault is not really even one of Agamben’s primary interlocutors in this text (although many have taken him at his word about that). What’s more true is that this introductory invocation of Foucault functions as a kind of stage setting for Agamben’s own argument, which is more accurately described as an elaboration of Arendt’s thesis in The Human Condition and, as he says, an application of it to “totalitarianism” and Nazism. While Agamben calls Foucault to task for overlooking Arendt, Arendt is faulted for not recognizing the importance of her own insights and relating them to one another. Thus, Agamben notes that Foucault’s argument will have to be not only “corrected” but also “completed” insofar as it fails to recognize what Arendt already understood to be latent in the modern replacement of bios with zoē as its central political concern.13

The obviously disciplinary character of this reprimand is underremarked; I will return to its latent moralism at the end of this chapter. For now, it is sufficient to note that in Homo Sacer, Agamben essentially adopts Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition regarding the twentieth century for an updated diagnosis of the twenty-first by recentering her biopolitical diagnosis of modern decadence around the Nazi death camps. His synopsis of her thesis there is, effectively, his own: “the transformation and decadence of the political realm in modern societies [are owed] to this very primacy of natural life over political action.”14 The difference is that Agamben couches Arendt’s understanding of life within the terms of sovereignty rather than embodiment (or, as she calls it, the human condition). As Agamben argues, in Western politics, “the inclusion of bar...