State Violence and the Execution of Law

Biopolitcal Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones

Joseph Pugliese

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135073015
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Diritto
• Categoria: Teoria e pratica del diritto

State Violence and the Execution of Law stages a provocative analysis of how the biopolitical divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in enabling state violence, including torture, secret imprisonment and killing-at-a-distance via drones. Analyzing the complex ways in which the United States government deploys law in order to consolidate and further imperial relations of power, Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalization of the state's monopoly of violence both in the US and in an international context. He demonstrates how networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions, military apparatuses, civilian sites, corporations, carceral architectures, and advanced technologies. The author argues that the exercise of state violence, as unleashed by the war on terror, has enmeshed the subjects of the Global South within institutional and discursive structures that position them as non-human animals that can be tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity. Drawing on poststructuralist, critical race and whiteness, and critical legal theories, the book is transdisciplinary in its approach and value. It will be invaluable to university students and scholars in Critical Legal and Socio-Legal Studies, Cultural Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, International Politics, and Postcolonial Studies.

Chapter 1

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Biopolitical caesurae of state violence

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Raciality operates, as Denise Ferreira da Silva underscores in her work, as an a priori within the state’s biopolitical schemata in relation to who may be killed or left to die with impunity.¹ In the course of this chapter, I want to draw attention to yet another a priori that, in turn, inscribes and constitutes raciality in order to demarcate the figure of the killable other: the animal. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, the testimonies of the detainees, who have been captured and imprisoned by the US in the course of its war on terror, repeatedly refer to the manner in which they were categorized by their guards and torturers as non-human animals who could thus be tortured or killed with no ethical compunction. By bringing into focus the manner in which the state repeatedly marks its targeted human subject as non-human animal, I want to address the complex enmeshment of racism and speciesism in the context of the state’s biopolitical operations, specifically by revisiting Foucault’s theorization of the relation between racism and biopolitics in order to disclose what remains unspoken in his address of the biopolitical.

In his Lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault examines the category of race in an in-depth manner that is strikingly absent from his previously published corpus. Race, indeed, assumes a fundamental role in his theorizing of biopolitics. In his analysis of early nineteenth-century European culture, Foucault identifies a decisive break with the past in relation to the uses and abuses of race and the ‘discourse of race struggle’:

It [the discourse of race struggle] will become the discourse of a centered, centralized, and centralizing power. It will become the discourse of battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage. At this point, we have all those biological-racist discourses of degeneracy, but also all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society.²

Foucault identifies the resultant ‘race wars’ that this discourse of race struggle enables as what is ‘articulated with European policies of colonization.’³ The biopolitics of race in the context of colonialism as theorized by Foucault is, in fact, underpinned by a governing biopolitical category that remains at once unspoken and untheorized: speciesism – understood in all of its anthropocentric dimensions. The entire apparatus of the biopolitics of race – its colonial and imperial dimensions; its discriminatory, exclusionary and necropolitical effects – are, I propose, all rendered culturally intelligible and biopolitically enabled by the category of the absolute non-human other: the animal – and I deploy the problematic definite article here precisely in order to underscore the violent operations of homogenization, totalization and genericity that are operative in the binary logic of anthropocentrism. The critical dependency of the biopolitics of racism on the category of non-human animals can be traced back to the ‘prehistorical’ human enslavement (‘domestication’) of animals. The enslavement of animals must be seen as supplying the template for the consequent enslavement of humans as the fungibility of animals was historically transposed to human slaves – with, as I elaborate below, one critical intraspecies prohibition. Biopolitical arguments of race and ‘the norm,’ ‘the biological heritage,’ and the threats of ‘degeneracy’ are all premised, in the first instance, on the unspoken assumption of an anthropocentrism that has assiduously labored to construct and consolidate species hierarchies and their attendant knowledge/power effects in terms of the valuation, fungibility and governance of diverse life forms. If, as Foucault suggests, biopolitics was principally ‘focused on the species body,’ then what remains unsaid in his work is the critical relation between the human species and its animal others. In his reflection on the manner in which the definite article designating ‘the animal’ has been wielded by Western philosophers throughout history, Jacques Derrida writes that:

all philosophers have judged the limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the other side of that limit there is an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right, the theoretical or philosophical right, to distinguish and mark as opposite, namely, the set of the Animal in general, the Animal spoken of in the general singular. It applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human.⁴

Derrida’s claim – that the general singular has been applied to the whole animal kingdom with exception of the human – becomes untenable once it is historically situated within the context of European philosophy and colonial practice. In the discursive practices of colonialism, invariably informed by European philosophy,⁵ the general singular has been systematically applied to the human-animal counterpart of the animal: the Native. As with ‘the Animal,’ ‘the Native’ is the colonial figure inscribed with the knowledge/power effects of homogenization, totalization and genericity. In colonial discourse, the figure of the Native homogenizes different ethnicities, tribes and nationalities; it totalizes through racist stereotypes different cultural and phenotypical attributes; and it thereby works to make intelligible the human subjects it captures under this descriptor in terms of a common sense genericity that establishes the Native as something always-already known: the Native as serial in her sameness and fungibility. These racial operations, critically, are predicated on relegating the Native to the very animal kingdom that Derrida sees as the exclusive preserve of the Animal. Captured under the sign of non-human Animal and relegated to the savage outside of the Human, the Native can then be managed, as I discuss in the latter part of this chapter, under the same laws that govern colonial understandings of fauna and flora – as evidenced by the biopolitical governance, for example, of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals who, at various times, have been included under the same legislative rubrics that govern the management of native fauna and flora.

‘The entry of life into history’

In his mapping of the entry of the category of race, as a fundamental category in the production of nineteenth-century European biopolitical formations, Foucault offers a genealogy of race that, by definition, suggests it was a recent category in European political thought and practice: ‘In the name of a biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon.’⁶ What is erased in Foucault’s locating of the racisms of the state as ‘on the horizon’ is a long and dense historical genealogy of the category of race as a foundational category in the exercise of European colonial and imperial power.⁷ The sheer density of this other history renders untenable Foucault’s truncated genealogy. Foucault reproduces another instance of this type of foreshortened genealogy in his discussion of the forces at work in the development of European capitalism:

One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first formation of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps wider impact than the new morality; this was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques.⁸

As Robin Blackburn evidences in his history of New World slavery, the development of capitalism must be tracked back to the 1600s and to its intimate imbrication with the category of race in the context of the development of slavery: ‘The slave plantation was the most distinctive product of European capitalism, colonialism and maritime power … with racial sentiment acting as a crucial bonding agent.’⁹ One can effectively, if retroactively, connect this other biopoliticial (slave) history back to Foucault’s critical assertion that ‘biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.’¹⁰ What remains occluded here, however, is a body whose controlled insertion into biopolitical economies was instrumental in the development of capitalism: the human slave.

I point to these crucial lacunae in Foucault’s biopolitical genealogies as they offer a glimpse to an even more profound area of irreflection: the erasure of nonhuman animals from his conceptualization of biopolitics. When he enunciates ‘nothing less than the entry of life into history,’ as the condition of possibility for the emergence of biopolitics, Foucault immediately qualifies and reduces ‘life’ to ‘the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques.’¹¹ The racial dimensions of the term ‘human species’ become the object of Foucault’s intensive theorization of biopolitics in his Society Must Be Defended lectures once they are grounded in the context of nineteenth-century Europe. The critical qualifier ‘human species’ is always-already fully racialized in terms of its biopolitical operations once it is situated within the colonial economies of the slave trade: the category ‘human’ was, by definition, one that could only be inhabited by the European subject. The ‘deference to shared values in Europe,’ Blackburn notes, ‘protected Europeans from enslavement, and in the course of time the descendants of the slave would also benefit from the emancipatory influence of market relations.’¹²

I have thus far worked to complicate Foucault’s historical conceptualization of biopolitics by drawing attention to two critical categories of effacement: human slavery and non-human animals. These two categories must, in...