The Discreet Charm of the ‘Anarchist Sublime’: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Revisited
Date
2012Source
Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the HumanitiesVolume
3Pages
1-23Google Scholar check
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HOW HAVE INTELLECTUALS, PARTICULARLY INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES, thought about the state in the period inaugurated by the catastrophic events of 9/11 and e#ectively terminated with the global $nancial crisis of early 2008? !ey have not thought about it much in its traditional, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guise, as arbiter and mediator between antagonistic private or group interests neither have they tended to dwell on a state that appears in the guise of the social security or Keynesian state of the postwar period, one that undertakes a redistribution of the pro$ts of uneven development with the aim of de%ecting acute forms of class struggle and engendering social stability and consensus in the metropolis. !e predominant face the state, and especially the state of the United States, showed to its inspectors in this period was rather that of a sinister Leviathan: a state predicated on unlimited and illimitable violence, on force that is not simply unchecked by law but that in fact predates all law, constituting it in the very act of suspending it. It has been an image composed empirically, shaped by the galvanizing synapse that 9/11 was to form between “us” and “them,” between the longfamiliar spectacle of non-Western refugees or civil war victims and the sudden revelation of the precarious life of $rst-world bodies, mass-incinerated in the %aming inferno of the Twin Towers, mutilated by mines and ambushes in Afghani and Iraqi ba"le$elds, frisked by police at metropolitan airports, surveilled, questioned, or detained by newly formed or newly enhanced authorities at home. It was, in short, the state Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and its sequels1 have envisioned, more dramatically than any other body of critical work in the recent period.