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Security and Terror. Eli Jelly-Schapiro
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isbn 9780520968158
Автор произведения Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Издательство Ingram
The term “counterterror” betrays the ways in which the state’s response to terror is itself a form of terror. The duality of terror as at once within and without, fundamental yet threatening to the imperial state, was revealed with a particular clarity, as myriad historians have argued, in the moment of the French Revolution, and the transition therein from Jacobin to Thermidorean violence—from Robespierre’s insistence that terror was “an emanation of virtue . . . a general principle of democracy” to its later redefinition, in the moment of counterrevolution, as the archetypal enemy of the state. For thinkers such as Arendt, as for Hegel and Kant, the relationship between terror and the liberal state is uniquely a problem of foundation. The abiding historical and philosophic question is whether the glorious ends of revolution justify its violent means. As the ongoing history of Euro-American imperialism makes especially plain, though, terror is a central technology of the mature and not merely nascent form of the liberal state. Terror is also, crucially, one basic condition for the birth of political modernity. The emancipation of the bourgeoisie in Europe was enabled by the terrors of primitive accumulation—the extraction of resources and exploitation of slave labor in the New World. In his reflections on primitive accumulation, Marx highlights the ways in which capital “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”1 But just as Arendt confines the terrors of the liberal state to the moment of its beginning, Marx imagines the terrors of primitive accumulation as primordial rather than perpetual. Countering these conjoined historiographic elisions, my argument in this chapter highlights the enduring mutuality of state terror and primitive accumulation.
The essential and enduring terrors of capital and the imperial state give rise to violent resistance. In the event of the Haitian Revolution, the masses of slaves in revolt demonstrated, to the world, that the radical realization of Enlightenment universalisms would be made possible by the violent destruction—and not merely philosophic rejection—of chattel rationality. In the mid-twentieth century, in dialogue with the anticolonial energies then reverberating throughout the world, C. L. R. James summoned the example of Haiti’s slaves—and that of their leader Toussaint L’Ouverture—into contemporary service. James reflected on the content of the revolution’s form—the theoretical implications of its violent methods, and the immutable contradictions of its violent aftermath. Writing in rhythm with James, in an allied conceptual idiom, Frantz Fanon meditated on the possibilities of an anticolonial violence that would bring newness into the world without itself calcifying, in the wake of independence, into the perpetual terrors of capital and state. The insights of James and Fanon continue to resonate in the current conjuncture. The possibility of a subjective terror that transcends the objective terrors of imperial power, without being assimilated by the latter, is a problem today posed from multiple political positions by a diversity of actors and theorists.
In this chapter, I demonstrate that the politics of terror are expressed in and by three primary modalities—terror as a pretext for imperial power, terror as a method of imperial power, and terror as a form of resistance to imperial power. Critical reckoning with the “terror” concept requires that we examine the interrelation of these modalities, within the recent histories of capital and the security state, and within the broad frame of colonial modernity.
TERROR AND THE COLONIAL SUBLIME
Kant, Burke, and the Colonial Sublime
The modern genealogy of the sublime is commonly traced to Kant and Edmund Burke. For both thinkers, the sublime—as a political and aesthetic analytic—was clarified by the colonial encounter. Writing in the latter half of the eighteenth century—a moment of deepening imperial processes in the Americas and in South Asia—Kant and Burke employed notions of the sublime to theorize the European male subject’s confrontation with the radical difference embodied in and by the state of nature.
In Kant’s definition, the sublime refers to the “boundlessness” of nature—that which is, in comparison to other phenomena, “absolutely great.”2 This greatness inspires in the subject a mixture of awe, pleasure, and terror. The receiving subject, Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment (1790), is broken down by the fearful immensity of nature. But in response, he submits to the primacy of reason, thereby restoring both the self and the social order at large. In Kant’s theorization of the “dynamic” sublime, the recognition of nature’s terrible power conditions the ultimate ascendancy of reason and rationality—and of the European male subject who is understood to be the privileged owner of such properties.
Like the imperial imagination at large, the Kantian sublime simultaneously posits the terrible vastness of the natural world and enacts its domestication. This double movement was performed in a quite literal way by artists of the romanticist movement, who at once paid homage to the immensity of nature and confined that immensity within the manageable parameters of a picture frame. In nineteenth-century North America, the artists of the Hudson River School exalted the immense scale, uncorrupted emptiness, and great, terrifying beauty of the New World. But in reducing that scale to the confines of the painting—and permitting the consuming public to view it at a position of safe remove, in a gallery or domestic setting—they affirmed human mastery over nature, and testified to the imminence and essential righteousness of the continent’s conquest. The depiction of empty landscapes symbolically cleansed the continent of its native inhabitants, at once eliding and providing visual proof of the epidemiological slaughter then well underway. Those paintings that did include, if not foreground, the representation of indigenous subjects imagined them as indistinct from the deep gorges, impenetrable forests, and rushing rivers—as evocative of terror and the “negative pleasure” that accompanies it, as less than human, and as subject to the inexorable destiny of white civilization. This rendering of indigenous subjects as a part of nature echoed Kant’s own philosophy of racial difference. As Gayatri Spivak and other postcolonial critics have argued, Kant imagines the “Fuegan” or the “New Hollander”—“man in the raw,” as he elsewhere terms the savage, colonized subject—as a potential source of, but incapable of being redeemed by, the sublime. (Women too are denied entry into the community of rational subjects for whom the sublime is “universally communicable.”)3
According to Burke’s earlier elaboration, the sublime is “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.”4 Burke allows that the terror of the sublime might also elicit feelings of pleasure—indeed, his own reflections share with Kant a basic understanding of the sublime as a displeasure that provokes feelings of pleasure—but its ultimate effect is disarming; the colonial subject is undone, his grasp of and power over the world threatened by the impenetrable and unfathomable vastness of what he confronts—an ascendant nature that exceeds, and demands the surrender of, humanity itself. In Burke’s rendering, there is no second moment wherein the individual, and the reason he wields, reclaims his power over the sublime object.
Though Burke’s 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is not explicitly staged within or addressed to any particular geographic context, the work is haunted by what would become one of the thinker’s abiding political concerns: the ethical and moral consequence—for Britain especially but also for its colonized subjects—of the British imperial project. Throughout his entwined intellectual and political lives, Burke maintained a deeply ambivalent relationship to Britain’s imperial projections in his native Ireland, in India, and in America. His extensive writings on Ireland and India in particular can be