LITMIR.BIZ

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world, the “zone of exception par excellence,” in Achille Mbembe’s words—could be killed with impunity. The extralegal violence honed in the colony was subsequently sublimated in the legal apparatus of the modern state. The United States, for example, has been governed under one emergency or another since 1933, when President Roosevelt declared a national emergency to shore up the banking system. The conditions that might provoke the declaration of emergency today are multiple, ranging from financial crisis, to social unrest, to natural disaster, to foreign or domestic war. In each case, it is “security”—the security of the body politic, or the security of capitalist order—that permits the suspension of the law, by the law, in the name of the law. In the context of the War on Terror, the politics of exception operates in the name of security and under the euphemistic guise of terms such as “battlefield detainee” and “extraordinary rendition.” As in the early modern era, the terror inherent in and expressed by civilization’s others provokes the perpetual interventions of the security state, the violent conduct of which is compelled and concealed by the invocation of “emergency.”

      Chapter 1 examines these intersecting modalities of the modern security project—capital, race, and emergency—in turn. More specifically, I locate these political forms within two imbricated genealogies—the long history of colonial modernity, and the recent, twentieth-century, history of the U.S. security state. Though my emphasis here is on the latter-day and longue-durée continuities of the security project, I do not aim to deny the uniqueness of Homeland Security. My intention rather is to demonstrate that the particularities of the Homeland Security moment are elucidated when their contiguity with the long history of security thinking and governance—as with the more recent formations of Social Security and National Security—is brought into the analytic foreground. And inversely, I am concerned to convey how those same particularities clarify the essential and enduring rationalities of the modern security project.

      The trope of “security” has long been joined to the trope of “terror.”⁸ In Immanuel Kant’s formulation, the sublime terror of the non-civilized world demands a countermovement of Enlightenment reason and rationality, which will secure the European subject against the corporeal and metaphysical threat of barbarism. Terror, in other words, is a pretext for the security state. Terror is also a method of state power, as the history of Europe’s modern empires reveals with a particular clarity. In 1919, at the highpoint of the British Empire, Winston Churchill argued for the use of poisonous gas in “[spreading] a lively terror” amongst “uncivilized tribes” (specifically, in this case, the Kurds).⁹ In 1936, during the war waged by Italian fascism on Ethiopia, Benito Mussolini advised his military commander to “pursue a systematic policy of terror and extermination against the rebels and all accomplice populations.”¹⁰ Though not meant for public reception, the words of Churchill and Mussolini nonetheless represent unusually open acknowledgments of an otherwise unspoken truth: terror—terror as a method and effect of violence—is fundamental to the practice of colonial governance, and to the modern state more broadly. The centrality of terror to the modern state was brought into especially stark relief by the events of the French Revolution. In that moment—the moment of the liberal state’s emergence—the dialectic of security and terror was articulated in the vocabulary of necessary intimacy rather than essential opposition. The Jacobin Reign of Terror was carried out by the Committee of General Security (along with the Committee of General Safety). Terror, Maximilien Robespierre put it, “is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the nation.”¹¹ In the period of the Thermidorian Reaction, when Robespierre himself met a prompt and severe end, terror was recast as the enemy of the state rather than a central element of its constitution—as the antithesis of security rather than its guarantor. The narrative of the War on Terror conforms to the latter paradigm; but the conduct of the War on Terror again reveals the ways in which terror is a fundamental technology of the modern security state, its imperial form in particular.

      One basic argument of this book is that the intersecting genealogies of security and terror are obscured by the assumption that September 11 constituted a historical rupture. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the history and contemporary articulation of terror in particular—and the dialectic of security and terror more broadly—are concealed as well by cultures of erasure that are fundamental to modernity itself. As the conjoined concepts of fetishism and reification clarify, the commodity form renders invisible its own social history. The state likewise labors to elide its violent origins—to make its existence appear natural and fixed rather than historically produced and contingent. The critical historicization of capital and the modern state uncovers instead the terror that founds modernity’s essential political and economic forms. But the latter critical revisions often reproduce aspects of the historiographic omissions they work to resist. Karl Marx, for example, imagines the terror of capital’s birth as eventually giving way to the “silent compulsion” of economic relations. And meditations on the centrality of terror to the invention of the modern state—from Kant and G. W. F. Hegel to Hannah Arendt—tend to cast to the historiographic margins both the colonial conditions of that terror and its endurance beyond the moment of putative foundation. Chapter 2 counters these conjoined tendencies by highlighting the continuing centrality of state terror to extant processes of primitive accumulation.

      Focusing on terror as a pretext for and method of the imperial security state, my inquiry is additionally guided by a third primary modality of terror—terror as a form of resistance to imperial power. The slaves that authored the Haitian Revolution intimated, in the act of violent revolt, that the seeds of a radical—anticolonial and universal—humanism would necessarily be sown in soil nurtured by the ashes of the plantation and the blood of its masters. In the mid-twentieth century, Frantz Fanon and other anticolonial thinkers avowed, in a kindred vocabulary, that the terror of colonial order would only yield when confronted with a counter-assertion of revolutionary violence. And today, the figure of the suicide bomber distills into subjective form the objective necropolitical logic of contemporary imperial power. The imperial state explains these instances of violent resistance as the expression of an essential native savagery rather than as a rational political response to, or reflection of, the terrors of empire. This is as true in the moment of the War on Terror, when terms such as “Islamic barbarism” enjoy a mainstream political currency, as it was in the sixteenth century.

      During the course of the twentieth century, rightist parties across the world met the emergence of socialist and anticolonial internationalisms with a fluid synthesis of fascism, authoritarianism, and market fundamentalism. The ascent of the latter in particular coincided with the increasing prominence of “security,” and correlatively “terror,” in state discourse. With the imposition, proliferation, and intensification of neoliberal forms of accumulation, governments around the world today acknowledge and present security as the primary reason of state. The global disorder occasioned and exploited by neoliberal processes—characterized by profound insecurity for the bulk of the world, recurring economic crises, and endless war—demands the regulatory and punitive powers of the security state. Since the later stages of the Cold War but especially in its aftermath, any violent resistance—occasionally even nonviolent resistance—to neoliberalism is labeled by the state as “terror” and met with the securing “counterterror” interventions of the police or military. This logic is clarified by the declaration of a so-called War on Terror. The War on Terror, I argue, represents the latest iteration of a paradigm fundamental not simply to the neoliberal moment but to colonial modernity itself—a paradigm in which the imperial state, in the name of security, posits, generates, and violently responds to the terror resident in and emanating from its internal and external others.

      Locating the moment of the War on Terror within deeper historical time, this book critically converges with an expanding field of contemporary historiography. In the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—a high point for neoconservative ideology—a series of academic and popular books affirmatively tied America’s existential struggle against

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