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to defend both the War on Terror in particular and empire in general—highlighted the legal, philosophic, and military threads that connect the contemporary security apparatus with the longue-durée history of European and American imperialism.¹² Gaddis’s Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), for example, traces the Bush doctrine of preemptive war—according to which “security” is achieved through imperial expansion—back to the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. Another constellation of works offers a more critical historicization of the present. In Cultures of War (2010), the historian John Dower elaborates a series of analogies between the War on Terror and the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War, reflecting on the destructive consequence of imperial hubris in either historical moment. Writers such as Chalmers Johnson—in his Blowback series (Blowback, 2000; The Sorrows of Empire, 2004; Nemesis, 2008)—place the War on Terror on a single line of geopolitical cause and effect, examining the relationship between the late twentieth-century assertion of U.S. power abroad and the resistance to which it has given rise. My own approach shares with Dower and Johnson a basic insistence on the urgency of historical explanation. I am principally concerned, though, with genealogy above analogy or causality. The genealogical method, as theorized by Michel Foucault, avoids the search for causation and labors instead to apprehend and understand the present through an analysis of the complex, multiple, and contingent—never inevitable—historical contexts and processes from which it emerged. Thinking genealogically, this book situates the conceptual paradigms and political forms of the War on Terror within the long, planetary history of colonial modernity.

      THEORIZING THE COLONIAL PRESENT

      For the guardians of established political order, the terror of revolution is defined not simply by physical or corporeal destruction but by the capacities it contains for abstraction—the totality that is revealed within and by the collective self-consciousness forged in the moment of struggle. Edmund Burke condemned the revolution in France because of the blood it shed but also because of the “doctrine and theoretick dogma” it projected toward the world. Though the histories of “terror” and “theory” are inextricably bound, terror has been under-theorized. So too has security. In contemporary theory, the tropes of security and terror are—with important exceptions—approached obliquely. Their theorization is less a discrete analytic pursuit than an adjunctive product of three intersecting critical strands: the critique of spectacle; the critique of the politics of exception; and the critique of empire qua global capita.

      Chapters 1 and 2 forground the continuity across time of colonial rationality, as expressed by the dialectic of security and terror. Considering how the critiques of spectacle, exception, and empire illuminate the longer history of the colonial present, chapter 3 persists in this basic route of inquiry. But I am simultaneously concerned here to emphasize and reflect upon the geographic implications of the contemporary reproduction of colonial political and economic forms. In a basic and important sense, the processes of combined and uneven development unfolding in the postcolonial moment are contiguous with the colonial era. Now as then, the imperial state enables the violent application of commodity rationality in the global South, thereby reproducing the geographic asymmetry between metropole and postcolony.¹³ I also want to highlight, though, the inverse trajectory, the boomerang return—“choc en retour,” in Aimé Césaire’s phrasing—of colonial rationality to the advanced capitalist world. In his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire sought to shed light upon the colonial origins of intra-European genocide, a genealogy also identified by Arendt. More broadly, Césaire accented how the prosecution of colonial power disfigured the humanity of the European subject and deepened the terminal sickness in European civilization. My use of the concept is yet more expansive. Choc en retour, as invoked herein, signifies the reenactment in the postcolonial metropole—including the “Homeland” of the U.S. imperium—of various modes of governance and accumulation that were innovated or perfected in the space of the colony; it names, even more capaciously, the contemporary reverberation, in the global North and South alike, of intersecting, often unacknowledged imperial histories.

      The critical theorizations of spectacle, exception, and empire, I contend, are conditioned by—and symptomatic of—this boomerang return. The critique of spectacle is responding to what Guy Debord termed the “colonization of everyday life,” the turning inward of capital’s imperial predations. The critique of exception is an effect of the enactment of “emergency” governance—ever the basic mode of colonial rule—within the juridical sphere of the liberal democratic state. And the critique of empire (qua global capital) is symptomatic of the return of colonial methods of accumulation to the economies of the advanced capital world. In more synthetic terms, these three instances of “return” evince the global normalization, in a moment marked by permanent war and perpetual neoliberal crisis, of emergency governance and economic insecurity.

      If conditioned by this choc en retour, however, the intersecting critiques of spectacle, exception, and empire are unevenly revelatory of the colonial origins and essence of contemporary political and economic forms. This unevenness, I argue, is owed in part to theory’s symptomatic tendencies—the ways in which certain works or premises of critique reprise not simply the vocabulary but the formal logics of their object. The contributions on which I focus in chapter 3 exemplify this formal echo. As authored by Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek, the critique of spectacle mirrors the ahistoricity of the image. In his 2002 essay “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” Žižek observes that the attacks of September 11, 2001, entered the world as narrative, as symbol—not as event and later as image, but as an “image-event.”¹⁴ In Baudrillard’s reading, the event is taken hostage, consumed, by its image—and thus cleansed of any historical content.¹⁵ In highlighting this evacuation, the critique of 9/11-as-spectacle itself struggles to look off screen—away from the “unforgettable incandescence of the images”¹⁶—and toward the concrete historical forces from which the event emerged. Similarly, the critique of exception—for which the work of Giorgio Agamben acts as a touchstone—often reinforces the assumption of rupture, the exceptionalism of the “post-9/11” state of exception. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler reflects, in a largely ahistorical manner, on the “new war prison” and new juridical concept of “indefinite detention.” Agamben’s work, by contrast, is profoundly genealogical. In Homo Sacer (1998), for example, Agamben identifies the Nazi concentration camp as the space wherein the conditio inhumana is most absolute.¹⁷ But in the context of “a new kind of war,” Agamben’s State of Exception (2004) describes the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay as the space wherein “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy.”¹⁸ This appeal to the exceptionalism of the “post-9/11” moment, however subtle, compounds the absence, in Agamben’s historical framework, of a sustained engagement with the colonial origins of the politics of exception. The tendency of theory to mimic the form of its object is likewise evidenced by the third intervention I examine in chapter 3, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy. Hardt and Negri’s theorization of the new global imperial order emulates key tropes of the triumphalist enunciation of “globalization”—the idea that there is no longer a constitutive outside, to capital or to the space and subject of sovereignty, and the related assumption that the political and economic forms of this achieved globalism originate within and emanate from the advanced capitalist world. The universality of contemporary imperial order is evinced, in Hardt and Negri’s account, by the “qualitative hegemony” of biopolitical production—forms of immaterial and affective labor that are ascendant in the post-Fordist economies of the global North but shape the cultural logics of production everywhere—and by the planetary projection of U.S. constitutionalism. My own argument in this chapter foregrounds the inverse trajectory—the return to the global North of colonial modes of governance, methods of accumulation, and conditions of social life—and accents more broadly the contemporary iteration of a colonial rationality that Hardt and Negri consign to the past.¹⁹

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      The tendency of left critique to conform to the logics of its object was observed by Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses

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