The Aesthetics of Redemption: Shapiro's War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice

Might (some) academic work that falls under the rubric of "the aesthetic turn" violate aesthetics? I am sure there is no clear answer to this question, and perhaps the question itself is badly formulated. This, not least because the very scope of aesthetics has been continuously contested in European thought—to take in, for example, more than just the beautiful and the sublime—and also because scholars advancing the aesthetic turn, who hail mostly from Europe and the former Anglo settler-colonies and who take inspiration from recent continental theory and sometimes also Hume and Kant, carry on lively debates in the persistent glow of this European tradition about what constitutes solid aesthetic-political work. Nevertheless, by asking such a question, I aim to draw attention to the ways some scholars in the wake of the aesthetic turn construct their domain of inquiry. In what follows, I consider Michael J. Shapiro's approach in relation to other trends in the joint study of culture and politics. Specifically, I worry that a prominent strand of aesthetic-political theorizing, as exemplified by Shapiro's War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice, disdains study of what I will call an aesthetics of the normal by aligning aesthetics only with critical thought and, moreover, that by programming a division between aesthetics and the "unreflective" this strand thus tasks aesthetics with redeeming numb or inured life.

Shapiro, no stranger to Theory & Event, was a member of its inaugural editorial board and has frequently published in the journal's virtual pages. In a career now spanning four decades, during which he achieved scholarly renown for early innovative work on the politics of discourse and representation inspired by poststructural and postmodern intellectual currents, including co-editing with James Der Derian the classic collection International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (1989), Shapiro also pioneered alongside others the more recent aesthetic turn in political theory and critical international relations. War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice is one of his latest books and continues a project of bringing philosophical analysis to film and television as these media shape and reflect global sensibilities. The visual impulse of this project goes back as early as Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender of 1999, and a related project of mining literature and literary theory for political insight goes back further yet. Among those working under the umbrella of the aesthetic turn—a diverse group that would include Roland Bleiker, Debbie Lisle, Matt Davies, and many others in international relations, as well as many (non-IR) political theorists associated with Theory & Event, such as Kennan Ferguson and Davide Panagia—Shapiro's voice is signature: few others range so widely across genres, locales, events, and sources of artistic and conceptual inspiration; few pursue the deterritorializing promise of transversal relations so insistently.

Shapiro's signature approach is on display in every chapter of War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice. The introduction and five chapters offer meditations on various aspects not only of war crimes and atrocity (chapters 1–2)—obviously—but also of the agency of weapons (chapter 3), insecurity and policing of and across interstate borders due particularly to narcotics trade and enforcement (chapter 4), and the archiving of injustice (chapter 5). The focal texts for these meditations include Zadie Smith's short story "The Embassy of Cambodia," Mathias Énard's novel Zone, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, László Krasznahorkai's War and War, Evan Wright's book Generation Kill and the HBO series it inspired, Linda Hattendorf's documentary The Cats of Mirikitani (2006), and the films Lord of War (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2005), Go West (dir. Ahmed Imamović, 2005), Sleep Dealer (dir. Alex Rivera, 2008), Lebanon (dir. Samuel Maoz, 2009), and Miss Bala (dir. Gerardo Naranjo, 2011)—but of course there are casts of minor characters too, from Georges Bataille and Jean-François Lyotard to a scene from the television series...