Swords and Regulation: Toward a Theory of Political Violence in the Neoliberal Moment

From the Sovereign's Sword to Biopolitical Regulation

For all its insight and timeliness, the turn toward biopolitical analysis in the last decade of critical theory and cultural studies has been paradoxically hindered by its historical trigger, the war presidency of George W. Bush. Observing the expanded purviews of the security state after 9/11, along with conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, critics began shifting the emphasis of their critiques from the politico-economic operations of "globalization" to one centered on sovereign imperial violence. Bush's own language encouraged this theoretical turn. Declaring himself to be the "decider," he repeatedly invoked the grand tradition of conceiving political will—the will of God, the will of the king, the General Will—as the very stuff of power. Not for nothing was the opening military campaign in Afghanistan called "Operation Infinite Justice," or the military strategy waged against Saddam Hussein's Iraq called "Shock and Awe." The great sword of the angry king, with its capacity to signal a declaration of war by pointing its punishing blade at the heart of the enemy, took center stage in biopolitical analyses of the suspensions of law, the naming of the enemy combatant and the creation of the militarized camp.

The critical models of Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe have been central to this work: Agamben, because his Schmittian understanding of the sovereign as he who can suspend juridical order, declaring a state of exception that "returns" human beings to a condition of bare life, offered a grid of intelligibility for the abrogation of civil liberties and the central role of Guantanamo and "black site" camps in the conduct of the war on terror. Mbembe's theory of necropolitics likewise found wide purchase through its insights into war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan as replications of the spatial logic of the colony, an empire's zone of political exception par excellence, wherein it may exercise on unlimited extra-juridical power to mete out death.¹

These sovereignty-based models of biopolitcs offer powerful lenses into recent historical events both inside and outside the U.S., not least because they explicate zones of indistinction, spaces simultaneously within the formal territory of the state and yet juridically outside of it, that seem critical to the exercise of state power and the political management of life. These concepts are now being applied retroactively to a variety of moments and locations in recent history, from anti-immigrant nativisms, prison systems, and cold war military installations to slavery and Indian wars. At their richest, as in Don Pease's The New American Exceptionalism, they have been further articulated with psychoanalytic accounts of national subjectivity that make possible the excavation of the relationship of collective fantasy to state violence.

What I want to explore here, however, is the idea that the sovereignty model does not exhaust the way we should be thinking about biopolitics, and indeed that biopolitical exercises of sovereign power should ultimately be integrated into a broader field for the analysis of political violence. Moreover, I will argue, critics should be wary of their own motives for viewing every act of political violence as the thrust of the sovereign's sword, which is so often aimed at figures we might construe as the outsider, the abjected, or even the living dead. The sword of the king, perhaps not so surprisingly, offers scholars a fetishistic identification with the victimized other of the politico-symbolic order. Ironically, this attachment tacitly embraces an utterly traditional form of American political liberalism that, at risk of demonizing the state, obscures liberalism's own status—understood as a space of freedom from the state or sovereign power—as the biopolitical strategy par excellence for the reproduction of capitalism today. Biopolitical liberalism does not work so much by subjecting the outsider to the sword so much as it uses the brandishing of the sword, like the law, as one means among many for drawing distinctions between normative and deviant populations, with the ultimate aim of regulating them both: lawful and criminal, healthy and sick...