Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony by C. Heike Schotten (review)

Queer Terror by C. Heike Schotten is a theoretically dense work that adds to the growing corpus in queer studies that focus on settler colonialism. In particular, the book maps out the connections among settler colonialism, empire, biopolitics, and queerness as they come to be structured through civilizational moralism. As Schotten notes in the introduction, the book situates the U.S. War on Terror as not an objective phenomenon but as a continuation of the civilizational moralism and its existential fear of the Native Other that animates settler colonies such as the United States. As such, all "enemies" that settler colonies subsequently invent (such as the post-9/11 terrorist Other) are but templates of the Native Other who poses a threat to settler futurity.

Schotten's main contention is that biopolitical studies inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben have not engaged civilizational moralism, which sanctifies European settlement and empire as noble while demonizing any resistance to it. Against this background, the book posits that life is as much ideological as biological because "to make live and to let die" (in Foucault's famous formulation) is always a matter of which lives are deemed as un/desirable by settler societies. In this, Schotten directly draws her inspiration from Native studies as articulated by the primary intervention of the book, which is to link biopolitics with Native studies and its critique of settler colonialism. Second, Schotten draws upon early queer theory, especially Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)¹ and Foucault's genealogy, to hammer out a liberatory critique whose central contribution to a Left politics is its antimoralism. In doing so, Schotten hopes to demonstrate how queer politics already contains within itself an anti(settler)colonial analytic that could ally a nonessentialized queer subject with the Native Other. In this, Queer Terror charts a different path as against scholars such as Jasbir Puar, who have highlighted queer complicity in colonial regimes.²

In Chapter 1, Schotten brilliantly demonstrates how Agamben's work does not enable a critique of the U.S. War on Terror but rather draws from the same reservoir of logic that constitute it. This is because Agamben's argument that sovereignty is increasingly central to the distinction between zoe (bare life) and bios (political life) in fact smuggles in Hannah Arendt's racist and misogynist distinctions between labor and action. As such, Schotten asks that biopolitics should renounce both Agamben and Arendt and embrace a new orientation that deploys a nonpsychoanalytic conception of desire as moralizing (settler) life as comprising the highest value. In the second chapter, Schotten turns to Native studies and queer theory recast through a critical Nietzschean perspective to reread Hobbes's Leviathan. The point here is not to understand the sovereign as he who decides on the exception, as Agamben would have it, but as he who produces (settler) life itself as a futurist endeavor that needs to be preserved forever. In other words, Schotten's argument is that Hobbes posits the state of nature as nothing more than living in a constant state of "despayre" against which the sovereign inaugurates a new life whose promises are security and well-being and whose orientation is resolutely futuristic. Although this may seem to mirror the variation between bare life and political life, what constitutes the difference here is the role that settler colonialism played in the founding of this distinction. Because, for Hobbes, the state of nature is isomorphic with the Indigenous peoples of America against which a settler life needs to be elaborated as structured by a civilizational moralism and its attendant logics of racial hierarchy.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Schotten tries to resuscitate a queer politics whose conceptualization of the queer as a subject without future (in Edelman's terms) can be important grounds to energize the Left. For Schotten, queer is neither an...