Epilogue: turning around the right to look

Abstract

The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk’s classification of terrorism (including state terror) in ‘Airquakes’ (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and privation that is entangled with juridical positivism and cognate humanitarian agendas presupposes the right-to-look as the property of a sovereign subject. However, the possession character of this right raises the question of envisioning a nonsovereign gaze and an ethics of opacity. The thinking through of a will not to will a right-to-look confronts the atmospheric and habitat hegemonies of technologies and ideologies of omnivoyance, including mass incarceration, policing, and the racial capitalism of environmental extraction.