Forgetting ISIS: enmity, drive and repetition in security discourse

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

doi:10.1080/21624887.2017.1407595

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the reconstitution and repetition of threat imaginaries in security discourse, with particular focus on the War on Terror era. Upon vanquishing the enemy (whether an individual militant or militant group) no tangible increase in ‘security’ is claimed by securitising actors. Instead, the security apparatus turns away and reconstructs the figuration of insecurity elsewhere. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS replace each other as signifiers for the most profound threat to international order. The article positions this compulsive refiguration of enemies within an aversion to attaining a state of ‘security’. The paper uses psychoanalytic concepts of drive and jouissance to argue that security imaginaries play out fantasies of insecurity to suture the symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and power. If enmity was permanently ended or victory attained, society would need to confront the continued experience of ‘lack’ (ontological insecurity) – something promised to disappear upon the resolution of hostilities. The fantasy of interpellation would collapse at this point. The article contributes to Critical Security Studies by explicitly addressing the repetitive constitution of terrorist threats. It goes beyond constructivist understandings of othering to explain why the resolution of insecurity is disavowed and why enmity is continually restaged.

Highlights

Security never seems to make any progress
This paper explores the reconstitution and repetition of threat imaginaries in security discourse, with particular focus on the War on Terror era
This paper explores how that ambivalence to the individual threat object works, despite simultaneous securitisation processes

Summary

Introduction

Security never seems to make any progress. Despite military investments, security reviews and ever more powerful technological surveillance, European and North American populations are continually represented as unsafe. Their military defeat in Iraq and Syria, if it comes, will not lead to a cliff-edge of ‘threat deficit’ for the United States, because the continuation of the jihadist threat has been foretold This discursive process of forgetting ISIS effectively evacuates the present tense of enmity – ISIS have represented the apocalyptic enemy of international society, and will (in slightly different and uncertain form) retake their position as threat object in the future. It did not have to account for the continued experience of lack during a state of security, because the attainment of security was disavowed – postponed because of the repetition of the enmity imaginary around another object petit a This designification work does occur upon the military defeat or death of the threat object. The totalising and amplified tenor of the alt-right’s security imaginaries might indicate a historical process of intensification and fragmentation, where repetitive threat construction has had effects upon the identification with a national (or transnational) self.

Conclusion