Homeland and Resilience: Immunitas, Katechon, the Uncanny, and Trauma’s Displacement

Abstract

The paper focuses on the category of resilience as it refers to the capacity of socio-political systems to withstand stress or to adapt to it. Invoking resilience enables a multifaceted reading of the TV series Homeland that looks beyond the show’s readily apparent propagandistic function. Resilience is posited as being partly at odds with the category trauma, which the show also invokes. Unlike trauma, resilience is conceptualized as taking place in the present moment, and an analogy thus obtains between resilience and the uncanny. Resilience is further linked to biopolitics with a discussion of Roberto Esposito’s immunitas and with a discussion of katechon, a category called upon by Esposito and by Paolo Virno. The latter identifies the katechon in the multitude which arises with the state of exception. Thus, the shift from trauma to the uncanny reflects not only the series’ generic conventions as a political thriller but corresponds also to a conceptual shift from the biopolitical immunitas to the more directly anarchic katechon of the multitude.