Horror beyond Death: Geopolitics and the Pulverisation of the Human

Abstract

Biopolitics often enters the sphere of geopolitics in the form of a series of necropolitical or thanatopolitical interventions.1 From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life and bodies in configurations of (geo)political power has generally involved the putting to death of large swaths of populations, whether they are directly targeted or they happen to be 'in the way'. Michel Foucault argued that biopolitics emerges when the power of the sovereign shifts from a 'right to take life' to a capacity to 'let live'.2 Thus, political power, the power of the geopolitical sovereign (generally), becomes concerned with the management, control, and enhancement of people's lives, with the 'health' of a population/body politic, and with the efficient utilisation and incorporation of individual bodies into political preoccupations (including the concern with the survival of the state or sovereign). Yet, as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others, have also argued, while Foucault's recognition that biopolitical power is primarily concerned with the maintenance of life is crucial, this capacity to 'make live and let die' is never completely separate from the old modality of sovereign power and geopolitical force that was/is premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, as Mbembe puts it, biopolitics is also about the 'subjugation of life to the power of death'.3 Agamben adds that 'if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones'.4 The distinction between biopolitics and thanatopolitics/necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. When biopolitics - the concern with the enhancement of human life/living - is the main object of geopolitical operations, what Mbembe calls 'the creation of death worlds' often becomes modern and late-modern geopolitics' primary objective (Necropolitics, p40).This essay, however, is not interested in reprising the many biopolitical arguments that have been advanced to demonstrate the close connections between biopolitics and necropolitics. It is clear and, in a way, it was so already for Foucault that, in order to maximise the life/living potentials of some populations and bodies, other populations or other bodies have to be sacrificed or must disappear (Society, pp254-258). Put differently, what brings geopolitics and biopolitics together is their devotion to making populations and bodies die (in other words, their attachment to necropolitics). This essay is also not concerned with the many necropolitical dimensions of latemodern geopolitics (whether we are looking at World War II and the camps, for example, or, more recently, at techniques of exclusion of bodies and disappearance of life in the long era of the global war on terror). Again, many studies have targeted this late modern condition of (geo)political life.5 Instead, my goal in this essay is to push further the biopolitical/necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, in some contemporary geopolitical configurations is what I have called the pulverisation of the human,6 or, to borrow Adriana Cavarero's language, a radical violence that, 'not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body'.7 What is at stake in some geopolitical scenarios is 'not the end of human life, but the human condition itself' (Horrorism, p8). With Cavarero's help, I have called this targeting of the human condition, of the fact of the human, or of humanity itself a matter of horror.8 Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical violence and destruction, may appear to be to put bodies to death. …