Rehearsals of The Sovereign

Abstract

The attacks of 9/11 have been generally viewed as a traumatic, historical rupture, ushering in the ‘war on terror’ as well as a warfare/security state in the US. Yet close attention to police practices on urban streets suggests that the actions of the state in this context are not without precedent. This article links apparently divergent situations in order to track the persistence of a rationality of government, which I call ‘threat governmentality’. Concerned with security and the management of risk, and fi xating on racialized bodies, threat governmentality comprises repressive violence on the part of police and civilians, and public discourse after the fact of such violence, in which the relative criminality of the victims—and hence the relative value of their lives—is debated. Rather than a post–9/11 invention, I argue that this rationality represents what Agamben called the ‘nomos of the political space’ in which we live.