Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory

Archives of the Insensible

Archives of the Insensible

Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory

Allen Feldman

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Allen Feldman is associate professor at the Department of Media Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of The Northern Fiddler and Formations of Violence, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27716-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27733-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27747-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277479.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Allen, author.

Archives of the insensible : of war, photopolitics, and dead memory / Allen Feldman.

pages ; cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-226-27716-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-27733-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-27747-9 (ebook) 1. War (Philosophy) 2. Just war doctrine. 3. War—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.

U22.F44 2015

172′.42—dc23

2015017185

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Enigmatic Dispersals

Part I: Desisting Sovereignties

ONE / Before the Law at Guantánamo

TWO / The Apophatic Blur of War

THREE / First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence

Part II: Amputating Archives

FOUR / The Structuring Enemy and Archival War

FIVE / Traumatizing the Truth Commission

Part III: Committing Anthropology

SIX / Turning Around Scars

SEVEN / Expiring Animality

Index

Acknowledgments

The seeds of these writings began in conversations with thinkers, both explicitly discussed in these pages or tacitly mediating; foremost are Reiner Schürmann, Ernesto Laclau, Talal Asad, Stanley Diamond, and Abram Engelman—their styles of thought and political integrity have been an irrevocable metahistorical influence that resonated with a voice and vision I encountered only in logos—Jacques Derrida. Avital Ronell, though she has not sought this role, continues to personify a rigorous ethics of politicized deconstruction, or take down, that beams like a searchlight on the lee shore of our grim contemporaneity. I also owe much to the generous and incisive interlocution of Jon Beller and Debbora Battaglia, and the unflagging support of my erudite editor, T. David Brent. In South Africa I would like to acknowledge the war veterans of Western Cape Action Tours for brokering my introduction to the herbal healers, and Mitzpah Botho, my Xhosa translator, and her nuanced reception of the multiplex speech of the social mothers and herbal healers. I am grateful to George Molebatsi, of the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC, for allowing me to sit in on their briefing sessions with witnesses during the course of hearings. I am in debt to Gerhard Richter and Juan Genoves, eminent visual ethnographers of violence, for making their art available for this book. Earlier attempts to engage the themes of this text appeared as sections of various publications, which are hereby superseded. A version of chapter 1 appeared as The Disputation of Ashraf Salim, in Cultural Studies 27, no. 6 (2013) and chapter 4 builds on and significantly expands the core argument of The Structuring Enemy and Archival War, which appeared in PMLA 124, no. 5, Special Topic: War (2009). I am in enriching debt to the political intensity and theoretical passion of Mangalika de Silva, who has never failed to incite and inflame in me the thinking through of justice.

INTRODUCTION

Enigmatic Dispersals

In Memoriam Ernesto Laclau

War is philosophical and whatever its destructive power, it always maintains itself within the limits of the philosophical, and it even maintains those very limits.

—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter

From Justice to Violence

Everything functions: this is precisely what is uncanny.¹

Archives of the Insensible explores war as a regime of truth, and truth claiming as forms of war. I contest the idea of jus ad bellum as actualizing a transcendental truth or grounding apperception, be that peace, democracy, homeland security, a national border, or entrenched racial, ethnic, or religious determinism. The matter-of-factness of truth as a justificatory and securing ground of violence is counterpoised as an in situ effect of the prosecutorial media of war that fuses right with fact. These chapters disinter regional ontologies of war and terror, mapped across embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, as mediologies that underwrite, convey, and implant truth effects that splinter off factuality from actuality in order to render war just. The anomalies that arise in war between justified factuality and dejustifying and disavowed actuality register the difference between constituted power (such as an order of veridiction) and constitutive power as a formative shapelessness behind and beyond political shape. Securitizing the violence of wars on terror in order to secure sovereignty entails the determination of sovereignty as indeterminate and as always in a self-altering motion. The prosecutorial autonomy of contemporary warfare, its capacity to exceed an extant ideological frame and normative and factual anchorage, presents as a matrix of dismedia, dissociation, disembodiment, and disidentity wherein each determinant act of force can reciprocally delink the state from its founding inception in law, proceduralism, discipline, instrumentality, means/ends ratios, and jus ad bellum. In such dislocation, peace, once a transcendentalized and orienting political ground, is no longer the absence of war, but one of its modalities or media; thus, peace cannot be readily polarized to violence, as evidenced by harm-making projects of pacification, rhetoricized postwar conflict resolution and facile reconciliation, blanket amnesty, and militarized policing. Humanitarian securitization is not the globalization of peace— the interdiction of antagonism and its Kantian conversion into international commerce— nor is it the just distribution of power, but rather the weaponization of globalization as a commerce in political symmetry and economic asymmetry. As Michel Foucault, in opposition to the Kantian concept of perpetual peace, succinctly puts it: We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.²

Rather than examining how jus ad bellum converts violence into justice through anthropological, theological, or productivist schema, I follow the conversion of justice to violence. Justified force, as hyperperformance and overkill, emits an overflow of effects and signifiers that cannot be readily folded back into the finite political purposiveness of jus ad bellum and its means/ends ratios. I term the chasm between these countervailing torsions of power the degree zero of violence, whereby political meaning and efficacy arise ex nihilo from a structuring absence—the ever-withdrawing and ever-contingent norm-giving, justificatory ground of war that can only be represented in absentia through the violence authorized as the name of its name.

Without malice aforethought, these chapters have evolved into an itinerary of trials, formal and covert, orchestrated and improvised, criminalizing and criminal. In these receding chambers of law there are trials within trials in which the trial scene is re-cognized and rescripted as a crime scene. At these checkpoints, where law itself is strip-searched, the will to truth, justice, and justification disappears into the very violence it interrogates. There is the witnessing of Ashraf Salim at the Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo (chapter 1); the kangaroo court of American soldiers who erased their murder of Gul Mudin, an Afghani noncombatant (chapter 2); Gerhard Richter’s forensic paintings of the disputed suicides of Baader-Meinhof members in Stammheim prison (chapter 2); Radovan Karadžić’s forensic allegations against the corpses left by his shelling of Sarajevo (chapter 3); the trial of the police officers who gave Rodney G. King a beat down and their indemnification by racializing video montage (chapter 3); Jean-Luc Godard’s film class in Sarajevo, where images, like facts, are indicted for no longer speaking for themselves (chapter 3); the Kantian-Sadean ethics of the drone (chapter 4); the aporias of avowal in the amnesty protocol of the South African truth commission (chapter 5); the discordant ethics of witnessing between that commission and fifth-century Athenian tragedy (chapter 6); the philosophical anthropology engendered by self-inflicted crimes against humanity (chapter 6); Edward Said’s cross-examination of the victimizing victims of a survivor state (chapter 6); the biopolitical excommunication of monstrosity, the zoopolitics of racist lynchings, Jacques Derrida standing naked before his cat, awaiting apocalyptic judgment (chapter 7); Emmanuel Levinas’s adjudication of snakes as nonethical subjects and the death penalty by migraine of a Roman emperor, administered by a restless gnat (chapter 7). This itinerary, at first glance, might appear unduly eclectic, but this diversity concretely refracts my ethnographical concern with a necessary and often disorienting passage through the particular, the singular, the micrological, and the contingent as undetected thresholds that rarely fail to unfold wider horizons of historicity. This prelude will unspool the connective threads that mediate these site-specific installations and the forces that convert their seemingly meandering pathways into structuring crossroads. As Foucault has noted in reference to his thematic engagements, One can hardly discern the guiding thread until the end of the process—that is to say, at the moment one has or is going to stop writing.³ To write these summations, overviews, or eulogies to the ashes of thinking is never a purely retrospective act; rather, it is to score an afterimage as a transit point between what has been written and a surplus terrain that makes of this introduction an aftermath.

At each of these crime scenes, failed veridiction and violent adjudication unfold as intensive totalities of wider forces and histories. Foucault, in his archaeology of the will to truth, writes of the forensic crime scene in Greek tragedy: The whole of the Oedipus tragedy is permeated by the effort of the whole city to transform the enigmatic dispersion of human events (murder, plagues) and divine threats into [certified] facts.⁴ Peripeteia, or the reversal of communicative action, and its lexical breakdown invariably frustrate that forensic project in Athenian tragedy and in the crime scenes gathered here. My task has been to perform reverse engineering on the will to truth in diverse wars on and of terror, to unpack the logic of certifiable facticity in war by following the state’s empowering enigmatic dispersion of events, murders, and political plagues. The epistemic terrain here combines the idiom of the modernist crime scene with the temporal aporias of archaic tragedy. As Ernst Bloch and Derrida respectively note:

The problem of the omitted beginning affects the entire detective genre, gives it its form: the form of a picture puzzle, the hidden part of which predates the picture and only gradually enters into it.⁵

There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this preoriginary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime-the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. One does not, for all that, bear any less of a responsibility, beginning at birth, even if it is only the responsibility to repair an evil at the very moment in which no one can admit it except in a self-confession that confesses the other, as if that amounted to the same.⁶

The reversibility between the force of justice and the force of violence is the nemesis of Oedipus and also his double bind—the incommensurability between his acts and the various alethurgical procedures, from divination to law to kingship to medicine, at his disposal as sovereign and criminal, husband and son, father and brother, agent and patient, victim and perpetuator. His attempted recuperation of lost or encrypted origins and acts of violation fails to install a new regime of facticity; rather, he escalates the crisis of existing juristic institutions. His self-blinding is not solely a recognition of his culpability and ignorance of originary causes, identities, and transgressions, but is provoked by the limits, failures, and occlusions of the array of instituted techniques of veridiction that were the cornerstones of his social order, his sovereignty, and his forensic reason. As sovereign adjudicator he enters into a condition of denegation for which his blind avatar, Tiresias, calls him out: Thou art the murderer of him whose murderer thou pursuest. In the tragic imagination, to act under the unilaterality of norm-giving facticity in politics and war is to open up enigmatic dispersal that stands against all traceable inceptions and origins through which consequence can be calculated.

The omitted beginning is the historical inheritance of a withdrawn origin, an inceptual event and commencement that both opens and slips into the crevice between grounding factuality and ungrounded actuality, that cuts across the justification and prosecution of war. The facticity of war originates in a falsification that institutes the political difference between fact and act, immunizing the former from the excessive dissonances of the latter. The more securing the regime of facticity in war becomes, the more it is permeated by the disturbing specter of an invasive otherness. In its denial and displacement of the dense dissonance of the actual, justifying facticity is imbued with the alterity of its defaced contingency. Invasion by alterity occurs at multiple registers of spatiality, embodiment, nomination, and normative cohesion. The trespass of a regime of facticity by invasive actualization disrupts the order of causality so treasured by the notion of justified war, precipitating the violence of the omitted beginning and spectral anteriority that suspend the promise of finality. The question of causality arises only where there is a dysfunction of facticity and its ordering of the world. Actuality in this context opens onto what Walter Benjamin termed politische Aktualität, which is irreducible to the linear time of a datable event history or a simple contemporaneity in being stamped by nonsynchronous time materialized as disturbing, heteronomous interpenetrations of body and image space—that, I might add, reach new levels of intensive acceleration in war.⁷ This can be the difference between the underwriting presence or undermining absence of a norm-giving ground transecting the justification and praxes of war. One has only to cite here the evaporating rationales for the invasion of Iraq, the war crimes committed in interrogations exclusively attributed to scapegoated, low-ranking bad apples, those acts of extrajudicial murder technocratically camouflaged as collateral damage, and the compulsory democratizing and humanitarian regime change that culminated in a sectarianized, fratricidal Iraqi polity. However, the above diagnostic x-rays into the prosecution of the war on terror and similar campaigns persist in tandem with the global expansion of counterinsurgent governmentality. Humanitarian exposés of a showing and shaming counterfactuality have done little to blunt the self-indemnifying trajectory of the war on terror and the radiating immunization of its political dysfunction as a purported apparatus of public safety. To propose the disjuncture between factuality and actuality is not to arrive at a determining, uncontestable ground beyond masking ideologies, but rather to explore that fissure itself as a generative power that circulates through the mutual retraction of fact and act.

Reiner Schürmann writes: The ‘pathos of distance’ is not thinkable without one type of will fixing that distance and another type keeping it.⁸ In a regime of facticity the measure-giving valuations of a mastering and normalizing agent install the fact as a norm for a patient to be normalized: Referents whereby norms are considered valid within a configuration of forces take birth from an act of domination.⁹ At the core of such fact-setting operations is the act of co-agitatio, a forcing together, a compression of convergence (convergere means bending together) in an operation that fuses right and fact. A political regime of facticity, such as just war, transitional justice, and torture, is the advent of an artificed and dominant historical synchronicity. Legislating the facticity of war is a formative imposition on and compression of polymorphous forces bent to an economy of the objectified and the occluded.¹⁰

The principle of co-agitatio fuels the cultural logic of asymmetrical war. Globalized asymmetrical war is a compressive assault on political and corporeal asymmetry. As a politico-aesthetic project, this asymmetrical war for global symmetry spreads its cultural isomorphism over historicity while relegating the dissymmetrical to mere transitory and deficient appearance amenable to the erasures of violence. Asymmetric war is a commensurating commerce in targeted, exchangeable, partible, substitutable, and computational political flesh. Global counterinsurgency launches compressive typification through illocutionary assemblages of flesh and the inorganic (in the form of military ordnance death and debris). Typification, as a realist percept and regimen of facticity, is the media for political essentialization, for literalizing the metaphors and allegories of power through the material expropriation and ill-use of the bodies and places of asymmetrical others. Typification fabricates and totalizes precomprehended collectivities as maneuverable forms, as magnetizing triggers and phobogenic objects of assault. These chapters describe confrontations with hieratic dystopian typologies that claim immense and aggressive powers of global decipherment and conferred objecthood—who is or is not a terrorist, which violence is democratic regime change and which is terrorism, what is torture or enhanced interrogation, which ordinance is legitimate or illegitimate WMDs, who has a right to rights and who has a right to be rightless?

The aesthetic regimes of typification or matter-of-factness known as synoptic and visual realism underwrite the expansionism of culturally isomorphic war; it is the form par excellence of settlement and stability gathering individual lives into an integrated whole. . . . Realism depends on the assumption that the world is story-shaped—that there is a well formed narrative implicit in reality itself.¹¹ No enigmatic dispersal in realism and its typologies based on that diagnosis, until one asks from what site the realist percept emanates, from where does it speak, gaze, and describe, and why it suffers no description of its modes of production. Realism unfolds here as a denegation, for it repels realist or empiricist description of its operativity and represses its historical becoming. Rather than acceding to realism as the mandated aesthetic for the portrayal of violence, I am interested in posing state violence as the depictive blade that incises realist aesthetics—an anesthetizing matter-of-factness—onto a sociopolitical landscape. The fusion of synoptic and visual realism with inscriptive violence upholds truth claims about the justice, rationality, and efficacy of the latter’s damage and does so from a site that repels its own objectifying disinterment. Legal, visual, mediatic, and ballistical realisms are crime-scene debris in the trial of Ashraf Salim; in the historical logic of guilt/debt in the black site(chapter 1); in the biometric archivization of the murdered Gul Mudin and in Richter’s photo-paintings of the Baader-Meinhof suicides (chapter 2); in the perceptual politics of the first-person shooter and in the cinematic antihistory of modern war montaged by Godard (chapter 3); in the archival aesthetics of the war on terror and the South African truth commission (chapters 4 and 6); and in the blindness of political philosophy in regard to animal natality (chapter 7).

Photopolitics

The contemporary matter-of-factness of low-intensity war and what is deactualized by this global assault on asymmetry is at the root of my abiding engagement with the photopolitics at the core of a fact-setting regime. The photopolitical archives and releases the historical violence of light as a metaphorical power of truth claiming, facticity, objectification, exposure, erasure, and appropriation by the will to know. The photopolitical is a neologism of the Greek phos and politea that implies a political economy of phos and aphos, apparition and disapparition, for within this economy nonlight (aphos) is as much a constitutive practice of power and privation as is light. Nonlight is not darkness, which is still an experience of photosensitivity, but a formation of insensitivity mediated by the historical and political abysses cast by light. To approach the political as a photosphere and as a photography of history is to be confronted with the ballistics of nonlight within light—the supernumerary forces of apperception and anesthesia that journey alongside the officiating political passages of light that articulate right and fact.

Derrida writes of "the ancient clandestine friendship between light [lumière] and power [puissance], the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession."¹² Reiner Schürman, in turn, describes the complicity between appropriative representation and the optics of accusatory targeting: "As an act of conceiving (begriefen) representation already amounts to an act of attacking (angriefen).¹³ Levinas writes of typifying power: If the other could be possessed, seized, and known, it would not be the other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.¹⁴ These thinkers follow Heidegger, for whom the technical distillation of language to the torsions of optics, ballistics, and automation is inescapably entangled with the militarization of light and facticity in modernity: Words have become instruments for hunting down and hitting, namely in the ‘procedure’ and the labor of representing everything [as surely as] precision-firing. The machine-gun, the camera, the ‘word,’ the poster—all have this same fundamental function of putting objects in retainment."¹⁵ The axiomatic Enlightenment opposition of language to violence is here rendered a canard by their shared underlying photopolitical materiality and militancy. Political violence is photo-graphy when it draws upon everyday communicative life worlds to imprint scene-setting common nouns and grammatical forms onto diverse attack surfaces. These common nouns install scopic enclosures through co-agitatio—a driving together—as modes of retainment, retention, and detention that implant factual interiority and irreal exteriority.

I seek to historicize the politics of light, a materiality without matter, as a transhistorical formulation that is difficult to bypass irrespective of the degree of context-bound or singularizing analysis being practiced. Derrida writes of the metaphoricity of light: Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it?¹⁶ Or as Gilles Deleuze proposes: the seeing subject is himself a space within visibility, a function derived from visibility.¹⁷ Archives of the Insensible seeks to further a postmaterialist critique of the political metaphoricity of light and, along with it, of sovereign presence as a regime that commands truth and light in haptic media not limited to the visual. The reflexive treatment of photopolitics queries, as metaphysics, the heliocentric politics of state right and light enacted in war. Therefore, the critique of photopolitical violence cannot be a disalienating or unmasking return to an idealizing empiricity of the material, to an unproblematic self-evidence of state practice as purely concrete and as the ground of analysis. Critique here cannot be the return to light and disclosure from an estranging and veiling condition; rather, it must explore how the political economy of light is complicit with the immateriality or withdrawal that is nonlight, in order to access a formative aesthesis I diversely term political denegation, immateriality, stasiology, and anesthesiology. Political aesthesis (light) and anesthesia (nonlight) are not polarized or mutually exclusive practices, but unfold in tandem as differential declensions of political actuality and factuality and as modes of perception and apperception. The term aisthesis and its related form aisthetikos refer to what is felt and apprehended through the senses; the prefix aisthe refers to affect and is the etymon of anesthesia and aesthetics, a conjuncture that traverses every use of these terms in this book. Aesthesis as affect is haptic, and if violence is a particularly intensive modality of the haptic, then the anesthesia or political apperception produced through self-indemnified and self-effacing violence can be read as the tactility that shapes history, politics, and subjects through intangibility.

In these chapters, what I term cultural anesthesia, political intangibility, and the inheritance of the uninheritable correspond to political aesthesis as marginalized, disqualified, deferred, or expelled sensory experience engendering a politics of disincarnation—the denudation of an embodied, situated, and common sensorium with the capacity to speak truth to war. Sensory stratification and deletion by state practice prepares the sociocultural conditions of political apperception—the violence of politically blanking out violence and the collective capacity for its public witness, seditious recirculation, and dejustification. The many discussions and descriptions in this book of the indemnification, immunization, intangibility, and impassability of state violence and sovereignty refer not only to juridical forms but to sensory deletion and mediated apperception. Regimes of matter-of-factness are not only tacitly reportorial and editorializing, but concretize both the visible and the invisible, which is why I locate this fact-setting mediacy in the performativity of weaponized force—each act of violence reenacts, repurposes, and precipitates a fact-setting ground through formative subtraction or subsumption, generating the collateral damage of the uninheritable. Thus the infamous Israeli invocation of facts on the ground to legitimate its settler colonialism encrypts war as the expulsive occupation of both land and historical witnessing. In this context, as the occupied well know, the communicative and semantic legitimacy of heteronomous sensory capacities are politically stratified, if not voided, across lines of race, gender, class, rightlessness, religion, geography, and nationality. Cultural anesthesia excommunicates the capacity of a subjugated sensorium to achieve collective veridiction as the advent of a public culture of dejustification (see chapter 3).

The Stasiology of the State

The so-called exceptions and deviations of jus ad bellum cited above, as well as many other seemingly anomic scenes of disapparition discussed in this book, have to be rethought as structuring, integral, and nomothetic elements of justified war. For they refract not the hypocrisy of the state, but rather a stasiology of the state wherein sovereignty, as detached from normative and unifying ground, multiplies power through discontinuous self-division of the presenting fact and the extrafactual surplus of its prosecutory force. Stasiology delineates the always unstable and permeable divisibility of state force into the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, the perceptual and apperceptual, which withdraws all anchoring foundation from the inceptual architecture of war. Stasiology interdicts warfare’s conceptual reduction to pure materiality and technique as much as it bars the referral of war to any transcendental morality.

The concept of stasis here partially references the classical Greco-Latin concept of an agonistic division and/or paralysis of a polity as well as the progression of a disease through a body, including a body politic. Stasis invokes the Latin cognate, sēditiō (sedition), a going aside, a going apart, and insurrectionary separation. In this book it specifically refers to the generative fissure within a sovereign formation as regards its own residual anchorages in positive law, the procedural, and goal-directed action. Stasiological sovereignty, as a self-retracting discourse, act, and movement in time and space, is a political foreclosure that consists of presenting one’s being in the mode of not being it.¹⁸ The stasiological, according to Carl Schmitt, is where the One (to hen) is infinitely in revolt (stasiazon) against itself. Derrida, commenting on this formula, relates the stasiology of the state to the immunological and to war:

The One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself, itself becoming war (se fait le guerre), frightens itself, itself becoming fear (se fait peur), and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence (se fait violence), transforming itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other (il se garde de l’autre), for it guards itself from, and in, the other, always, Him, the One, the One different from itself.¹⁹

Schürmann writes of a denegating topology of power and emplacement as a showing, arising, manifesting, presencing, self-giving; but it is all that in a ‘fissured’ mode, in ‘dissension,’ as ‘unconcealment-concealment,’ ‘appropriation-expropriation,’ in the ‘strife,’ the polemos and the agon by which the No asserts itself and death declares itself.²⁰ The torsions mapped by Derrida and Schürmann above are imbricated, entangled, ensnared, and entailed—they index an always creviced, polycentric, and ex-centric sovereignty structured by the free play of contingencies from which any anchoring ground has been cut away. There is no foundational norm or legality from which the sovereign apparatus could except itself. For warfare, as force protecting, retracting, and subtracting itself from itself, predicates violence through the latter’s indemnifying self-defacement, which becomes the condition of its presentation as lawfare. As forces in stasis, as conflictual and countervailing movements and culminating suspensions of each other, warfare and lawfare are neither exclusively interior nor external to each other, but are braided in a Möbius strip of productive and structuring dissonance and discontinuity. In this reciprocal hosting and hostaging of law and war there is a crosscutting di-visibility of power—war divides law against itself to produce the justifiability of violence, and law divides war against itself to produce its justice.

Derrida and Schürmann excavate the anarchic political strata that Foucault anatomized when he described the civitas not as juridical form, but as silently encrypted by the polemological.²¹ If, as Foucault asserts, politics is war by other means, then actualized, promissory, and symbolic violence inform, imprint, and even overflow the arterial network of disciplines, practices, effects, and apparatuses that solidify the political sphere as contractual civitas, sufficient means/ends, and procedural formalism. Foucault’s schema of a disemic civitas, surreptitiously structured by the logic of war, of a civil peace that covertly and concurrently inscribes a history of war, is contingent on a stasiology that drives the sovereign exercise of war, overt and covert, within and without. Thus, the concussive sites delimited by Derrida and Schürmann above amend Foucault’s schema of state and civil formation as undercoded by interiorized war. Rather than thinking the stasiology of the state on the basis of external war that is interiorized, polemos should be thought on the basis of the stasiology inherent in the sovereign right to be without right.

Stasis is itself a multiplex concept at war with it itself, unable to achieve semantic domestication and pacification; as such, its indecision and labiality are descriptive of the self-canceling yet empowering aporias of sovereignty at war. The description of sovereign right as an act of self-institution without law, and before the law, requires a stasiological narration. Stasiology both defines and describes a bifurcation in the structure of sovereign performativity that amplifies and striates power and privation in a fissured mode—the apparition and disapparition of the radiating material effects and authorial lineages of force in war. Stasiology is operant in the auto-indemnification of an act of violence by the state as the latter unfolds a series of sense-violating retractions and effacements concerning the nameability of state violence and the accessibility and legibility of its damage. Stasis can be found in the mutation of war events into nonevents—a phase shift that does not void the devastations of the former. I term this self-defacement of violence, this appearing nonappearance of violence, exclosure (see chapter 5). Exclosure is the operative other side of a line of closure that circumscribes a topology of sense, facticity and right; exclosure repels the collateral illegibility of the violence it secures and conserves. Dis-exclosure, another seminal point of stasis, is the invasive counterpunch of a dismediating violence that resists being foreclosed as symmetrical or politically proportional. Dis-exclosure occurs when once secured state violence is thrown beyond the sense-making thresholds and phenomenality required by political interest, calculation, seriality, and program.

Stasiology is at the root of a self-indemnifying counterinsurgency as a governmentality of auto-defacement. The reflexive fashioning of self-indemnifying warfare, which I term force protection, is the (re)securing of those ultimate referents that legitimate war as principial action—the unified rules and norms from which the compass of political action is meant to be derived and that political actualization is expected to re-echo.²² As force protection, war becomes a constitutive power that seizes, secures, and perverts the very epistemological and moral ground that measures its violence, including that very ground-seizing act. The stasiology of war is the motor for a recursive force that encircles and ensorcells warfare to secure a norm-giving ground prior to, in the aftermath of, or in tandem with a commissioned act of violence. Indemnification draws on the life-preserving logic of immunization to alchemically alter the dead residues and surplus materiality of war into living circulatory value, prestige, and achievement— or, failing that, to spirit away politically compromising and remaindered residues of dead matter and memory to crypts of invisibility and opacity.

A stasiological logic of self-fissuring promotes the disapparition of the dense and diffuse actualities of violence, thus generating just war through filtering scenic affirmations. Disapparition, as the self-division of prosecutorial action into perception/apperception, underwrites the dogmatics of war, which consign a polity to unreflective and securing automatisms. Stasiology fuses design and crime insofar as this self-effacement of violence emerges as a submedial incursion mobilizing sensibility and insensibility, attention and inattention. Self-indemnifying force protection incorporates two etymological senses of the term—to hurt or damage (from the Latin damnificāre, to injure; damnific-us, hurtful, injurious) and to protect from damage. In the sixteenth century one damnified an enemy in order to indemnify the sovereign. Indemnification is thus not the absence of violence, but the removal of violence through an act of violence. Here, violence as damnification and facticity as indemnification are constitutive antagonisms shaping the bifrontal stasiological motion of war.

Shibboleth

I find an alignment of war, conflict resolution, pacification, and metaphysics in their common question, What is to be done?, which has been historically assigned to a justificatory fundament as the source of measure and order in acting, be that the nomos of the Earth (such as ground zero), a deity (god or humanity), a returning traumatic date, a distributive good, or the supreme government of reason and its ends.²³ If a transhistorical grounding of political action could be identified, according to Schürmann, it would be as a system where representations of ground replace each other across the ages.²⁴ He interrogates the justificatory grounding of political action through a critique of the Aristotelian genealogy of acting. The latter is structured by a double transference from the doctrine of technical motion to that of physical motion, which is then transposed to political actualization. Being-moved defines the ontology of the political, which is grounded in an anthropology of fabrication where man is at the origin of technical causality. For Schürmann, Aristotle’s physical kinetics obstructs the phenomenal understanding of what political life is (87). He further proposes that to exclusively define the political as principial action—action anchored to a norm-provisioning ground and a calculable fabricated end—is to inherit a substantialist ontology of the political, which, by extension, in my view, authorizes the functionalist materialism of war. The substantialization of the political guarantees the autarchy of political teleology, since, for Aristotle, only substance is autarchial, for nothing is independent from substance, which predicates all subjects.

The affairs of the city are treated [by Aristotle] genetically in a manner analogous to natural growth and in the last analysis to human fabrication. . . . Individual ends and actions are ordered to those of the city as accidents are to substances, and predicates to the subject, From this ontological priority of the body politic springs forth the common stereotypes of politics . . . public welfare first, private interests next—as well as all the corporatisms. (86–87)

Polity is cast here as a plêthos politôn, a political mass, motion, and efficacy, constituted by the quantifiable convergence, compression, or co-agitatio of its citizens as a theoria—a certifying collectivity. The act of political constitution here is the fabrication and design of the maximal substance of the political. For Aristotle we aim at the good and target ends within a continuum of fabrication and technics. Praxis, techne, and methodos are intertwined in political domination as the appearance and alteration of substance by the motion and time of force as both causality and artifice. Schürmann writes: Teleocratic representations refer to the substantial changes artisan man is capable of effecting (83). This implies that the analysis of action is derived not from the phenomenal fields of the ethical and the political, but from the artifactory of technical fashioning from which political movement, causes, and ends unfold as subsistent on stabilizing and enduring substrates, as a sculptor or potter is subsistent on his or her material in order to produce the terminus of the good. Political action, such as warfare, is analogized to teleocratic technicity, which subordinates action to calculation as the positing of a good through substantive media. Substantialist action demarcates the phenomenal region where the end reigns, a rule that traverses the powers of scientific inquiry, war, economic good, and technical functioning (83).

The legitimation of the city in relation to its constitutive elements is gained by substantialist criteria that belong properly to the analysis of fabrication. It is in making things that all acts of the artisan, all materials and accidents must be directed towards the one, that is towards the finished work. Only on this basis is there technical movement, and only then can the work be complete, independent, autarchic. Since the very beginning of politics as a branch of philosophy, its basic patterns have been aligned with that branch which studies technical production. (87)

Through this critique Schürmann opens the possibility of a nonteleocratic and nonsubstantialist model of political action. If continuous or linearized historical time registers and underwrites the dominance of teleocratic action, then the delinearization of historical time, the emergence of chronotopic breaks and ruptures, subtractive events, and new self-fashioning modes of constitutive power withdraw enduring ground and underlying substance from political action. When a transcendental apperception, such as an originating cause or substance, is delinked from political subjectification, the anchoring ground evaporates, calling into question the legitimacy of those public institutions that claimed this substance, territoriality, sequence, and referentiality as their site of repose.

Action as linearized fabrication and design is double-edged in making the good it correspondingly designs the sustaining will that substantializes the political subject as the substrate and continuum of such production. Aristotle posits a hyperfoundation of the political, a hypokeimenon, the teleocratic fashioning that fuses politics with technocracy and the substances of life with the designs of power as a physics of the political.²⁵ However, this raises the question of whether technicist or physicalist schemata can fully account for the political. The contemporary application of jus ad bellum in the war on terror appears to answer in the affirmative, mobilizing a will to fabrication in order to technologically submerge the political in substances of terror, fear, and destruction through artificing violence and computational technologies of enframing and retainment such as drone scanscapes and targeting by metadata. However, this does not exhaust the political ontology of a war for security. For the other side of this question is how a political substrate can appear without the attribute of definitive substance, such as the preemptive and spectralizing forensics of proleptic risk, threat, and terror and the disapparition of war crimes escalated by a state lacking in any substance beyond its technical capacity to void substance or to confine life to the immobilities of devalued, denigrating, and degraded substance. Either posture is testament to sovereignty’s immeasurable distance from the terrain of inscriptive design and material distillation it makes possible in the violent fashioning and fictioning through which it presents itself.

The sovereign is at the height because the height separates the top from the bottom and frees the former from the humility of the latter: from the humus, from the back bent from working the earth, from laying down in sleep, from malady or death, and from extended things in general. Extension holds everything at the same level, but the thing that is not extended, what looms over extensions and inspects it, is the thinking thing and the subject of the general government of things.²⁶

Political action as teleocratic substantialization requires an arkhé (ἀρχή), a ruling origin and instituting justification that commands and commences postures of moral, linguistic, economic, or technological measurement. It is at the imputed site of the arkhé where the substantialist and teleocratic model of power stands and, for Schürmann, falls. For Schürmann, like Foucault, the origin is neither ground nor fundament, but a contingently constituted topology, an historical a priori, that has its era and is thus tied to finite conditions of appearance and disapparition.²⁷ The arkhé is an historical entity grounded on other historical entities, which is to ground nothing at all.²⁸ The origin is a verb, not a noun, and a command perverted into a referent. The militaristic inference should not be passed over lightly: in this schema warfare, as constitutive political power, commands justificatory grounds and derivatives though perverting violence and terror, denial and disavowal. The norm-giving ground is not perverted by de facto violence, but is itself a de facto violence, a right that is perverted through the erasure of its ballistical arrival. Schürmann writes of this terrain of political inception:

Aristotle is the one who explicitly joins the more ancient sense of inception with domination. From the time of Homer, the common meaning of the verb ἀρχειν has been to lead, to come first, to open, for instance a battle or a discourse. In the epic tradition ἀρχή designates what is at the beginning, either in an order of succession in time, like childhood, or in an order of constitutive elements. . . . The other meaning, that of command, of power, of domination, although absent in Homer, is found in Herodotus and Pindar. Aristotle also uses the word in this sense. But the Aristotelian innovation consists in uniting the two senses, inception and domination, in the same concept.²⁹

The arkhé refers not only to origin, ground, foundation, or inception, but to a continuance or sending of the rule of the ground across time and space as their measure. The arkhé is simultaneously superstructure and substrate, inceptual and teleological. Being singular in multiplicity, the arkhé, as a whole prior to its parts, is replicated and echoed through a substantializing touchstone such as violence. However, whether the arkhé is an unmodifiable substance itself is another matter, for the origin, which is pre-sent, always calls for its retrieval, re-collection, resending, and re-turning, which entails desubstantializing repetition. For Derrida, the origin, as that which is meant to escape play, is brought into presence through the immaterial play of the trace, the iterative possibility of self-substitution, and deforming repetition as nonoriginary origins of the origin. Through violence the arkhé can be measured, reenacted, altered, and degrounded in the radical mutation of extant material integrities (combining ruination and/as fabrication). What better demonstration of the covering rule of the origin than when and where its assigned executors violently fabricate the ex nihilo from which the justificatory origin appears to autonomously arise? What better demonstration of an absolute political ground than the subtraction of all other contingent grounds of sustenance, shelter, life, value, and polity?

The reified justificatory origin as a norm-provisioning ground stands before and outside the field of meanings it commands and commences. It mediates the translation of indeterminate power into determinate forces. A dejustificatory engagement of jus ad bellum opens the dossier of this preemptive justification of ends, means, and the inceptual probative narratives that excuse destructive force. This is to scan the accusatory structures of war as they prove to be detachable from any norm-giving ground. It is to examine the act of command sending itself across time, space, and audition as pure medium, as an autonomous power of impartibility independent of any impartible content. In many ways the arkhé as ground is a shibboleth, a performative password empty of intrinsic content, a void point, the cut of a nonsignifying difference, and the grillwork of policing, normalization and methodical subjugation.³⁰ The shibboleth was a code, a password that required enunciative, that is performative, fidelity. The arkhé as shibboleth is a sentinel, a gatekeeper, and a law positioned before the law, regime, polity, and policies it precipitates and enforces. The inceptual shibboleth is the incision that installs the difference, the circumcision, between communal selfhood and otherhood, friends and enemies, inside and outside, and historical periodization as moral order. Its demand, citation, and enunciation engrave lines and borders and permit their crossing or their barring. The shibboleth is a self-mandating autarchic singularity promoting the indiscernible discernment between alliance and war.³¹ It is not a cipher or secret of that polity, but in its self-encryptment and self-command, a precondition of polity, its initiation and rite of passage. The shibboleth encrypts polity as its immobile and immobilizing concentrate, since all are subject to it—the guard and the guest, the insider and the outsider, the living and the dead. The origin as shibboleth is not accessed through an extrinsic unlocking code, but unlocks itself and enchains others in being enunciated as an automated/phantomatic password and default public secret. The shibboleth, as a self-authorizing performative, presents a command that passes over a recessed ground whose logos, or law, or speech

withdraws the Walten [autarchic force] from what hides it, from its retreat, its Verborgenheit . . . liberates this Walten—and this physis, this physis-as-Walten, from its Verborgenheit, its hidden, dissimulated, silenced being. And what is thus said, liberated from its retreat in the shadow of what is hidden (Verborgenheit), would be Walten itself, i.e. the law, its order and its status, its law (seine Ordnung und Satzung, das Gesetz des Seienden selbst), the law that rules over beings themselves: "Im λóγοζ wird das Walten des Seienden entborgen, offenbar [in logos, the reign, the power, the law of the entity is unconcealed, manifest.]"³²

That frozen point in time and space termed 9/11 is a shibboleth that withdraws the autarchic force of its logos from the ruins and graves that hide and conserve it. In being enunciated correctly, even orthopedically and therapeutically, the shibboleth of ground zero, as origin, rule, currency, debt, withdrawing abyss, void, hole, crevice, and demand, becomes the precondition for anything to happen politically, from war to the mass surveillance of civilian populations to winning presidential elections. Derrida writes of the shibboleth: Like the date, like a name, it permits anniversary, alliance, return, commemoration—even if there was no more trace, what one commonly calls a trace, the subsistent presence of a remainder, even if there were scarcely an ash of what one still dates, celebrates, commemorates or blesses.³³ Traversing various political scenographies in this book is a discernible articulation, superimposition, and cohesion between the anachronic cavity of the war grave, the catastrophic topos, and the shibboleth as an archive and political morgue that holds and triggers dead memory as a password and pathway to the decisionism of the friend/enemy matrix. The shibboleth presents as an ethicohistorical invariance, a stigmata or punctum outside of time that gestates time through command and violence.³⁴

Liquidating Economies

At many sites in this book the break with justificatory ground in war takes shape as the containerization of violence, analogous to capitalist containerization, which fuses mobility, evasion of legal accountability, and state oversight with deferring invisibility, through what Alan Sekula terms the serial discipline of the box.³⁵ Economic containerization is the stratagem of re-siting, dispersal, and disconnection that permits new mobilities of power—extraction, production, and consumption—which expand corporatist predation and legal impunity.³⁶ Containerized war is the deconsolidation of the productive sites of power—the offshoring of governmentality through site-specific performances of sovereignty. Battlescapes reemerge as floating kill boxes or mobile enclosures of enframing and transnational target acquisition. This mobile teleprompting grid is rapidly transposable across diverse political borders that are rescripted as attack surfaces and kill boxes subjected to the typologies of spectrum dominance. This militarization of teleportation itself is a medium of geopolitical value productivity. Containerization is both an ethos and a habitus insofar as many drone ground control command centers operate from retrofitted shipping containers. However, in contrast to the economic mediation of containerization as a mode of global standardization, the containerization of war produces perceptual, moral, and legal destandardization and discontinuity. I read containerized war as a multiplier of power, as a drone or satellite regime of detachability that I term the becoming nonstate of the state (chapter 4). This is far from the containment of violence, in its limiting or pacific sense; it is instead the deintensification of war’s visibility through strategies of structural deniability, cutouts, and juridical shadowing and blurring. Containerization interdicts courts of conscience as organs of witnessing, jurisdiction, and veridiction as regards the harms of war and the reversal of its rationality. Containerization addresses how an organ of violence might sever itself from an originating or underlying body politic and procedural order and become self-organ-izing and self-mediating as the expansive power of ever-shifting centers of force. Containerized war is described as an organogenesis in which the increasingly detachable organ of war is no longer a subordinate organ of the state, but rather is the state’s dis-organ-ization. The emergence of a dis-organology of war runs in tandem with the escalating immateriality of counterinsurgent violence as an insular zone of political insensibility and anesthesia.

Containerization advances the absence of moral or even phenomenal continuity in the prosecution of war that is invested in the logistics of disconnectivity. As a symptom of the withdrawal of a continuous justificatory ground of war, containerization speaks to the intertwining violence of political economy and a political economy of violence. Throughout this book convergences emerge between bellicosity and risk preemption on one side and forms of prognostic and aleatory capitalization on the other, though warfare’s traversal of economic and political forms precludes any reductive determination of state violence by capital or the reverse. As Étienne Balibar puts it: "Violence [Gewalt] circulates, in a way that is fundamentally uncontrollable, between politics and economics."³⁷ This an-archic circulation points to degrounding dynamics between economy and war as predatory, hyperconcentrated technologies of value extraction that meet at contingent points, though not always in encompassing synthesis. War and capital are situated, without fusion, in a matrix of accelerated liquidity, dissolution, and fragmentation that consequently accelerates the flux and mutability of their relation. They converge in a politics of abstractive destruction where the extermination of value becomes the inaugural point for the institution of value through the renewable exploitation of geostrategic and embodied substrates of threat, risk, and insecurity. Aleatory risk creates value as it drifts and swerves, thereby provisioning the securitizing project with expanding scenic prospects and newly encumbered bodies of value extraction and containment.

The politics of risk assessment and preemption in the war on terror intersects with the logic of accelerationist capitalism (see chapters 1 and 4).³⁸ The latter is characterized by an unfixed site of value generativity that Deleuze variously names the dummy-hand, la place du mort (the dead man’s place), and the empty square, which can never be substantiated, occupied, or filled in order to be displaced in relation to itself.³⁹ He elaborates: Such an object is always present in the corresponding series, it traverses them and moves with them, it never ceases to circulate in them, and from one to the other, with an extraordinary agility. One might say that it is its own metaphor, and its own metonymy.⁴⁰ Deleuze particularly associates the empty square with the temporal qualities of an ever-circulating debt, a theme taken up in chapter 1 of this book, which examines the fiscalized epistemology of the infinite historical culpability (debt/guilt) extracted from the terrorist archetype at black sites. Culpabilizing debt structures the historicity of the omitted beginning and resembles the commanding shibboleth empty of intrinsic content; it embodies the power relation of value asymmetry that informs