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ABSTRACT
This article assesses French philosopher Frédéric Gros’ contribution to the analysis of security and suggests ways in which it can help us analyse and critique it. By organising security around distinct, historically defined clusters of meaning, Gros gives us a sense of how deeply embedded security is in the constitution of the self, in totalising theological and political projects and in the foundation and maintenance of the modern political order. Indirectly, Gros’ hypotheses can provide us with the critical resources to respond to and resist the various embodiments of security. Whilst resistance to contemporary modes of risk-management can take the form of aesthetic disruptions and agonistic self-definition, resistance to more traditional forms of security requires the mobilisation of bodies and juridical resources. Building on but also departing from Gros’ genealogy, the article contends that these forms of resistance have to be combined and simultaneous if we are to disrupt security’s multiple power effects.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Frédéric Mérand and Anthony Amicelle for reading and commenting on a previous version of the manuscript as well as Greg Hainge and both reviewers for their diligence and helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Philippe Fournier is research fellow at the CÉRIUM and lecturer in international relations and critical theory at the University of Montreal. He has published on governmentality, security and US domestic and foreign policy.
Notes
1 The so-called ‘Welsh School’ draws on thinkers associated with the Frankfurt school such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas to critically analyse security. Best represented by Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones, this particular strand of critical security studies argues that we should pay attention to actual experiences of insecurity, that theories of security are implicated in the construction of social reality and that immanent critique can help us uncover an alternative version of security. As political praxis, this means opposing war, structural imbalances, exploitation and imperialism. Key contributions include Booth (Citation1991, Citation2005), Wyn Jones (Citation1999), Nunes (Citation2012), Peoples (Citation2011) and Browning and McDonald (Citation2013). For a problematisation of the criticality of critical security studies see Hynek and Chandler (Citation2013).
2 All quotes from Gros’ book are my translations.
3 This a loose translation from the original formulation ‘foyer de sens’.
4 For Foucault, the latter designates a very partial mode of analysis that conceives of power as a capability that can be used to sway an individual or a group or the various theories such as Marxism and psychoanalysis that function along the repression/liberation axis. Although he occasionally points to the complementarity of sovereign power, discipline and government, it is fair to say that his genealogies did not fully integrate these different embodiments of power.
5 Foucault defines biopower as ‘what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’ (Foucault Citation1998: 143).