The Universal Adversary will attack: pigs, pirates, zombies, Satan and the class war

Abstract

This article explores a category to have recently emerged out of the national security state: the Universal Adversary. The category appears in emergency planning documents and suggests a new way of thinking about the enemy that is becoming embedded in the logic of security and emergency. However, the radical expansiveness of the category offers new possibilities for thinking about the “universality” with which the enemy of bourgeois order has historically been considered and offers new ways of connecting this universality with a particular figure: the disgruntled worker.

Keywords:

• Universal Adversary
• emergency planning
• emergency powers
• piracy
• zombies
• Satan
• the Devil
• class war
• disgruntled worker
• pigs

Notes

1. This article is an edited and extended version of a keynote talk presented at “Neoliberalism and/as Terror”, the annual conference of the Critical Terrorism Studies Group, Nottingham Trent University, September 2014. I am grateful to Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Lee Jarvis and Christopher Baker-Beall for the invitation. An earlier version was presented at the 2014 Critical Legal Conference, at the invitation of Tarik Kochi and Kimberley Brayson. The article has been largely left in the style of a talk rather than a written article and thus comes with minimal referencing. A longer and fuller account is forthcoming as On the Universal Adversary (2015).

2. For a selection of the images, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmTbe5avjAw.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Neocleous

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, UK, and is on the Editorial Collective of Radical Philosophy. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is War Power, Police Power (2014).