‘The continuation of sovereign capture by other means’: biopolitical tattooing and the shared logic of the exception and securitisation

ABSTRACT

Carl Schmitt’s description of the sovereign decision has played an important role in works of securitization theory and biopolitical approaches to security studies. While analysis of the securitization of an isolated referent object may be clearly different from the analysis of a generalized state of exception as in the concentration camp, both processes tend toward the same end. When securitization is iterative rather than isolated, it creeps across society and could potentially move all political activity into the realm of security. This problem of “securitization creep” highlights the danger of analyzing security in isolation or in limited iterations. By turning to Giorgio Agamben’s paradigm of biopolitical tattooing, this article analyzes the danger of securitization creep and its relation to the state of exception. While sometimes regarded as a pessimistic thinker, Agamben’s affirmation of the agency of the citizenry in his call to reject biopolitical tattooing also bears resemblance to the ability of the audience to reject a securitizing move. Not only are securitization and biopolitics in the state of exception related historiographically to the work of Schmitt, but also in the capacity of the citizenry to ameliorate political futures by rejecting sovereign overreach.

KEYWORDS:

• Securitization
• Biopolitics
• Exception
• Sovereignty
• Giorgio Agamben

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jacqueline Best, Andrew Heffernan, David Moffette, Daniel Nexon, Michael C. Williams, Sandra Yao and the editors and reviewers of Critical Studies on Security for their comments on this work. Earlier versions of this argument were presented at the University of Ottawa Centre for International Policy Studies and at the International Sociological Association XIX World Congress of Sociology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I take the phrasing of determinate/indeterminate from Agamben’s framing of the state of exception in The Time That Remains. The Pauline influence on Agamben’s thought has largely been overlooked in application to security studies (Agamben 2005a, 105).

2. Because of this importance of the generalisation of the state of exception as a process similar to iterated-play securitisation (securitisation creep), this discussion draws on Agambenian rather than Schmittian accounts of the exception.

3. I follow Adam Kotsko’s delineation of the text published in English in 1998 from the series by italicising Homo Sacer the book and not italicising Homo Sacer the project. (Kotsko 2016, 123n7; Murphy 2018b, 125).

4. Neither does Agamben offer a set of practical strategies for his theory of ‘destituent potential’, which he proposes as a guiding concept for the coming politics (Agamben 2016).

5. Carlo Salzani notes that the fact that this excluded life (bare life) is different from the pre-political non-human existence zoe means that Agamben’s nuda vita is more than a translation of Benjamin’s bloBes Leben (2015). Judith Butler’s (2004, esp. 67–8) critique of Agamben begins from the faulty premise that bare life and zoe are identical.

6. This includes those objects to the apparent rigidity of Agamben’s description of the extreme situations he illustrates. E.g. William Connolly’s call to ‘loosen the logic that Agamben articulates’ (2004, 30) or Catherine Mills’ calling of ‘the question of whether the breadth of Agamben’s critique is defensible’ (2007, 195).

7. This applicatory infinitude is both claimed by the Copenhagen School – i.e. ‘Depending on circumstances, any issue can end up on any part of the spectrum’ (Buzan, Wæver, and Jaap 1998, 24) – and used as a form of critique (e.g. Barkawi 2014, 703; Salter 2007b).

8. This is especially evident in Agamben’s work where the anomie (lack of grounding governing principle) becomes the very foundation for the generalised state of exception (Agamben 2005a).

9. Humanitarian terms have also factored into the development of border control and patrol (e.g. Little and Vaughan-Williams 2017).

10. In The Figure of this World, Matthew Abbott makes a similar argument about paraconsistent dialetheism as the logic internal to Agamben’s ontological works (Abbott 2014, 104n95, 185–6).

11. Clearly, the cottage industry that developed around airport security following 9/11 has only grown in the decade since Agamben’s work was published.

12. This phrase is a reference to Abrahamsen and Williams’ (2011) Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics. The applicability of the exception beyond the state in the depth that Abrahamsen and Williams (2011) analyse security in Security Beyond the State is, in turn, beyond the scope of this inquiry. However, analyses ranging from the WHO (Hanrieder and Kreuder-Sonnen 2014) to the Hudson’s Bay Company (Cavanagh 2011) in declaring states of emergency appear to suggest the fertility of this line of inquiry.

13. As Murphy (2017b) has argued previously, this necessarily unlimited quality exists in the case of exceptionalism as well.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Michael P. A. Murphy

Michael P. A. Murphy is a PhD candidate in International Relations and an Associate Fellow at the Research Unit for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include theologies of the International, quantum social theory, and critical security studies. He is currently the assistant to the editor of Security Dialogue. His recent work has been published in the Journal of Political Power, the Canadian Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Science Education, the Journal of Museum Education, and Sport in Society.