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Lastly, the state remains a site of struggle, and political parties will have a role in any ecology of organisations – particularly if the traditional social democratic parties continue to collapse and enable a new generation of parties to emerge. Ensuring a post-work society for all will require more than just individual workplaces; it demands success at the level of the state as well. 57 While parties are frequently denounced for their cynical consent to electoralism and the limits posed by international capital, this changes within an ecology of organisations. Rather than making them the impossible vehicle of revolutionary desires – associated with the hopeless prospect of ‘voting in’ postcapitalism – they can instead take on the more realistic task of forming the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of political pressure, as well as developing the ability to bring together a widely varied constituency. 58 The state can complement politics on the street and in the workplace, just as the latter two can broaden the options for parties. The avoidance of the state – common to so many folk-political approaches – is a mistake. Mass movements and parties should be seen as tools of the same populist movement, each capable of achieving different things. At their most general level, parties can integrate various tendencies within a social movement – from reformist to revolutionary – into a common project. While international capital and the inter-state system make radical change virtually impossible from within the state, there are still basic and important policy choices to be made about austerity, housing support, climate change, childcare, demilitarisation of the police and abortion rights. Simply to reject parliamentary politics is to ignore the real advances these policies can make. It takes quite a privileged position to not care about minimum wage regulations, immigration laws, changes to legal support or rulings on abortion. At their best, electoral entities can act as a disruptive force (stalling, publicising controversies, articulating popular outrage), and even act as a progressive force in some situations. This does not imply that social movements should simply be turned into the vote-mobilising wings of political parties. The relationship between parties and social movements should extend far beyond this, into a process of two-way communication. On the one hand, financial support can be given from the party to community initiatives, and various policies – such as laws on public protest – can be amended to facilitate the activities of social movements. In Venezuela, for instance, the state supported the creation of neighbourhood communes as a way to embed socialism in everyday practices. 59 On the other hand, resources for new parties can be mobilised collectively – Podemos, for example, got started through crowd-funding € 150,000 – and the vitality of the party can be maintained through constant institutionalised negotiations between local movements, party members and central party structures. 60 Podemos, for instance, has aimed to build mechanisms for popular governance while also seeking a way into established institutions. 61 It is a multi-pronged approach to social change and offers greater potential for real transformation than either option on its own. 62 Meanwhile, Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores has maintained openness to multiple groups (liberation theology groups, peasant movements) while still organising around an essentially union-based core. In the words of one researcher, ‘this combination of grassroots and vanguard constituted a Leninism that was not very Leninist’. 63 What all these experiences show, however, is the mass mobilisation of the people is necessary in order to transform the state into a meaningful tool of their interests, and to overcome the blunt division between the power of movements and the power of the state. The aim must be to avoid both ‘the tendency to fetishise the state, official power, and its institutions and the opposing tendency to fetishise antipower’. 64 In a context of widespread discontent with the political system, this remains possible – though, again, the importance of having a discursive framework in place to channel this discontent is obvious. In the end, parties still hold significant political power, and the struggle over their future should certainly not be abandoned to reactionary forces. It should be clear how far away we now are from the folk-political fetishism of localism, horizontalism and direct democracy. An ecology of organisations does not deny that such organisational forms may have a role, but it rejects the idea that they are sufficient. This is doubly true for a counter-hegemonic project that requires the toppling of neoliberal common sense. What we are calling for, therefore, is a functional complementarity between organisations, rather than the fetishising of specific organisations or organisational forms.

Writing in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche argued that nothing was more deeply characteristic of the modern world than the power of nihilism.43 Nietzsche’s intervention here allowed us to move beyond the well-rehearsed attack upon Platonic reason or Christian faith, to focus instead upon ‘the radical repudiation of value, meaning and desirability’.44 Nihilism, thus understood, referred to the triumph of reactive thinking. It was all about the negation of life as it appeared to be incapable of affirming that which is properly and creatively different to human existence. Hence, for Nietzsche, nihilism was not simply reducible to some historical event in time, i.e. an exceptional moment in history which could be shamefully written into annals of human suffering. Nihilism was the recurring motor of history as the operation of power leads to a will to nothingness that strips life of any purposeful meaning. Crucially, as Nietzsche understood, this repudiation of the affirmative realm of experience is something we create for ourselves. 45 Nihilism, in other words, is to be understood through a sophisticated manipulation of desires such that the individual subject depreciates itself to such an extent that it actively participates in a custom of political self-annihilation. Central to Nietzsche’s thinking on the perpetuation of nihilism is the notion of ressentiment. In his On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche explains this in terms of the slave mentality. This produces a feeling of impotence which not only translates into vengefulness, but more problematic still, teaches the slave that the only way it can become free is to give over to the prevailing reason mastery has set in place. Sloterdijk equates this ressentiment with rage, the basis of all great theisms.46 Such a condition, as Nietzsche understood, was ‘paralysing’ insomuch as it annuls the possibility of thinking and acting otherwise, and it was ‘exhausting’ insomuch as life was forced to compromise with the very lethality that put its condition originally into question. Through a ‘spirit of revenge’ what is lacking is therefore produced in a double movement, for lack is not some original gesture, it derives out of the ressentiment to deny us the opportunity to bring something different into the world. This raises a number of pressing questions: Could it be that not only have we become slaves to our biological existence, but in claiming false mastery of the earth we have given to ourselves an illusionary sovereignty? For how can we have mastery if that which we claim to be able to dominate as the principle force makes us increasingly vulnerable with each passing moment? Have we not, then, become slaves to ourselves and slaves to the earth, and resentful of them as a result? Nihilism has never been alien to liberal biopolitics. It is arguably its most potent expression. Its early development can be traced to Kant’s Copernican revolution of the mind. Placing life at the centre of its universe, Kant forced us to look for meaning beyond the realms of theological destiny. Whilst this moved us beyond the suffering and lament of the Christian subject which so irked Nietzsche, Kant’s universal substitute proved to be no substitute at all. The universal was actually denied to us due to the limits of our reason and our imperfections as finite beings – imperfections that significantly proved incapable of moving us beyond the reductionism of metaphysical idealism and its crude representations, towards a more affirmative form of metaphysics that worked in practice. As Drucilla Cornell writes, ‘Martin Heidegger famously wrote that Kant takes us to the limit of the very notion of critique and ultimately raises, but does not fully address, the question of ‘who’ is this finite being that must think through the transcendental imagination’.47 In a remarkably potent yet tragic stroke, Kant wrote the death of the omnipotent God and the types of docile subjects it produced who were rendered immobile due to its vengeance and fury, while putting in its place a fallen subject that was fated to be forever incomplete because of the burdens of its own actions. While Kant’s thinking paved the way for new eschatological forms of power to emerge that took leave of traditional sovereign moorings, the fallen subject was compelled to become resentful of its biological existence. Bios were to remain forever imperfect by design and fated to be judged accordingly. With life fated to live a biologically endowed existence, it is stripped of its capacity to have a meaningful existence beyond the limits of its bodily formations, while political strategies operate by governing through the problem of finitude, even though the finite inevitably became a philosophical problem too difficult to comprehend. As a result, forced to endure a growing resentment of its unfolding drama, liberalism slowly became morally equipped to continually intervene upon the souls of the living simply by offering to prolong the subject’s existence better than any other political rationality. Such was the realization of our finite entrapment in the bodily form that the ability to philosophically transgress the injunction between life death became increasingly impossible. Indeed, as and we shall point out later, while liberal societies have a particular relationship to the question of dying as our existence is continually put into question, such that with each passing second we learn to survive until we become truly meaningless in the end, the idea of death remains incommensurable to the liberal subject. No longer does the resilient subject solely project its resentfulness onto the souls of ‘Others’. It resents the living world, for it too is radically endangering. It is here that catastrophic imaginaries begin to truly thrive. The resilient subject is shaped and anxiously mobilized by the prospect of the coming catastrophe. It fears the transformation of the subject, just as it fears the transformation of the ecosystem that gives sustenance to life. Our rage as such, to borrow from Sloterdijk, has become truly limitless. As everything becomes the source of our endangerment, we internalize the ressentiment and proliferate our impotence with unrivalled intensity and absolute necessity. Hence this produces a form of nihilism which is ‘unbounded’. For no longer do we simply resent the teleological unfolding of history as we phase shift from masters to slaves to masters; there is no mastery to speak of and as a result all our lament filters into a politics of ressentiment as we are left to simply govern through our continually unfolding state of unending emergency. This brings us to an important conceptual point that must be addressed in our critique. Adaptation in the face of the catastrophic is not the same as political transformation. The former accepts its conditions of insecurity and vulnerability. Adaptation conflates resistance with resilience such that politics becomes a sheer matter of survivability. Without challenging the fundamental tenets of a catastrophic existence, to adapt is to concede defeat to the avatars of liberal reason which continue to proclaim no political alternative except the pathological. Transformation, in contrast, finds enough reasons to believe in the irreducible spirit of the world such that we may affirm a different sensual and aesthetic relationship to its natural forces. This has nothing to do with a fatalism that accepts the inevitability of human extinction (even though it is inevitable). Nor does it seek to make light of the real experiences of oppression, destitution and daily struggle faced by the majority of the world’s inhabitants. On the contrary, it has everything to do with reintroducing political meaning back into the world, such that our relations do not dismiss the sense of wonder of experience one enjoys in those poetic moments with fellow humans and the earth which cannot be reduced to the techno-scientific conceit of biopolitical rule. And it has everything to do with a willingness to challenge indifferences to the political with more affirmative expressions that demand replacing the vulnerability of catastrophic rule with a poetic confidence in the creation of worlds to come.

According to Nietzsche, we can then become active nihilists and reject the values given to us by others in order to erect values of our own. Or we can become passive nihilists and continue to believe in traditional values, despite having doubts about the true value of those values. The active nihilist destroys in order to find or create something worth believing in. Only that which can survive destruction can make us stronger. Nietzsche and the group of 19th-century Russians who self-identified as nihilists shared this outlook. The passive nihilist however does not want to risk self-destruction, and so clings to the safety of traditional beliefs. Nietzsche argues that such self-protection is in reality an even more dangerous form of self-destruction. To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything, to taking the risk of staring into the abyss – a metaphor for nihilism that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work. 

In other words, for the passive nihilist, knowledge doesn’t matter. Just think about how often words such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘certainty’ are used haphazardly in everyday life. Someone says that they know the train is coming, and either we don’t ask how they know or, if we do ask, we’re often met with the absolute foundation for knowledge in contemporary life: because their phone says so. The phone might turn out to be right, in which case the phone’s claim to authority is preserved. Or the phone might turn out to be wrong, in which case we are likely to blame not the phone but the train. Since the phone has become our primary guarantor of knowledge, to admit that the phone could be wrong is to risk having to admit that not only could our phone-based knowledge claims be baseless, but that all of our knowledge claims could be. After all, just like with the phone, we tend not to ask why we think we know what we think we know.  

But underperformativity, like passive aggression and other problematically evental modes of relating, sneaks around the codes of sincerity and intelligibility that make possible normative social trust and trust in the social. Abjuring the inevitability of or self-evident value in the dramatic, its gestural style destabilizes the conventional relation between high intensity and importance. It is also a disturbance in the promise of confirmation that structures sentimental esthetics. In the sentimental scene where we presume emotional universality and an ethics of emotional intelligibility, manners and manner are pathways to the confirmation of mutuality and collective belongingd. The recessive esthetic does not promise sentimental participation in a world’s worldness, for it cannot rely on the transparency of performance. At the same time, it is not merely ironic, paranoid, or untrusting in relation to surfaces. Thus it cannot rely on the self-evidence of “excess.” A concept oft-invoked but rarely conceptualized, “excess” points to an intensity that, encountered in relation to an action or an atmosphere, is irrational, outside of ratio. But the recessive style always ports with it the potential for denial, disavowal, and foreclosed experience. It might genuinely represent a big emotion under the discipline of comportment and crisis. Or, it might actually be expressive of a non-, or a light-touch, or a diffused experience. But it might also not be hiding anything. In the underperformative scene, one can always say nothing happened, because little happens and when it does, it can point at once in many directions. The nothing might mask an event, or not. In other words, this mode of encounter is less an esthetics of expression than of apprehension. It foregrounds modes of reception that dilate or suspend the becominggenre of events as we conventionally understand them. Things happen, but the event finds its genre through measured action and often kinds of recursive distribution. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call the dynamic matter of these activities “percepts and affects”: figurations derived from a world’s atmosphere that register the impacts continuously unfolding in subjects and appearing in their concepts of the contemporary situation. The first impact of an encounter does not constitute the event: it is just a disturbance that sets off a process. This is why apprehension matters dramatically more than expression in these texts and scenes: in the realm of underperformed emotion, incidents are sensed, and it remains to find a form for the disturbance, which might include its extension or renovation (comedy) or not (tragedy). In the timing of the effect of an impact, a causal trajectory forces on the present a sense of itself as unfinished business without constituting the present as congealed or already playing out a fate. It is always the case that the event remains to be sensed. Recession induces a sense of interregnum. A style that seems casual, therefore, can point to something stuck, neutral, or withheld in relationality, a hesitation or a defense against presence. It can point to the overcloseness of the world, and be a distancing mechanism. Or, sometimes a space of recessive action can be both a defense and a scene of appeal for help in shifting the way things are. It is open to ambivalent, incoherent, or enigmatic aims. Indeed, it can involve a performative insistence that the connective encounter is unfinished, is being handed off to waiting and seeing, which involves a social, public, or collective component that has not been eventilized from the beginning. Interpassivity is Slavoj Žižek’s term for the practice of a disavowed delegation of feeling to others.9 In his view of mass mediated affectivity and emotion, what looks interactive often really involves the handing off to others of affective responsibility through esthetic or social forms that do the feeling for the subjects who invest them with sensation. What appears as action is passivity in action’s drag. But Žižek’s concept could be more robust: less about emotion owned and disowned and more about processes of allocation that may not at all involve self-negation. 

The reason for these conceptual moves lies in the state’s importance for a progressive transformative politics. In the global north, left-wing critiques of the state from Marxist, anarchist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives are extensive and hard-hitting. Modern states are criticised for their repressive, coercive, regulatory, functional, and extractive practices, particularly in relation to penal policy, workfare, market enhancements, welfare, privatisation, and coercive-military engagements. While some work critically responds to particular state developments and policies, an important current in critical work treats capitalist states or, indeed, all states as inherently oppressive. But not all critical and progressive work “writes off” the state. While this article is attuned to the concerns of anti-state scholarship, it also shares an anxiety that politically abandoning the concept of the state risks withdrawing important organisational scales for planning, redistribution, and decision-making; assumes a clear division between state and non-state practices and politics; and gives up the state to elite and dominant forces; leaving progressive constituencies with a set of “less than the state” institutions. But holding on to the state does not mean holding on to a particular apparatus, institutional structure, set of functions, or even scale. First, as different writers have explored, the structures, systems, and functions of the state can be revised in more progressive ways. Second, what can also be revised are our conceptions of what it means to be a state: specifically, what states do, what makes them up, and how they interface other aspects of the social. Contemporary scholarship approaches the state conceptually in ways too varied and extensive to set out fully here. Academics diverge on whether the state is an actor, organisation, structure, field, intangible effect, or idea; on its functions and role; on the degree, character, and conditions of its autonomy or boundedness; and on its power, composition, ethos, and modalities of change. The scale of divergence between treating the state as institutional machinery, an organic formation encompassing civil society, and a relation between classes reveals the state’s conceptual plasticity as well as the political stakes in how it is framed. This is not just a scholarly dilemma. Material effects follow from how states are imagined by officials, politicians, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others, as the recent development of neoliberal statehood reveals - a political-economic project firmly embedded in, and supported by, competitive marketized conceptions of what states should and could become. In their work on the economy, JK Gibson-Graham set out to think differently about its present forms. Instead of imagining an ideal or socially transformed future economy, Gibson-Graham reimagine the economy as it is. Their depiction of contemporary economic relations provides a purposive challenge to the “naturalized dominance of the capitalist economy” as they seek to “make a space for new economic becomings”. This article takes a similar approach. It seeks to reimagine the state as it is, challenging the assumption that the state is only made up of dominant interests, beliefs, systems, logics and practices. It aims to support progressive state thinking by foregrounding the state’s dissident and transient parts. While from a global perspective, some progressive initiatives and policies seem to be driven by centralised, unified states asserting their will, this seems less evident in contemporary neo-liberal democratic states of the north. Here, progressive developments frequently appear as fleeting, oppositional activities in the interstices of dominant state practice. Approaching the state in ways that recognise dissenting, minority beliefs, values, interests, and forces as part of what composes it, of course, does not mean dissent is inevitably left-wing. There are many instances of conservative dissident state action - not least those early 21st century state registrars who refuse to marry gay couples. Publics, as I discuss, can also take a conservative form, legitimising and entrenching authoritarian, hierarchical, and exclusionary state practices. However, the dissident publics addressed in this article, namely those which seek to transform social and political practice in progressive ways, are vitally important in rendering states relevant to the left through their emphasis on the commons, liberation, and collectively held public responsibilities. In this way, publics provide a counterpoint to the increasing entanglements and alignments between liberal post-industrial states and commercial interests, something Bonnie Honig also explores in her work on “public things” as objects of democratic desires and affections. Publics provide a counterpoint to the assumption that people’s desires and affections are exclusively embedded in individuated lives and choices. This does not mean extrapolating a universal common good from differentiated interests, a process that tends to reinforce already hegemonic norms. The phrase publics rather than public or public sphere emphasises plurality as Squires’s work on black publics explores. But plurality also does not have to mean group-segmented interests. What the concept of publics, as developed here, offers, is a way of framing concerns and political projects, from sexual liberation to “no borders” migration, as matters of public concern and interest. But why treat such publics as parts of, or as intimately connected to, the state? Publics may emphasise the collective, open-ended character of concern-driven social action, but what is gained by suturing publics to the state? In the face of the counter-claim that the political value of publics, and particularly radical publics, comes from their independence and state-distance, I want to propose three reasons for foregrounding a state nexus. First, it illuminates the networks that form around progressive or dissident policy ideas within state formations. This claim echoes Samuel Chambers’ approach to the work of radical political theorist Jacques Rancière. Against interpretations of Rancière which divide institutional order from democratic politics, Chambers interprets Rancière to suggest that politics - the disruptive and challenging assertions made by the excluded in equality’s name –is always entangled with the “police” order rather than separate from it. Focusing on state publics then provides a way of tracing the ebb and flow - the transformations, silences, and erasures - that shape radical politics, as dissident political currents weave through everyday institutional “police” life. Second, tying transformative publics to the state highlights how progressive and dissident action takes up and draws upon state-generated statuses, access, and resources. Reading such action as resistance, necessarily located outside centres of power, can obscure and attenuate the power that subordinate forces can and do make use of through their state location – whether as street-level workers, school students, or prisoners. Third, recognising the state-shaped character of social life makes it possible to explore the complex ways state and other (including grass-roots) governance logics and processes combine rather than assuming they meet as discrete independent forces. I return to these claims in the third section of the paper which explores how transformative publics connect to the state.

But locating state presence within everyday life does not mean states necessarily saturate, monopolise, and dominate social practice. Social forces and things can be parts or carriers of state formations when they participate in processes of political governance, while still participating (including simultaneously) in other kinds of action. States also contribute to diverse actor-networks – from the regional assemblages Allen and Cochrane discuss, with their mix of elements from state, agency, and business systems, to the “mash-ups” of state and grassroots governance addressed at the end of this article.

This argument is clearly in tension with some of Foucault's own proposals. Indeed, the notion of a transparent society marked by a Rousseauian general will is a Foucaultian nightmare. Democracy itself is based upon the diffusion of disciplines. Yet a carefully formulated "communitarianism" need not lead to postmodern anguish.3 There are several immediate reasons for this. First, the proposals suggested by Foucault, Connolly, Hooke, and others, such as a new form of rights or an aesthetic approach to ethics, cannot be implemented without a large measure of collective, democratic support. This is because of the nature of 'capillary' power as described by Foucault. In his view, power is so ubiquitous, insidious, and flexible that it is implausible to suggest that individuals acting alone could successfully combat it. Furthermore, this collective support cannot be gained without moral argumentation and appeals to shared values. An exclusive use of genealogical investigations and deconstructions of others' moral views is not sufficient. The conception of democracy and collective action endorsed here does not emphasize a postmodernist agonism or contestation, though such heated debate often proves salutary. Instead, moral debate which seeks consensus and which in turn motivates group action is seen as a better ideal. Still, collective action and democratic institutions can and should embody practices and goals that Foucault himself would support.

Ideals of justice may do little toward the correction of injustice in real life. The influence of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has led some philosophers of race to focus on “nonideal theory” as a way to bring conditions in unjust societies closer to conditions of justice described by ideal theory. However, a more direct approach to injustice may be needed to address unfair public policy and existing conditions for minorities in racist societies. Applicative justice describes the applications of principles of justice that are now “good enough” for whites to nonwhites (based on prior comparisons of how whites and nonwhites are treated). Social information just dribbles in, bit by bit, and we simply get used to it. A single story about a person really hits home at once, but the grinding injustices of daily life are endured. It is easy to ignore them and we do. Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (Shklar 1990, 110) IDEAL theory about justice extends from Plato’s Republic to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, including many careers devoted to analyses and criticism about such texts in political philosophy. Rawls offers a picture of the basic institutional structures of a just society, on the premise that in order to correct injustice, we must first know what justice is. According to Rawls, while “partial compliance theory” studies the principles that govern how we are to deal with injustice, full compliance theory, or ideal theory, studies the institutional principles of justice in a stable society where citizens obey the law. Rawls began A Theory of Justice with the claim: “The reason for beginning with ideal theory is that it provides, I believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems” (Rawls 1971, 8). Rawls’s ideal theory is too abstract to correct injustice or provide justice for victims of injustice in reality, because it is based on a thought experiment and the assumption of a “well-ordered” society in which there already is compliance with law (Zack 2016, 1–64). What people care about in reality concerning justice is not what ideal justice is or would be, but how immediate injustice can be corrected. Injustice is always specific in concrete events that are recognizable as certain types, for example, theft, murder, or police racial profiling. Injustice can be corrected by punishing those responsible for it in specific cases and instituting social changes that prevent or reduce future occurrences of the same type. Rawlsian nonideal theories of justice, constructed for societies where people do not comply with just laws, rely on ideal theory as a standard for just institutional structures. The main question driving nonideal theory is how to construct a model or picture of justice that will result in the future correction or avoidance of present injustices. John Simmons quotes John Rawls from Law of Peoples, on this matter. Nonideal theory asks how this long-term goal might be achieved, or worked toward, usually in gradual steps. It looks for courses of action that are morally permissible and politically possible as well as likely to be effective [LOP p. 89]. (Simmons 2010, 7) However, injured or indignant parties may not care about the long-term goal of justice that could lead to balance or compensation for their situations. Not only are what P. F. Strawson (1962) called “reactive attitudes,” such as moral indignation, blame, and a desire for deserved punishment, strong in their focus on injustice, but the best theory of justice in the world does not tell us what to do about the injustices we are faced with in the here and now, especially “the more pressing problems” of race-related injustices. Such questions cannot be answered with reference to ideal theory or some application of ideal or nonideal theory to their concrete situations, because the a priori nature of both of these does not provide a fit with specific contingencies—ideal and nonideal theories do not generate practical bridge principles. As theories, they posit ideal entities, but without the apparatus of scientific theories which provides connections to observable entities or events. (Moulines 1985). The correction of injustice or injustice theory requires a philosophical foundation for itself. Models of justice have often been naïvely utopian throughout the history of philosophy, because they are based on an assumption of automatic total compliance, as though the right words or pictures by themselves have the power to transform reality, or as though agreement with those right words or pictures will automatically result in action that will automatically make the world instantiate those words or pictures. When they are not fantastically and ineffectively utopian in this way, such models have been used to justify the already-existing dominance of some groups over others. (A prime example is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, written decades before 1688 Glorious Revolution, to express the interests of the new rising class of landed gentry, which were eventually fulfilled by a Protestant king on the throne and a strong representative parliament after that revolution [Laslett 1988].) Models of justice have legitimately served to inspire law in modern societies with government constitutions and national and local law. But, sometimes, as in US founding documents, although universal and absolute justice is proclaimed, subsequent events make it clear that this language was intended to legitimize just treatment for members of selected groups only, that is, white male property owners, at first. As a result of just law and its selective application, over time, there comes to be justice for an expanding group, but still not everyone in society. However, what is written, together with descriptions of real justice for some, can be a powerful lever for obtaining justice for at least some of the excluded. To understand how that works, it is necessary to develop an approach to justice that begins with injustice, in real situations where there is already some degree of justice in a larger whole. The extension of existing practices of justice to members of new groups is applicative justice, a concept with substantial historical and intellectual precedent, although not by that name. In what follows, more will be said about the idea of applicative justice and then its history will be considered. Voting rights and housing rights are examples of candidates for applicative justice in our time. Finally, content in the form of narrative may be motivational for social change. The Idea of Applicative Justice Applicative justice is an approach to justice with the goal of making the unjust treatment of some comparable to those who already receive just treatment. Applicative justice takes a comparative approach, for example, comparing how young black males are treated by police officers in contemporary US society, to how young white males are treated (Jones 2013; Zack 2013, 2015). Applicative justice rests on a pragmatic approach to social ills, which includes the premise, based on Arthur Bentley’s 1908 insights in The Process of Government, that government is much more than the apparatus of state and written laws and court decisions. Government is an extended, dynamic process, an ongoing contention among interest groups in society. This full-bodied, empirical and pragmatic view of government process entails, for example, that we consider as parts of the same political mix/phenomenon/raw material all of the foregoing: the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the 1960s Civil Rights Legislation, doctrines of probable cause, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, racial profiling, and police homicide with impunity. Thus, Rawls’s insistence that “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests” (Rawls 1971, 4), should be understood as “the rights secured by justice should not be subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” In reality, “the rights secured by justice” are constantly subject to political bargaining and the living calculus of social interests. One consequence of this empirical perspective is that moral outrage, critiques of white supremacy, or analyses of white privilege, along with other forms of blame, cannot be assumed to have the power to change anything, by themselves. By contrast, changing relationships between police officers and their local communities, or changing the rules of engagement when police stop or attempt to stop suspects, might on this view have some causal power (Ayres and Markovits 2014). It is important to realize that such changes in practice would not be specific applications of a theory of justice, but ways of changing social reality into a different political mix. However, a better theory of justice, even a more racially egalitarian one and even a theory of applicative justice that was widely accepted, would still be no more than a change in what Bentley calls “political content.” Any theory of justice or any set of just laws is compatible with widespread racially unequal and unjust practice. And the converse also holds. Unjust laws or laws with gaps for unjust practice are compatible with just practice. Thus, applicative justice is pragmatic in taking the whole political mix/ phenomenon/raw material as its subject for a specific injustice. Unlike ideal or nonideal justice theory, the applicative justice approach brooks little faith that reality can be changed by a special conceptual space or mode of critical moral discourse that is undertaken apart from reality. Reality cannot be changed by normative pronouncements, by or on behalf of the oppressed, but only by shifts in existing interests of groups of real people. To base hopes for change on normative content alone may paralyze [eliminate] the means for taking action that could result in change, because such content proceeds as though matters of justice were only matters of argument. Those who have opposed social racial justice have understood this well enough, because instead of mainly arguing against new just law over the twentieth century, they have taken action to block progress. Race and Justice Consideration of race and injustice together, within political philosophy, focuses on the need for specific groups to not be treated unjustly. For a group to be treated justly, a large number of its members need to be treated justly. But for a group to be treated unjustly, it is sufficient if a smaller number or lower proportion than required to meet the standard of just treatment be treated unjustly. One reason for this asymmetry is that just treatment is easily normalized within communities, whereas unjust treatment of only a few is disruptive and considered abnormal among other members of the group to which victims belong (although not necessarily by members of groups who are generally treated justly). The unjust treatment of a small number ripples from their friends and relations to other members of the same group, who realize that they are subject to similar unjust treatment from their membership in that group alone. More broadly, if the group treated justly and the group treated unjustly belong to the same larger collective, such as whites and blacks in the United States, then the unjust treatment of even a very small number of that total collective of residents or citizens should be disruptive to the whole collective, given promulgated principles of “justice for all.” But that does not always happen, at least not in ways that result in real change. Apathy and self-absorption of those not treated unjustly is part of the reason, although another significant part is that the group treated justly already knows that the national collective rhetoric of justice is intended to apply primarily to them. It is that kind of disparate treatment, which does not disrupt everyone, even though it should, which calls for a theory of applicative justice, on the abstract level where people call for justice. But applicative justice is not only an abstract theory. Applicative justice requires comparisons of group treatment. If minorities are treated unjustly, a description of that injustice does not require an ideal or nonideal theory or model of justice, but simply a comparison with how the majority is treated. (The term “minorities” refers to those disadvantaged or oppressed, because sometimes minorities are greater in number than “majorities,” e.g., blacks under apartheid in South Africa, American slaves in some Southern states, or black Americans in some twenty-first-century cities.) The principles and mechanics of justice that work well enough for most white Americans need to be applied to nonwhite Americans. For rhetorical purposes, it might be evocative to talk about black lives or black rights, but strictly speaking the subject is a racial framework that is color-blind in an important part of law—constitutional amendments and federal legislation—but not in reality. This gap between written law and social reality can be viewed as hypocrisy, racial bias, or white supremacy, only if one assumes that written law is an accurate description of, or blueprint for, social reality. But a perspective that takes in the whole process of government reveals that the gap and what is permissible within it, are parts of the same whole process. The contrast between blueprints and maps is important to consider. Political philosophers often proceed as though their writings about justice are blueprints, when they should instead begin by constructing maps. Present politics or a political party in power may present obstacles and challenges to applicative justice in any specific case. Those who aim for applicative justice must struggle against such obstacles and challenges, as well as the ignorance, prejudice, and ill will of large parts of voting publics under democratic government, and in addition, media misrepresentations, business interests in a status quo, and lack of understanding of oppression by those who are treated unjustly. For example, the injustice in the disproportionately large number of African Americans in the US criminal justice system has been supported by law-and-order politics, the War on Drugs, belief in racial gender myths (e.g., the larger-than-life black rapist), explicit racism, media sensationalism of crime committed by black men, profits made by for-profit prison corporations, and embrace of self-destructive subcultures by some black men who become incarcerated. At the same time, as an efficient cause or precipitating factor, ongoing racial profiling by police helps feed the system with new suspects, about 90 percent of whom plead guilty in preference to the risks and costs of a trial (Kerby 2013; Rakoff et al. 2014). Intergenerational poverty, unemployment, and undereducation contain people within this system, and the high rates of nonwhites in the prison population are used as official justification for racial profiling (Zack 2015, chap 2). Thus, the complexity of causes and background factors associated with the disproportionate number of African American male prison inmates can be understood through a number of approaches. The normative approach of applicative justice would be to address those causes or factors, distinctly and individually, through specific changes in concrete practice, as well as changes in law, as relevant.

As so often, Foucault’s periodization (‘in the second half of the eighteenth century . . . by the end of that century’) is less precise than a historian steeped in positivism and empiricism might expect or desire,2 but it is his hesitancy that is so striking: once more, biopolitics is in inverted commas and the notion is presented as an approximation (‘what I would call’). The same hesitancy appears in the first of the 1977–8 lectures on ‘Security, Territory, Population’: ‘I would like to begin with something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power’ (Foucault, 2007: 1). While issues that have already been associated with biopower – such as the handling of famines, the shift from the social and physical exclusion of lepers from the community to the use of controls, surveillance and regula- tion to handle outbreaks of plague – indicate a focus on strategies of exclusion, a significant shift occurs with the emergence of a biopolitics of population. The key element is the shift from exclusion to the management of populations at the level of a new rationality of the state; much of the text is devoted to an exploration of the themes of pastoral power and then Raison d’État.

The following year’s lectures were, according to their title, to be devoted to ‘the birth of biopower’, but its birth, at least in Foucault’s text, is once more deferred: ‘It seems to me that it is only when we understand what is at stake in this regime of liberalism opposed to Raison d’État . . . only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is’ (Foucault, 2008: 222). The index to a book on biopolitics contains only six references to the topic, and one of those is to an editorial footnote that supplies chronological information about the term’s origin. Most of the text is devoted to a discussion of economic liberalism and neoliberalism (see Lemke, 2001), and not to biopolitics itself. The most probable explanation for the hesitations (which may not be purely rhetorical), the approximations and the deferrals is that, while it represents the emergence of something, biopolitics is also a subset within the broader category of ‘government’ or ‘governmentality’ (see Burchell et al., 1991, for example), and that is a very broad category that includes the pastoral government of a flock of believers as well as the ‘government of the self’ of Foucault’s neo-Stoicism.

I have argued that Agamben has two competing theories of the state in play within his work. His first theory of the state posits the state in a determined relation to the economy. From this position, he can more easily describe political change as the economic forces determining the state bear within them the seeds of the coming community. This is a theory, however, that disguises its reliance on a form of power to secure the conditions of possibility for a common relation to communicability, and he does not address the consequences of the possible weakening of that form of power—the globalization of spectacular capital—for the commonality that it enabled. If spectacular capital should weaken, on one hand, or if it produces not commonality but polarities, on the other, then presumably the commonality that it theoretically enabled would either wane with the weakening of this power formation or simply not exist. Agamben’s second theory of the state posits the state as a determining force over human life. Agamben establishes the state in this determining position by borrowing from Schmitt’s theory of sovereign decisionism. Yet, in so doing, he erects a theoretical roadblock preventing passage to the coming community. Although I have suggested that he hasn’s conceived of three possible ways whereby subjects might decide to act to render this state power inoperative or perform actions enabling the suspension of sovereign law and messianic passage beyond this sovereign state, each of these three forms of political subjectivity fails to do the theoretical work demanded of it. Bartleby’s manifestation of a pure potentiality might render inoperative modern state government as Foucault has described it by disrupting the linkages among the series of institutions and subjects that the modern state relies upon to govern, but it is unclear how Bartleby would affect the Schmittian unitary sovereign decision maker upon which Agamben bases his theory of the state in Homo Sacer. Agamben also points to anomic 168 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 carnivals to suggest that states of emergency can become something more, and his theory of the gesture might contribute to a description of how a carnival might become something politically revolutionary. This would require, however, forcing the gesture into a relation of transcendence with regard to carnivalesque performances—an unacceptable move for a theory that embraces immanence to the extent that Agamben does. It also misrepresents why the carnivalesque harbors emancipatory political potential within it. Finally, Agamben indicates, through the example of the apostle Paul and the remnant of those who faithfully adhere to messianic law, the possibility of active political subjects adequate to the challenge of state sovereignty. This argument, however, contradicts his earlier positions embracing potentiality over the acts emblematic of sovereign decisions, and an experience of being beyond any idea of law. It also, by relying on a determinate situation to create the conditions of possibility for a successful speech act, occludes the forms of power needed to maintain this situation against other ontological possibilities much as his first theory of passage beyond the state of integrated spectacle did. This argument also begs the question of how this messianic community might relate to that which remains other to its situation. That is, Agamben must address the very questions that his ontological approach to state sovereignty intended to avoid— questions of power and otherness. In sum, Agamben remains haunted by the very problems that motivated not only his critique of the state but also his attempt to remove this inquiry from political philosophy to “first” philosophy. 43 At the end of Agamben’s theory of the state, politics remains. There are four implications of this critique for political theory and the state. First, the modern state is poorly understood as transcendent, unitary, and sovereign. The “state” encompasses a variety of institutions, many of which predate modernity.44 The Foucauldian understanding of government, I suggested, is the practice by which articulations between these institutions are forged—and non-state institutions are joined to this chain—and they are mobilized toward various purposes. The plural nature of this ensemble is precisely what gives extension to the modern state.45 Second, if we treat the state as an ensemble of institutions, then the concept of a state of emergency is poorly suited to understanding our political present. Agamben rightly criticizes the USA PATRIOT Act in State of Exception. This law, like most laws that are passed in an ongoing legal system, amends a variety of other laws and sits on a foundation created by these other laws, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Antiterrorism Act created the possibility of attributing guilt by association since it criminalized the provision of material support for Passavant / The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben 169 Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 organizations that the administration deems “terrorist”—provisions that the USA PATRIOT Act builds upon.46 From this perspective, current policies are less “exceptional,” unfortunately, and more a continuing development of a national security state apparatus that has been built through legislation like the National Security Act of 1947, through discourse, and through the creation of stakeholders (the military-industrial complex).47 In other words, another state formation is struggling to emerge through the ruin of liberal democracy in the United States, and this emergence (and ruin) is hastened by those who seek to enhance surveillance and presidential powers, while diminishing the power of courts and legislative oversight as a response to September 11, 2001.48 Third, any social formation is constituted by elements of both contingency and determination. By emphasizing pure potentiality, Agamben misses this and either cherishes the excessive quality of pure potentiality to the neglect of the exigent needs of the present, or neglects how the active political subjects he does defend are embedded within finite commitments that necessarily persevere through the foreclosure of other possibilities. Some contemporary political theorists concerned with injustice and the lack of democracy also emphasize contingency, excess, and potentiality over determination, finitude, and acts.49 These theorists correctly seek to disrupt oppressive patterns. Since politics—hence political change—would not be possible under conditions of absolute determination, emphasizing contingency or excess makes sense. Yet reflection upon the retraction of certain state services from places like the Bronx during the late 1970s permits us to see how neither justice nor democracy is served by excessive economic duress or violence. Not only are these contingencies unjust, but also their incapacitating effects prevent democratic practices of government where the latter necessarily presupposes some collective capacity to direct and achieve collective purposes. State actions that mitigate chaos, economic inequality, and violence, then, potentially contribute to the improved justice of outcomes and democracy. Political theorists must temper celebrating contingency with a simultaneous consideration of the complicated relation that determination has to democratic purposes.50 Fourth, the state’s institutions are among the few with the capacity to respond to the exigency of human needs identified by political theorists. These actions will necessarily be finite and less than wholly adequate, but responsibility may lie on the side of acknowledging these limitations and seeking to redress what is lacking in state action rather than calling for pure potentiality and an end to the state. We may conclude that claims to justice or democracy based on the wish to rid ourselves of the state once and for 170 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 all are like George W. Bush claiming to be an environmentalist because he has proposed converting all of our cars so that they will run on hydrogen.51 Meanwhile, in the here and now, there are urgent claims that demand finite acts that by definition will be both divisive and less than what a situation demands.52 In the end, the state remains. Let us defend this state of due process and equal protection against its ruinous other.

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT has become very controversial in the United States. Many Americans misunderstand what government does generally and underappreciate the specific role that government plays in guaranteeing America's success as a nation. The US government has improved the lives of Americans in numerous ways. It provides income, food, education, housing, and health care supports for many, not just those in poverty. It ensures cleaner air, water, and food. It supplies the vast infrastructure (roads, bridges, sewage systems, etc.) on which economic growth depends. The government has stabilized the economic system through these activities and others, including the government's bailout of the largest banks and other institutions responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown. Without government action, that economic crisis would have led the world economy into a total collapse. 

The government also engages in activities that trouble many Americans, including domestic surveillance and repression and the monitoring and control of behavior considered to be immoral. The government's national security policies have also spun out of democratic control on many occasions, leading the nation into unwanted and costly wars and interventions. What the government does, then, is a complex mix of activities that includes many things that Americans support wholeheartedly, and others that elicit concern and criticism. This has been one of our main points in this book. It is distracting and confusing to paint with a broad brush when speaking of "the government." 

2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby mntaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.

This article argues that while Foucauldian security studies (FSS) scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war has not ignored racism, these works largely replicate Foucault’s whitewashing of the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence. Drawing on Black, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, we show how Foucault’s genealogy of biopower rests on an unspecified concept of the “human,” failing to account for how notions of “human” were constituted through the savage and slave other, how enslaved people were rendered into things, and how punitive, sovereign violence persists as a (settler) colonial technique of gratuitous, not merely instrumental, violence. FSS exacerbates these problems. This article challenges two core FSS propositions on liberal war: 1. that “human life cannot ever be secured,” which replicates Foucault’s Eurocentric reliance on an unspecified “human” as the object of biopolitics; 2. that “everyone is (potentially) dangerous” and thus open to the punitive/lethal dimensions of liberal power, which reduces racism to a sorting process after the establishment of biopolitics and liberal war, rather than a precondition of it. This “methodological Whiteness” (Bhambra 2017a) results in major oversights in FSS empirical genealogies of: state violence, twenty-first-century digital and molecular revolutions, labor, capital, and enslavement. 

FSS is engaged in a project of critiquing the instrumentality of liberal biopower, but in doing so, it erases subjects and spaces exposed primarily or exclusively to punitive or gratuitous violence. It claims to extend Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics to security, war, and the international, but it does so without seriously engaging Foucault’s many critics. It not only reproduces Foucault’s reliance on the idea of an unspecified human, it deepens it. As a result, while this body of FSS claims to be genealogical, it cannot seriously historicize the biopolitics of the racial (settler) colonial projects that underpin modernity. 

The concepts of post-politics and biopower may be helpful in theorizing the current mutations of neoliberal power but they are not fully up to the task. They have been rightly castigated for constructing an overly rigid and all-encompassing regime of power which lies beyond challenge and change. As Bonnie Honig (2009: xv, 66–7, 88) makes clear, the apocalyptic image of the state of emergency and biopower in Agamben rules out the possibility of democratic response and cements ‘emergency’s closures’. It postulates an all-too solid, omnipotent, top-down sovereignty which takes exception to the law and cannot be resisted, covering over remaining fissures, opportunities, drives and invitations to collective mobilization. Modern sovereignty could be thought, instead, ‘as a contingent formation that might get relocated or redistributed in contests over whether a state of exception should be instituted, in what such a state should consist’ (Honig, 2009: 88). In contemporary globalized capitalism, sovereignty appears to be a multipolar circuit of forces, ‘displaced from national to international territories and reconstituted for the benefit of financial capital’ (Saskia Sassen in Dean, 2009: 131–2). People’s power in collective action or electoral politics remains often a variable component in this mobile, complex and uneven constellation of forces, at least where liberal democracy has not been fully torn apart.

Likewise, the ‘post-political’ qualification of biopower has attracted incisive criticisms. Jodi Dean argues that left-wing laments about the rise of technocratic expert rule, the declining significance of democratic politics under the compulsions of the markets, the disappearance of the ‘political’ as radical antagonism are apt but partial descriptions of our state of affairs. They obfuscate the surviving sites of politics and politicization and the real energies of democratic agency when they are taken as full and comprehensive accounts. In this case, the emphasis on post-politics ‘cedes in advance key terrains of activism and struggle’ (Dean, 2009: 12). Talk of post-politics fails thus to recognize and to engage with the terms of political games which are actually being played, and it stops short of supporting emerging instances of democratic agency, producing a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Foucault points out, however, that since the seventeenth century the West has undergone a very profound transformation in terms of mechanisms of power. Little by little, the violent sovereign power has been replaced by the power that Foucault calls biopower. In the case of biopower it is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism. The logic of biopower  is not deduction but production:  “It exerts a positive influence on life, endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it.”4 Biopower replaces the right to “take life and let live” with that of a power to foster life  – or disallow it to the point of death. Instead of being exercised by means of law and violence, biopower is exercised through the normalising biological, psychological and social technologies – through the “methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life general.”5 Unlike sovereign power, it does not celebrate death. On the contrary, biopower wants to exclude it  (“disqualification of death”6).  Death is no longer the way in which power expresses itself, but rather its absolute limit. Instead of death, the focus of biopower is on the birth and life of individuals and populations.7  

Biopolitics in the past included efforts in public health, medicine, psychiatry, public policing and sexuality sciences; for the twenty-first century it has evolved to employ now genetic technologies, biological weapons, global communication networks, and advanced digital analytical tools (Koopman 2014). On top of that, political technologies of control 14 seem now fully submerged in the widespread use of globally distributed, ubiquitous and pervasive digital technologies: a fast-expanding chaotic structure of intersecting apparatuses (dispositifs), within the operation of which are absorbed all notions of ‘the Internet of Things’, ‘algorithmic governance’ and so on – even the over-encompassing concept of the ‘Network Society’. Therefore, the reach of biopower deepens across populations, its impacts are becoming more immediate and intensified, whereas uncontrollable diversities of private and public entities get involved in determining how, when and towards whom power is exercised, by virtue of their access to or ownership of the intertwining hardware and software setups and their management.

For this reason, the site of the space had to remain a resistant exception to state sovereignty. It was therefore imperative that the squat remained illegally squatted, for only then could it push against state power while also carving out aparadoxical site within/outside of it. This is demonstrated by the heated debate when offered a very lenient rental contract for continued, legal use of the space, which the group nonetheless ultimately refused. The plenary body argued that:

The occupied status of the Flora offers possibilities and strategies that would otherwise be impossible due to legal and economic constraints. In addition, it multiplies opportunities to repeatedly transgress the current political rules of the game and to produce ruptures in the dominant prevailing political order. (Zeck 2001)

Nevertheless, the problem is not all that simple. How can one think the “appearing” of an exception? And of the monster? There are at least two ways of thinking the monstrous exception: on the one hand, the monster, because it instantiates a tautological singularity, should be absolutely unreadable and undecipherable, radically other and otherworldly; which also means that, on the other hand, it should break all rules in order to deliver its own rules, the rules we may then use in order to read the monster, to understand it—be it in order to mock it, expel it, cure it, take care of it, or look at it with pity, maybe tenderness... But—here lies the problem—as soon as it is read and demonstrated, as soon as it is understood and classified, the monster is demonsterized: it becomes appropriated and domesticated. It is not a monster anymore, or it is just one monster among others, which one may class according to a taxonomy or typology of monstrous lives—that is, a teratology. In this process, the monster loses its monstrous potency, its subversive force, and is converted into an item among others in order to be managed according to biopolitical normativity and power-knowledge dispositives. By definition, teratology is an impossible science.12 This difficulty prompts Derrida to distinguish between normal monsters and monstrous monstrosities:

I shall distinguish between normal monstrosities and monstrous monstrosities which never present themselves as such. A monstrosity never presents itself; or else, if you prefer, it only presents itself, that is, lets itself be recognized, by allowing itself to be reduced to what is recognizable; that is, to a normality, a legitimacy which it is not, hence by not letting itself be recognized as what it is—a monstrosity. A monstrosity can only be “mis-known” [méconnue], that is, unrecognized and misunderstood. It can only be recognized afterwards, when it has become normal or the norm. . . .

On one hand, othering those affected by the violence of environmental harm and dispossession serves to suspend the responsibility of the state (or multilateral institutions) for guaranteeing the wellbeing of such groups, typically already marginalised and racialised populations (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017). A related expression of such othering is the production of certain territories as “sacrifice zones” of extraction and waste (De Rosa, 2018), increasingly also associated with the “green energy” economy (Zografos & Robbins, 2020). On the other hand, othering-qua-racism can be used to legitimise the outright use of direct, murderous state or state-sanctioned violence, the establishment of “states of exception”, and the deployment of military force, “counterinsurgency” or “pacification” tactics against groups that actively resist or oppose extractivist projects (Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Huff & Orengo, 2020; Weldemichel, 2020). Those who resist are labelled as “terrorists”, “agents of foreign powers”, or are otherwise discursively constructed as “internal enemies”, in order to justify their repression or killing.

To the extent that they follow an extractivist and colonial logic, large-scale renewable energy and associated extractive-infrastructural projects are illustrative of “necropolitical”, exclusionary uses of othering.2 Extractivist logics are historically associated with material and immaterial forms of “dispossession” (Navarro Trujillo, 2021b). Much like fossil fuel extraction, “low carbon” energy projects contribute to separating affected populations from their means of livelihood—both directly through legal or de facto “enclosures”, and indirectly through contamination and other forms of “slow violence”. While dispossession and enclosure can also result from climate adaptation programmes (Taylor, 2015; Zografos, 2017), land enclosures, mines, plantations and large scale infrastructural projects such as mega-dams are associated with grave socio-ecological impacts, and therefore show more clearly the “deadly” side of “climate action”, including the production of dispensable, “surplus populations” (Alonso-Fradejas, 2021; cf.; Sassen, 2010).

In speaking of othering as a technology of government underpinning and reconciling two types of power—one promoting life or improvement, the other violence or sacrifice—we do not argue that these are the only ways that, historically, the West has represented “the rest”. In a broad sense, ways of knowing the other have much deeper and more complex histories: the practice of ethnographic writing, and attention to the knowledges and practices of other cultures, stretch back to ancient Greece (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Sullivan, 2017, p. 222); moreover, Western representations of non-European cultures and geographies, even when associated with colonialism, include positive depictions and even romanticising idealisations (e.g. Altmann, 2020). Here, however, we want to maintain our focus on these two ways of constructing the other—as an internal enemy or an object of improvement—because we find them especially salient to dominant ways of framing and governing the climate crisis.

In doing this, we also caution against exaggerating the difference or distance between these two logics of othering. These are in fact “idealtypes” that, in practical contexts, often overlap and conflate. First, before being (and in order to be) identified as an internal enemy, a certain group needs to be included within the governmental responsibility of the state (or development institution). Second, othering may serve not simply to exclude or include, but also to include differently. For instance, as Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 59) argue, drawing on Mbembe (2003), the necropolitical logic of colonialism and the plantation in Africa did not preclude “making live” native populations in the colony, yet it did so in ways that primarily advanced the interests and “improvement” of the ostensibly racially superior people in the metropole. Othering, therefore, underpins a wide array of interventions that go from the pure act of killing or sacrificing an internal or internalised enemy, to the ostensibly disinterested act of including, as a way of improving a group’s conditions, wealth and wellbeing.

In Weil’s depictions of affliction and the effects of force, images of living death proliferate. There exists in Weil’s imaginary a kind of human being whose life has been destroyed even as they remain alive. Under the weight of social degradation, oppression, or warfare, a human being can become dead-while-alive. In both essays, Weil describes this state of death-in-life as involving an ontological transformation. Recall the analogy to waterboiling: to go from suffering to affliction, from pain to having one’s life become an attenuated death, is akin to the transformation of hot water to boiling water. It is a transformation in kind, not simply in quantity. I have suggested that, for Weil, this transformation is marked by several features: one who inhabits a living death cannot think, hope, or will; the inevitability of death subsumes her entire vision of the future; and she loses the reflexive reactivity to stimuli usually shared among human and non-human animals. Further, force should be condemned not only for its production of death, but also for the way that its presence transforms the way in which life is lived. The threat of death does not only cause harm when death arrives; rather, the threat itself, the fact that one could be killed at any moment, is itself profoundly destructive to the human being. Exposure to the possibility of death is here presented as something that makes a human being a corpse while still alive. To be alive under the constant threat of death is to enter a different kind of aliveness – a life in which one is already in some sense dead.

The potential for a human life to become a kind of death poses particular challenges for modern ethical and political discourse. An ethical framework that emphasizes sympathy and compassion becomes untenable in the face of living death, for we are largely incapable of feeling compassion for such individuals and instead either feel disgust or fail to register their existence at all. Further, a political discourse of rights and personhood fails to adequately name the devastation to which human beings are too often subject; mistakenly articulating the damage wrought by force saps protests against such force of their normative potency.