Calkivik 10

If ending political violence and securing life is the dream of the modern political project (as captured by Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace”), how is it that the spread of this political project across the globe has translated into not less but more violence, not a disinvestment from but an overwhelming investment in more efficient ways to kill life? How is it that an era of exponentially increasing objects to be secured—objects as diverse and disparate as the nation, the environment, food, health, the human and the globe—is also an era when a constant state of terror inflicted by war, hunger, poverty, displacement, and xenophobia become the defining features of global political life? Taking this paradox as the starting point for my dissertation, I argued that what is needed is to dismantle security rather than reproduce its imperial gaze. To make this argument, I investigated the implications of the construction of politics as a global security project and critically inquired into the implications of politics devoted to securing life at its most general level, in an all encompassing manner. I explored the meaning of dismantling security as untimely critique in this empire of security and discussed alternative conceptions of politics beyond politics of security. I started my analysis by diagnosing the way in which security has emerged as a global bio-political apparatus in the contemporary era—an apparatus that is charged with the task of producing and transforming life at its most general level. In Chapters 1 and 2, I mapped out the contemporary landscape of in/security and discussed the 182 way in which security becomes a sovereign demand amidst the terrorization of life globally. I highlighted the way in which the project to secure life gets articulated in temporal terms through the logic of preemption—revolving around not only the fear of what exists, but also the danger of what might be—and pointed out that the same logic animates contemporary form of capital accumulation. Chapter 4 built upon this diagnosis about preemption becoming the defining feature of politics of security and capital accumulation, where I situated contemporary manifestations of the temporal homology between them within the context of bio-political modernity. Elaborating on the way in which, in modernity, political time gets reduced to abstract unit measure, I suggested that security colonizes the future by annihilating political time as possibility and writing the future as present. It is upon this premise that I offered an interpretation of my call to dismantle security as an untimely claim on time. I carried out a parallel inquiry into the meaning of dismantling security as untimely critique by relating it to an investigation of the reproduction of the hegemony of the sign of security through the disciplinary production of knowledge on security. In Chapter 3, I engaged with the critical security studies literature and tried to show how such critiques of security end up securing security’s hegemonic hold. If critical thought on security in its current formulation transmogrifies into a form of questioning that further consolidates the disciplinary project of security, how then are we to conceptualize a form of critique that would open the space for dismantling security? This was the question that I grappled with in Chapter 5, where I formulated an understanding of critical thought as an untimely intervention—one that is historically situated, yet, not historically foreordained or determined. In contrast to a form of critical subjectivity that takes the limits of what exists as the limits to what is possible, critique in this formulation becomes an untimely intervention that resets the account of times and renders the present as the site of non-utopian possibility. It is this understanding of critique, I argued, that gives form to dismantling security as a critical project. After making these deconstructive moves on the terrain of the empire of security, in the final chapter, I turned to a discussion of what a politics beyond politics of security would entail, what ethical and political possibilities open up when insecurity is embraced as an inescapable condition. What happens when thought of politics starts at the limits of security? To answer this question, I inquired into three possible moves beyond politics of security. One of these three moves, I suggested, passes through de-centering the sovereign subject of security by exposing the Otherness constitutive of subjectivity as such. Shattering the illusion of a sovereign and secure self opens the way to formulate ethical responsibility on the premise of the radical interdependence inscribed at the heart of being. It recasts politics as a way of being in the world beyond a techno-politics of life. The second move beyond a politics of security that I discussed centered on the works of Jacques Rancière, where politics is conceptualized as the overturning of the ordered space of security by staging political subjectivities in excess of the secure and functional order. Deploying the distinction that Rancière makes between “police” (logic of consensus) and “politics” (logic of dissensus), I suggested that, on this account, a politics beyond disrupts the reduction of politics to the management of the given and the securing of the proper distribution of identities, space, and time. I elaborated the third and final move beyond politics of security by visiting Jacques Derrida’s conception of political time as aporetic and his account of the future beyond representation. Such a conception of political time inscribes anxiety that issues from the absence of secure grounds as the condition of possibility of politics. In contrast to politics of security that annihilates political time as possibility by legislating the future, I argued, Derrida’s thinking on political time allows for a form of writing the future beyond security. My investigation into alternative conceptions of political subjectivity beyond security hopes to serve as an opening that calls for further inquiry into other possibilities, other conceptions of politics that would allow approaching global political life with an idiom detoxified from security. Politics beyond politics of security can be a point of reflection in the light of many other questions that could be raised. For instance, if security reduces the body of the political community to a species body, what alternative forms of thinking about the body are available that could challenge this assertion? How would different conceptions of the body beyond biological thinking enable different forms of politics beyond bio-politics of security? Or should political thought abandon the thought of the body altogether? Does politics beyond politics of security call for a new body or a no body? Besides alternative political and ethical possibilities beyond security, another issue that calls for sustained interrogation relates to the question of violence. One of the points that I highlighted in my discussion is the extent to which thinking about violence is confined within the framework of security, which, I argued, is itself an order of violence. This prompts a series of questions, which could be fruitfully pursued. For instance, how are we to think about violence beyond security? If the subject of security is a violent subject, does it mean that abandoning security demand that we abandon the subject of violence as well? What sorts of political and ethical challenges do we face if we abandon security, but not violence? How are we to think about the relation between violence and politics on an alternative terrain to the politics of security? I certainly do not think that these are the only possible questions that could be raised. My only hope is that dismantling security opens the way to diversifying and pursuing such questions rather than being held captive by the impossible and violent promise of security.