2011economies of Abandonment PDF

Economies of Abandonment
A ian W
Alger
War
ar, -
ar,
Bretton W
Woods, ; Marshall Plan, ; Gold Standard Collapse,
Socialism w/ Chinese Characteristics,
Opec Embargo,
Nonaligned
Movement,
US Withdraws
from
om V
Vietnam,
Asian Financial
Crisis,
Berlin W
Wall
Falls,
Tasmanian Greens ; British Greens ; French & German Greens, ;

Zapistista ; Landless Peoples Movement,
Israel, ; Suez,
March
ch on W
Washington, ; Stonewalll R
Riots, ;
; W
Wounded Knee,
Keynesian Economics
Neo-Liberalism
White Mans Burden
Cultural Recognition
Wages & Prices Accord, ;

; W
Workplace Relations Act, ;
Maritime Union Strike,
Housing Prices in Darwin,

k ; k, ; k, ;
k,
k,
Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal People),

Aboriginal
al Land R
Rights () Act,
High Court, Mabo v Queensland,
Native Title Act,
High Court,t, W
Wik: Pastoral Leases trump
Native Title, land affecte
ff
ffecte
d,
Liberal Govt cuts million from
Indigenous programs,
Economies ofAbandonment
Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism
A Qaedaa A
AlAttacks US,
Financial Markets
Collapse,
Elizabeth A.Povinelli
Anarcho Liberalism
Civilizational Securitization
Australian : c, ; c, ; c, ; c,
Liberal Govt abolishes Aboriginal &

Torres Islanders Commission,
Liberal Govt declares Emergency Intervention in
Aboriginal
al Sex
Sexual Child Abuse,
La
Labour
Gov t apologizes for the Stolen Generation.
Announces continuation of Intervention,
vention,
vention,
Liberal Govt refuses
efuses to apologize for past
ef
harms to Indigenous Australians,
Duke University Press

Durham & London 2011
2011 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper . Designed by Jennifer Hill. Typeset in Arno Pro by Tseng Information
Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed
page of this book.
To Nuki Bilbil
May she rest in peace
Even if she is not
Where I wish she were
Contents
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
The Child in the Broom Closet1
One
The Part That Has No Part47
Two
The Brackets of Recognition75
Three
Road Kill
Ethical Substance, Exhaustion, Endurance101
Four
Events of Abandonment131
Five
After Good and Evil, Whither

Sacrificial Love?163
Conclusion
Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies187
Notes 193
211
Index 225
Bibliography
Preface
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a
breed of life.
WAlT WhITmAN, Song of myself
This book is a meditation on alternative worlds

in the shadow of contemporary transformations
of late liberalism, a phrase I will explain more
fully in the introduction, but which can here be
understood as the governance of social difference in the wake of the anticolonial movements
and the emergence of new social movements. It
looks at shattered lives and exhausting struggles,
at discourses that deflect ethical and social responsibility for crushing if at times imperceptible
harms, and at scholarly attachments to miracles of
Preface
enduring difference. Ethnographic material is culled from a variety of personal and professional relationships I have had in the United States and
Australia and culminates as one moves through the chapters. This material is situated in a variety of discursive fields including political theory
and philosophy, anthropology, and cultural and legal studies, and also
through academic and activist thought and writing. One reader of this
text described it as austere ethnography, a description meant to indicate
a move away from a now longstanding commitment in anthropology to
thick description. I myself like a term that James Clifford used, during a
dissertation hearing, sociography, to describe a way of writing the social
from the point of view of social projects.
But this way of writing ethnographicallyor sociographicallyalso
presupposes an entire corpus of previous and projected writerly projects.
Although certainly able to stand on its own, this book is the second in a
series of books I am writing under the broad rubric of Dwelling in Late
Liberalism. The Empire of Love was the first volume in this series and a
subsequent volume will focus on an augmented reality project that this
book mentions, if only glancingly.
Economies of Abandonment is conceptualized as an argument that
builds across chapters, rather than as a set of thematically related essays.
Material elaborated in an initial chapter is referred to in subsequent chapters. Material acting to support a point in one chapter is elaborated and
made the center of a subsequent chapter. I have tried to make each chapter as self-contained as possible, which means that there is some repetition of information. And I have tried to allow for innovative readings, say,
starting with chapter 3 on ethical substance and moving back to chapter 2
on recognition, camouflage, and espionage. Nevertheless, this is a book
written to unravel an argument step by step. Two works of fiction frame
this book: Ursula Le Guins The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
and Charles Burnetts 1977 film, The Killer of Sheep, the one written loosely
within the genre of science fiction, the other, a quasi-documentary of the
Watts neighborhood, the scene of the infamous 1968 black uprising. Le
Guins story sets the framework for the introduction and first two chapters, Burnetts film for the last three. Two other divisions mirror this one.
First, while gesturing to the critical importance of eventfulness and ethical substance chapters 1 and 2 focus more heavily of the use of tense in
Preface
late liberalism, chapters 3 and 4 on ethical substance and eventfulness;

chapter 5 draws these divisions together through a discussion of sacrificial
love. Second, the first chapters focus more centrally on the governmental
aspects of late liberalism and neoliberalism, the later ones on the nature
of life within these governmental orders.
The introduction moves from Le Guins short story, The Ones Who
Walk Away from Omelas, and discusses the specific social worlds and
projects that interest this book; why I am interested in these kinds of
worlds and projects; what this has to do with tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance. I then describe how the general space and time in which
this book was written has made understanding these kinds of concerns
unavoidable and make sensible why I use the chronotrope of late liberalism rather than other available chronotropes such as liberalism, neoliberalism, postcolonial liberalism, or diasporic liberalism. Alongside late
liberalism are other terms and phrases I will use in this book as a counterweight to late liberal: tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance. I
will present what I mean by some of these and how the following chapters slowly unpack late liberal techniques of power that might make them
useful framing devices.
xi
Acknowledgments
This book emerged from the generosity of conversation and life. I would like first to thank
members of the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, in particular Linda Yarrowin, Rex Sing, Rex
Edmunds, Cecilia Lewis, Trevor Bianamu, and
Robyn Lane. Also essential were colleagues at the
School for Social and Policy Research at Charles
Darwin University, especially conversations with
Tess Lea and David Lamb; the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, especially
Akhil Bilgrami, Craig Calhoun, Francis Ferguson,
xiv
Acknowledgments
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee, Charles Taylor, Greg Urban,

Michael Warner, Lisa Wedeen; and the workshop on the Governance of
the Prior, especially Glen Coulthard, J. Khaulani Kauanui, Andy Smith,
Sandy Grande, Kevin Bruyneel, Robert Nicholls, Ned Blackhawk, Jessica
Cattelino; I would also like to thank the members of the Short Mountain
Sanctuary for their lived perspective on alternative publics.
Not least, Id like to thank my oldest conversationalist and most rigorous editor, Susan Edmunds. Michael Warner kept insisting I let him be a
good colleague. And he is, and has been, whether or not he read a stitch
of this manuscript. Ditto Dilip Gaonkar. Stacey DErasmo suggested that
I read Le Guins The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas, which became a central framework for this book, which seems fitting, and right.
I received invaluable feedback on this manuscript from a variety of
people. I am sure I am forgetting some essential voices, but let me single
out the members of Liberalisms Others and the Borders and Boundaries projects at the Columbia Center for the Critical Analysis of Social
Difference, especially Nadia Abu El Haj, Lila Abu Lughod, Liz Emens,
Katherine Franke, Murat Guney, Claudio Lomnitz, Alondra Nelson, Mae
Ngai, Anupama Rao, Audra Simpson, and Neferti Tadiar. I would like to
thank Austin Sarat and Adam Sitze, who organized two separate workshops through the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Legal Studies
at Amherst College; one on killing states and another on the work of
Roberto Esposito were early versions of some of these chapters were presented and worked over. And not least, Liza Johnson and Michele Spano,
who read various chapters and more generally were generous in their conversation; and my student Carolijn Trewindt for sharing her thoughts and
research on radical ecological movements in the United States.
Certain people slogged through an entire manuscript draft; these include Saba Mahmood and Eric Fassin and the two reviewers at Duke University Press. Their comments have made whatever insights are expressed
in this book deeper and more coherent.
This coherence would never have been possible without the continued
support and tug of war with Ken Wissoker, who is ever diligent and hopeful that my prose will one day reach beyond the whirligig of my mind.
Although sometimes anonymous, the audiences who were kind
enough to listen to spoken versions of this book were also invaluable.
Acknowledgments
These include audiences at the Department of Musicology at New York

University; the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University
of Helsinki; the University of Montreal; the Center for Cultural Studies
at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Department of Comparative Literature, Humanism in the Humanities Lecture Series at
the University of California, Los Angeles; the Simpson Center for the
Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle; the Center for Contemporary Critical Theory at the University of Chicago; the Subaltern
and Indigenous Critical Theory Workshop at the Humanities Center at
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the Gender and Womens
Studies Program at Duke University; the Committee on Social Theory at
the University of Kentucky; the Institute for Comparative Modernities
at Cornell University; the Critical Theory Workshop at New York University; the Institute of Anthropology, Forum on Political Anthropology
at the University of Copenhagen; the Danish Research School for Anthropology and Ethnography and the Rehabilitation and Research Centre
for Torture Victims, Slyst Kursus og Konference Center, Denmark; the
Westminster International Law and Theory Centre at the University of
Westminster; La Sapienza at the University di Roma; Lcole des Hautes
tudes en Sciences Sociales; the Women and Gender Studies Program at
Princeton University; Department of Anthropology at York University;
and the Cogut Center at Brown University.
Research in this book was made possible by funding from the Lenfest
Distinguished Columbia Faculty Prize, the Department of Anthropology
at Columbia University, and the School for Social and Policy Research at
Charles Darwin University.
xv
Algerian War, -
Bretton Woods, ; Marshall Plan, ; Gold Standard Collapse,
Socialism w/ Chinese Characteristics,
Opec Embargo,
Nonaligned
Movement,
US Withdraws
from Vietnam,
Asian Financial
Crisis,
Berlin Wall
Falls,
Tasmanian Greens ; British Greens ; French & German Greens, ;

Zapistista ; Landless Peoples Movement,
Israel, ; Suez,
March on Washington, ; Stonewall Riots, ; Wounded Knee,
Keynesian Economics
Neo-Liberalism
White Mans Burden
Cultural Recognition
Wages & Prices Accord, ; Workplace Relations Act, ;

Maritime Union Strike,
Housing Prices in Darwin,

k, ; k, ; k, ;
k,
Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal People),

Aboriginal Land Rights () Act,
High Court, Mabo v Queensland,
Native Title Act,
High Court, Wik: Pastoral Leases trump
Native Title, land affected,
Liberal Govt cuts million from
Indigenous programs,
A Symphony of Liberalism
Al-Qaeda Attacks US,

Financial Markets
Collapse,
Anarcho Liberalism
Civilizational Securitization
Australian : c, ; c, ; c, ; c,
Liberal Govt abolishes Aboriginal &

Torres Islanders Commission,
Liberal Govt declares Emergency Intervention in
Aboriginal Sexual Child Abuse,
Labour Govt apologizes for the Stolen Generation.
Announces continuation of Intervention,
Liberal Govt refuses to apologize for past
harms to Indigenous Australians,
Introduction
The Child in the Broom Closet
In the Broom Closet
Ursula Le Guins The Ones Who Walk Away

from Omelas tells the tale of a city, Omelas,
where the happiness and well-being of its inhabitants depend on a small childs being confined to
and humiliated in a small, putrid broom closet.
It is critical to Le Guins fiction-based ethical
wager that Omelass happiness is not ideological
in Louis Althussers sense, nor naive. It is experientially unmediated, materially substantive, and
morally desirable. This happiness is what every
average Joe and moral philosopher might wish
Introduction
for. But it is, nevertheless, dependent on a childs being naked and constrained in a cramped space and being covered with festering sores from
sitting in its own excrement, and on these facts being known by all Omelas inhabitants. Some actually visit the childs fetid chamber. Some have
merely heard of it since they were children themselves. But every member of Omelas must assume some relationship among his or her present
personal happiness, their solidarity with the present happiness of the millions inhabiting Omelas, and the present suffering of one small human
being. A child is being beaten, and unlike Freud no one in Omelas can
pretend it is mere psychic fantasy. Some offer facile excuses for preferring their happiness to the childs. At this point, they reason, the child is
too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. She is so destroyed and
so used to her destitution that liberating her would do more harm than
good. Others face the true paradox. For them their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and
to accept it.1 Others leave Omelas. Not en masse. They leave one by one:
The place they go is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the
city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not
exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk
away from Omelas.2
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was conceived as a fictional
engagement with William Jamess The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life and more broadly to the moral philosophy of American pragmatism,
of which James was a leading voice. James begins his essay with the position that there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics,
until the last man has had his experience and said his say.3 This ethical
position was deeply influenced by the semiotic musings of Jamess colleague Charles Sanders Peirce. More specifically, James broadly borrows
Peirces understanding of the temporal and modal structure of the final
interpretant and applies it to the question of ethical truth. Ethical readings of the kind that interested James have a specific temporal and modal
structure; a variant of the future anterior. Ethical readings are the toward
which the actual, as the sum total of all interpretants, tends.4 But this
actual is already in the durative present. The future anterior is what will
have been the ultimate truth, good, and justice of this existing action,
event and experience, after every last man has had his experience and his
say. This truth might only become available with the point of view of the
last man. But this last man is supposedly simply standing where we are
standing, seeing what is front of our eyes but outside our field of vision.
Regardless of her agreement or disagreement with James, Le Guins
account of temporality, eventfulness, and ethics opens a productive avenue for critically engaging the affective attachments and practical relationship of subjects to the unequal distribution of life and death, of hope
and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion in late liberalism, a phrase
I will elaborate below. One reading of Le Guin would alter three ways
in which liberal subjects normally understand and experience the social
tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance of thriving, suffering, and lethality. First, as opposed to those who would read ethics from the perspective of future ends, this reading of Le Guin would insist that there
is no horizon in which a changed material version of this child could be
incorporated into the material and emotional good of the city without
that good being compromised. The ethical nature of the relationship between the residents of Omelas and the child in the broom closet cannot,
therefore, be deferred to some future anterior perspectivewhat will
have been the positive outcome of this suffering from the perspective of
a future interpreter we cannot as of yet know. In late liberalism, as opposed to Omelas, the future anterior is sometimes marked by the perfective, sometimes the imperfective. But in both cases the ethical nature of
present action is interpreted from the point of view of a reflexive future
horizon and its cognate discourses, such as that of sacrificial love.5 The
childs suffering disappears when seen from the perspective of what it will
have beenor been for. Because Le Guin refuses to grant to Omelas the
truth of this ethical point of view, the ethical relationship that links the
citizens of Omelas to the child in the broom closet cannot be removed
from the durative present of her suffering. Hers is not so much a sacrifice in the city as an organ of the city. To be sure, whether the political life
of the city should be based on an alternative ethical tensethe durative
presentand whether the question of politics should bear any relation to
the question of ethics are important, if separate, questions that I explore
later.
Second, the nature of the suffering that interests Le Guin is ordinary,
chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime.
Introduction
Granted the child in the broom closet is covered in sores and, every so
often, is given a kick. But for the most part her misery is a quieter form of
abjection, despair, impoverishment, and boredom. She is not a part of a
system of disposability because she cannot be disposed with. In the oscillation between this state of neither great crisis nor final redemption there
is nothing spectacular to report. Indeed, nothing happens that rises to the
level of an event let alone a crisis. The small childs life-as-suffering will
drift across a series of quasi-events into a form of death that can be certified as due to the vagary of natural causes. As a result any ethical impulse dependent on a certain kind of event and eventfulnessa crisis
flounders in this closet. How does one construct an ethics in relation to
this kind of dispersed suffering?
Finally, any goods generated from the kind of misery found in this
broom closet must be seen as socially cosubstantial as well as temporally nontransferable. The happiness of citizens of Omelas is substantially within the small childs unhappiness; their well-being is part of a
larger mode of corporeal embodiment in which her carnal misery is a
vital organ; the usefulness of the child is inseparable from the distension
of her body through the bodies of the citizens of Omelas. And these are
not metaphors. She and they are not like a shared body; they are a shared
body. Or, as I have put it previously, they share a mutual, if distributed,
form of enfleshment.6 The solidarity the citizens of Omelas share with each
other must, as of necessity, loop through her. As a result, the ethical imperative is not to put oneself in the childs place, nor is it to experience the
anxiety of potentially being put in her place. Le Guins fiction rejects this
ethics of liberal empathy. Instead, the ethical imperative is to know that
your own good life is already in her broom closet, and as a result, either
you must create a new organization of enfleshment by compromising on
the goods to which you have grown accustomed (and grown accustomed
to thinking of as yours including the health of your body) or admit that
the current organization of enfleshment is more important to you than
her suffering.7
That Le Guin allows some people to walk away from Omelas rather
than stay and fight its injustice may seem a cop-out. That Le Guin is unable to describe the place they go seems even more of one. How to come
to grips with Le Guins refusal, or inability, to provide a substantive alter-
native to her devastating paradox of the good lifeand aprs Derrida, a

philosophy of ends more generally8is the last point that this book will
address. Other issues about Le Guins short story and her opus more generally will be raised through a set of encounters with a number of alternative social worlds and their social projects. Of particular emphasis will
be the contrast between Le Guins interest in the emergence of the liberatory novum, of individual initiative, of understanding and communication, which correspond to the classical utopian aspirations of Western
philosophy and, say, the science fiction writer Samuel Delanys interest in the dominance of dispersion, of compelling convention, of statistical typicality, of delusion and a systematic distortion of communication,
which emerged from his encounter with Michel Foucaults notion of the
heterotopic.9 My reading of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
and Le Guins ethical reflections on civic responsibility merely provides a
convenient narrative starting point for the concerns of this book: How do
specific arrangements of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance make
affectively and cognitively sensible and practical, late liberal distributions
of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion
across social difference? Given these arrangements, what are the conditions in which new forms of social life emerge? And, if we believe that all
potential social life is material, that it is embodied, then how does the materiality of the social otherwise matter to critical theory?
This is especially pertinent since outside of Omelas no one is simply
happy. Citizens in actually existing states do not live in the perfect grace
that prevails in Omelas. Nor is the difference between those who have and
those who have not as precisely defined and located.
Obviously this is a large and unwieldy set of concerns. And the meanings of the terms I have already usedprojects, social projects, and
alternative social worlds; events and quasi-events; tense, eventfulness, ethical substance; sacrificial love; late liberalismdemand
some initial specification. So let me begin by describing the specific social
worlds and projects that interest me; why I am interested in these kinds
of worlds and projects; and what of this has to do with tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance. I will then describe how the general space
and time in which this book was written has made understanding these
kinds of concerns unavoidable and explain why I use the chronotrope of
Introduction
late liberalism rather than other available chronotropes such as liberalism,

neoliberalism, postcolonial liberalism, or diasporic liberalism. And finally
I will describe how the following chapters slowly unpack late liberal techniques of power and the concepts I use to understand them.
Spaces of Otherwise
My analysis of the social worlds and projects that provide the sociographic
core of this book emerges from very longstanding friendshipsfor instance a twenty-six-year relationship with friends in north Australiaand
much shorter onesI have been in deep conversation with members of
alternative queer projects for only six years. Throughout this book I discuss how my friends in Australia have been working on an augmented
reality project as a way of maintaining within late liberalism an ethical relationship to themselves and their country. My discussions of alternative
projects of embodied sociality have a more diffused focus. But what interests this book about these social worlds is fourfold. First, I am interested
in them as projects, a term that is loosely modeled on the meaning that
the moral philosopher Bernard Williams gave to the concepts of moral
projects and actions. Responding to utilitarian understandings of the
good, Williams argues that moral projects cannot be measured, as many
utilitarian approaches would have it, by assessing happiness or pleasure,
or any action for that matter, from the point of view of a systemized impartial perspective. Happiness, goodness, and justice are never judged by
a set of impartial decisions or from the perspective of the view from nowhere.10 And this is because happiness depends on a person being taken
up or involved in any of a vast range of projects and commitments.11 To
be taken up and to be involved has a much stronger meaning for Williams than to be merely interested in something. Projects are the thick
subjective background effects of a life as it has been lived; and these thick
subjectivities provide the context of moral and political calculation. All
judgments and views always occur within thick and particular life projectsa point most anthropologists would take as axiomatic. But it is also
a point that foregrounds the fact that in any given social world, multiple
moral and political calculations proliferate because no one ever lives the
exact same projectin Omelas, for instance, the good life would be the
contested space between the child in the broom closet and each and every
citizens project, including those who decide to remain in the city and
those who walk away from it.
Whereas Williams is interested in projects from the point of view of
individual moral agents, I am interested in them from the point of view
of the social worlds in which these projects are situated, and not all of
these equally. I am interested in those social projects that attempt to capacitate an alternative set of human and posthuman worlds. (The view
from nowhere is from this perspective a social project that has as its
background assumption that background assumptions can be emptied
out.) When I say I am interested in social projects I am gesturing to specific arrangements (agencements) that extend beyond simple human sociality or human beings. As will become clear, a social project is dependent on a host of interlocking concepts, materials, and forces that include
human and nonhuman agencies and organisms. Focusing primarily on
the human dimension of these social projects, critical social theory has
used many phrases to describe these worlds. Michael Warner has used
the term counterpublics, Charles Taylor new social imaginaries, and
Nancy Frazer subaltern counterpublics. I have used the phrase radical
worlds.12 Much earlier, Foucault coined the term heterotopia to refer
to a set of countersites (sortes de contre-emplacements) that are real localized sites in the world and yet contested inversions of the world (je suis
l-bas, l o je ne suis pas).13 Some of these worlds may, from one perspective, seem more voluntarist than others. Alternative spiritual publics
that I discuss in subsequent chapters might seem to be this sort of voluntarist counterpublic. It may appear that members of these social projects
choose to place themselves within this or that alternative world. Others
may seem to be structurally located within normative worlds in such a
way that their everyday actions are heterotopic whether they intend them
to be or not. My Indigenous friends in Australia would seem good candidates for this less voluntary form of the otherwise. But I hope the following chapters give lie to such simple divisions of the willand put serious
pressure on the quasi-mystical concept of the will itselfbut there is
nevertheless a discursive power of the fantasy of the will and its volitions
that needs to be noted.
In any case, we have social worlds, social projects, and individuated
Introduction
projects, each of which conveys a slightly different aspect of human life

as this life unfolds in equally complexly organized material compositions.
Social worlds are the most encompassing. But specifying even the location and composition of contemporary social worlds is quite difficult.
What composes a human social world may be anything but proximate to
it, let alone human. The dissemination of various forms of sociality and
meaning vis--vis various emergent communicative and market linkages
creates anonymous and yet intimate linkages and supports across social
worlds. Moreover, no social world is simply organized or unorganized,
coherent or incoherent, unified or fractured. Instead, social worlds are
multiply partially organized and thus always multiply partially disorganized. Social projects disaggregate aspects of the social worlds and aggregate individual projects into a more or less wholea definable and
describable thing. But social projects are not fixed things. Indeed, they
are not things so much as aggregating practices, incessantly fixing phenomena and cosubstantiating practices.
This book is particularly interested in a certain moment, or condition,
in the life of alternative social projectsthose moments, or those conditions in which a social project is neither something nor nothing. This
indeterminate oscillationthe virtual space that opens up between the
potentiality and actuality of an alternative social projecthas attracted
the attention of a range of immanent critical theorists even as Foucault
presented his lecture on heterotopia in 1967.14 Since the mid-1960s, immanent critique has sought to conceptualize the source and space of new
possibilities of life independent of philosophical notions of transcendental consciousness.15 In his Vincennes lectures on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze,
for instance, slowly differentiated between a mode of thought defined by
its representational character (ideas) and a mode of thought that is not
defined representationally (affects).16 Deleuze concedes that affects can
have an ideational form (there is an idea of the loved thing, to be sure,
there is an idea of something hoped for) and that ideas have a chronological and logical primacy in relation to the affects (In order to will its
necessary to have an idea, however confused or indeterminate it may be,
of what is willed). But he insisted that affects like hope and love represent nothing, strictly nothing.17 Affects may be ultimately determined by
the given system of ideas that one has, but they are not reducible to the
ideas one has, whether one considers these ideas in their objective extrinsic reality or in their formal intrinsic reality.18 Ideas and affects are two
kinds of modes of thought that differ in nature. An idea represents
something while an affect does not. An affect is not nothing, but it is also
not something in the same way as an extrinsic or intrinsic idea. An affect
is a force of existing (vis existendi) that is neither the realized thing (an
idea), nor the accomplishment of a thing (an act, potentia agendi). This
perspective on the force of existing is clearly engaging Spinozas claim
that things, finite and determinate kinds of existence, strive (conatus) to
persevere in their being. For Deleuze, the perpetual variation between vis
existendi and potentia agendibetween striving to persevere and any
actual idea or action that emerges from this strivingprovides a space of
potentiality where new forms of life can emerge. But it is exactly in this
ontotheoretical spacing that a different, sociological question emerges:
How do new forms of social life maintain the force of existing in specific
social spacings of life? How do they endure the effort it takes to strive to
persevere? And how in answering these questions do new, if not ontotheoretical, then political and ethical concerns emerge?
The question of how new possibilities of life are able to maintain their
force of existence in specific organizations of social space becomes especially acute in the wake of Giorgio Agambens reflections on Deleuzes
immanent philosophy and his own work on the biopolitical. In his reflections on Deleuzes Immanence: A Life, Agamben calls for the development of a coherent ontology of potentiality (dynamis) that would upend
the primacy of actuality (energeia).19 For Agamben potentiality has a dual
nature: while the actual can only be, the potential can be or not be.20 And
it is exactly within this ontological duality of the potential that new possibilities of life are sheltered. But for Agamben, not all potentialities have
the same potential when it comes to the kinds and degrees of difference
necessary to disturb current biopolitical formations. In the difficult last
few sections of Homo Sacer, Agamben turns to a series of uncertain and
nameless terrains where life and death enter zones of indistinction.21
The American comatose patient Karen Quinlan exemplifies such spaces:
Karen Quinlans bodywhich wavers between life and death according
to the progress of medicine and the changes in legal decisionsis a legal
being as much as it is a biological being. A law that seeks to decide on life
10
Introduction
is embodied in a life that coincides with death.22 Death and life, far from
having become more exact, now [oscillate] from one pole to other with
the greatest indeterminacy.23 Failing to be actual, death and life become
pure potential. They can be or not be. And it is in these maximally intensified zones of oscillation and indeterminacy that new forms of life and
worlds will emerge and the ways and the forms of a new politics must
be thought.24 But rather than answering our question of how new forms
of social life can survive the perpetual variation of being, Agambens
examples intensify it. How can new forms of life, let alone the political
thought they might foster, persevere in such spaces? How can new social
worlds endure the wavering of death that defines these spaces?25 Indeed, so unlikely are the possibilities of new life surviving in these spaces
that, cribbing off Brian Massumi, we might describe instances of survival
as moments of miraculization.26
The social projects that interest this book may not have the force to act
in the sense of making anything like a definitive event occur in the world
(becoming a counterpublic is an achievement), but they exist, nevertheless, in the Spinozan sense of persisting in their being. And insofar as they
do, these alternative worlds maintain the otherwise that stares back at us
without perhaps being able to speak to us.
But if the point is not to discover the eternal or the universal, but to
find the singular conditions under which something new is produced,
then two specific aspects of social life need to be emphasized. This is of
special concern to those trying to write an anthropology of the otherwise.
On the one hand, attempting to address the question of the endurance,
let alone the survival, of alternative forms of life in the gale force of curtailing social winds opens a set of new ethical and political questions. If
the possibilities of new forms of life dwell and are sheltered within the
variation between the force of existing and the power of acting within
these intensified zones of being and not being, then what does immanent
critique demand of those who live in these zones? This problem becomes
particularly clear if we think of potentiality as the ethical substance of
immanent critique. If, as Michel Foucault defined it, ethical substance
is the prime material (matire principale) of moral reflection, conduct,
and evaluation, then the ethical substance of immanent critique would
be intensified potentiality, insofar as intensified potentiality is the ma-
terial on which ethical work (travail thique) is carried out. But this ethical work is distributed across different social groups. Thus it is important
to note, again following Foucaults reading of the use of pleasure among
the Greeks and the practice of critique more generally, that pleasure and
critique are generally available materials and practices, irrespective of the
fact that only some people make use of them. But the general availability
of intensified potential doesnt seem to be equally available in the same
way. Certainly all subjects exist in the variation between vis existendi and
potentia agendi and between modes of being and not being. But the intensity of this variation and its zoning are neither uniform nor uniformly
distributed. As a result a gap seems to open between those who reflect on
and evaluate ethical substance and those who are this ethical substance.
Thus, on the other hand, we need to understand, first, that late liberalism is
a social projectit is a metadiscourse that aggregates aspects of the social
worldand we need to understand, second, how this aggregation occurs
through and across other social projects and their material supports.
This book argues that a key means by which late liberalism aggregates
social worlds is through figurations of tense, eventfulness, and ethical
substance. So let me say a few things about how I understand the tense,
eventfulness, and ethical substance in late liberalism, beginning with
tense.
Tense, Eventfulness, Ethical Substance
The aspect of tense that interests me is broadly social rather than strictly
linguistic. I am interested in the social divisions of tense that help shape
how social belonging, abandonment, and endurance are enunciated and
experienced within late liberalism. From a grammatical perspective, tense
and event are themselves difficult to disambiguate. Metapragmatic approaches to discourse, for instance, understand tense and event to emerge
from the intersection between what is being narrated and the act of narrating itthe time during or over which the state or action denoted by
a verb occurs. In the grammatical past, for instance, the event being narrated is marked as prior to the act of narrating, while in the grammatical present tense the event being narrated coincides with the act of narrating it. Languages demonstrate a wide variety of ways of configuring
11
12
Introduction
the temporal relationship between what is being narrated and the act
of narrating it.27 French marks this relationship in a different way than
does English; English in a different way than the Australian Indigenous
language Emiyenggal. Emile Benveniste noted long ago, In one way or
another a language always makes a distinction of tense. Sometimes, as
in French and English, a past and future is separated by a present;
sometimes, as in various Amerindian languages, the preterite-present
is opposed to a future or a present future or distinguished from a past.
But for Benveniste what is shared across these differences is a line of
separation whose reference is the present, a time that Benveniste puts
in scare quotes to emphasize its performative nature.28 Thus, how various
narratives of belonging, abandonment, and endurance are socially enunciated and experienced depends in part on the ways that the relationship between the time of narration and the event narrated, or, put in another way, the event of narration and the narrated event, is grammatically
marked. What Le Guin is doing, for instance, is arguing that the event of
the childs misery cannot be narrated as if it were in the past perfect or the
future anterior. The grammar of the childs misery must be written in the
durative present.
What interests me is how these strictly grammatical figurations are absorbed into other discourses, affective attachments, and practices of late
liberalism. Take, for instance, teleological and eschatological discourses.
Grammars might differently mark the temporal relationship between
what is being narrated and the act of narrating it, constituting in the process the linguistic event, but in late liberalism this linguistic variation is
inflected by a shared teleological discourse that apprehends events as
[the] realization of an already given end or telos and a shared eschatological discourse that waits for extreme or ultimate moments and
events which immediately precede or accompany the end of history
and its reversal into eternity.29 In other words, the differences in narrative tense are metadiscursively refigured through teleological and eschatological discourses such as sacrifice and sacrificial love. As chapter 5
unpacks in more detail, discussions of sacrificial love can figure death,
whether an individuals death in war or a generations loss in structural
readjustment, as best understood from the perspective of the redemptive
end from which this death gains its meaning.
Teleological and eschatological are not the only tense-laden discourses

of late liberalism. Take, for instance, liberal constitutional events. Constitutions can be said to presuppose and project into social space a division
of tense, that is, the before and after the event of the constitution.30 Constitutionality divides national time between the liberal state of exception
(the foundational violence of the constitutional event) and liberal exceptionalism (the exclusion of further foundational violence that the constitution guarantees). Likewise, in previous writings, I have tried to suggest
how the intimate event is similarly laden with this performative tense, but
in the case of the intimate event this performative tense projects into
global space a temporally inflected civilizational division (the autological
subject and genealogical society).31 In this book the autological subject and
genealogical society, the brackets of recognition, the governance of the
prior, and sacrificial love are all examined as techniques of social tense
that are at hand when accounts of ongoing structural social harm are explained from a neoliberal or late liberal perspective. I will discuss this
projection in more detail below; for now it is important merely to note
that these complex, interrelated figurations of tense transform everyday
liberal life into problems of threshold, scale, and performative realization.
They continually deflect moral sense and practical reason from the durative present to an absolute difference between presence and absence or
the critical difference between the future anterior and the past perfect.
While time and the event have an internal relation vis--vis tense, there
is another aspect of the event and eventfulness that concerns this book.
Like Le Guin, I am interested in forms of suffering and dying, enduring and expiring, that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime. In other words, this book is interested
in the quasi-events that saturate potential worlds and their social projects.
If events are things that we can say happened such that they have a certain objective being, then quasi-events never quite achieve the status of
having occurred or taken place. They neither happen nor not happen. I
am not interested in these quasi-events in some abstract sense, but in the
concrete ways that they are, or are not, aggregated and thus apprehended,
evaluated, and grasped as ethical and political demands in specific late
liberal markets, publics, and states, as opposed to crises and catastrophes
that seem to necessitate ethical reflection and political and civic engage-
13
14
Introduction
ment. Crises and catastrophes are kinds of events that seem to demand, as
if authored from outside human agency, an ethical response. Not surprisingly then, these kinds of events become what inform the social science
of suffering and thriving, the politics of assembly and dispersal, and the
socially constituted senses of the extraordinary and everyday, as the work
of Veena Das and Joo Biehl have helped make clear.32 What techniques,
such as statistics, allow nonperceptual quasi- events to be transformed
into perceptual events, even catastrophes? What are the temporal and
epistemological presuppositions that foreclose an anthropology of ordinary suffering and thus an anthropological understanding of the dynamic
by which extraordinary events of violence are folded into everyday routinesand visa versa? How and why do things move from potentiality to
eventfulness to availability for various social projects? How might we turn
from an ontology of potentiality to a sociology of potentiality in which
potentiality is always embodied in specific social worlds? How can we
grasp some of the qualities of a material object that is nevertheless a discursive object? How can we talk about subject-effects and object-effects
without making materiality disappear or making its different manifestations irrelevant to the unequal organization of social life? And finally, how
can we simultaneously recognize that discourse makes objects appear,
that it does so under different material conditions, and that the matter
that matters forth from discourse is not identical to discourse?
These questions become especially pertinent when we turn to the
problem of ethical substance in late liberalism. If we take seriously Le
Guins narrative of the cosubstantiality of bodies in Omelas, then how
should we understand the relationship between ethical substance and
critical theory? Attempting to address the question of the endurance, let
alone the survival, of alternative forms of life in the gale force of curtailing social winds opens a set of new ethical and political questions. As
noted above, if the possibilities of new forms of life dwell and are sheltered within the variation between the force of existing and the power of
acting within these intensified zones of being and not being, then what
does immanent critique demand of those who live in these zones? This
problem becomes particularly clear if we think of potentiality as the ethical substance of immanent critique.
When I use the phrase ethical substance, I am clearly thinking here of
Michel Foucaults understanding of ethical substance as he enunciated it

in The Uses of Pleasure. And here I return to the issues, raised above, about
the sociology of potentiality in immanent critique. In Pleasure, Foucault
argued that in the Greek episteme ethical substance was bodily pleasure
insofar as it was the prime material (matire) of moral reflection, conduct, and evaluation.33 The ethical work (travail thique) of the self was
to establish proper conduct in relation to this ethical substancea substance that was material (matire)so as to bring into being the self that
was the object of ones behavior.34 As is also well known, Foucaults colleague at the Collge de France, the classicist Pierre Hadot, deeply influenced Foucaults thinking about askesis (exercise; self-mastery) and
about freedom as a kind of heterotopic spacing of the otherwise. As Foucault began reconceptualizing his second two volumes of The History of
Sexuality, Hadot engaged Foucault in conversation about various forms
of post-Socratic askesis: the Platonic renunciation of the pleasures of the
flesh under a specific dietary regime; Pyrrhonian indifference; the Cynic
endurance of hunger, cold, and insults; Epicurean limitation. Hadot believed that understanding practices of life within these post-Socratic
schools would help dislodge the hermeneutic bias of contemporary philosophical practice by demonstrating the classical emphasis on philosophy
as self-transformation. These discussions with Hadot were central to how
Foucault would come to think about critique as a type of virtue organized
around the question of governance (how not to be governed like that,
rather than how not to be governed at all). Central to these virtues of critique was an examination of forms of eventualization (vnementialisation)the relay between mechanisms of coercion and contents of knowledge likely to induce behaviors and discourses, affective attachments and
analytic tendencies.
And yet, as I noted above, in relation to the variation between vis existendi and potentia agendi, and between modes of being and not being,
while all subjects are subject to forms of eventualization, not all forms
of eventualization are the samenor are their powers of coercion and
incitement and intensities of variation and zoning equally distributed.
As a result, once again we see a gap open between those who reflect on
and evaluate ethical substance and those who are this ethical substance.
What I will suggest throughout this book, but especially in the last three
15
16
Introduction
chapters, is that the ethical substance of immanent critical theory is embodied potentiality insofar as embodied potentiality is the prime material
of moral reflection and evaluation. In some ways the gap between those
who reflect on and evaluate ethical substance and those who are ethical substance mirrors a much older gap in critical theory. We can think
here of the ways that Louis Althusser struggled to specify how intellectuals and the proletariat were differently situated in and represented class
struggle.35 But rather than dwell on the question of critical theorys proper
stance toward the subject that it posits as the engine of history, in this
introduction I want to examine a slightly different set of concerns. First,
I should note that I am myself aligned with the general project of immanent critique to find a source of a social otherwise outside a gesture of
transcendental consciousness. My alignment with immanent critique is
no doubt due to a certain aesthetic and theoretical predisposition to this
framework. But it also emerges out of a longstanding commitment to a
set of local Indigenous Australian understandings of the immanent geontological (the being of geology) source of life and its possibilities. Second,
given these commitments I want to turn from an ontology of potentiality
to a sociology of potentiality. Rather than the question of the variation of
being and not being or affects and ideas in general, I want to understand
this variation in specific historical contexts. But I am making a general
claim; namely, that potentiality and its perpetual variations never occur
in a general way, but always, as Delueze himself noted, in specific agencementsarrangements of connecting concepts, materials, and forces that
make a common compositional unity.
Before elaborating what an alternative glossary might consist of, let
me turn to what I mean by neoliberalism and by way of this explain why I
use the chronotrope of late liberalism rather than other available chronotropes such as liberalism, neoliberalism, postcolonial liberalism, or diasporic liberalism. It is critical to this discussion that even as I describe
how I am using these terms I do not think that they are referring to some
given state of affairs. Liberalism, late liberalism, and neoliberalism do not
exist as things in the ordinary sense of the term but rather as actions like a
sighting or a citing. They exist insofar as they are evoked to conjure, shape,
aggregate, and evaluate a variety of social worlds, and each of these conjurings, shapings, aggregations, and evaluations disperse liberalism as a
global terrain.
Neoliberalism
First to what I mean by neoliberalism. The term neoliberalism, as used

by writers as diverse as Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, and Michel
Foucault, marks the transformation of state politics and market relations
between the postwar Bretton Woods agreement (loosely the Keynesian
period) to its collapse in the 1970s and marks two different philosophies
about the proper relationship among markets, state, and civil society.36
In general Keynesians believedand still believethat because capitalism is subject to periodic unemployment crises, it should be regulated
by state and international monetary and fiscal policy, one pillar of which
is the redistributive compromise among state, corporation, and labor.
With the collapse of Bretton Woods, neoliberals argued for the privatization and deregulation of state assets, the territorial dispersion of production through subcontracting, and a shift in tax policies that favored the
rich. Central to neoliberal thinking is the idea that the market naturally
pays people what they are worthand that bargaining power organized
through extant institutional arrangements should have nothing to do with
income distribution. Indeed, so the argument goes, intervening in the
market through group bargaining distorts fair distribution based on the
ultimate rationality of the market to pay people what they are worth.
But whatever neoliberalism is, what it refers to is not an event, but a
set of uneven social struggles within the liberal diaspora. Ronald Reagans assault on the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in
1981 and Margaret Thatchers confrontation with the National Union of
Mineworkers in 198485 occurred more than a decade before the Australian prime minister John Howard confronted the waterfront unions
in 1997. Likewise, a formal relationship among state, corporations, and
labor came much earlier in Europe than Australia.37 In Australia, this
formal compromise came with the 1983 Prices and Incomes Accord (colloquially known as The Accord) even as both the Hawke and Keating governments instituted key pillars of neoliberalismprivatization of
state corporations, floating the currency, and dropping trade barriers.38
Conceptualizing noliberalism as a series of struggles across an uneven
social terrain allows us to see how these heterogeneous spaces provide
the conditions for new forms of sociality and for new kinds of markets
and market instruments (or products). The derivative trade is perhaps
17
18
Introduction
exemplary of new markets and instruments. Prior to 1970 no organized

financial-derivative exchange existed anywhere in the world. By the end
of 2006, exchange-traded derivatives totaling 84.4 trillion dollars were
globally outstanding.39 And by 2010, the United States was attempting to
reregulate this vast network of capital speculation.
Begun in 2003, the writing of this book stretched across the global
boom and bust of the first half of the twenty-first century, the height of
the neoliberal ascendency. At the turn of the century, debates focused on
the shape of the neoliberal relationship among state, market, and empire.
For instance, Giovanni Arrighi proposed that the concentration of power
in the hands of particular blocs of governmental and business agencies
has been as essential to the recurrent material expansions of the capitalist
world-economy as the competition among approximately equal political structures.40 That is, capital expansion and empire were intimately
linked whether or not empire took the form of older multinational states
such as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires or the form of the
Westphalian nation-state.41 From this perspective, Arrighi claimed that
we were witnessing the last stages of the material and financial expansion
of the U.S. empire, the heir of the British Empire, and the first stages of
an Asian century.42 Although less sanguine about the imminent demise of
the American empire, David Harvey, writing in the wake of the Bush war
on terror, argues that, whether of a British, American or Chinese shape, all
imperial undergarments of capitalist expansion have a similar cut, namely,
accumulation by dispossession.43 As in previous centuries, what we were
witnessing in neoliberal capital was the displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat.44 What has changed,
Harvey argues, is the location of accumulation by dispossession, not the
process. In the last three decades the displacement of peasant populations
has been occurring in countries such as Mexico and India where many
formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatized
(often at World Bank insistence) and brought within the capitalist logic
of accumulation.45 The political theorist Glen Coulthard has extended
and refashioned Harveys argument by focusing on the foundational and
ongoing events of Indigenous dispossession.46
The internal spoils of this new organization of neoliberal governmentality did not lead to a general rise in the life-worlds of all people.47 Rather
than the doors of various broom closets being swung open, the occupants
of these closets were shuffled around while new justifications for belonging and abandonment emerged. Some continental disparities continued.
Africa remained mired in what Achille Mbembe calls a necropolitics
the spatial demarcation of Africa as a society of spectacular killing and
death.48 Other continents emerged as major economic and social forces.
China and India of coursebut also South Americaemerged as major
centers for a renewed revolutionary Left fueled by such means as petrol
pesos (Venezuela) and production centers (Brazil) even while the material benefits of the revolution remains unclear. (If Harvey is right, the
rise in the capital power of these states corresponds with the formation of
a new landless proletariat.) In other, long-developed contexts, wealth was
reorganized. Andreas Cornia and Julius Court have shown that from the
1960s to the 1990s, inequality of wealth has increased in the vast majority
of developed and developing countries and has decreased only in France
and Norway.49 In the United States, countless economists on the right
and left have noted a dramatic concentration of wealth in the top one
percent of the population. If middle- and working-class Americans didnt
feel the shift in wealth, this was largely due to consumption practices that
depended on the acquisition of a huge middle- class debt through easy
credit.
What new political opportunities are made available by these old wineskins is unclear. Some think that the new globally striated nature of accumulation by dispossession will provide the possibility for new supranational grassroots political alliances, such as alliances between residents
of small American towns in Maine fighting the company Poland Springs
for control of municipal waters and residents of the Indian city of Varanasi protesting Coca-Cola Companys access to scarce water supplies.50
Others propose that class struggle might be giving way more generally
to the multitude or to a loosely organized anarchist Left.51 What does
seem clear is that neoliberalism is not a thing but a pragmatic concept
a toolin a field of multiple maneuvers among those who support and
benefit from it, those who support it and suffer from it, and those who
oppose it and benefit from it neverthelesseach action changing if only
slightly the field of maneuver itself.52 Again, from a certain logical point of
view, this field of maneuver is available to anyone, but in the actual worlds
19
20
Introduction
of neoliberalism, the generally available is always distributed in specific

ways.
What seemed clear when I began this book was that, with the United
States mired in a disastrous war in Iraq and the emergence of potential
market counterhegemons in China, India, and Russia, whose political
forms resist or outright reject the typical conjuncture of capitalism and
democracy, liberalism as a broader formation was in crisis. Key pillars of
liberalism as a general theory of political governancethat there is a selfevident relationship between a political form (democracy) and economic
form (capital market)no longer seemed so self-evident to key global
players. Socialism with Chinese characteristics seemed to be providing a
major engine for an unparalleled rate of world growth and, consequentially the capital to expand into and transform long-stagnant zones in
Africa and elsewhere. This rise of counterhegemons subsequently opened
new potential for South-South relations, unmediated by the G8, even as
it challenged liberal democracy as the horizon of a world political economy.53 In other words, the G8 faced increasing competition not merely
for economic authority but also for political legitimacy from the G20. The
liberalneoliberal G8 was not late in the sense of near to the end of its life,
but late in the sense of being belatedthat fundamental assumptions
about the inevitable relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy were being decentered and provincialized.54 Thus the problem was
not simply, as Wallerstein noted, that neoliberal capital expansion in the
first world was financed by the fantastic expansion of borrowing (indebtedness) via the sale of U.S. treasury bonds to the controllers of world
energy supplies and low-cost production facilities.55 The problem was
that the major holder of this escalating debt (China) was not a liberal
democracy, nor did it seem to need to be to be a driving market force. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was exactly during this period that a form of neoconservatism reemerged in the United States, proposing that the United
States use its economic, political, and military strength and influence to
impose liberalism, market capitalism, and democracy on other countries
even as it claimed that this triumvirate was the natural destiny of all civilizations.
But neoliberalism is not merely a set of arrangements among the markets, labor, and state, nor is it merely an older form of laissez-faire capi-
Changing amount of U.S. Treasury Securities held by selected states, in billions of dollars.
(source : Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities, February 27, 2009. Department of the
Treasury, Federal Reserve Board)
talism. By the time Foucault was giving his 197879 lectures, The Birth
of Biopolitics (Naissance de la Biopolitique), he had become interested in
what he called todays liberal . . . or neoliberal program (la programmation librale ou, comme on dit, neolibrale notre epoque). Of decisive import for Foucault was the noncorrespondence between laissezfaire liberalism and neoliberalism. Neoliberals did not merely wish to free
the economy from the Keynesian regulatory state; they wished to free
the truth games of capitalism from the market itselfthe market should
be the general measure of all social activities and values.56 In a recent
New York Times Book Review essay, Tony Judt asked how and why liberal
democracies like the United States, Britain, and Australia stopped assessing social programs and actions on the basis of political philosophy and
instead restricted themselves to issues of profit and loss, and languages of
21
22
Introduction
efficiency, productivity, and benefit to gross domestic profit.57 As Wendy

Brown has noted, in neoliberalism the market is no longer seen as a selfperpetuating machine but as a normative achievement that is the result
of aggressive social policies.58 Thus the ascendency of neoliberals in Germany and the United States was not the resurgence of old forms of liberal
economic ideology formulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
but a new form of governmentality, namely, a new way in which power
over and through life and death was being organized and expressed.
What Foucault did not discuss was that neoliberalism transformed an
older liberal governance of life and death. Neoliberalism has not merely
mimicked the move from faire mourir ou laisser vivre to faire vivre et
laisser mourir. It has resuscitated faire mourir into its topology of faire
vivre and laisser mourir, even as the more dominant powers of making live
and letting die have changed the techniques of state killing. Any form
of life that could not produce values according to market logic would
not merely be allowed to die, but, in situations in which the security of
the market (and since the market was now the raison dtre of the state,
the state) seemed at stake, ferreted out and strangled. This way of killing
is not commensurate with an older sovereign power Foucault so viscerally described in the opening of Discipline and Punish. There are not public spectacles of drawn and quartered bodiesor lynched bodies. Secret
agreements are made to remove the body to be tortured far away from
public sight and scrutiny. Moreover these new semipublic and secret ways
of making die have their counterpart in market disciplines. Any form of
life that is not organized on the basis of market values is characterized as
a potential security risk. If a social welfare program, for instance, can be
shown to lengthen life and increase health, but cannot at the same time
be shown to produce a market value, this lengthened life and increased
health is not a value to be capacitated. Indeed, it is a value to be actively
attacked and rooted out of the state and national psyche. Once we understand that neoliberalism is neither laissez-faire liberalism nor Keynsianismneither a social formation in which the state allows the market to
proceed on the basis of one set of principles and the market allows the
state to proceed on another set of principles, nor a well planned form
of state and market regulationbut something much more aggressive,
then we can understand why we get nowhere within neoliberalism argu-
ing whether this or that person did or didnt care about the vulnerable or
that this or that social welfare program was or was not a failure. Instead
we need to start asking what are the measures of failure, the arts of failure,
such that people believe and experience cultural recognition and social
welfare as failures. After all, as I hope subsequent chapters will make clear,
failure is not an ideal form floating outside social space. Failure is instead
a socially mediated term for assessing the social world. When chapter 4
asks why social welfare in Australia suddenly seemed to stop working at
the turn of the century, it doesnt try to first define what failure is or isnt.
Instead it demonstrates how within a neoliberal framework any social investment that does not have a clear end in market valuea projectable
moment when state input values (money, services, care) can be replaced
by market output value (workers compensated and supported by nothing
except the market)fails economically and morally. And a social investment is an economic and moral failure, whether or not the investment is
life-enhancing.
By 2003, in Australia where I have focused most of my quarter-century
or so of research, the neoliberal reorientation of global economic hegemony seemed well under way as well as the accumulations by dispossession it sparked. The global commodity boom fueled by the production boom in China and Southeast Asia raised the Australian dollar to
near parity with the American dollar (by 2011 it had achieved parity). The
Australian mining industry led the way in producing a twenty-two billion dollar federal surplus in 2008. (Other primary exporting states were
seeing similar surplus booms.) In this economic environment, Australia
seemed sheltered by the double-digit expansion of the Chinese economy
and vigorously courted new trade agreements with it. But rather than expanding social welfare to its Indigenous citizens, the conservative federal government reversed a longstanding commitment to cultural recognition and reconciliation. I discuss this at length in the next chapter, but
here is just a taste. In July 2007, the government announced an intervention in Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory. The government
pegged its declaration of emergency to the release of the Little Children
Are Sacred report that claimed that some Aboriginal children were being
sexually abused because of the fetid nature of Indigenous communities.
The government called for a move beyond the politics of recognition
23
24
Introduction
and reconciliation to a free market approach to Indigenous affairs. Everyone agreed that Indigenous life would initially be much worse. But, in a
move readers should now be able to anticipate, from the perspective of
the future good that market integration would bring, this present suffering, we were told, should be bracketed. Focus on the future.
This form of neoliberal governance was itself shaken at the end of my
writing of this book. By the fall of 2008 the crisis of capitalism and liberalism wasnt merely formal in sense of what kinds of state forms could
not only be compatible with capitalism but were necessary to its current
formation. It was now linked to a very different set of circumstances. A
global financial credit crisis arose in large part from the collapse of a host
of new financial instruments intended to manipulate the assets of longterm market investments for enormous short-term profit. The collapse
of the credit market led to the collapse of consumption in the United
States, production in China, commodity exports in the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries and Australia, and currencies in Eastern
Europe. China did not immediately emerge as an independent engine
of growth as widely hoped, although it continued to grow and, by this
growth, buffer the effects of the recession in commodity export centers
such as Australia. But Russia, Venezuela, and Dubai were caught banking too heavily and exclusively on high oil revenues.59 By March of 2009,
the World Bank predicted that worldwide gross domestic product would
shrink for the first time since the Second World War.60 The Brussels Forum
followed suit, with the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, stating that 2009 would be a dangerous year, with issues going beyond the
economic to political and social instability.61 In the midst of these events
many proposals were advanced to fix global capitalism or to bring it finally
to its knees. To those arguing that we were witnessing the end of neoliberalism and, subsequently, the end of capitalism, Amartya Sen reminded the
readers of the New York Review of Books that even Adam Smith envisioned
a world of diverse economic formations (free markets and governmentcontrolled social domains such as education) within capitalism. Smith
never thought that capitalism, with its signature characteristics of market
transactions, profit motivation, and individually based private property,
was sufficient.62 That Sen was incited to defend capitalism by differentiating it from neoliberalism suggests something late about liberalism, not
in the sense that we are seeing its last hurrah, but that it has entered a
new stage of reflexivity. With the calming of the markets, the loosening of
credit, and the tentative return to consumption, some of this reflexivity
may yet wane. And how this globally systemic crisis is resolved in liberal
democracies, if it is resolved, is as of yet unclear. We see some contours of
a post-postBretton Woods world emergingthe return of a more robust
regulatory environment, the partial nationalization of industry and banks,
and the call for a global currency independent of the U.S. dollar.63
If this book seeks to understand how social projects that lie on the cusp
of being endure, then it turns not to an ontotheoretical answer, but to a
sociographic which roots analysis in the actual conditions of neoliberalismand late liberalism.
Late Liberalism
So why do I use the phrase late liberalism? By late liberalism, as distinct from these varieties and specificities of capitalism and state, I mean
the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it responds to a series
of legitimacy crises in the wake of anticolonial, new social movements,
and new Islamic movements. But in a broader sense late liberalism is a
belated response to the challenge of social difference and the alternative social worlds and projects potentially sheltered there. From the 1950s
onward, and culminating in the dramatic world events of 1968, anticolonial and new social movements transfigured the prior way in which liberalism governed alternative forms of life by putting extreme pressure
on its legitimating frameworksimperial arts of paternalist and civilizational governance. Anticolonial and new social movements refigured
these paternalistic arts of civilizational care into acts of colonial domination and dispossession. Activists and their theorists, such as W. E. B.
Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, claimed that Western arts of caring for the
colonized and subaltern were not rectifying human inequalities but creating and entrenching them. But this legitimacy crisis was, over time,
turned into a crisis of culture for the governed as state after state instituted formal or informal policies of cultural recognition (or cognate policies such as multiculturalism) as a strategy for addressing the challenge
of internal and external difference that they faced. The political theorists
25
26
Introduction
Wendy Brown and Patchen Markell have described this as the culturalization of politics.64 In the wake of the liberal states recognition of past
harm, the crisis would no longer be a crisis of liberal legitimacy but a crisis
of how to allow cultures a space within liberalism without rupturing the
core frameworks of liberal justice. In short, in late liberalism to care for
difference is to make a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of figuring experienceordinary habitual truths. And
thus to assess care in late liberalism is to assess the capacity of culture as
an agent of care.
No matter how superficially they might seem the same thing, the culturalization of politics was not the same as the colonial critique of liberalism. As the first two chapters elaborate in more detail, late liberal cultural
recognition incorporated and disciplined the challenge that anticolonial
and new social movements posed to liberal forms of government by shifting the locale of the crisis and creating a definitive, though undefined,
limit on the formative legal and social power of cultural difference. For
this shift to become practical, culture had to become pliant to legal and
social science analysis and political and social incorporation. In the first
instance, culture had to become equivalent to an artifactsomething
that could be said to have specific qualities that could then be measured
and evaluated. Anthropologists of a certain structural and structuralfunctionalism ilk were helpful here. They truly believe(d) that culture is a
set of rulesrules of descent and kinship or ritual and symbolic orders
that people do or do not follow as one follows a recipe. The souffl rises
or fails toand its success depends upon what the rules are for making
it and whether one follows them. In the second instance, this version of
culture had to come out of the mouths of others. But even here, only a
specific kind of other will dothe general other, the other that complies
with the rules.
Not only was culture made into an object that one could possess or
insufficiently create, the actions of different cultures were assigned different tensesnot merely different times, as Johannes Fabian so nicely
demonstrated, but different tenses.65 And this is what I tried to suggest
in The Empire of Love by way of the division between the autological subject and the genealogical society. In brief the autological subject refers to
multiple discourses and practices that invoke the autonomous and self-
determining subject, and which are therefore linked to, but not exhausted
in, liberalisms emphasis on freedom, more narrowly conceived as a political philosophy. The genealogical society, on the other hand, refers to
discourses that stress social constraint and determination in processes of
subject constitution and construe the subject as bound by various kinds
of inheritances. But these discourses of freedom and constraint are themselves animated by an imaginary of national and civilizational tense. Foucault noted as much in his Collge de France lectures, Society Must Be
Defended, where he argued that Europe witnessed an inversion of the
temporal axis of the [political] demand. Reading the work of Abb de
Sieyes in the broad context of new-regime France, Foucault argued that
the political demand would no longer be made in the name of a past
right that was established by either a consensus, a victory, or an invasion.
Instead the demand would be articulated in terms of a potentiality, a
future, a future that is immediate, which is already present in the present
because it concerns a certain function of Statist universality that is already
fulfilled by a nation within the social body, and which is therefore demanding that its status as a single nation must be effectively recognized,
and recognized in the juridical form of the State.66
But the temporal inversion Foucault diagnosed was not merely a transformation of Europe in relation to itself. The inversion of the temporal
axis of the demand had a dual address. It constituted a division of tense
within Europe (what it had been and what it was now becoming) and
a division between Europe and non-Europe (what Europeans were becoming and what non-Europeans were). This doubly situated inversion
of tense connects the two major if fitful developments (the consolidation of demos and colons) that marked the long European dure from the
fourteenth to the seventeenth century and was consolidated in the eighteenth to the nineteenth. It locates this dure in a topological knot in
which Europe (demos) is in the body of the colonies (colons) as surely
as the citizens of Omelas are in the body of the child in the broom closet.
As democracy fitfully expanded across Europe and European conquest
across the globe the truth of some would be increasingly judged in terms
of a past perfect beingtheir already having been or, their potential to
stop being what they are still in essencewhile the truth of others would
be judged from their potentiality. The futures of some, or the hopes that
27
28
Introduction
they have for their future, can never be a future. They can only drag others
into the past (Osama bin Laden [Radical Islam going backward] coordinated the bombings). And for others, no matter what harms they
do, the truth of these harms is deferred into the future. What is happening isnt happening because it is what it will have been when the last man
has his say. The society of potentiality (demos) seemed to demand societies of fixity (colons), as if the future anterior of freedom demanded
the clawing determination of the customary to make its difference visible
and palpable. Indeed, so fundamentally is this history internal to modern
Europes language of itself that its foundational terms of critical reference are saturated by this temporal inversion. Even the seemingly neutral social scientific term, the social cannot escape these same historical
conditions, on the contrary: the historicity of the autological subject and
genealogical society is internal to the historicity of the sign, the social,
and consequently to the divisions of social belonging, social worlds, and
social projects that I am examining.67 That we can say, the social as opposed to the individual, and that we can compare different (individual)
social worlds presupposes the division between the autological subject
and genealogical society.68
Late liberalism is not an epochal form that emerged in the wake of
national, anticolonial, and new social movements, and subsequently
ceased to adapt to new conditions. Late liberalism is no more a unified
thing then is neoliberalism: they are both uneven terrains of social maneuver. This has become exceedingly clear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Though not born at this moment, a reactionary position to cultural difference, especially Anglo-American forms of multiculturalism, has taken
on new force since the attacks. The rise of this reactionary movement is
perhaps exemplified by the influence of Samuel P. Huntingtons The Clash
of Civilizations in neoconservative circles, but no matter whether we use
this text or another as a marker, we have witnessed over the last decade a
new and intensive shift in the governance of social difference. As the next
two chapters make clear, culture is once again being inflected by a civilizational rhetoric. And this civilizational rhetoric has been articulated to
national and international security. British, French, and German politicians such as David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel have
declared state multiculturalism a failure and called for a robust defense
of western liberal principles.69 As chapter 3 argues, however, this seeming
shift from cultural recognition to liberal defensiveness is drawing on two

modes already within state multiculturalism, namely, cultural espionage
and camouflage.
Although I make a distinction between late liberalism and neoliberalism, I do not conceptualize these two as external to each other, for
two main reasons. First, state forms of late liberalism arose within the
struggle between Keynesian liberals and neoliberals. The culmination of
key anticolonial and new social movements occurred in the same decades
as the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the election of proneoliberals such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The apparent
conflict between neoconservatives and neoliberals to multiculturalism
(and other robust forms of cultural recognition) clouds the fact that both
emerged as powerful social forces in the same few decades. Second, late
liberal ways of framing social difference through specific configurations
of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance are utilized by laissez-faire
liberals, Keynesian liberals, and neoliberals to legitimate differential belonging. These configurations are ready to hand across these ideological
positions because they lie in the deep integrated background of late liberal life, making sense of pockets of abandonment and differential belonging. They allow the killing of all social projects that do not produce
market forms of life to be justified on the basis of a distinction between
societies of freedom and those of constraint, and the security risk of
allowing the latter to gain a footing in the former. They make these forms
of killing and letting die seem right, reasonable, and good. They figure the
relationship between dominant forms, justifications, and experiences of
social belonging, abandonment, and endurance and changing economic
forms such as the recent dramatic cycle between capital accumulation
and concentration and capital contraction and realignment.
Again, if a social otherwise is to emerge from the potentialities of this
ordering of governance, then it must find a way of persisting and enduring
in these late liberal ways of making live, making die, and letting die.
An Alternative Glossary for Late Liberalism
Economies of Abandonment not only looks at how late liberal figurations

of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance distract the eye from potential social worlds and their social projects but also offers an alternative
29
30
Introduction
vocabulary for understanding these spaces as lived worlds. My argument

is that specific, if mobile, figurations of tense, eventfulness, and ethical
substance aggregate harm in such a way that its ethical and political demand is dispersed and dissipated. But this book is also interested in how
alternative social projects are able to open a space in these assumptions
as they endure this dissipationand more, to become more than merely
persistence. As a result, I make use of an alternative glossary that seeks to
illuminate ways that alternative social projects aggregate life diagonal to
hegemonic ways of life.
Espionage and Camouflage. I begin by returning to Johannes Fabians classic text, Time and the Other, placing it in recent debates in Australia and
the United States on social difference in order to show how the tense of
the other is availableis at handwhenever the problem of cultural recognition arises. I spend time elaborating this point in order to show not
merely that the tense of the other is always at hand when confronting the
problem of cultural recognitionthe major feature of modern late liberalismbut that recognition itself should be understood as simply one
modality of a larger triadic dynamic of recognition-espionage-camouflage.
By espionage I mean actual practices of spying and being spied on, as
well as a much broader and diverse set of assumptions that someone is
trying to penetrate a socially sealed space. In espionage, value circulates
in such a way that both those circulating it and those trying to impede its
circulation avoid the initial confrontation underlying the imaginary of
recognition. By camouflage I mean the art of hiding within a given environment via embodied disguise. These actual practices of cloaking are
part of a much broader and diverse set of discourses about modes of concealment that allow otherwise visible organisms or objects to remain indiscernible from the surrounding environment.70 Obviously camouflage,
as I am using it, has a genealogical relationship to mimicry and colonialism, say the work of Fanon, Bhabha, and Serres, and equally obviously
perhaps, they are not merely spectral qualities but involve the entire sensory apparatus.
Many scholars, including myself, have for some time now argued that,
rather than adjudicating between antagonistic worlds, liberal forms of
cultural recognition project an internal incommensurability within lib-
eralism onto the subject of recognition. Liberal exceptionalism pivots

on the commonsense truth of two competing, or at least incommensurate, political and social discourses and their affective entailmentsthat
in cases of cultural conflict the problem of difference is solved through
public reason and in these same cases moral reason must draw red lines
across which difference cannot proceed, or a bracket must be put around
the difference so that it can be removed from public debate until that
time its challenge can be managed. In moments when these two impulses
collide, liberal cultural recognition shifts the burden and responsibility
for maintaining liberalisms exceptionalism from dominant to subaltern
and minority members of society. The subjects of recognition are called
to present difference in a form that feels like difference but does not permit any real difference to confront a normative world. In these moments,
recognition cannot be separated from its modal twins, espionage and
camouflage, and thus the precarious potentiality of each is continually
oscillating across all three states. They are the modes of recognition that
become visible when, as a result of some threat to late liberal security, the
tense of the other is written as a bracket. In these redlined and bracketed
moments, difference is given a tense and moodsay, the past perfect and
subjunctiveand recognition is transformed into the modality of espionage and camouflage.
Endurance and the Endurant. Because the types of social projects that
interest me exist in the precarious zone of being and not being and between vis existendi and potentia agendi, this book is interested in three
modes of their life: social belonging, abandonment, and endurance. Each
of these aspects of existence presents a different angle on the issue of
tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance. Approaching ethical substance
from the perspective of belonging and abandonment cantends to
figure substance as a secondary condition. On the one hand, we have the
social logics of belonging and abandonment and, on the other hand, the
how or to what material condition one belongs or is abandoned; for example, the child is abandoned and the material conditions of this abandonment are such and such. These second-order questions are often not
sufficiently probed, leading to some questionable conflations of various
states of so-called bare life. The question of enduranceand its social
31
32
Introduction
antonym, exhaustionrefuses to consider the substance of being as a

secondary quality. Internal to the concept of endurance (and exhaustion) is the problem of substance: its strength, hardiness, callousness;
its continuity through space; its ability to suffer and yet persist. We get a
glimpse of what is at stake here in ordinary English exchanges. If we hear
someone has been abandoned, we might ask how she is doing. But if we
are told that someone is enduring a tragedy, we do not usually ask how
she is doing but how we might help. Moreover, endurance encloses itself
around the durativethe temporality of continuance, a denotation of
continuous action without any reference to its beginning or end and outside the dialectic of presence and absence. Enduring isnt a singularity. As
will become clear, especially in chapter 4, endurance is not a homogenous
space. Every scene of endurance, and certainly the scenes that concern
this book, is shot through with multiple and incommensurate configurations of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance and aggregations of
life. The alternative social projects that lie within these stretched and striated spaces must survive eventfulness that is below the threshold of the
catastrophic and ethical substance as sacrifice.
Immanent Obligation, the Dwelling Sciences, and the Demand to Capacitate.
The kind of immanent critical theory that this book supports and worries
constantly confronts the problems of adjudication, ethical commitment,
and political action. How, among the variety of alternative worlds struggling for dominance, does one assess which should live on? Habermas
insisted that any critical project must have recourse to norms on which
evaluative judgments about specific social projects, goals, and values can
be made. Nancy Fraser, among others, took up Habermass argument and
criticized Foucault for a dual failure. She argued that because his work
lacked a normative commitment it could not, on the one hand, adjudicate among a variety of antagonistic alternative worlds nor, on the other
hand, provide prescriptive solutions to empirical reason. While disagreeing with how Habermas and Fraser ground adjudication, I think they are
right that the way that immanent critique adjudicates among antagonistic
worlds cannot emerge from a normative commitment. If we believe that
life is cosubstantial, then whatever forms of adjudication we have must be
equally cosubstantial within the space we are adjudicating.
The kinds of cosubstantial potentiality and its adjudication I propose

are simple and I am sure unsatisfactory. First, immanent critique will have
to abandon any gesture to the difference of the will when answering why
some people persist in striving to be and others do not, or why certain
potentialities achieve the miraculous state of counterpublics and others
do not. The will has long been an alibi of late liberal and neoliberalism.
The will becomes a way of holding those who suffer accountable: Look,
this one had the will to lift herself up by her own bootstraps; and If she
could, why cant you? And those who are able to be the miracle aggregate
the hope of the Right and Left, leaving in the analytical shadows the far
greater number of those who could or did not. Here we might remember
Spinozas view of the concept of human free will as a result of men being
conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are
determined.71 Thus rather than will, I press heavily on the notion of immanent obligation as a no-mans-land between choice and determination. By immanent obligation I am referring to a form of relationality
that one finds oneself drawn to and finds oneself nurturing, or caring for
in the midst of critical reflexivity. This being drawn to or repelled is
often initially a very fragile connection, a sense of an immanent connectivity. Choices are then made to enrich and intensify these connections.
But even these choices need to be understood as retrospectivethe subject choosing is herself continually deferred by the choice. In other words,
she is and is beginning to be different in the vicinity of this choice; she is
belated to herself, arriving too late to be any use to adjudication. I might
be able to describe why I am drawn to a particular space and I may try to
nurture this obligation or to break away from it, but still I have very little
that can be described as choice in the original orientation.
This leads to my second point, equally simple, if unsatisfactory. Assessmentadjudicationwill always emerge in the queasy space of dwelling within these potential worlds, a dwelling within that is reshaping the
subject who will then assess these worlds. Judith Butler makes a similar argument when she claims that Foucaults contribution to normative
theory lies in the poiesis of desubjugation and self-making.72 Adjudication
arises not via some transcendental gesture, no matter how fragile, but
from a continual reflexively practiced dwelling within the worlds to be
adjudicated. Thus adjudication is not merely internally tethered to ethi-
33
34
Introduction
cal commitment and desubjugating obligation but also to the capacitating

of potential life in late liberalism. This demand to capacitate foregrounds
without sidestepping the queasy and uncertain terrain between epistemology and deontology and the constant uncertainty of capacitating life
at the threshold of being and not being.
Governance of the Prior. If this book was written in a particular moment, it
was also written from a particular point of viewindigenous politics and
socialities within the settler colony. The chapters that follow do not draw
exclusively on ethnographic research in Indigenous Australia, though
they do concentrate their thought on two settler nations, Australia and
the United States. Other materials include contemporary struggles within
the radical ecological movement, religious jurisprudence, and state tactics
in the shadow of the war on terror. But, in the first instance, I think it is
important to note my vantage on these issues has been deeply influenced
by twenty-five years spent working closely with Indigenous Australians.
From this point of view of the issues I discuss seem unavoidable. As a fact
of daily life, Indigenous subjects face the disciplinary nature of late liberal
tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance through a specific mode of governance I am calling the governance of the priorthe priority of the prior
across political, market, and social relations. The governance of the prior
is, however, striated with other social divisions of tense such as the division of the autological subject and genealogical society. And throughout
this book I will argue that although originating in settler nationalism and
concentrated there, the governance of the prior provides an essential formation of tense and event to the governance of difference in late liberalism.73
Others have discussed the relationship between settler nationalism
and prior occupancy. The political scientist Jeremy Waldron has discussed
whether the general duty of a government to do justice to all citizens
within its territorial jurisdiction is trumped by any special duty to Indigenous people based on the claims of first and prior occupancy.74 Waldron
argues against the triumph of indigeneity by first differentiating two foundations of Indigenous claimsfirst occupancy and the claim of prior occupancyboth of which he believes fail to pass a basic test of Rawlsian
justice. Indigenous claims made on the foundation of first occupancy face
two problems, according to Waldron. The first is evidentiary (first occupancy is nearly impossible to prove because its truth stretches into prerecorded history); the second is the hierarchies of justice (the fact of
being first, even if it could be proved, is only one of a set of values that
must be assessed when deciding issues of justice). According to Waldron,
Indigenous claims made on the basis of prior occupancy gain moral force
from the human interest in stability, security, certainty, and peace, and
for the sake of those values it prohibits overturning existing arrangements
irrespective of how they were arrived at.75 But they also suffer from an
ever-decreasing moral weight as the event of dispossession recedes into
historical time.
In a brilliant critique of Waldron, Robert Nichols slowly unpacks the
assumptions built into his model and analysis. Nichols notes that in order
to divide Indigenous claims into the categories of first and prior occupancy, Waldron must assume that contract theory, the principles of personhood it presupposes, and the ontological categories of being it projects
are also indigenous categoriesthat is, universal, general epistemological
and ontological categories. Numerous Indigenous studies scholars, from
Vine Deloria to Dale Turner in the United States, and Deborah Bird Rose
to Irene Watson in Australia, have decisively demonstrated this not to be
the case.76 Moreover, scholars such as Glen Coulthard and J. Khaulani
Kauanui have shown dispossession is not a historical event but an ongoing process.77
When I speak of the governance of prior, I am specifically interested
in the social genealogies of these kinds of political theoretical abstractions. There is not enough space here to discuss at length the conditions
that gave rise to the governance of the prior in the modern settler nationstate, the nation-state system more generally, or the Indigenous as a specific and general formation within the history of colonial settlement, let
alone the variations and complexities of these interlocking relations of
the governance of the prior with the divisions of the autological subject
and genealogical society.78 This much I can say, if all too briefly. The conditions of the governance of the prior were in place before the emergence
of the modern liberal nation-state. And this is true whether we believe
that the modern nation-state emerged in the eighteenth-century Americas, as does Benedict Anderson, or only after the Second World War, as
35
36
Introduction
do John Kelly and Martha Kaplan.79 What matters is how nationalisms

emerged. And what Anderson emphasizes is that one of the justifications, sooner or later for the new nationalism was their creole nature:
their distinctive history, and especially their demographic blending of
settler and indigenous peoples, to say nothing of local traditions, geographies, climates, and so forth.80 This manner of strategically claiming that
inhabitation in a continent took priority over a foreign colonial homeland
became the modular form of the modern national imaginary. Projecting
themselves against the metropolitan state, non-Native Americans could
claim and experience themselves as the prior occupants of the Americas.
But in acceding to the logic of the priority of the prior as the legitimate
foundation of governance, the settler state projected those who already
inhabited the land before the settlers arrival as spatially, socially, and temporally before it in the double sense of beforebefore it in a temporal
sequence and before it as a fact to be faced. Susan Scheckel examined this
dynamic in the American literary nationalisms of the early nineteenth
century. Anxious that the Revolutionary War would lead not to a new and
lasting peace but to an endless series of subsequent revolutions, many
literary nationalists of the early nineteenth century suggested that the history and myths of American Indians could provide the new nation with
a sense of primitive origins.81 But while solving one problem, literary
creolization created another, namely the governance of the prior as a temporal sequence and event: Who had the right to own and govern the land
originally possessed by Indians and inherited through the Revolution?82
Thus we see another source of the deep belatedness of late liberalism.
This division of tense within the social fabric of emerging settler nationalism bifurcated the sources and grounds of social belonging in such
a way that the relationship between settler and Native/Indigenous was
transformed from a mutual implication in the problem of prior occupation to a hierarchical relationship between two modes of prior occupation, one oriented to the future, the other to the past. As the governance
of the prior crossed the truth-value of the future anterior and past perfect,
the priority of the human as ultimate signature of liberal democratic sovereignty was detached from the priority of the descent of persons even
as the priority of certain persons, colonizers, was safeguarded against the
priority of others, the colonized. And this division became available to be
applied to other grounds within the nation and against the nation.
The governance of the prior. The settler citizen differentiates, localizes, and temporalizes
its territorial claims by creating two distinct and contrasting categories, the native and the
foreigner, locating their territorial claims in the past (native) and future (foreigner).
To see what is at stake here let us return to Andersons argument in

Imagined Communities that nationalism emerged as a new political imaginary in settler societies and that the political community it imagined reorganized previous forms of state sovereignty. According to Anderson,
the emergence of the print media broke previous socialities organized
around face-to-face relations, vertically oriented to kingly authority, and
without clear territorial borders. It installed a new horizontally oriented,
homogeneous peoplehood whose internal integrity was defined in relation to the border. This homogeneous space-time written against state
borders, institutionalized in market, public sphere, and state function,
displaced the older imaginary of radial monarchical sovereignty. Numerous refinements and critiques of Anderson have been written since
the publication of Imagined Communities, many of them quite incisive.
But Andersons basic point remains quite important: the diffuse imaginaries of stranger sociability, value abstraction, and social objectification
that emerged in settler nations came to provide a metaframework within
which the discussion of sovereignty persists. The problem with Andersons account of the imagined political community of nationalism is not
that it locates the origin of the nation-state at the wrong moment or in the
wrong place. Rather, the problem is that Anderson doesnt account for a
division that emerged internal to the otherwise homogeneous space-time
of nationalism. When we look at these differential narrative structures we
find that although all people may belong to nationalism, not all people
occupy the same tense of nationalism.
37
38
Introduction
Because I assume that settler colonialism as much as liberalism is a

diasporic object, I am as interested in the dispersion of the governance of
the prior as much as its unity. A full discussion of the governance of the
prior would include the different ways that Spanish and English colonialism invoked the customary.83 Even across the major British settler coloniesNorth America, Australia, and New Zealandthe governance of
the prior did not have a uniform application, even though wherever the
British went, they carried the governance of the prior with them. In the
British Americas, for example, the priority of the prior was acknowledged
and then annulled through treaty, land seizure, and passive and active
genocide. The newly constituted United States of America levered its
subsequent legitimacy on a similar toolbox of acknowledgment and annulment in its relations with Native Americans. But the ever-expanding
United States also incorporated the logic of the governance of the prior
into its own sovereign identity. In the United States, this creole logic
coiled around the Jacksonian concept of manifest destiny in such a way
that foreign invaders (settlers) were transformed into autochthonous
domestics (nationals), the former inhabitants (an empty set created by
the foreclosures of settlement) into domestic dependent sovereignties
(natives). But the logic of creole nationalism did not merely allow the
creole state to claim a form of priorness in relation to the newly foreign
metropole and foreign domestics (natives). It also allowed the creole
state to make numerous other internal and external sovereign distinctions. For instance, the so-called Marshall Trilogy that established the
notion of domestic dependent nationalism was as much about the relationship between federal and state governments as the federal government and tribesNative Americans provided a convenient setting for
negotiating the competing powers of federal government.84 These decisions about the status of the natives were then extended into other jurisdictions, as with the U.S. seizure of Puerto Rico.85
Like other settler colonies, Australia articulated a creole form of nationalism that stretched from early celebrations of the bushman to more
recent characterizations of the Dreaming during the Sydney Olympics
in 2002. But the Australian settler colony had a different strategy for addressing the claims of the prior. By 1788 the British found it more convenient to bracket the presence of prior inhabitants through the doctrine of
terra nullius than to negotiate treaties with the variety of inhabitants they
confronted. More generally, according to Kathleen Wilson, the projection
of Englishness was increasingly authoritarian and paternalist by the time
it reached Australia.86 The 1901 Federal Constitution, which established
Australia as an independent Commonwealth, for the most part continued
to treat the aboriginal native population as a spectral presence, referring
to the Indigenous population in just two of its sections. Section 51(xxvi)
gave the federal parliament the power to make laws for the peace, order,
and good government . . . with respect to people of any race, other than the
aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws. Section 127 prohibited the parliament from counting aboriginal natives in the consensus. To be sure, the frontier was rife with organized and disorganized violence, seizures, resistances, and informal land
agreements.87 Which is merely to say that in Australia the problem of the
priority of the prior was confronted through a variety of tacticswarfare,
genocide, and illegal property transfers. Unlike in the United States, all of
these huddled under the cover of the doctrine of terra nullius. But like in
the United States, in Australia specific tactics for maneuvering around the
governance of the prior were not merely about Indigenous-state relations
but about federal dynamics. Sections 51(xxvi) and 127 were less about
the state in relation to Indigenous people than about struggles between
Commonwealth and state powers. Internal power within the federal government was also at stake in the 1967 referendum that provided the federal government with the power to make laws with respect to people
of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is
deemed necessary to make special laws, giving rise to the modern land
rights regime.
And yet, even given these diverse histories, what the governance of
prior shows is that from a critical point of view, the Indigenous does not
confront the state, nor does the state confront the Indigenous. Both are
caught in strategic maneuvers around a shared problematic; the nationstate and the Indigenous cite a shared discourse originating in a history
that predates both of their emergence. A formation of power articulated
as tense and eventthe governance of the prioris foundational to the
imaginary of sovereign power to both settler and Indigenous as such and
to late liberalism more generally.
39
40
Introduction
While it seems clear to me that the social tense, events, and ethical
substance are unavoidable from the point of view of settler nationalism,
I think it is legitimate to ask what relevance the above discussion has
for other forms of historical and contemporary social difference. For instance, how does this discussion help us understand the unequal distribution of life and death, of hope and harm, and of exhaustion and endurance when the social referent of these distributions seems to be based
on sexuality and race? There are several ways of answering the question
of how the interests of this book relate to problems of social belonging,
abandonment, and endurance outside the Indigenous context.
The first would point out isomorphisms cutting across Indigenous
and non-Indigenous contexts. In Israel, for instance, tactics of disenfranchisement of Palestinians operate as if they were culled from a condensed
settler manual. An initial Israeli creole nationalism, organized around the
image of the sabre, indicates how many Israeli Jews attempted to ground
their territorial claims in the past perfect of indigeneityliterally writing these claims as facts on the ground.88 Israel, however, also presents
its difference from Palestine as a difference of social tense, rooting its
general being in the autological destiny of Europe as opposed to the customary past of a socially primitive Palestinian population.89 These temporal discourses have spatial entailments. In East Jerusalem, Palestinians
must show an unbroken residency to their homes and lands in order to
maintain their right over their homes. Persons leaving for school or work
abroad are claimed to have severed their traditional attachment and thus
annulled their rights of place. This method of disenfranchisement is isomorphic to the way in which the Australian Native Title Act (1993) recognizes Indigenous native title. Indigenous claimants must prove an unbroken physical and cultural connection to their traditional lands even
if previous governments forcibly removed them. In France, too, we hear
similar strains of civilizational tense. Although interested in the viability
of racial analysis to discourses of lacit, in Da la question sociale la question raciale?, Eric and Didier Fassin demonstrate, in a painful irony, how
the homosexual has become a figure of the autological subject wielded
against the backward-looking Muslim migrant.90 And in Turkey, Dicle
Koacolu has shown how the tradition effect (the genealogical society) continues to frame so-called honor killings in contemporary Tur-
key.91 Transformations of local modes of belonging through discourses of

tense, such as the governance of the prior, are clearly seen in various regions of the African continent. As numerous scholars have shown, many
African groups had complex understandings of the dynamic relationship
between, not the Indigenous and settler, but the autochthon (first comer)
and allochthon (new comer). David Lan, Mathieu Hilgers, Michel Izard,
and Peter Geshiere have shown how this dynamic relation between
autochthon and allochthon allowed a constant negotiation between new
comers and first comers.92 But they have also shown how these dynamics were disrupted by the rigid categories of the governance of the prior
that sharpened and froze the distinction between first comers and new
comers, transforming these categories into the Indigenous and settler.
This is all very different from the second way of answering the question of how an understanding of the social tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance of late liberalism helps us critically understand the distribution of life and death in late liberalism outside an Indigenous context.
This answer provincializes in one way or another alternative forms of social belonging, abandonment and endurance. Take, for example, one of
the struggles that define critical indigenous theory in the United States
today: its relationship to critical race theory. Is critical indigenous theory
a modality of critical race theory? Is it a subset? What would critical race
theory look like if it were a subset of critical indigenous theory? Why does
the scholarly public within the United States often find it hard to conceive of the centrality of the Indigenous-settler division, so palpable and
unavoidable in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, outside theories of
race as race has been defined by the histories of African enslavement in
the United States? Surely part of the answer is that the specific history of
race internal to U.S. nationalism has become universal because American
cultural hegemony has made it so. Already scholars are thinking, if not
through critical indigenous theory, then about the techniques by which,
as Nancy Bentley recently argued, modern race was the dekinning of African Americans.93
But what these debates are actually asking, it seems to me, is, what
are the various relationships informing social imaginaries and concepts?
Race, indigeneity, the divisions of the autological subject and genealogical society, collective power and individual freedom, the governance of
41
42
Introduction
the prior: these are not abstract theoretical truths but socially invested
aggregating tools that transform the variegated space of liberalism with
its multitudinous collection of ways of immanent life in order to make
them conform to a set of expectations and accountings that do work in
the actual world. This is why I try to describe the two broad conditions
in which this book was conceived and written. It is not to argue that the
social division of tense and its relation to eventfulness and ethical substance exist at all modes and levels of analysis of late liberalism. But that
they are available across all modes and levels of practicing late liberalism,
of justifying its exclusions and inclusions, of making good of its goods and
good of its harms.
Chapter by Chapter
This introduction can be thought of as a robust presentation of the thematics and concepts that organize this book. Chapters should be read
together and in sequence. One can read them separately. Although all
these thematics and concepts are always in the scene, each chapter takes
a different aspect on the tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance of late
liberalism. If a reader is mostly interested in the dynamics of recognition
in late liberalism, she could read the first two chapters. If a reader is interested in the problem of embodiment and endurance in late liberalism she
could start with chapters 3 and 4. However, because later chapters assume
material discussed in previous chapters, the argument makes the most
sense if read consecutively.
The first two chapters examine the contemporary politics of recognitionin the contemporary moment often voiced as an opposition to the
politics of cultural recognitionas a central technique of late liberalism.
Chapter 1, The Part That Has No Part, examines two unrelated cases of
social difference in two different national settings with two seemingly different outcomes. I examine the recent national emergency in Aboriginal
affairs in Australia prompted by a report on sexual abuse in Aboriginal
communities and the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a
preliminary injunction exempting the religious group, Unio do Vegetal,
from the Controlled Substances Act. I pick these two examples for their
contrasts: they are situated in different national traditions (Australia and
the United States); they touch on different kinds of social panics (sexual
panics and drug panics); and they involve different aspects of the state
apparatus (parliament and judiciary). They also come to opposite conclusions: the Australian Intervention argues against protecting traditional
customs; Gonzales v. O Centro Esprita Beneficente Unio do Vegetal decides
to offer protection to religious expression. But I chose these two cases because they demonstrate how the tense of the other is available whenever
the problem of cultural recognition arises and how this tense is inflected
by the question of security. This availability means that the divisions of
social tense provide a unified, if mobile, discursive field that makes maneuvers within it appear as if they were antagonistic to it. The support of
or assault on the genealogical society seems opposed to the support of
or assault on the autological subject, rather than merely a movement in a
dead division. And this movement within a given order allows us to ask
what is and is not a moment of the politicalwhat part has no part in the
social divisions of tense and what political potential might this part have.
Chapter 2, The Brackets of Recognition, continues my examination
of the late liberal politics of recognition and my interest in the potentiality
of the part that has no part within this mode of governance. Chapter 1
examined how various forms of social tense (the divisions of autological
subject and genealogical society; the governance of the prior) manage the
line between policing and politics in order to make difference intelligible
in late liberalism. The second chapter puts more pressure on recognition
itself. It asks what form, or mode, recognition takes when the moment
of intelligibility is deferred, bracketed, or denied and recognition is not
able to overcome liberal intolerance. I argue that when viewed from the
brackets of recognition, recognition as such is only one of three modalities of how late liberalism governs difference, the others being camouflage and espionage.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine how the part that has no part in the given
orders of the sayable and visible endures in these kinds of social spacings.
Chapter 3, Road Kill, asks what the conditions are of life lived within
these brackets from the point of view of an ethics of substance. Moving
across an ethnography of the radical green movement and an Indigenous
Australian mixed-media project, I pivot the discussion on the relationship
between ethical substance and biopolitics, especially as these intersect
43
44
Introduction
around the problems of excess, exhaustion, and endurance in late liberalism. If ethics is the realm in which we reflect and act at the intersection
of right conduct and the good life, then our ethical relation to life within
these differential zones of abandonment and vulnerability is fraught, to
say the least. The life worth living is not necessarily found within these
zones because the zones create such reduced conditions of life that the
political desire for them to spawn or foster alternative worlds can seem
naive at best and sadistic at worst. What would happen if, on the one
hand, we allowed for a wider field of substantiality into our critique of
biopolitics and substance, and on the one hand, we dwelled more fully in
the conditions of excess, exhaustion, and endurance that characterize the
spaces and zones of late liberal exposure and abandonment?
Chapter 4, Events of Abandonment, returns to Indigenous Australia. In this chapter, I examine modes of eventfulness and discourses of
lethality in contemporary Australia, focusing first on the contemporary
carnal conditions of Indigenous life and second on recent state security
measures said to be a reaction to the post-9/11 world. I do so in order to
understand the dynamic conditions that qualify one kind of lethality as
state killing and another as a more amorphous condition of letting die.
I do so in order to understand how present-tense modes of living and
dying are transformed into future anterior modes of the proper life.
Chapter 5, After Good and Evil, Whither Sacrificial Love?, continues
this discussion but turns it to eschatological discourses of sacrifice and
sacrificial love, the imaginary of a form of killing as a mode of life giving,
in late liberalism. The question whether this or that sacrifice is worth it
opens the events of suffering and dying, if not to the problematic of being
and time, then to the problematic of being and tensethe narrative relation among social, economic, and political values and subjective finitudes
and how, where, and whether subjective finitudes are seen to occur and
lead. I embed arguments between the Bush administration and its critics
about the competing rhetorics of good and evil and sacrifice and sacrificial love in contemporary critical theorys romance with Christian modes
of sacrificial love. It concludes by asking what lies beyond good and evil,
if sacrifice and sacrificial love provides a means of memorialized denial
of human suffering.
The conclusion, Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies, returns
to Le Guins decision to let some members of Omelas leave without

specifying where they are going. In the long shadow of negative critique
I discuss the role of positive sociography to a form of critical theory that
is oriented to progressive life and yet refuses to be lulled by the promises
of miraculous endurance or sacrificial love.
45
Chapter One
The Part That Has No Part
Traditions of Dysfunction
In the southern winter of 2009, a debate raged

across reviews, blogs, emails, and scholarly essays
in the wake of the publication of The Politics of
Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the
Liberal Consensus.1 The book was written by Peter
Sutton, an anthropologist, and promoted by conservative pundits such as Christopher Pearson
of The Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert
Murdoch.2 Sutton argued that policy makers and
academics should focus on Indigenous social traditions as the primary source of Indigenous social
48
Chapter One
dysfunction. Forget problems of structural racism and state neglect, the

central cause of Indigenous impoverishment, ill-health, and educational
stagnation was Indigenous peoples ancient need to pursue family loyalties over essentially foreign ideologies such as the doctrine of the common good and traditional medical beliefs and practices that blocked
certain preventative and curative health measures.3 Indigenous Australians, he implies, must walk out of their communities, leaving their ancient ways behind. Sutton seems sure where they are going: modernity,
where common goods prevail rather than sexual abuse, family loyalties,
and strange beliefs about bodies. In a review of the book, the economist
Jon Altman notes its deep vitriol, surface bitterness, and bizarre accusations. Among its strange assertions and beliefs about knowledge and embodiment is this one: Many of the academics who I knew who reacted
negatively to the intervention as a whole . . . but failed to give primacy to
the fate of so many children, were also childless.4
The questionable dichotomies and sexual economies that appear to
organize The Politics of Suffering should not be quickly dismissed, however.
They are symptomatic of a broader conservative agenda in contemporary
Australia that sought to, and has been quite effective at, hegemonizing the
political and social field by using images of primitive sexuality to figure an
absolute difference and hierarchy between the modern and ancient, personal freedom and customary constraint, depersonalized common truths
and identity-based prejudices.5 Sutton himself hoped that The Politics of
Suffering would provide positive support to the controversial 2007 Australian federal Intervention in Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory.
The Intervention is shorthand for a set of policies that the then LiberalConservative prime minister, John Howard, put in place in 2007 in the
wake of the Little Children Are Sacred report of the Northern Territory
Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual
Abuse. In the name of a national emergency in Indigenous child sexual
abuse, Howards government assumed broad and unprecedented powers
over Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, including Indigenous
welfare, education, land tenure, and health. The era of cultural recognition and reconciliation was over, Howard declared. The governance of
the prior, and the sexual dysfunction at its center, would no longer extend
to Australias Indigenous inhabitants, and the sooner the inhabitants of
Australia accepted this the sooner the harms of the past could be extinguished. The federal government would, forcibly if necessary, puncture
the sovereignty of Indigenous communities and liberate countless Indigenous children who were languishing in their broom closetsworse,
being raped in these sealed-off spaces, their abuse aided and abetted by
childless advocates kowtowing to the sanctity of traditional law.
What would the anthropologist Johannes Fabian make of The Politics
of Suffering? In Time and the Other, Fabian characterized the relation between anthropology and its object as a political cosmology, at the center
of which lay a constitutive contradiction. On the one hand, anthropology
has its empirical foundation in ethnographic research, inquiries which
even hard-nosed practitioners carry out as communicative interactions
and, on the other hand, when these same ethnographers represent their
knowledge in teaching and writing they do this in terms of a discourse that
consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of
the one who talks.6 Demonstrating how the event of ethnographic narration was misaligned to the narrated event that provided its foundation
allowed Fabian to align the writing practices of modern anthropology to
the historical desires of a modern Hegelianism, in which the function
of the non-Western other is to entail a Western unfolding.7 The problem
with modern anthropology, according to Fabian, was that the contemporary ethnographic subject, often a single individual, was continually
transfigured into a mass subject living in the past tense. Peoples contemporary lives were reduced to a set of ancient needs: the durative unfolding
present was narratively transfigured into a frozen past perfect. Suttons
text would seem an exemplary if belated case in point.
Fabian insisted that the people anthropologists speak withor more
broadly interact withare not in a different time from the interactional
encounter itself. And his point was to demonstrate how locating them
in another time (the past perfect of the genealogical society) aligns the
anthropological narrative with the most conservative of Western civilizational philosophies and agendas. Suttons reverses this argument. Because contemporary Australian anthropologists refuse to speak honestly about the harms of traditional Indigenous culture, they are unable
to understand that the time of traditional custom is out of joint with modern society. It is this temporal dissonance that is causing the present social
49
50
Chapter One
dysfunction in Indigenous communities. This ancient past has no place

in a nation defined by the promise of freedoms future. Thus, from Suttons point of view, anthropologists arent producing the past perfect of
Indigenous society; Indigenous people are doing that. Anthropologists
are simply refusing to accept its irrelevance in contemporary, freedomembracing societies.
We should be wary, however, of wallowing too long in a self-lacerating
version of anthropological exceptionalism. After all, narrative maneuvers
of time and the otheror what should be more precisely called tense and
the otherwithin the political cosmology of anthropology are located
within the broader social tenses of late liberalism. These social tenses are
heard not only in Australian anthropology or in Australia even if they
have a particular narrative form and force there. It is this broader system
of late liberal tense and governance that interests me. In this chapter and
the next, I examine this system of tense and governance through the shifting terrain of late liberal recognition in the wake of the consolidation of
neoliberal rhetorics and institutions and the elaboration of new concerns
about state security in the shadow of 9/11. As the dominant technique of
the governance of difference in late liberalism, cultural recognition manages the difference between policing and politics in Jacques Rancires
sense; namely, policing as the management of a given distribution of social places and roles, ways of being and saying such that some activities
are visible and sayable (are located in the order of logos) while other activities appear to be nothing more than noise (are located in the realm
of phonos); and politics as the transformation of phonos into logos and
a subsequent emergence of new distributions of visibility and sayability.8
In Disagreement, Rancire draws examples from classical Greece and contemporary labor and new social movements. For instance, he points to the
plebian uprising of ancient Greece and to black, female, and homosexual
claims on public rationality. His purpose is to demonstrate the difference
between political acts that transform the background assumptions of
logos and policing practices that merely rearrange elements while leaving
the background assumptions intact. How does the politics of recognition in late liberalism manage the difference between police and politics,
the actual world and the potentiality embedded in the noise this actual
world faces and helps to create? I examine these issues in this and the
next chapter in order to make a space for subsequent discussions in chapters 3 and 4 about the maneuvers of social worlds and projects who are
addressed by, exist in, or are a result of these tactics of recognition and
social belonging.
In this chapter I discuss in some detail two seemingly unrelated cases:
the politics of the Australian Intervention and the jurisprudence of spiritually based drug consumption in the United States pivoting on the case
Gonzales v. O Centro Esprita Beneficente Unio do Vegetal (2006). As I
noted in the introduction, these two examples cut across state and national borders (Australia and the United States), involve different kinds
of social panics (sexual panics and drug panics), and focus attention on
different aspects of the state apparatus (parliament and judiciary). Moreover, the two social worlds and projects differ significantly in relationship
to the governance of the prior in late liberalism and in relationship to
the entanglements of power and the will. In the case of Indigenous Australians we seem to be witnessing a structural relationship between the
state and Indigenous people that is independent of any particular persons will to be different. Members of the Unio do Vegetal congregation
would seem a more stereotypically volitional form of association. Additionally, the two cases seem to relate very differently to the governance of
the priorthe Indigenous Australians are a clear and forceful case of the
governance of the prior, the Unio do Vegetal congregation is not. And
finally, the Australian state and U.S. judiciary seem to come to opposite
conclusions: proponents of the Australian federal Intervention in Indigenous life argue against protecting traditional customs, while the Supreme
Court in Gonzales v. UDV offers constitutional protection to religious expression. But I am not aiming to produce a comparative sociography of
late liberalism, at least not comparative in the sense of comparing two
distinct entities in order to produce a higher order unity.
Instead this chapter first discusses each case as it reveals how late liberal governance makes use of an array of social tenses to legitimate its
powers over life and death. Second, I discuss how this mobilization of
social tense manages the potential eruption of noise (phonos) such that
the fundamental ordering of social roles is not disturbed. And finally,
I examine how this management of noise faces and creates new social
projects and worlds. I focus on these three aspects for several reasons.
51
52
Chapter One
First, I want to demonstrate how the tense of the other is available

is at handwhenever the problem of cultural recognition arises. As my
introductory reference to Fabians ground-breaking work meant to suggest, noting that the other is continually interpreted vis--vis a temporal
inflection is hardly a new insight. I spend the time elaborating this point
in order to show that the tense of the other is not only always at hand
when confronting the problem of cultural recognition, it is also a demand
placed on others to give an account of themselves in terms of the social
divisions of tense. But I am also interested in how the tense of the other
is entangled in the recent permutations of the late liberal governance of
difference under the shadow of state security. How in paying attention
to the local textures and potentialities of late liberal recognition can we
begin to map the contemporary securitization of alternative worlds?
Understanding social tense as a demanding environment internal to
late liberal recognition allows me to make my second pointthat the
divisions of social tense are a part of a unified, if mobile, discursive field
that makes maneuvers within it appear as if they were antagonistic to it.
As I hope to make clear, the support of Indigenous tradition and the subsequent assault on the same unsettle a certain level of political organization even as it conserves another. Ditto with the Unio Do Vegetal case.
But the purpose of my discussion is not to adjudicate what actions are instances of policing and what are instances of politics in Rancires sense.9
The immediate goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the common policing function operating in social and political debates in Australian and the
United States. From what perspective are the disruptive debates about Indigenous traditions and the alternative religious practices political events?
What kind of political events they are? And, in light of these questions,
what would it be to engage politically in late liberalism? I will begin with
the Australian invention and then move to Gonzales v. Unio do Vegetal. I
conclude with a discussion of the part that has no part in these debates.
Sweeping out the Broom Closet
On June 21, 2007, the then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, declared a national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Howards declaration
came in the wake of the Little Children Are Sacred report of the Northern
Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children
from Sexual Abuse. As I noted above, in the name of this national emergency, Howards government assumed broad and unprecedented powers
over Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, including Indigenous
welfare, education, land tenure, and health. Howards announcement
came with carrot and stick. As a carrot Howard promised millions of
dollars for Indigenous health, education, and employment training. As
a stick the federal government assumed control over seventy-three Indigenous townships through the forcible acquisition of five-year leases
over townships on Indigenous-owned land, community living areas, and
other designated Indigenous areas and sent, under the cover of military
police, medical personnel to conduct compulsory sexual health exams for
all children under the age of sixteen. Business managers with powers to
control and direct all Indigenous programs and their assets, including the
monitoring of all community communication and video equipment, were
also sent to take control of all Commonwealth programs in Indigenous
town camps and rural communities.10
One of the first actions of these business managers was to shift Indigenous workers from the Community Development Employment
Programme (CDEP, a work and training program within a social welfare
framework, loosely called work for the dole) to welfare. Publically proclaiming its neoliberal (enterprise culture) commitments, the federal
government nevertheless began the Intervention by shifting as many Indigenous people from the CDEP to welfare as possible. This shift from
work to welfare was necessary if the federal government wished to control
the wealth and spending of Indigenous people in remote communities
and town camps. For legal reasons, persons on the CDEP couldnt have
their wages managed. Once all Indigenous people were placed on welfare,
payments could be tied to school attendance and other behavioural indices; furthermore, fifty percent of payments could be given in the form
of debit cards that restricted purchasing choices of Indigenous men and
women to selected stores for selected items while prohibiting other purchases such as alcohol and pornography. But shifting Indigenous men and
women from CDEP to welfare came with a dramatic lowering of incomes
in a population already suffering general and sustained poverty. Speaking
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Chapter One
to Leon Compton on Darwin ABC radio on July 23, 2007, Mal Brough
made the link between welfare and social control explicit:
ComPton: Are you saying that money from CDEP is the problem in
child sexual abuse and alcoholism and violence?
Brough: Absolutely, there is no doubt that there is a contributing factor beyond the CDEP payments and because for
all intents and purposes they are a welfare paymentit
is the cash that is being used to buy the drugs and alcohol that have caused so many . . . so much of the pain for
these children. There is just no doubt about that.11
Although Howard pegged his declaration of emergency to the release
of the Little Children Are Sacred report, he did not restrict himself to its
recommendations. Instead he endorsed the longstanding call of the minister for families, community services and Indigenous affairs, Mal Brough,
for a move beyond the politics of recognition (self-determination) and
reconciliation with Indigenous people to a neoliberal approach to Indigenous affairs. Indigenous people needed to stop worrying about their culture, move out of rural regions, and accept whatever jobs they could get
in the cities. If they wouldnt move on their own accord, the federal government would starve them out by reducing their income.
By September, the Howard government, which controlled the federal
parliament, passed the Northern Territory National Emergency Response
Act (2007). The act gave the federal government sweeping powers over
Indigenous land tenure, welfare, alcohol consumption, and education.12
Throughout the Northern Territory large bright blue or yellow signs were
erected at the entrance of Indigenous communities announcing that pornography and alcohol were banned and in the process publicly branding
Indigenous communities as spaces of perversion and decay. (An unexpected consequence, from an Indigenous point of view, was that some
areas previously understandable as public or private lands were suddenly
and publically visible as Indigenous land.) Because many of the provisions of the proposed emergency legislation were racially discriminatory,
the federal government added an amendment that suspended the application of the Racial Discrimination Act to the legislation. Two years later, in
2009, one of the authors of the Children Are Sacred report, Patricia Ander-
son, questioned the relationship between the reports recommendations

and the emergency powers claimed by the government.13
On November 26, 2007, the Howard government was soundly defeated in federal elections. In addition to losing the elections, Howard
lost his parliamentary seat, as did Mal Brough. The new Labour minister
for Indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refused, however, to condemn the
Howard Intervention. Instead she decided to investigate how the Intervention could be humanized, expanded to the other Australian states,
and made compatible with the Racial Discrimination Act.14 On April 30,
2008, Macklin announced that the new Rudd government would neither
immediately close nor permanently restore the CDEP, a key target of
the Howard government. And, in public presentations leading up to the
Rudd governments first budget speech, the government announced that
it would introduce a new national welfare debit card if it proved successful in an experimental deployment in selected Indigenous communities.
The card would control payments to negligent parents by ensuring that
half of the cardholders welfare payments are spent on approved goods
and services, such as food and clothing for their children, rather than
wasted on alcohol and drugs.15
On February 13, 2008, Kevin Rudd made a national apology to Indigenous people, who represented, he said, one of the oldest continuous cultures in human history. The apology, one the previous Howard government had steadfastly refused to make, was said to be for past government
mistreatment of Indigenous people, in particular the Stolen Generation, the generations of Indigenous children taken from their families
under assimilation policies that were in place between 1869 and 1969.
Rudd claimed that righting the wrongs of the past would allow Australia
to move forward with confidence to the future. And, in almost the same
breath, Rudd promised a renewed commitment to the policies and rhetoric of the Intervention described as new solutions to enduring problems.16 A similar two-step dance was seen six months later in Canada,
where on June 11, 2008, the Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper,
apologized for the sexual abuse of First Nation children in Indian residential schools, not by traditional members of the Indigenous communities,
but by non-Indigenous people caring for them, calling it a sad chapter
in Canadian history. But at nearly the exact same moment, Harper re-
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Chapter One
fused to rethink his rejection of the Kelowna Accord, one of his first acts
of government in 2006, which was meant to put $5 billion into Indigenous
employment, housing, and social programs.17
The support of the Intervention by the Labour Rudd government suggests how the Intervention seemed to dramatically upset previous alignments between the Left and Right and thus signal a radical new political
epoch in Australia. That the arts of care announced and practiced in the
Intervention have rattled the political order is undisputable from a certain
perspective. At the beginning of June 2008 Dr. Alyssa Vass, spokesperson
for the Darwin Aboriginal Rights Coalition, told an inquiry of the Senate Select Committee on Regional and Remote Indigenous Communities: The punitive discriminatory approach taken by the intervention has
made life more difficult for families, has been disempowering to the extreme and perpetuated destructive negative stereotypes.18 But by the end
of June 2008 the West Australian Childrens Court magistrate, Dr. Sue
Gordon, and Major General Dave Chalmers issued a report calling for
increased spending on housing and police, fully funded clinics, a choicebased welfare debit system, and community-based alcohol management
rather than an alcohol ban. But they also advocated for the elimination
of unviable settlements. Divisions also emerged between Indigenous
scholars and politicians, played out in regional and national settings.19 In
a searing critique of Howards policies, a Northern Territory Labour parliamentary member, Marion Scrymgour, referred to the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act as the black kids Tampa. (In
August 2001, the Howard government refuse to let a Norwegian freighter,
the MV Tampa, enter Australian waters after it rescued 438 mainly Afghan
asylum seekers; many people believed that this violation of international
law was an election year stunt.) Scrymgour was the first Indigenous minister in any Australian governmentat the time the minister for family
and community services, and environment and heritage in the Northern Territory government.20 In a previous moment her words would have
carried a certain irreproachable weight. But Brough immediately called
for Scrymgour to resign. She initially refused. But after two years of controversy, Scrymgour left the Northern Territory Labour Party, which immediately elevated another Indigenous woman, Alison Anderson, to her
portfolio. Soon after, it emerged that only three hundred houses would be
built from the AuD$672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Programthe bulk of the money going to administrative costs
and the builders. Facing a stalled and underfunded housing initiative, the
refusal of health care workers and teachers to move into Indigenous communities, and large amounts of dedicated funds going to non-Indigenous
administrators, Anderson threatened to quit. And quit she did, on August 4, 2009.21
And Anderson was right: it is uncertain how much of the $587 million
actually allocated for the first twelve months of the Intervention has been
spent, nor is it clear on what it has been spent. Preliminary analysis suggests, rather unsurprisingly, that a large percentage has been allocated to
the employment of non-Indigenous bureaucrats, bureaucratic agencies,
police, and researchers. Part of the problem of tracking the actual distribution of wealth is the bureaucratic practice of proliferating and changing program names; redirecting previous unspent or promised budgetary
allowances; and closing programs without a subsequent account of where
their allocated but unused funds have gone. Even if we could clarify the
deceptive bookkeeping, it would remain unclear how to assess the social
value of the Intervention. What will be the individuated and thus quantifiable units to be measured? The creation of new houses, play yards, and
schools? The quieting of communities? Will any studies be undertaken
to show where the trouble makers have gone? And if so, will the money
spent to show where they have gone be deducted from funds allocated for
the building of Indigenous housing? Will these facts be factored into the
assessment of the Intervention? We already know that many people have
shifted to the cities, living in the long grass, struggling to meet basic rental,
food, and clothing needs on their new government-enforced budget.
But no one advocating for the Intervention pretended that life would
be easier for Indigenous citizens in the present. In fact they emphasized
that life would be harder during the transition from a welfare-based politics of self-determination to a neoliberal enterprise culture and that
Indigenous people would need to endure this difficult period as best
they could. The Howard government acknowledged thisthat life in
the present would be worse for many Indigenous men and women. The
Labour government has agreed, saying it would remain unclear for some
time how the Intervention would impact Indigenous liveswhether it
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will have made any positive difference in basic service delivery, housing,
health, or education.22 By July 2009 the Productivity Commission was
reporting that the key indicators of Indigenous disadvantage were far
worse than anyone had thoughtthe gap between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians was either unchanged or widening across eighty
percent of social statistics, including education, life expectancy, jobs and
income, preventable diseases, overcrowding, incarceration, and community violence.23 According to the Productivity Commission the only programs that seemed to be closing this gap were cooperative approaches between Indigenous people and government, nonprofit and private sectors,
conceived from the bottom up rather than top down. And it is exactly
in these ordinary bureaucratic statements that we witness how the time
of harm is always belatedsomething that happened when no one was
looking; always something to come and then coming too late.
In light of statements that Indigenous lives already difficult to endure
would be made more difficult, what makes the Intervention seem like a
sensible good, a form of life enhancement rather than, say, state killing or
neoliberal modes of making die? What discourses of social belonging and
abandonment, caring and disregard made the emergency Intervention
seem necessary, and by making it seem necessary, allowed the Howard
and the subsequent Labour governments to create a narrative form that
conjured away the social harms of the durative present? What does care
consist of such that when a form of creating harm for others is thought of
and experienced as a form of caring for others? To begin to answer these
questions we must begin with what supposedly started this social drama,
the Little Children Are Sacred report.
The report, commissioned by the Northern Territory Labour government, written by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson, and publicly released
on June 15, 2007, begins dramatically, noting a breakdown of Aboriginal
culture caused by a number of underlying conditions of Indigenous life.
Excessive consumption of alcohol is variously described as the cause or
result of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, boredom and overcrowded and inadequate housing. The use of other drugs and petrol sniffing can be added to these. Together, they lead to excessive violence. In
the worst case scenario it leads to sexual abuse of children.24 The Little
Children Are Sacred report was careful to dispel five myths about Indige-
nous sexual abuse: that Aboriginal men are the only offenders; Aboriginal law is the reason for high levels of sexual abuse; Aboriginal law is used
as an excuse to justify abuse; Aboriginal culture is the reason for underreporting; and Aboriginal men do not have an important role to play in
preventing child sexual abuse. And yet, it was in terms of these myths that
federal government spokespersons and the national media made sense
of the abuse. When the report circulated in the national press, the point
that received the most attention was not the supposed breakdown of Indigenous culture but the abuse of children by men acting according to
traditional marriage laws. Again and again the media reported older traditional men raping young girls and boys and justifying this sexual abuse
in terms of traditional marriage practices. Film clips of young people running amok in Aboriginal communities and townships supplemented these
stories. Conservative commentators rushed to claim their pyrrhic victory,
indicting supporters of multiculturalism for their naive understanding of
Indigenous customs even as they loudly proclaimed the collapse of the
Indigenous social order. And the ubiquitous billboards proclaimed at the
entrance of every Indigenous community its scarlet letter of shame.
Throughout, the national media promoted the promarket and promodernization visions of particular Indigenous men and women who had
close ties to the Howard government, such as Noel Pearson, or academics,
such as Peter Sutton, who castigated progressive white Australians for
wishing to lock Indigenous people into national museums. What Indigenous people wanted, according to these Indigenous men and women
and their non-Indigenous allies, was to be free-enterprise subjectsto
have real jobs, to live in the real world of contemporary Western society,
where horizons were oriented to the future not the past. Even after the
Rudd Labour government came into power, newspapers and other public media continued to foreground the link between child sexual abuse,
traditional law, and the governance of the prior trumping the governance
of freedom. Take, for instance, an article in The Australian, Secrets in the
Shadows, published in June 2008. The story begins dramatically with a
teenage boy, who dropped dead after a footy match near Papunya in
central Australia. Although nobodys fault, his death set off a round of
vicious violence in a world where payback, retribution, spearings and
mob violence are ever-present. Dismissing the moaning of critics that
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the intervention was a land grab and not about child sexual abuse, the
article foregrounds the moaning of children through hearsay about rampant sex abuse, and asserts that the cause of the abuse is the traditional
law of elder men and kowtowing white enablers.25 Community workers,
terrified that the 12-year-old boy would rape again, took to sleeping in the
boys house at night. When FACS [Department of Family and Community Services] finally came to take the child into care, after a delay of many
weeks, the boys family whisked the child into cultural business. Police refused to transgress on ceremonial ground and FACS workers retreated.
The use of a sex panic to intervene in racial politics is hardly new. A
similar disruption occurred in the United States in 1965 after the release
of the Report on the Negro Family: The Case for National Action, popularly
known as the Moynihan Report. Daniel Moynihan was a sociologist and
assistant secretary of labor under President John F. Kennedy. The Moynihan Report correlated black female-headed households to a tangle of
pathology . . . capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the
white world. As William Graebner notes, the report appeared just as the
civil rights movement was negotiating the turn to black power, a moment Moynihan understood as crucial to whether the black movement
would radicalize. As Sutton did with Indigenous Australians, so Moynihan did with African Americans, blaming the radical inequality between
whites and blacks on internal pathologies rather than contemporary institutional arrangements (although, in Moynihans case, this pathology was
said to have emerged from the institution of slavery, three centuries of
injustice, rather than a traditional precolonial practice that could somehow be abstracted from contemporary actions). The Right seized on the
report. Nothing was wrong with America or American law or American
capitalism. What was wrong was black culture. A direct political line leads
from the Moynihan Report to the Reagan demonization of the racialized
figure of the welfare queen to the Clinton administrations dismantling
of the welfare system.26 The legislation that emerged is particularly interesting to the recent Australian case, given how, as Anna Marie Smith has
shown, a series of programs under the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, intertwined sexual regulation and welfare reform.27
For example, to receive support the woman must provide the state with
the name of the biological father. The state then pursues a child support
action that, if successful, forces the father to pay the state, not the mother,
for the benefits she receives.
Moreover, as among African-Americans in the United States, in Australia, most Indigenous men and women living in the rural north are used
to being the locus of social experimentation, and the nodal point of a national anxiety organized around free and collective agency projected onto
their ways of life. They are used to hearing government officialswho
themselves continually change as governments replace governments
announce rivers of money and infrastructure that subsequently turn into
a dirty trickle by the time it reaches them. They are used to hearing that
the harms in their present lives should be bracketed. They are used to
being aggressively abandoned within a temporal horizon of a future perspective: a future from whose perspective their present suffering has already been mourned and buried. And they are used to the two poles of social belonging, autology and genealogy, being used as the means through
which new programs are justified. After all, the reliance on the specter of
genealogical determination was as vital an organ of social control under
the previous regime of self-determination through cultural recognition
as it is now a vital organ in the Intervention. In the previous regime of
recognitionwhich, I should note here, continues alongside the current
attack on recognitionthe evidence determining whether an Indigenous
difference was truly Indigenous referred to the same specter of customary
law.28 Native title, land rights, and cultural heritage and property laws demanded of Indigenous people a genealogical reckoning, not within their
own language of obligation and belonging, caring and being cared for,
but with a liberal imaginary of individual determination. What a surprise
that Sutton could so easily invert the values of Indigenous culture: he
had spent the previous decade vigorously arguing that Indigenous people
should be divided between traditional owners and historical people
based on various individuals adherence to past social forms and practices. If you think that any people can be split into groups based on the
siphoning of complex contemporary practices into premodern and modern action, then you can flip the values of these actions back and forth
negative, positive; positive, negative.
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Gonzales v. O Centro Esprita Beneficente Unio do Vegetal
Gonzales v. UDV takes us far from the Northern Territory of Australia and
its current accounts of the sexual dysfunction of its Indigenous citizens.
Instead we enter the somewhat rarified realm of judicial reflection about
matters of state powers, religious expression, and international security.
But it is exactly the difference in social location, situation, and genre that
allows us to begin to see the ways in which social tense is available and
dispersed in late liberalism and thus the multiple ways the powers of
making live and making die reappear there.
The bare facts of the case are well known and undisputed. Gonzales v.
UDV addressed the concerns of a demographically insignificant group in
the United States, members of the Unio do Vegetal community. According to its official history, the Unio do Vegetal is a Christian religion established in Brazil on July 21, 1961, in Porto Velho, Rondnia, Brazil, by the
rubber-tapper Jos Gabriel da Costa. The vegetable of spiritual benefit is
ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic black tea brewed from Banisteriopsis caapi vine
and Psychotria viridis plant. I have never imbibed ayahuasca, but others report its physiological and spiritual effects by word of mouth, in YouTube
testimonies, online blogs, underground zines, and alternative spirituality
magazines. These also provide information on where one can go to access
this form of spiritual enlightenment.29 Venues differ significantly in terms
of crass comfort. Friends of mine describe the settings they have drunk
ayahuasca as ranging from ratty dens where couches are stained with
vomit to smart new age venues with tasteful vomitoriums. The Unio do
Vegetal is not the only formal and informal group to celebrate the spiritual
powers of the ayahuasca plant. Other spiritual groups that use this plant
include Santo Daime, PaDeva Church, and Irmandade Beneficente Natureza Divina. These churches trace their religious practices to the period
prior to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but embed their contemporary beliefs in various spiritual discourses including Christianity, Wicca,
shamanism, and neopaganism. The membership of these churches is relatively small. The Unio do Vegetal claims about ten thousand members.
Only a couple hundred are resident in the United States.
Prior to Gonzales v. UDV, one large roadblock stood in the way of those
persons in the United States who wished to explore the spiritual offerings
of these churches. In Brazil the possession and use of ayahuasca was legalized in 1992.30 But in the United States the key hallucinogenic component
of ayahuasca, dimethyltryptamine, or Dmt, is defined as a Schedule 1 class
drug under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule 1 drugs are drugs
classified as having a high abuse risk and no safe, accepted medical use in
the United States. Other Schedule 1 drugs include heroin, marijuana, LSD,
PCP, and crack cocaine.31 Trafficking in these drugs is a federal crime.
First offenses carry a penalty of up to twenty years in prison if no death
or serious injury occurs and not less than twenty years if they do, in addition to a $1 million fine for individuals and $5 million fine for groups. The
second offense carries a penalty of up to thirty years in prison if no death
or serious injury occurs and not less than twenty years if they do, in addition to a $2 million fine for individuals and $10 million fine for groups.
It was exactly the issue of drug trafficking that wound the Unio do
Vegetal in the U.S. Supreme Court.32 On May 21, 1999, the U.S. Customs
Service seized a shipmen of ayahuasca tea heading from church headquarters in Brasilia, Brazil, to John Bronfman and the Unio do Vegetal headquarters in New Mexico. A subsequent search of Bronfmans
house turned up thirty gallons of ayahuasca. The federal government
did not file criminal charges against any member of the Unio do Vegetal, but threatened to do so. In a preemptive strike on November 2000,
mestres (leaders) of the church filed suit against the Customs Service.33
They claimed that the Customs Service had violated their First Amendment rights (free exercise of religion), the Fourth Amendment (search
and seizure), Fifth Amendment (due process), and Fourteenth Amendment (due process, equal protection) rights, as well as their rights under
the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and various international treaties
and obligations. The Unio do Vegetal asked the court to prohibit the
government from prosecuting them, to return the seized tea, the holding
of which they considered sacrilegious, and to declare legal the ceremonial use of ayahuasca, which they claimed was a necessary and essential
part of their religious practice. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in
Boulder, Colorado, agreed to execute a preliminary injunction exempting
the Unio do Vegetal from the Controlled Substances Act. This exemption would allow the Unio do Vegetal to import, distribute, and use a
Schedule 1controlled substance for religious purposes. The federal gov-
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ernment appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In December of the

same year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the preliminary injunction
against prosecution in an unanimous decisionthe first decision of the
new John Roberts Court.
The Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in Gonzales v. Unio do
Vegetal under the shadow of the war of terror. The oral arguments of Gonzales v. UDV were heard on November 1, 2005, the same session that heard
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that found that the military commissions
established by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo
Bay violated the Uniform Code of Military Conduct and the Geneva Convention. Ten months later the U.S. Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, an amended version of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992, which Bush signed into law on November 27, 2006.
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act penalized the use of force, violence,
or threats to animal enterprises including the incitement for others to use
force. This definition opened the door for the prosecution of radical green
websites.
From a legal point of view, Gonzales v. UDV did not address these legal
findings in the ever-growing jurisprudence of terror. It commented on
an ongoing dispute between the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court
about the burdens that religions should bear in relation to neutral laws
of general applicability (laws that do not appear to be based on animus
or hostility to the free exercise of religion) that nevertheless impact the
religious free expression clause of the U.S. Constitution.34 And, more narrowly, it concerned the question of whether the 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals was right to issue a preliminary injunction exempting the Unio
do Vegetal from the Controlled Substances Act. The federal government,
represented by the deputy solicitor general, Edward S. Kneedler, vigorously disagreed with the 10th Circuit Court. A central question in the
dispute was the competing controlling powers of the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of 1993 and American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1994 in the wake of City of Boerne v. Flores (1997); the Controlled Substances Act; and all three of these acts in relation to the 1971
United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, of which the
United States became a signatory in 1980.
The dispute about religious free expression intensified after the
Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), in which

two Native American members of the Native American Church were denied unemployment benefits on the basis of having lost their jobs at a
drug rehabilitation center after testing positive for the Schedule 1 drug
peyote, which they had ingested during a Native American Church ceremony. At stake in Employment Division v. Smith was whether a neutral law
of general applicability (denying unemployment benefits to persons fired
for certain forms of criminal conduct) should be held to the principle of
strict scrutiny, namely whether a law or government action that was
religiously neutral could survive constitutional scrutiny only if the government interest was compelling (the most demanding test to constitutional challenge)? Or could the court decide that, if there was a law of
general application that did not specifically refer to religion but nevertheless burdened religious practice, then the government need only show a
rational interest for the law to be upheld? Writing for the majority, Justice
Anthony Scalia argued that the Supreme Court would no longer hold the
government to the standard of compelling state interest if a law only accidentally affected a religious practice. Acknowledging that in most cases
minority religions would bear the brunt of so-called neutral laws, Scalia
argued that the threat of anarchy must at times expose democracy to the
prejudice of the majority and that this prejudice had a political not juridical address. (That neutral laws are never neutral from the point of view of
a social world must be accepted.) The Court today suggests that the disfavoring of minority religions is an unavoidable consequence under our
system of government and that accommodation of such religions must be
left to the political process.35
Supported by a broad and unlikely coalition, including marijuana legalization advocates, conservative Catholics, evangelical Christians, and the
ACLu, Congress accepted Scalias challenge and passed the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 which restored the compelling interest
criterion to cases involving religious expression, and amended the American Indian Religion Freedom Restoration Act of 1994 to exempt the use
of peyote by Native Americans in the American Indian Church from
the Controlled Substances Act. But four years later, in City of Boerne v.
Flores and RFRA (1997), the Supreme Court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act had exceeded Congresss constitutional authority.
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Boerne v. Flores did not involve the ingestion of Schedule 1 drugs, nor did it
involve a minority religion. It concerned a zoning ordinance and a church
faade. The archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, sued local zoning authorities for violating his rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
by denying him a permit to expand a church as he saw fit. The Boerne
zoning authority argued that local preservation ordinances forbid the
construction and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act was an
unconstitutional infringement on local government rights and prerogatives. The Supreme Court agreed, ruling that Congress had exceeded its
constitutional powers by intruding onto local and state prerogatives to
regulate the health and welfare of its citizens and by predetermining what
laws were or were not constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment,
a power reserved to the Supreme Court.
While Boerne severely restricted the application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, most jurists believed the compelling interest criterion it wrote into law remained in force in federal cases. But this opinion
had not been tested. And so, the questions before the Roberts Court included: What legal force remained in the Religious Freedom Restoration
Act after Boerne? Did the compelling interest test apply to federal law and
international treaty? Was the securing of health, borders, and international relations a significant enough governmental interest to trump the
free expression of a minority religion? What about the United Nations
Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971? In wake of 9/11, was
there a new compelling interest in state security that overrode all minority
concerns? And what, if anything, did the special rights of Native Americans as enshrined in the amended American Indian Religious Freedom
Restoration Act have to do with the rights of the Unio do Vegetal?
It may seem surprising that the American Indian Religious Freedom
Restoration Act was raised at all in Gonzales v. UDV. After all, the Unio
do Vegetal is a self-declared Christian religion not an Indigenous religion,
and as such seems to be differently situated within the governance of the
prior. Unio do Vegetal originated in Brazil, and thus has a migratory relationship to the territorial integrity of the United States. Moreover, the
Unio do Vegetal claimed that its rights were violated in relation to the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act not the American Indian Religious
Freedom Restoration Act. Nevertheless, the Unio do Vegetal, the federal
attorney generals office, and the Roberts Court all argued whether the
Unio do Vegetal were similarly situated as Native Americans to religious expression. In other words the technical legal questionwhether
neutral law of general applicability touched the free expression jurisprudence, whether the distinction between religious belief and action mattered, and whether these issues affected questions of the compelling state
interest testpivoted on broader understandings of the relevance of the
governance of the prior to the general governance of difference in late
liberalism. Who belonged within the exemptions of the governance of
difference and how did these exemptions relate to the governance of the
prior? Who were abandoned to make their own way? The answers were
disputed. Lets start with the federal attorney generals office.
According to the attorney generals office, Native Americans are an exception within the chattering crowds of religious minorities because, as
the political theorist Will Kymlicka puts it, they are a national minority
with unique if qualified claims of sovereignty based on a set of genealogical principles that linked them to the event of settler conquest.36 In other
words, they seem differently situated in the governance of the prior than
do the congregants of the uDV. The federal governments position was
simple. The Unio do Vegetal did not, according to the government, fall
within these principles of the governance of the prior. Its religious beliefs were extraterritorial and its principles of inclusion were based on
Christian proselytizing rather than genealogical descent. And yet the attorney general also argued that the members of Unio do Vegetal should
be treated as if they were Native Americans when it came to what piece of
legislation was relevant to them (the American Indian Religious Freedom
Restoration Act rather than the Religious Freedom Restoration Act).
The federal governments interest in protecting the unique status of
Native Americans by grounding their difference in the governance of
prior was not, however, motivated simply by high regard for the worth
of Indigenous difference. It was also motivated by an understanding of
how the governance of the prior helps discipline the proliferation of alternative social projects and their practical reach. The constitutional event
allows the state to sort populations into pre- and postconstitutional entities even as the territorial distortions of the constitutional event (the fact
that the coverage of the constitutional event changed over time as new
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territories were incorporated and quasi-territories such as Puerto Rico

and American Samoa remain within it) provide endless interpretive maneuverability. We see how it allows this sorting by returning to the different discursive work that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Scalias decision in
Employment Division v. Smith do. Remember, the passage of the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act was prompted by Scalias majority opinion in
Smith. But on the face of the statute, the aim of the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act is the reinstallation of the compelling interest criterion in
cases of neutral general laws, not the rights of Native Americans to ingest
peyote in religious ceremonies. The Act states that a government cannot
substantially burden a persons exercise of religion even if the burden
results from a rule of general applicability, unless it could prove that is
in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.37 As
Boerne makes clear, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can have as
much to do with capital and property rights as the spiritual ingestion of
drugs.
The amended American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act
addressed a different issue: the right of Native American members of the
Native American Church to ingest peyote, a Schedule 1 drug, in their
religious services. In other words, as opposed to the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, the amended American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act was controlled by the imaginary of the governance of the
prior, and this mode of governance was grounded in the divisions of the
autological subject and genealogical society. In the American Indian
Religious Freedom Restoration Act the terms Indian, Indian Tribe,
and Indian Religion were defined according to the descent of blood,
kinship, and culture, and mutatis mutandis those members of the Native
American Church who are not Indian in this way or any other way remained subject to criminal law and its demand that they make their difference legible under the Religious Freedom Reformation Act.38 It is important to note that the Native American Church does not abide by the
genealogical imaginary of the federal government. Prior to its amendment, all members of the Native American Church were exempted from
the Controlled Substances Act. The American Indian Religious Freedom
Restoration Act specifies that only Native Americans are except from the
Schedule 1 prohibition of the ingestion of peyote. And the Drug Enforcement Agency is slowing changing its regulatory practices to conform to
this restricted social referent. But the Native American Church itself continues to be open to all irrespective of their racial or ethnic profile. Thus
perhaps more than protecting the rights of religion, the American Indian
Religious Freedom Restoration Act restricts which members of a religion can be exempted from prosecution under the law. In other words,
the American Indian Religious Freedom Religious Act seemed to close
a gap between membership in a religion and membership in a racial descent group. The potential racial discrimination embedded in this legislation is preempted by the discourse of the governance of the prior, namely
the special trust relation the federal government has to Native American
tribes.
The gap between membership in a religious community and membership in a descent groupa difference written into the discursive separation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the American Indian
Religious Freedom Reformation Actthreatened to reopen in the State
of Utah v. Mooney (2004). In Utah v. Mooney, James and Linda Mooney,
along with their church, the Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American
Church (collectively, the Mooneys) were charged by the State of Utah
with multiple felony counts of engag[ing] in a continuing criminal enterprise and of engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity by possessing
and distributing peyote, a controlled substance, to members and visitors
in their religious services.39 The State of Utah claimed that the Mooneys
and other members of the Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American
Church were not exempt from prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act because they were not members of a federally recognized
tribe. They read the definition of the term Indian (any tribe, band, nation, pueblo, or other organized group or community of Indians . . . which
is recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided
by the United States to Indians because of their status as Indians) in the
American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act as exempting only
federally recognized tribal members. The Utah supreme court disagreed
with this narrow reading, finding the Mooneys Indians under the law.
Thus while the Utah supreme court loosened who may be recognized as
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a legal Indian, it reaffirmed that one has to be recognized as a legal Indian.

In other words the relationship between the governance of the prior and
the divisions of the autological subject and genealogical society remained
intact. The Mooneys were exempted as a class of people rather than as
members of a descent-neutral religious community.
From a federal point of view, the Unio do Vegetal case seemed to
erode even further the means by which the governance of the prior helps
to discipline the proliferation and practical reach of alternative social
projects. The Unio do Vegetal had no genealogical principles to restrict membership. Indeed, in their submissions to the court, the Unio
do Vegetal foreground the volitional nature of their congregation. They
were not a closed group that has gone through screening but a religious
sect, and therefore believed that it is important to invite everyone to the
table. This proselytizing mission, the federal attorney generals office argued, provided the compelling interest for refusing the injunctionthe
health of the groups members, the impossibility of determining membership based on descent, true belief, and thus the possibility of drug diversion. To exempt ayahuasca from the regulation of the Controlled Substances Act and United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances
would not merely interfere with the governments role in protecting the
health of its citizens; it would also jeopardize the security of its external
and internal borders. To support this last point, they pointed to the furtive means by which the Unio de Vegetal tried to smuggle the seized ayahuasca across the border.
The Unio do Vegetal, the 10th U.S. Federal District Circuit Court,
and the Roberts Court rejected these arguments. They argued that the
relevant statute to consider when providing a preliminary injunction exempting the Unio do Vegetal from the Controlled Substance Act was the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the American Indian Religious
Freedom Restoration Act. If the American Indian Religious Freedom
Restoration Act was relevant at all, its relevance was to demonstrate that,
on the one hand, the unique relationship between the United States
and Indian tribes did not justify their differential health treatment and,
on the other hand, no serious health, social, or diversionary consequences
would result from allowing this specific exemption. As Roberts wrote, if
hundreds of thousands of Native Americans practice their faith with-
out serious health or diversion harms despite peyote being banned as a

dangerous substance with a high potential for abuse, then it is difficult
to see how an exemption cannot be granted to the 130 or so American
members of the U.D.V. who want to practice theirs.40
Policing the Political
The decision of the Roberts Court to uphold the preliminary injunction against the prosecution of the Unio do Vegetal under the Controlled Substances Act seems to travel in the opposite direction from the
Howard and Rudd administrations decisions to initiate and then uphold
the Intervention. The difference between these two cases doesnt appear
merely at the surfacethe Roberts Court refusal to demonize the alternative bodily practices (illegal drug ingestion) of a minority religion occurred at nearly the same moment that the Howard government declared
a national emergency based on the specter of Indigenous bodily practices
(illegal sexual practices). Not only do we seem to be seeing a different
judgment but we also seem to be witnessing a different mood and stance
toward the minority social projects and worlds that crisscross the nation.
Gonzales v. UDV is soothing and practical, allowing and monitoring difference. In the case of the Intervention in Australia, the mood and stance
was hysterical and confrontational. As the first decision of the Roberts
Court, Gonzales v. UDV was hailed as signaling a potential softening of
judicial ideological positions, especially important after the controversial
intervention of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, which effectively decided the 2000 election by halting the Florida ballot recount. The Intervention, meanwhile, was widely considered to have roiled the social and
political field, hardened ideological positions, broken longstanding alliances and friendships, and shattered a longstanding consensus on the importance of multiculturalism to the making of the Australian nation.
But were either of these cases instances of a political eventor indices of a broader political shift in recognition in late liberalism? Lets
take the Australian case. The sex panic did alter one level of the political
order. But, as much as something like a political event seems to have occurred, the question remains how to relate this level of political disruption to another level of political conservation. Did the Intervention actu-
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ally disturb anything from the point of view of a common politics if we

take common politics to mean the normal distribution of roles, places,
and occupations within a given political order?41 Has the common, in
this sense, been disrupted? Have late liberal strategies of transforming
a crisis of colonial legitimacy into a crisis of culture been affected as the
state has shifted from cultural recognition (self-determination) to social intervention? The answer seems to be no; the Intervention is not a
political action in Rancires sense, but merelyand only partially, because other laws demanding the traditional subject remain in forcean
inversion of the relationship between culture as the agency of care and
as the cause of crisis. If the Intervention was not an instance of political
action, was Gonzales v. UDV? Here again the given distribution of social
places and rolesthe given spacing of the governance of the prior and
the distinction between the autological subject and the genealogical societyremains firmly in place even as who is thought to occupy which
space is shuffled around. Native Americans will remain situated within
the social tense of the settler state. They alone will be disciplined by the
specter of the governance of the prior.
It is vital however to remember that although it can police the potential eruptions of political events, the politics of cultural recognition in
late liberalism cannot saturate social worlds in such a way that no potentiality remains within the actual world. This is in part because, in relation
to social projects and worlds, recognition only faces one aspect, or plane,
of these projects and worlds, and because trying to manage this plane creates new potentials for these projects and worlds. As well as demonstrating the success of containing a potential political event, the Intervention
and Gonzales v. UDV demonstrate the inability of recognition to saturate
any given social field.
In the case of the Gonzales v. UDV, the plaintiffs had social and cultural
characteristics that straddle and cross the divisions of the autological subject and genealogical society. The origins of their religious practice of ingesting ayahausca are continually projected into the period before the
conquest of the Americas. A Mayan backdrop indigenizes its religious
practice. But its proper name, and the official representation of the group,
continually situates members within the framework of the free subject
of Christian conversion. We might go so far as claim that it was this very
indeterminacy that made the Unio do Vegetal available for judicial re-
flection and debate. The same can be said about the Unio do Vegetals
relationship to the governance of the prior. Are the Unio do Vegetal the
same or different from other Indigenous groups? The Unio do Vegetal
leadership argues that there is no difference between what their church
does and what the Native American Church does. And who decides
which of these will be the truth of this group: the extraterritorial nature
of the Unio do Vegetal (and then what about the Comanche empire,
which straddled the current divisions between Mexico and the United
States)42 or the Christian rewriting of pre-Christian practices (and what
about the Native American Church with its complex dialogical relation
to Christian notions of communion)?
In the Australian case, similar problems of indeterminacy arise. Sutton
might be able to differentiate between traditional and modern, customary and historical peoples, but this differentiation cannot survive an encounter with the material conditions of actual Indigenous social worlds.
What Indigenous man or woman cannot be addressed from the perspective of either the autological subject or the genealogical society? Some
have job skills in education, construction, and power and water management; some keep outstations where their deceased relatives inhabited the
landscape. Some make their way through the competing Christian ideologies that aggressively address them, casting their deceased relatives as
devils if they appear to them. Most of their modes of kinship and association have had to address competing discourses of race, friendship, and
stranger intimacy as they do nothing more than go to school, buy a can of
Coke, visit a doctor, or fill out their unemployment forms. These modes
of association are the unintelligible knots (nots) in the social divisions of
tense defining late liberalismthe part that has no part in the distribution of social roles and places. But even as they are caught in the divisions
of social belonging, the members of the Unio do Vegetal and contemporary Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory resist this division
insofar as they remain and endure. As neither this nor that they stand as
a constant refusal of the techniques of recognition and their inversion
in late liberalism.43 They are the part that has no partthe noise of the
unsayablefound neither on one side nor on the other of the temporal
division of social space, but in the space that cannot be contained by this
division.
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The Brackets of Recognition
The Intolerance of Recognition
This chapter continues my examination of the late

liberal politics of recognition and my interest in
the potentiality of the part that has no part within
this mode of governance. Chapter 1 examined
how various forms of social tense (the divisions of
autological subject and genealogical society; the
governance of the prior) manage the line between
policing and politics in order to make difference
intelligible in late liberalism. Even as it continues
to explore how tense functions as a technology of
power, this chapter puts more pressure on recog-
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nition itself, arguing that recognition is not a single entity but is instead
one of three modes, or forms, of apprehending alternative social projects
and worlds in late liberalism. If the previous chapter was interested in the
way recognition prevents the eruption of a political event in the vicinity
of the part that has no part, this chapter asks what form, or mode, recognition takes when this moment of intelligibility is deferred, bracketed, or
denied and recognition is not able to overcome liberal intolerance.
After all, as even Le Guins short story The Ones Who Walk Away
from Omelas makes clear, the fictional citizens of Omelas have several
different ethical responses to the abused child in their midst. They reconcile. They refuse to reconcile. They stay. They leave. The public, political,
and juridical discourses surrounding the Intervention in Australia and the
U.S. Supreme Court case Gonzales v. O Centro Esprita Beneficente Unio
do Vegetal demonstrate the variety of responses that a set of nonfictional
subjects, embedded in governmental and legal institutions, take to the
injustices done to alternative social, religious, and cultural projects and
worlds in their midstincluding whether or not they experience a disciplinary action taken against them as an injustice. The responses of these
actual persons vary as surely as do those of their fictional counterparts.
They refuse recognition. They grant the favors of recognition. They decide that recognition should be granted carte blanche or on a case-by-case
basis. And these responses meet a variety of other responses outside the
strict confines of parliament, Congress, and law, such as when liberal academics and pundits say such uncontroversial things as: We need to denounce the social projects of the other (Sutton); We need to be able to
live with the impasses of justice (Scalia); And we need to proceed in a
case-by-case manner (Roberts).
The statement that we must proceed case by case, or cognate statements such as that we need to begin with what we can agree upon suggest
the complex temporal and spatial nature of recognition. Until a specific
political struggle for recognition is resolved, alternative social projects
must hide in plain or not so plain sight, and states must be ready to discipline them. Moreover, no one assumes that the social projects and worlds
denied recognition evaporate when a verdict is announced. In short, the
dynamics of recognition depend on a temporal suspension of judgment
that manifests as a social spacinga bracketing of the other in a no-mans
land of having been neither recognized nor denied recognition. Insofar

as these brackets of difference are ordinary responses within the politics
of recognition in late liberalism, they suggest the vast social worlds and
projects that are neither inside nor outside recognition, whose worth and
value has neither been nor not been decided, that remain pure potentiality in the actual divisions of the social order, a virtual queue in the seams
of late liberalism. Statements such as these, exemplified in Robertss majority opinion in Gonzales v. UDV, suspend, or bracket, social differences
that cannot as yet enter into the communicative rationality and moral
sense of the late liberal public sphere. Whatever the objective conditions
of the world are really out there, such statements insist that the relationship of justice and ethics to these bracketed spaces must be suspended
for the moment. But what if we opened these brackets? What conditions
of life would we find in these suspended zones? What are the modes of
comportment of the parts that have no part but are nevertheless living
among us?
To understand what is at stake here the first thing we need to remember is that the call for people to begin with the agreeable and become
comfortable with impasses does not mean that those people who are disagreeable and the supposed source of the impasse disappear from the face
of the earth. People may be bracketed by liberal procedures for proceeding in the face of alternative social projects and worlds, but these brackets
do not vaporize them. Those within these brackets hear the same call for
patience as those without. They are just differently positioned to this call.
Large groups of people may be, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in another
context, consigned to the imaginary waiting room of history.1 But they
are living within these waiting rooms. Whether one wishes they would
or not, statements such as We should begin with the practical and the
agreeable do not place the lives of the impractical and disagreeable in
the past perfect or future anterior tensea problem that society has dealt
with or will have dealt with from the perspective of the last man. Such
statements might configure these social worlds in such a way that they
effectively disappear from public discussion, sentiment, and ethics. But it
would be mistaken to think that the people themselves are sitting quietly
in their broom closets, or clamoring outside the gates of the Emerald
City waiting for the wizard to appear, or hanging out with the doorkeeper
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of law waiting for permission to enter. The social worlds of the impractical and disagreeable remain in durative time. They persist. But they do
not persist in the abstract. From the perspective of dominant worlds, the
condition in which they endure has the temporal structure of limboan
edge of life located somewhere between given and new social positions
and roles, and between the conditions of the past and the promise of the
future. Nicolas Rothwell of The Australian noted this suspension of being
a year after the beginning of the Intervention: Aboriginal societies of the
Centre and Top End are now in a disquieting limbo, at the mercy of their
bureaucratic masters and administrators in distant Canberra. Everything
is transition, reform, new initiatives both economic and social. The revolution promised a year ago is not over, or even well advanced. Indeed, it
has scarcely begun.2 But from the perspective of the bracketed, the problem is how to endure the material conditions that compose their limbo.
Not only are the parts that have no part in the given orders of the sayable and visible continuing to live as they wait in their waiting rooms,
when we open the brackets of recognition and examine the clamorous,
sprawling social worlds living within, against, on top of these brackets,
we find that the broom closet might not be the best metaphor for the
spatial distribution of this form of social abandonment. And we find that
recognition might not be the most useful way of conceptualizing the
dynamics at play. And thus the second thing we need to remember is that
recognition is simply one of several forms that the apprehension of alternative social projects and worlds take in late liberalism. When the security of the state, its specific organizational integration with the market,
and its enmeshment within dominating discourses of ethics and rights
are threatened, recognition appears in a different modality. When we look
into and around the waiting rooms of history, what we see is not recognition but recognition in another state, or another state of apprehension;
namely, espionage and camouflage. By these terms, I mean to refer to
actual practices of cloaking as well as a much broader and diverse set
of discourses about modes of concealment that allow otherwise visible
organisms or objects to remain indiscernible from the surrounding environment. Espionage and camouflage are, in other words, the modes of
recognition that become visible when, as a result of some threat to late
liberal security or some bracketing of the politics of recognition, the tense
of the other is written as a suspension of the present and the future. In
this way of conceiving things, recognition is not negated by espionage or

camouflage. Recognition is simply one mode of apprehending the other
in late liberalism alongside espionage and camouflage. These latter two
modes might be most apparent when recognition is bracketed, but they
are always potentially present in successful bids for recognition. In other
words, because recognition, espionage, and camouflage are modal relationsin the strict sense that they relate to each other as internal possibilitiesrecognition is as much a response to threats to late liberal security as espionage and camouflage. Or this is my argument: recognition is
never simply about the worth of the other; it is also always about the arts
of disguise, perimeter busting, and uncloaking necessary for recognition
in the more limited sense to make a discernment. And because it is, recognition and its other modalities provide an especially dense site for understanding the contemporary entanglements of late liberal and neoliberal
governancethe governance of alternative social projects and worlds in
the wake of the legitimacy crisis of the postcolonial world and a new post9/11 crisis.
The answer to the question of how the part that has no part in the
given orders of the sayable and visible endures in these kinds of social
spacings will stretch across the next two chapters. In chapter 3 I focus on
ethical substance, endurance, and materiality of being a social potential
in the actual worlds of late liberalism and neoliberalism. In chapter 4, I
examine the form of eventfulness that characterizes suffering and surviving in these spacings. In this chapter I examine two different issues: first,
I discuss accounts of the cause and meaning of moments when late liberal recognition is not able or is unwilling to overcome its intolerance of
alternative social projects, moments that include the suspension of judgment about the other or the suspension of others when a negative judgment is made about their life and worlds. I then discuss espionage and
camouflage as modalities of recognition that emerge at these moments
of intolerance.
The Trembling of Recognition
Since the emergence of recognition as a technique for managing the crisis

of legitimacy in the wake of anticolonial and new social movements, liberal celebrants of recognition have had to provide, on the one hand, an
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account of the underlying causes of intolerance and, on the other hand,

a justification for withholding or suspending recognition. What causes
liberal recognition to tremble and turn away from its supposed commitment to valuing the diversity of the other? What causes liberals to draw
clear red lines beyond which they refuse to extend recognition and tolerance? For some time, scholars of recognition have been interested in
two aspects of these red lines and the brackets of recognition they create: their cause and justification. On the one hand, they have asked what
causes the trembling of recognitionthe liquefactions of the liberal self
and her social commitments in relation to an alternative social project
and worldso that we can better understand, shape, and direct the resultant transformations of law, economy, and politics that these liquefactions provoke. Broadly speaking, two competing causes of this trembling
have been discussed in the critical literature.
One group, exemplified by Samuel Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations, argues that a trembling of recognition results when the semantically ordered, practically based, moral foundations of distinct civilizations
collide.3 The borders between peoples, civilizations, and their semanticomoral formations are metaphorized as tectonic plates. When they touch,
or shift from their established positions, they release massive forces that
form and deform the borders of social worlds. Consider, for instance, an
editorial in the Sunday Times (London), September 16, 2007, in which
Nick Clegg, then the home affairs secretary of the Liberal Democratic
Party, presented to the public his partys official stance on the appropriateness of recognition in the current moment of the war on terror: Our
aim must be to refute the medievalism of Al-Qaedas perverted world
view, while ensuring that members of our mainstream Muslim communities feel that our liberal values of tolerance and diversity are their values
too. We must combine critical engagement with the many grievances held
among mainstream Muslims, without necessarily accepting them, drawing a clear red line beyond which liberal respect for other views does not
extend.4 Clegg acknowledges that people tremblehe might even be
said to be insisting that a tremble occur whether it has or has not. Medievalism, culturally based abuse, terror: not only should these categories
prompt the red lines of late liberal recognition, they should also abrogate the communicative procedures through which late liberal judgment
emerges in social time. We are told that recognition has its proper limits;
that liberals always seek to overstep those limits because of their deep
commitment to tolerance; and that, as a result, liberals must be careful to
discipline their good impulses especially at the divide between the modern autological subject and medieval genealogical society. But Clegg also
insists that the proper comportment to this trembling should be understood through a temporal spacing. In other words, he finds at hand a temporal framework on which the red line of intolerance can be drawn. The
confrontation, Clegg tells his readers, is not merely between people, but
across time. Denying them recognition is not denying recognition to the
people who are among you, but people who are in your past. The child in
the broom closet isand the Muslim next door and the Indigenous man
down the road might bein a different geological sediment.
Though hardly aligned with and strikingly more complex than Huntingtons political project, some philosophers of language have likewise
presented the problem of recognition in terms of incommensurate semantic fields. They ask how and why radically incompatible ethical and
epistemological horizons are aligned or not; how people interpret and decide between them; and how they characterize these interpretations and
the practical worlds that result within or alongside them. Scholars such as
Gadamer, de Man, and Derrida have vigorously argued about the degree,
source, and condition of distortion in translations (and interpretations)
across incommensurate semantic fields; about the risk of assigning and
acting on these translations in ordinary life; and about the social productivity of foregrounding indeterminacy and undecidability as a progressive
social ideal.5
The ability to commensurate two textual (or social) fields without distortion or the ability to decide between two translations or interpretations on the basis of truth and accuracy puts more than metaphysics at
risk (though as Derrida has noted, it also puts metaphysics at risk).6 The
stakes of these distortions seem high, given, as Jim Hopkins has argued,
that the ability to spontaneously, continually, and with remarkable precision and accuracy interpret one another seems fundamental to our
co-operative and cognitive lives.7 The American philosopher Donald
Davidson located the purest form of the philosophical problem of truth
and incommensurability in colonial history insofar as his notion of radi-
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cal interpretation finds its starkest expression there. Davidson uses the
phrase radical interpretation to indicate the semantic dynamics that are
operating when people interpret an utterance in the context of radical linguistic (and social) alterity.8 How could the Hawaiians have understood
James Cook, or Cook the Hawaiians, without producing serious distortions?9 As he puts it, Hesitation over whether to translate a saying of
another by one or another of various non-synonymous sentences of mine
does not necessarily reflect a lack of information: it is just that beyond a
point there is no deciding, even in principle, between the view that the
Other has used words as we do but has more or less weird beliefs, and the
view that we have translated him wrong. Torn between the need to make
sense of a speakers words and the need to make sense of his patterns of
belief, the best we can do is choose a theory of translation that maximizes
agreement.10
Davidson props the possibility of radical interpretation on the principle of charity, namely, that speakers and listeners assume that the other
is acting according to a set of rational linguistic conventions like their
own.11 This convention allows speakers and hearers constantly to readjust
their passing theories about the meaning of words as they realize that
others are not using them as the listener would. As a result, if our aim is
to understand the speaker as she or he wishes to be understood, then we
modify our own language assumptions in the direction of a speakers own
as, in the course of conversation, we realize that the two are divergent
that the semantic way the other uses hippopotamus is the way we use
orange, for example.12 In short, we negotiate charitably. And like liberal
respect, charity begins and ends at home. According to Davidson, If we
cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviors of a
creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own
standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having
beliefs, or as saying anything.13 That creature becomes noisebecomes
a creature as it becomes noise.
At the basis of all of these theories of translation, the political theorist
Mahmood Mamdani has argued, is a more or less sophisticated version
of culture talk: the idea that there are cultures and that each culture
can be defined by some internal essence or arrangement of sense and
value.14 For Mamdani and other political theorists, like Patchen Markell,
culture talk is a second-order discourse.15 It registers the facticity of a moment of embodied social dissonance and it characterizes this dissonance
as the effect of a kind of thing (culture). This social dissonance might
be a fleeting feeling at the edge of an encounter or a pronounced and
well-defined event. The occasion of a dissonance that threatens to turn
into intolerance may be publicly discussed or silently reflected upon. It
can involve human or nonhuman animals, organic or inorganic life. What
is at stake is how these exemplary moments of reasoned public debate,
animated by the trembling of recognition, sit side by side with quieter
even silentmoments of trembling and the reflections they produce. In
other words, the social terrain of late liberal recognition is not reducible
to a single kind of eventthe same kind of seismic shock that levels all
houses equally or in the same way.
Take the claim made by some of my Indigenous friends in Australia,
whom I have known and lived closely with since I was twenty-two, that
animals should be allowed to die in their own way. This is not indifference
on their part, but an ethics they themselves learned as a way of life prior
to their developing an explicit, propositionally based way of justifying it
to themselves and others. But when this dying presents, from my point
of view, unnecessary pain to an animal, my response to the competing
claims of the animals pain and my friends moral stance prompts a response that certainly has cognitive aspects, but also involves an embodied
interpretation, a set of affective and energetic interpretations. I turn my
head away as my body becomes upset, even as I think about the difference between what I think and what they think. Even if I take to heart
Donna Haraways call to take seriously the idea that human nature is an
interspecies relationshipthat within the child in the broom closet are
all sorts of living beingsI do not know how to square this hermeneutic
circle.16 And I would say that in these moments I tremble and my trembling is not in the past tense. I tremble in a durative sense. I continue to
feel the shores of liquefaction lapping at my breast each time I am confronted by these competing claims; the terror and liquefaction doesnt kill
me, nor do they lead to a simple distribution of master and slave.
And yet, for a variety of reasons, I keep the content of these reflections
close to my chest. I have not presented or debated them in publicor at
least not until here and now. At various moments, I talk with my friends
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about these competing claims. At other moments, I sit, watch, experience

my reactions, and think about the consequences of taking a stand in the
contexts of local and regional representations of the traditional Aboriginal and the concrete politics of cultural recognition, self-determination,
and Intervention that I discussed in chapter 1. At all times I know that I
am acting, whether I am doing or not doing something concrete. At all
times I find that this trembling of recognition is about the degrees of difference and indifference I am cultivating to various things in the scene
myself, my friends, the nonhuman animaland about the uneven consequences of removing or being removed from belonging to any one of
these cultivated obligations. And at all times I understand that there are
different psychic, social, and physical consequences to the various social
persons in the scenewhat good will be available to which people based
on what decision I make. But to call any of these reflections and decisions volitionalchoices of the willwould radically mischaracterize
the time and nature of these reflections and decisions. I can say that I can
leave our little Omelas. I can say that I can decide enough is enough,
that losing my friends is less important than continuing to inhabit this
impasse. So they can also say. But every decision and subsequent action
is the result of a set of obligations already in the scene. That is, we are not
within different cultures, rather we are all implicated in a set of shared
and divergent forces that bring us together and move us apart.
Other moments of potential intolerance are less noticeable, even less
of an event than mine, more like a quasi-event, more like a passing shiver,
quickly felt and then swallowed up by ongoing life.
The force of dissonance need not be discussed in such classic anthropological terms. The mixed and heterogeneous subject is within liberal
spaces classically conceived. The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, for
instance, provoked widespread public debate with his provocation that if
we are to make a distinction between persons and nonpersons, then all
nonpersonsthose who are world-poor, in the calculus of who and what
kinds of entities are world-making or world-poorshould be treated
equivalently, and most controversially, should be liable to be put to death
by persons. Into the class of the world-poor Singer casts animals, fetuses,
and severely disabled newborns. Outraged responses to Singers proposal came side by side with coolly reasoned ones. Philosophers such as
Bernard Williams and disability activists such as the late Harriet McBryde
Johnson responded publicly in the genre of dispassionate argument.17
Johnsons widely reported decision to debate Singer in public was meant
to defeat the substance of Singers argument by reason and addressthe
content of her argument and the fact of who was authoring these words,
a woman born severely disabled and thus, within Singers framework, a
nonperson at the time of her birth. Singers response and the various replies to him are not at stake here.18
What is at stake is how these kinds of exchanges are characterized,
valued, and evaluated in late liberalism. In late liberal democratic contexts, these kinds of exchangesthe content of their argument and the
pragmatics of how they argueare typically understood as exemplary
acts of deliberative communication safely protected under the genre of
constitutionally protected and celebrated liberal public reason. But this
typical characterization masks the fact that Singers propositions and
Johnsons counterpropositions are not merely one kind of thinga token
of a type of thing that is stable across all social contextsamong other
kinds of things. What they were doing as they debated at Princeton University is open to multiple metadiscursive characterizations. Habermas,
for instance, might celebrate their engagement insofar as he can use it as
an instance of the procedural basis of a (re)integrated public sphere. For
Habermas, debates such as theirs enhance democratic society by modeling how justice is achieved and the good life made material in late liberalism.
But others do not agree. Many European countries would consider
Singers position as falling within the parameters of prohibited hate
speech. The redline of tolerance is drawn in front of his argument no
matter how persuasive it might beindeed, precisely because it might
have persuasive power a red line of tolerance might be needed. And Singer
is not the only person barred from proceeding. Having himself suffered
the accusation of engaging in hate speech, Singer defended in an article in
The Guardian the rights of the radical animal rights group PEtA (People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to post posters headlined To Animals, All People are Nazis. As Singer noted, PEtA adapted this line from
the Polish-born Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the same week
that Germany and the World Jewish Congress rejected the idea that defa-
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mation of religion is an affront to human dignity, moving against a U.N.

Human Rights Council declaration condemning defamation of religion,
Germanys highest court ruled against the right of the United States
based animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
to exhibit posters that juxtapose photographs of victims of the Holocaust
with photographs of animals in factory farms and at slaughterhouses. . . .
According to the court, Germanys laws on freedom of speech did not
protect PEtAs campaign, because to make the fate of the victims of the
Holocaust appear banal and trivial was an offense against human dignity.19 And there is nothing particularly unique about this case. Were the
anti-Islamic cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllends-Posten or the Macleans magazine article, Why the Future Belongs to Islam, or Mahmoud
Ahmadinejads denial of the Jewish Holocaust instances of deliberative
debate, free expression, or hate speech? According to whom? In other
words, like culture talk, talk about deliberative reason is an interpretive
intervention in a field of interpretive forces.
This way of thinking about culture talk has led a second group of critics
to argue that recognition trembles, not when experiencing the collisions
of semantic fields, cultural borders, or civilizational boundaries, but when
experiencing internally incommensurate social, political, and economic
logics, practices, and affects, and the competing fields of power in which
they are embedded. From this point of view, the problem is not the mismanagement of colliding civilizational borders. The problem is that a dissonance internal to late liberal society is projected outward as a problem
between liberal, illiberal, or nonliberal societies. This internal dissonance
can be exacerbated when liberal institutions are placed in the vicinity of
an illiberal or nonliberal cultural or social other, but the dissonance exists
independent of any such encounter. And two broad kinds of dissonance
are central to the trembling of recognition.
One form of internal dissonance emerges from the incommensurability and undecidability of truth as it stretches across late liberal deliberative sense and moral sense.20 When deliberative sense is cited in the
liberal public sphere, the meaning of sense tends to gravitates toward
aspects of semantic or pragmatic signification and its possibility for truth
production. When moral sense is cited in the liberal public sphere the
meaning of sense tends to gravitate toward the faculties and fields of
sensation, often organically grounded. This sensate ground is the field

of the final intelligibility of moral senseand as a form of understanding and interpretation is often explicitly contrasted to deliberative reason. The infamous statement of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart that, although he believed hard- core pornography was impossible to define, he would know it when he saw it, should be rephrased as I
feel it when I feel it. We also see this sense of moral sense in my visceral
reaction to the pain of dying animals in the context of the claim of my
friends. But whether public or private, large or small, these moments of
dissonance and the trembling of recognition that occurs in their vicinity
are not meaningful in and of themselves.
They are, to be sure, in the sense that they occur, if not exactly exist.
But what they mean, or how we understand themhow we interpret
them discursively so that these tremors can be made sensible as a kind
of thingwill not be found within the tremor, the trembling, itself.21 To
be sure, the tremor is a moment of interpretation. As Charles Sanders
Peirce argued, interpretation can be logically understood to have at least
three different grounds, the affective (emotional), energetic, or logicalsymbolic-linguistic. These three grounds interact with each other dynamically even as they remain analytically distinct. And all of them are rhetorical in the sense that they figure a relationship between two other signs (or
a sign and its object, in Peirces terminology).22 The feeling of rage a subject might experience in the vicinity of neoconservative politics would, for
Peirce, be an example of an affective interpretant, and my trembling in the
face of the competing claims about the proper response to the suffering
of animals would be an example of an energetic interpretant. Rage is an
affective sign that interpretsin the sense of figuresthe subject relative
to a political field. This subject might reflect on this rage with a variety of
propositionally based accounts of its meaning, thumbing through and
variously interdigitating the various political registers and genres available to her. She may, through this discursively mediated reflection, produce new affective interpretants such as finding herself becoming proud,
or scared, of her rageor new energetic interpretants such as finding
oneself paralyzed by the discovery that ones self-understanding as a committed pacifist is out of joint with ones feelings. One might as a result decide to abandon formal politics altogether even though one doesnt know
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what ones next step will be. In any case, from a Peircean perspective, this
entire spiraling matrix of interpretation is internal to political semiosis.
It is no surprise then that Pierre Bourdieu and Paul de Man read
Peirce and Heidegger as engaged in a similar project of precognitive
understanding and rhetoric as buildingor that earlier, John Wild read
William James from the perspective of an existential phenomenology.23
Heideggers early philosophical project rested on elaborating the hermeneutic conditions of Dasein.24 Within this early philosophy, interpretationunderstanding as interpretationis not originally within propositionally based language games. As Mark Wrathall has argued, Heidegger
understood propositionally based language games as presupposing a
prior mode of interpretation (a primary meaning) in which a thing
or activity . . . refers to or relates to other activities or entities in such a
way that the disclosure of meaning is not dependent on our possessing
a system of signs.25 Understanding as interpretation is within the practical comportment of everyday lifea comportment rooted in practical
understanding and grounded in a variety of interpretants, the total effect
of which produces what Bourdieu referred to as habitus.26 This does not
mean that understanding as interpretation is outside language and consciousness, or linguistic consciousness, or that it is within the individual
subject. Understanding is instead a complex topology that interdigitates
the internal and external, subject and object, affect and reason; a topological spacing that Lacan called extimacy.27
For thinkers like Peirce, Bourdieu, and de Man what moments of trembling mean, in the sense of their semantic and propositional sense, cannot be found in the trembling itself, nor can the trembling be reduced to
semantic or propositional sense. The meaning of the trembling of recognition is only secured through a second-order interpretive actthe various available ways of saying how these trembles should be socially understood, absorbed, and distributed and the demanding environments that
impose repressive and productive consequences of using one or another
of these ways of understanding and evaluating them. These second-order
interpretative acts say what kind of thing the tremble is and thus what
proper stance (actions, relations, and feelings) one should take toward
it. But a gap, a difference, remains between these first- and second-order
modes of interpretation because they are differently grounded. Not only
can the meanings of the trembling of recognition not be solely located

in cognitive reflexivity but all recognition is an immanent proposition, a
potential social direction, because moments of recognition and its trembling emerge at the intersection of the dynamic relation to these grounds
of interpretation.
But if these moments of recognition ricochet across these various interpretive grounds, the distinctiveness of these grounds is not without
a history.28 The phrases deliberative sense and moral sense are often
used to refer to these three kinds of grounds. Over time, the procedure
of deliberative reason came to be considered a critical domain of truth
production as distinct from moral reason, even as both senses of sense,
sensate and cognitive, moral and deliberative, became available for generating truths in late liberalismand thus of assessing the legitimacy of the
other. From such mundane examples as my friends and my responses to
the suffering of animals to such portentous examples as the U.S. Supreme
Court decision on pornography, these distinctions are elaborated and put
to use through a typical series of questions, such as: Should I allow my
gut to decide to tolerate or not tolerate this or that alternative social
project and world? Where is my gut? Is it being camouflaged by my mind?
Is my mind merely a mask taking power over but not negating the affective
forces registering through me? In other words, truth was not consolidated
in one or the other of these senses. It was dispersed across them, creating spaces of undecidability with respect to which of the senses should
have the upper hand in any given context of social and cultural politics.
In short, the historically constituted difference between deliberative and
moral sense constituted a zone of undecidability within late liberal truth,
even as it ordered that truth.
Another form of internal dissonance arises from the incommensurate
ways in which institutions designate what will and will not be an instance
of an alternative social world. Here we shift from looking at the internal
incommensurate and undecidable grounds of understanding, interpretation, and evaluation to the incommensurate and undecidable grounds
of various bureaucratic orders, institutional purposes, and evidential demands. Singer was pointing to this disorder in liberal bureaucratic orders,
institutional purposes, and evidential demands when he criticized the
contradictory stances the European Union has taken on hate speech.29
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We can also return to a case discussed in chapter 1. In the wake of the Little
Children Are Sacred report, the Australian federal government loudly announced the end of the previous regime of cultural recognition. But this
announcement did not wipe the legislative or juridical slate clean. It was
not a sovereign act in this sense: for the most part, the existing legislation,
a maze of incommensurate laws pertaining to land usage in Indigenous
country, remained on the books. We can take even a very few of the major
bureaucratic entities and their legislative regimes affecting land usage in
the Northern Territory of Australia: Aboriginal Land Trusts set up under
the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976; land councils established under the same act; the Aboriginal Areas and Protection
Authority set up under the revised Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act in 1989; the
Native Title Act passed in 1993 but then subsequently amended; the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act, 1976; and the Local Government
Act, 1978. These pieces of legislation and their implementation place demands on (recognize) Indigenous subjects and groups in slightly to significantly different ways. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act and the Native
Title Act pivot on a model of human descent from clan-based estates.
The Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act allows for economic associations independent of these clan-based groups. The Local Government
Act is based on residential principles that do not assume descent or market associations. And the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority can use
any of these criteriadescent, economic, residential, ritualfor making
a judgment about what aspects of the country should be registered as a
sacred siteand who has authority to register them. And groups organized on the basis of all of these acts might be operating on the same
piece of land with different intentions and outcomes.
These few legal regimes do not begin to saturate the density of property relations in the region where the Intervention was located. Other
property forms would include, at the very least, forms of title such as freehold, leasehold, life estates, ground leases, and pastoral lease and rights
regimes based on common law, international law, and statutory law.
Through these various bureaucratic entities and their regulatory regimes
pass numerous kinds of goods and services, including housing, land development, land management and protection, employment schemes such as
the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), and more
recently, shared responsibility agreements.30 These legislative regimes derive their meaning, often explicitly, from their surrounding legislative and
discursive contexts, without these surrounding contexts fully determining that meaning or its ultimate direction. And yet, considered as a field,
these reappear as a set of incommensurate, though often mutually referring, state regimes that are themselves constantly under revision.
For example, leading up to and following the federal emergency intervention in Indigenous affairs, some of this legislation changed. Aboriginal Councils and Associations have become the Office of the Registrar of
Indigenous Corporations, and the local governments are currently being
consolidated into the twentytwenty concept: twenty central town hubs
by 2020. But these changes do not occur instantly, nor leave a pristinely
commensurated field in their wake. These competing, at times incommensurate, legislative regimes exist simultaneously even where they are
not explicitly referred to or mobilized.
It is within these dissonant, often incommensurate legislative and bureaucratic terrains that Indigenous people must make their way. And because they exist as incommensurate fields, they provide a potential field
of maneuver for Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects supporting and
opposing these policies. In short, dissonance itself may be a means of conserving power as much as a source of interference to power. In the above
cases, the dissonances within these legislative fields provide different degrees of maneuverability or blockage to various actors within them.
It is not necessary to choose between these two broad and competing
causesthe seismic shocks that occur when two semantic-civilizational
orders collide, and the internal incommensurability within late liberalism.
The trembling of recognition is no doubt produced by any of a number of
factors internal and external to late liberalismit has plural conditions
as well as plural states. It can be caused by various social orders confronting each other, especially when a given or emergent mode of social
life challenges one or the other side of late liberal deliberative and moral
sense, or both sides at the same time. It can also be caused by struggles
within any given late liberal order, especially when moral sense and deliberative sense are metathematized as religious sense and rational sense.
And it can be located within any given social order or within any given
social subject. So a subject might find herself trembling, liquefying, be-
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cause, for example, she might think she should love across radical difference but in fact is physically and affectively repulsed by some aspect of
a concrete otherthey insist that I let this small animal bloat and die,
and believe that to summon the courage to kill it is to enter the domain
of abominable cruelty because each and every entity must be allowed
to encounter its own deathand because she cannot be sure if her repulsion has a theological or (merely) cultural origin, and cannot be sure
if it matters whether her repulsion has a cultural, physical, reasoned, or
spiritual ground. But she might not notice, remember, or self-consciously
consider other quasi-events of trembling. Maybe these will resurface in
her dreams, intensified or dispersed across a number of phantasmagorical
figures.
What is necessary to understand is that these moments of trembling
produce a variety of reactions, the intelligibility of which are socially external to the trembling even as the reactions are an internal expression
(interpretation) of the force of this dissonance in a scene. And it is necessary to understand that this intelligibility is embedded in a variety of
demanding environments that passively and actively enforce one mode
of intelligibility and justification over another. In other words, scholarly
and political interest in the causes of the trembling of recognition and
their interest in the problem of justice and justification when red lines of
intolerance and incarceration are drawn is due in no small part to the fact
that this trembling leads to acts of state and public enhancement of life
for some at the expense of others. After all, when recognition encounters,
or manufactures, an unrepentant alterity, it does not simply tremble. Nor
does the liberal state merely transfer these public tremors to the realm of
private beliefs (no matter how many times the transformation of public
religion into private belief is held up as the exemplary transformation of
secularism). Where the security of the state is challenged, the state of recognition publicly denounces the redlined public, enacts repressive laws to
eliminate it, and hunts down its recalcitrant members.
When recognition is formally withheld or granted as a suspended judgment, issues of justification come to the foreground. Political theorists
and political philosophers have attempted to discover some overarching
principles on which to ground justice and justification in these moments
of overt oppression. We might even say that the dominant strain of theo-
retical thought has focused on social justice in the moments that states
decide an alternative social project cannot be accepted as a member of
the national or international community. What norms can be imagined
against which judgment can be judged? To be sure, the juridical history
of constitutional democracies is littered with cases in which jurists have
noted that a prior cultural or social judgment was not based on reason
but on mere prejudice (a culturally grounded gut reaction). In other
words, when the projected future became the actual present, those who
decide who will be designated as the part who has no part come to view
their past decisions in a negative light. And yet the conservation of the
narrative configuration of tense in the new judgment insulates that new
judgment from reflexive memoryjuridical judgment from reflexive
judgment. After all, we might think that when jurists consider how many
times past judicial judgments of the worth of the other have been revised,
they would, in the face of a new decision, liquefy in terror that their judgment too will, from the perspective of the future, be revealed to have been
merely a culturally inflected gut reaction. We might expect them to understand, alongside Derrida, that Justice is annulled at the very moment of
the verdict.31 But they do not in general do so. As a result, brackets continue to proliferate without acquiring any special supernatural powers to
transubstantiate immediately or fully the life-worlds so bracketed. And
thus, for longer or shorter, and more or less effectively, these life-worlds
must develop a mode of living within the brackets of recognition. What
happens to the people who are the part that has no part in late liberalism?
What happens to recognition?
Espionage, Camouflage, Recognition
When brackets are thrown around recognition, either as a suspension of

judgment or as a red line of toleration, the full modal possibilities of recognition become visible. They are not absent in instances when recognition succeeds; they are simple in potentia in these moments. Often these
redlined publics are part of the formal political order. In November 2008,
for instance, the Sarkozy government arrested around twenty people in
connection to the deliberate short-circuiting of the transportation system
throughout France. The minister of justice, Rachida Dati, accused the ar-
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rested of being members of the mouvance anarcho-autonome, a part of

the extreme Left. In other words, the productive forces of state discipline are supplemented by its repressive forces, and, when they are, governmental interests in life give way to spectacular acts of killing or barely
perceptible acts of letting die.
The struggle to define the difference between human and nonhuman
animals in the United States and Europe presents us with an exemplary
case of these redlined publics, the differential of institutional power in
which they are situated, and the productive and repressive forces available to enforce one mode of intelligibility and justification with respect
to their alternative way of life. In the United States, for instance, the 1990s
witnessed the rise of a new wave of animal rights and welfare legislation
backed by powerful industry groups. The Animal Enterprise Protection
Act (AEPA) was passed in 1992, backed by the National Association for
Biomedical Research, creating new criminal and sentencing guidelines
for attacks on businesses whose business or research involves nonhuman
animals. The lack of criminal prosecution under the AEPA, and increasing violent and nonviolent protests against businesses using animals as
commodities, led many within industry and research to call for a new,
tougher law. Edward J. Walsh, a member of the Board for the National
Animal Interest Alliance, published a widely circulated essay in Lab Animal calling for the toughening of the AEPA. In it, he condemned the lack
of sentencing power in the AEPA, pointing to the emergence of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front as serious threats to
business and science. And he went a step further. He insisted that because
the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front are terrorist
groups and because terrorism is a special form of criminal activity, the
assault on these groups requires special legal consideration. And not
just the people in these groups who act violently on their beliefs: Walsh
argued that the real battle is being waged in the not-so-savage-acts
and the silly crimes of street activism. In response to their theatrics
and petty criminal acts, we must deliver the solid, unambiguous message
that their disrespect for the law will not be tolerated.32 According to the
Source Watch, the National Animal Interest Alliance is a front group for
industries involved in animal commerce and agribusiness. They promote
substituting animal welfare for animal rights and tough laws against
ecological activists. The National Animal Interest Alliance and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provide model legislation that
can be downloaded off their websites, were among the powerful lobby
interests that pushed the amendment of the AEPA, transforming it into
the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006, which did as Walsh suggested, criminalizing not merely violent acts but any act that is experienced as a threat by those against whom the act is aimed and any act that
supports and promotes these acts. The Internet was being dividedon
the one hand were websites that could openly oppose the politics of the
radical ecological movement because their view of violence to nonhuman
animals could be understood as a site for public debate; on the other hand
were websites that would open their managers to criminal prosecution
because these had been effectively characterized as on the other side of
the red line of tolerance.
All of these examples presuppose a volitional agent on the other side
of the red line. The mouvance anarcho-autonome, the Earth Liberation
Front, and Earth First! are imagined to be composed of individuals who
choose to separate themselves from dominant neoliberal orders in the
creases that these orders make available and to hide themselves within
these same orders. As volitional actors they are more available to neoliberal techniques of making die, as opposed to others who might simply
find themselves in a structural space no longer valued by the market and
its cultural forces. For these people, the softer forms of letting die will
do. They will be allowed to continue to persist in the seams of neoliberalism and late liberalism until they exhaust themselves. But in both cases,
the techniques of persistence that these alternative social projects devise
must be covered in various kinds of camouflage lest too much public attention merit state attention.
Take, for instance, documents from the U.S. Supreme Courts decision
to uphold the 10th District Courts preliminary injunction that allowed
the Unio do Vegetal exemption from prosecution under the Controlled
Substance Act. During the presentation of the case, a debate emerged
about how to understand the covert means by which the Unio do Vegetal moved ayahuasca across the border. The 10th Circuit Federal District
Court acknowledged that the Unio do Vegetal president, Jeffrey Bronfman, misled customs brokers about the substance he was importing from
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Brazil.33 The custom forms described the ayahuasca as an herbal extract

that would be used by Unio do Vegetal members as a health supplement. Emails that Bronfman drafted emphasized the need for confidentiality regarding uDVs sessions involving hoasca. He wrote: Some
people do not yet realize what confidentiality is and how careful we need
to be. People should not be talking publicly anywhere about our sessions, where we have them and who attends them.34 Moreover, when
the Unio do Vegetal attempted to grow the two plants used in the ayahuasca ceremonies in the United States, members themselves used the
term clandestine to describe their activities, requiring all members to
sign confidentiality agreements to keep their plans secret. The 10th District Court acknowledged that all of these actions by uDV demonstrate
a recognition that its importation and consumption of hoasca [sic] violated the CSA and that although uDV eventually sought a preliminary
injunction after the seizure of the hoasca, at all times leading up to that
event the record reveals that the status quo was the enforcement of the
CSA. Nevertheless, the District and Supreme Courts rejected these acts
of camouflage as deleterious to the Unio do Vegetals case, arguing that
because the Controlled Substances Act does not list hoasca as a Schedule 1 drug, but only the Dmt derivable from it, the seized plants were in
fact unregulated herbal supplements. Robertss practical suggestion for
solving this problem of camouflage was for the state to keep an eye on the
size of the Unio do Vegetal as a means of assessing the possible diversion
of ayahuasca.
At one and the same time, the Court upheld the injunction against
denying the Unio do Vegetal the legal right to import and consume a
Schedule 1 drug, placed this act of recognition under surveillance, and
deferred the possibility of claims by analogous groups to a case-by-case
review. In practical rulings such as Robertss, the other is placed within a
bracket that is as much a narrative configuration of time as it is of space.
These deferred and partial judgments are not issued in the durative tense
but as a catachresis of the past perfect, in which the undecidable practice
will have been apprehensible, and the future anterior, in which the undecidable practice will have been resolved. At the intersection of these two
tenses, the harms done within these brackets narratively disappear, and
social worlds are abandoned to their own means of making their way
their own means of making the world work.
But Robertss practical reason did more than make these worlds disappear. His practical reason also discursively and functionally integrated
the Unio do Vegetal into the same bureaucratic order that monitors the
rest of the United States through secret, though warranted, or warrantless wiretaps. Not surprisingly, many people would view Robertss practical reason to be the result of a new dynamic of recognition that predates
or postdates the 9/11 attacks. Many people have argued, in contexts more
broad than this decision, that the emergence of tactics such as camouflage and espionage postdates the attacksand indeed, that continuing
to discuss the politics of recognition now demonstrates a naive failure to
understand the fundamental transformation the liberal democratic state
has undergone.35 For them the recognition of cultural difference has been
absorbed by state security, something the courts adjudicate (such as in
Hamdan v. Gonzales, heard in the same session as Gonzales v. UDV) but
do not abrogateand something that has long been under way such as
is seen in the passage of legislation such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
These new technologies of surveillance have already been absorbed
into new ways of conceptualizing the global market. Bruce Mehlman, the
assistant secretary for technology policy, United States Department of
Commerce, delivered a talk on February 14, 2002, at a Biometrics Consortium Conference, in which he articulated global terrorism, national
security, and economic dominance through the concept of espionage.36
According to Mehlman, biometrics would allow Americans to defend
themselves in all these domains from the perimeter-busting practices of
others, even as it would provide a means of uncloaking those camouflaged within their borders. The problematic at play is not tolerance and
worth but (bio-)informatics and population management: how to make
the camouflaged stand out, to be perceived surreptitiously, to be tracked
in order to manage its threat. Perhaps ironically, even as the Australian
state was implementing the Intervention, China was threatening to prosecute members of the Australian-British mining group Rio Tinto for domestic espionage. But, if we turn the angle of this gaze, if we are looking
from the perspective of the camouflaged, the problem is not the agony
of worth but the agony of action: getting in without being seen and clandestinely navigating internal and external perimeters in order to change
the existing order. The problem is not about being deemed worthy or
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having worth for who one is in ones most robust social skin, but what one
could potentially do, how one could potentially transform the world as it
is given, or dominantly given, and make it into the world that it is not. But
however much their hierarchical relationship may have changed, or intensified, since 9/11, the modal relations of recognition, espionage, and camouflage preexisted the new security state, their origins found in and tied
to the emergence of late liberalism as a response to anticolonial struggle
and new social movements. Espionage and camouflage are not new states
of recognition, nor are they the end of recognition. Rather, they assume a
different relationship as late liberalism becomes entangled in a post-9/11
neoliberalism, and produce different forms of making die.
At first blush, it seems significant to the survival of an alternative social
project that recognition can be explicitly granted, withheld, or deferred.
And for specific alternative social projects this is no doubt the case. After
all, recognition brings with it a host of material and immaterial infrastructures that help shape and capacitate life. But, as we know, every act of
recognition creates new zones of potential life that is as yet neither prohibited nor allowed. Thus, what matters from the point of view of a specific alternative social project seems to matter less from the point of view
of the dynamics of recognition.
If the distinction between explicit and deferred refusals of recognition doesnt capture the immanent social field that make these refusals
intelligible and justifiable, then it does capture a critical tactic by which
late liberalism secures the positivity of recognition. Moments of explicit
recognition of the worth of the other, or moments in which this worth is
refused, create the illusion that espionage and camouflage are external to
recognition. And this sequencing of recognition, camouflage, and espionage is an important tactic for evacuating the durative lives of those living
in the brackets of recognition. A typical way of understanding the relationship among recognition, espionage, and camouflage, is to see recognition as the first moment, followed by espionage and camouflage. Or to see
espionage and camouflage as the first moments, followed by recognition.
In both cases, recognition, espionage, and camouflage are seen as distinct
moments, each external to the other. But when we view recognition from
inside its brackets we begin to understand recognitions multiple modalities and better appreciate the clamorous, sprawling social worlds living
within, against, on top of these brackets and the multiple, uncoordinated

strategies that those living there deploy to maintain their lives. And these
sprawling social worlds are particularly interesting because they upend
the comfortable view of recognition as an encounter entre nous absolutely
distinct from acts of espionage and camouflage.
Indeed, life-worlds that are accustomed to falling within the brackets
of recognition are especially attuned to how legal debates and decisions
may demand new social maneuvers, many of which lie within the gray
zones of legality. For this reason, I am ultimately less interested in finding
or disputing who is bracketed or the justice or justification of moments
of bracketing. Rather, I am interested in the modes of comportment that
emerge from brackets that address them, telling them, for instance, that
they will have to live with less now in order to live with more in the future,
or that their present deaths are actually a future redemption. If we are
not to be left thinking that these counterworlds are picturesque scenes
of glorious resistance and wells of creative discovery, then we need to
be clear about the conditions of life within populations that must engage recognition where it trembles and then expresses itself as espionage
and camouflage. There exhaustion rules the roost. And why wouldnt it,
when such significant forces are lined up against a targetwhen they
must bear the tension of inhabiting the tense of the other? Hegel might
be right that in the end it is the position of the slave that moves history.
But most slaves die. They are worn to death. They have no energy left to
make a revolution. And so their tactics of world making within the waiting rooms of history often never appear. I am hardly the first to make this
point. If Foucault was interested in why, given the emergent forms of
life that proliferate in the contemporary world (caused as much by these
zones of abandonment as any encouragement of market or state to be
otherwise), so few forms persist and become dominant, then one answer
is, as I have noted, the exhaustion of life when a group is the part that has
no part. A variety of world-making tactics swarms around all of us. We are
all in the waiting rooms of history. But some of these tactics do not appear
to all of us. Some wear sheeps clothing. Some names are changed not to
protect the innocent, but to protect those named from the necessity of
being innocentof proving to some court of law that what they are doing
should be recognized as legitimate. Various emergent or persistent forms
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of life circulate, or are prohibited from circulating, across various communicative media.
Moreover, as I hope the previous chapters discussion of the Australian
Intervention made clear, when the dynamics of recognition are operating within the metadynamics of the autological subject and genealogical
society, governments and publics can rapidly shuttle between calls for
the recognition of social difference and calls to refuse not merely social
difference but to reduce life to such a degree that that social difference
cannot survive. In these displaced zones of recognition people sometimes
put their energies into the reelaboration of the self rather than the identification of the self for certain others. In these social fields, the point may
well be to reshape habitudes ahead of recognition, to test something out
rather than translate it, not to produce meanings that can be translated, or
embodiments that can be recognized. This is especially true when we are
discussing subaltern publics that violate moral and deliberative sense. By
the time normative law and publics deliberate, commensurate and decide
their horizons of moral sense, the bodies before them have changed, as
have (hopefully) the conditions of embodied reason itself. But to engage
in these practices of self-elaboration or self-maintenance a social group
may spy on those who join them, assume that they are being spied on, and
camouflage themselves in the cloak of authorized identities.
Chapter Three
Road Kill
Ethical Substance, Exhaustion, Endurance
Hospices of Late Liberalism
If late liberalism, as distinct from laissez-faire liberalism and neoliberalism, refers to the effects of
anti- and postcolonial and new social movements
on how difference is treated in liberal worlds, the
1970s saw a robust set of alternative languages of
difference emerging in these movements wake.
In 1977, three years after Ursula Le Guin received
the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Charles
Burnett submitted his master of fine arts thesis,
the film Killer of Sheep, to the School of Film, Uni-
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versity of California, Los Angeles. Killer of Sheep is a quasi-narrative film

cast with nonprofessional actors, friends of the filmmaker and residents
of Watts, the setting of the movie. Across a multitude of loosely coordinated neorealist vignettes and plots we enter Stans life: Stan works in
a slaughterhouse; the slaughterhouse is Fordist in its mode of production, racist in its stratification of skills. If I wanted to push the allegorical through-line of this book, I would draw the readers attention to a
particularly poignant scene in which Stans daughter is shown playing
with a white female doll, singing Earth, Wind, and Fires hit Reasons
in a cramped broom closet, clothes littering the floor, walls falling apart,
wiring exposed, a washing machine in disrepair.
But as I move in this and the next chapter to examine how the parts
that have no part in late liberalism endure, I am interested in another plot
of the film, which follows Stan and his friends attempt to buy an engine
for a car that Stan has been slowly renovating. The engine is not merely
a sign of Stans potential upward mobility. It is the material condition
of this mobility and material evidence of a history of racial discrimination carved into the landscape. As Celeste Langan has noted, A steady
stream of seemingly innocuous funding and operational decisions . . .
have, since 1964, quietly but effectively restricted the mobility of poor
African-Americans and other disfavored minorities who do not own
cars.1 Thus the car Stan hopes to make is not merely a mode of transportation; it is the material condition for the transformation of his body,
the production of a body less exhausted, alienated, and numb. The availability of cars does not merely allow access to mainstream economies. It
can also capacitate alternative socialities. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson have described how the availability of trucks in rural Indigenous Australia allows for the emergence of new Indigenous territorial publics.2 But
they, like Stan, must first procure a vehicle.
As Killer of Sheep progresses, viewers witness the various ways, legal
and otherwise, in which Stan and one of his friends raise money to purchase the engine. What becomes painfully clear is that, for members of the
Watts neighborhood, nothing is ready to hand in the Heideggerian sense.
Nothing in Stans world simply works. Everything must become a theory
in the sense of a self-conscious encounter with the world. In slow neorealist time, we watch as Stan and his friend are absorbed into and resist
Road Kill
the chaos of local gray economies. They finally purchase a used engine for
fifteen dollars from a local purveyor of such items, lug it down a precarious set of stairs, nearly but not quite dropping it along the way, and then
heave it onto the back of a borrowed truck. But by the time that they have
reached this final platform of their desire, they experience themselves as
having no energy left. And this is not a metaphor. It is a fact of muscle,
bone, and will, whatever we mean by this last term. The motor sits on
the edge of the truck bed. They do not move it any further. Their bodies
exhausted, as well as their minds, they convince each other the motor
is secure. They start the truck, move a few feet, and the engine falls off.
Thats it. The engine is busted. The motor wont run now if it ever would
have.
No matter that Burnett ends this meditation on race, poverty, and
hope with Stan in the same position in the same slaughterhouse pushing
a group of sheep down a metal corridor to their slaughter, he claims his
film was meant to be hopeful. What is hopeful about Stan is his perseverancehe has decided to persevere and fight on despite societys place
for him.3 Stan remains a thing in Spinozas sense, a particular modification of the possible if unknowable attributes of life, insofar as he continues to strive (conatus) to persevere in his being. We might say that Stan
stares in the face the question of how to endure as he strives to persevere.
But it is important for us to note that Stan himself would like to change
the conditions in which he striveshe is striving to change the conditions in which this perseverance occurs. The harrowing nature of the film
is the vertiginous precipice of Stans being and becoming as the viewer
comes to understand that the only thing separating Stan from the sheep
is his will to persevere.
Insofar as Burnett sees these kinds of spaces as hopeful, as sites where
a potential alternative social project exists in the actual world, he shares
this optimism with a strain of critical theorythe immanent critical
theory of scholars, such as Gilles Delueze, who were also developing a
theory of potentiality in the 1970s. Burnett filmed Killer of Sheep during
the transition from Keynesian liberalism to neoliberalism and during the
emergence of late liberalism as a strategy for governing the challenge of
postcolonial and new social movements. Thus whether intending to or
not, Burnett was a part of a much broader discourse of potentiality and
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endurance, of hospitality and livability. In 1979, Commonwealth delegates signed the Lusaka Declaration of the Commonwealth on Racism
and Racial Prejudice at the fifth Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting in Lusaka, Zambia. The Lusaka Declaration stated the commitment of signatory states to legal equality without any distinction or exclusion based on race, colour, sex, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
The declaration focused on three main groupsthose suffering under
apartheid in South Africa, economic immigrants, and Indigenous minorities. In relation to Indigenous minorities, the Lusaka Declaration noted
that the legacies of colonialism and racism in the past may make desirable special provisions for the social and economic enhancement of indigenous populations. In doing so it acknowledged that Indigeneity was
not a form of life that was finding it easy to flourish within the settlerstate. In Canada, Australia, and the United States, the life expectancy,
educational levels, and disease profiles of Indigenous people better fit the
third world than the first world in which they were situated. The Australian states commitment in the 1970s to the politics of the cultural recognition (self-determination) of Indigenous people through land rights
legislation should be seen in this broader light.
At issue were not merely the inhabitants of the earth, but also the earth
itself. In 1979, James Lovelock, a chemist and National Aeronautics and
Space Administration consultant, published Gaia: A New Look at Life on
Earth. In it he proposed that the earth was a supraorganism of which
humans were mere part rather than center. The Gaia theory helped spawn
the deep ecology movement, whose scope was a biospheric perspective
on all living and nonliving parts of the earthand critiqued the distinction between living and nonliving as being nothing more than the deforming nature of the human perspective. Although castigated by the likes of
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins as more high priests of a neopagan new age religion than natural scientists, Lovelock and his collaborators have continued to seek science-based evidence for their theory.
Their aim is not merely to test a hypothesis but to influence human governance overor withina form of life that is not, by many natural science definitions, life. For most natural scientists, life is that which can replicate itself. Gaia cannot. It can only provide the conditions of hospitality
within which the life proper to it can flourish. Thus, if Gaia is life, then it
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is a life whose function is not to replicate itself, but others. PEtA, Earth
First!, the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front: these are
the names of only a few of the best known ecology groups pushing every
member of the human race to assume some relationship between his or
her present personal happiness and the present suffering of other species
on the earth and the earth itself. The citizens of Omelas must think outside the closet.
But the earth has its competitors. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became
prime minister of Great Britain. During her tenure she set into motion
what were then radical principles of limited government through the dismantling of key elements of social welfare; expanded market freedom
through the crushing of trade unionism and the privatization of state-run
enterprises in schooling, education, and health; and taxation reform in
which taxes on the wealthy were significantly lowered and indirect taxes
significantly increased, thereby redistributing the burden of state finance
from the rich to the middle class and poor. All state-based regulatory
regimes, including environmental protection, were portrayed as hostile to
the flourishing of capital (an argument that reemerges in debates about
the human contribution to global climate change). Ronald Reagan would
become president of the United States a year later, after pushing through
a similar policy agenda in California during his terms as governor from
1967 to 1975. Thatcher and Reagan would become the heroes of the Atlantic neoliberal movement. Key to their governing strategy was dismantling
social alliances within the Labour and Democratic parties of their respective countries through the demonization of racial and sexual minorities
and alternative publics.4 If the conservative state was to replicate itself, it
needed to deny the conditions of hospitality within which progressive life
forms flourished.
Meanwhile, throughout 1979, Foucault was presenting his Collge de
France lectures on the birth of biopolitics.5 The course was the third of a
series focusing on the arts of governance and formations of power (the
first two were Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population).
In the course, Foucault proposed a series of shiftsor reorganizations
that marked the advent of biopolitics, including a shift from law to truth;
from the rights of man to the efficiencies of markets; and from revolutions against the state to management by the state.6 These reflections on
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biopolitics occurred during the same period that Foucault was working
on his histories of sexuality and beginning to reflect on askesis and ethical substance. In The Use of Pleasure, for instance, Foucault argued that
in the Greek episteme the ethical substance was bodily pleasure insofar
as it was the material of moral reflection, conduct, and evaluation.7 The
ethical work (travail thique) of the self was to establish proper conduct in
relation to this ethical substancethe prime material of a persons moral
conductso as to bring into being the self that was the object of ones
behavior.8 But how does one endure the conditions of neoliberalism and
late liberalism long enoughor in a sturdy enough fashionto accomplish this performative trick?
This was not Foucaults focus at the time. A number of more recent
critical theorists have, however, taken up the broad problem of how to
understand the intersection of biopolitics and ethical substance in the
light of broader transformations of liberal markets and powers. Judith
Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Brian Massumi, among others,
have attempted to formulate a critical theory of vulnerability, bodily materiality, and embodied potentiality that would have as its ground something other than a metaphysics of substance. These and other scholars
rejected the understanding of substance as embedded in a hierarchy of
being in which being has a primary sense (substance) and a secondary
sense (qualities, quantities, relations, and modalities of substances). In
other words, they rejected the idea that substances are kinds of beings
that are self-identical, while quality, quantity, and so on can only predicate, modify, and find a dwelling in substances. The problem critical theorists faced was how to address substance, materiality, and embodiment
without treating substance as a singular, stable, independent, and ultimate
referent of an immovable and unmoving being against which social and
culture forces brace, qualify, quantify, or relate?9 The difficulty of finding
a space between the metaphysics of substance and some other ordering
of substance has led to accusations that critical theory simply evacuated
substanceor, the bodyor made everything socially constructed,
docile, and perfectly malleable to language games. Butlers work is often
presented as an exemplary case of how the critique of the metaphysics
of substance, intended to radically destabilize normative governance,
has unintentionally led to a radical desubstantialization of the body and
world.
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In response to this reception, many critical theorists have tried to specify further what they were seeking to do when they crossed the governance of life with the ethics of substance. Since Gender Trouble, Butler
has been quite careful to specify what she meant by the metaphysics of
substance and to what aspect of life she was applying her critique. Her aim
was not to evacuate substance per se. She sought to critique the ontology
of self-identical, self-enclosing being and the mobilization of this ontology in the governance of persons. How, she asked, was the deployment
of a metaphysics of immovable and original substance used to support
the politics of gender and sexuality? Critiquing the metaphysics of substance mattered because of the ways in which this metaphysics propped
up the liberal humanist concept of the (sexed) person, and the humanist
governance of populations through a notion of the proper life of substantial anatomy.10 To resist biopolitical governance we had to decenter the
self-identical substance in which it covertly dwelled. The decentering that
was needed had to go beyond the usual operations of subjects and their
predicates, substances, and the attributes. The critique of the metaphysics
of substance needed not merely to take an ethical stance against the determination of gender identity by a self-identical anatomical substance
(the sexist stance); nor merely to take an ethical stance against the multiple qualifications of self-identical anatomical substance by gender (the
culturalist stance). It had to fundamentally resist the biopolitics operating
through these ontologies, and epistemologies, of self-abiding substance.
Power did not merely make attributes stick to substances. Power produced cartilage and skinand life itselfin such a way that attributes
emerged as natural to them and thus was, in critical ways, cosubstantial
with them.
And yet there remains a deep confusion about the grounds and aims
of critique when critique is influenced by a concept of biopolitics and
aimed at substance and its ethical reflection. Or, put another way, critical
confusion arises when the governance of life intersects with life, the bodywithout-organs with the body-with-organs. As a result, a funny thing happened on the way to decentering substance, interrogating the conditions of
its formations, and formulating a politics of hospitable dwelling organized
around ethical substance (reflecting ethically on the techniques of the
self). Everything took on an almost infinite plasticity or such an extreme
potentiality that any acknowledgment of the actuality and consequences
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of various kinds of events seemed to signal a reactionary moment in the

movement of thought. I think this is so because, ever since we noticed the
socially pernicious nature of the metaphysics of substance, wherever else
we might fall, the fall into the mistake of seeing self-abiding substance
outside the field of social power has seemed the most precipitous fall
of all.
I dont think making everything absolutely elastic was what was, or
should have been, the right way of critiquing the metaphysics of substance or engaging the biopolitical, especially as this critique intersected
with critical reflections on the arts of life contained in scenes such as
those that interested Burnett and, for that matter, Le Guin. And I think
that the worst excesses of a wild desubstantiation are past us. In their
wake have emerged four general positions on substance and biopolitics.
First, critical theorists take great care not to separate an order of immovable and unmoving substance from the ordering, coordinating, and distributing of biopolitical substantialization, even as they do not reduce
materiality/substance to this mode of substantialization. Often, and Braidotti is a good example of this, critical theorists avoid this ontological reduction by distinguishing between materiality and substance.11 Likewise,
Brian Massumi describes flesh as the condition of possibility of the
qualities of the world, but it is never contained within or defined by those
qualities.12 I have distinguished carnality and corporeality as an order of
substance (carnality) that is excreted from the organization of substance
(corporeality) but not equivalent to it.13
To put this as clearly as possible: to argue that there is not an immovable and unmoving substance which social and cultural discourses merely
qualify is not to say that there is a strict correspondence between the
forms of governance and the materialities they excrete and extrude. The
discursive construction of materialitywhat I am here calling corporealityshapes, carves, and assembles a given formation of the material
world. But it never does so without producing a specific remainder. For instance, if he had been able to get the engine home, Stan would have used a
spanner to secure it to the chassis of his car. Which spanner he would have
usedone that perfectly fit the nuts he would use to secure the engine, or
one that was a little too large or small for the jobwould have determined
whether the nuts were stripped in the process. And the nuts would be
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stripped more or less easily depending on what they were made of. Their
material composition would influence their functionality and whether it
would be exhausted as the nuts were rounded. In other words, the shaping, carving, and assembling of materiality encounters the material being
shaped, carved, and assembled. In this way, the forms of equipment that
compose the discursive construction of materiality are constantly producing embodied life and unintegrated life at the same time. There is always
a shaping and an errantness. The unintegrated, errant aspect of materiality is what I am calling carnality. This dynamic between corporeality and
carnality is not merely a function of equipment in a narrow sense, but an
entire arrangement of the condition in which someone builds a world
in the case of Stan, not merely that the nuts he uses can be made of a
harder or softer, more or less pliant steel, but also that he only has so much
money to spend renovating his car, and so must purchase the cheaper,
softer versions that are more liable to being stripped. The errant nature of
carnality is not, however, merely negative. It iscarnality is always within
corporeal formations. But the difference between corporeality (the arts
of material formation) and carnality (the mattering forth of the worth
vis--vis these arts of formation) can, as this chapter will show, become
the positive occasion for alternative forms of life.
All of these ways of specifying aspects of embodied being are efforts to
answer the charge of the evacuation of the materiality of being in the critique of the organization of matter. Second, critical theorists emphasize
that the biopolitical is not a space of life but a spacing of life; not a living
difference but a differential within the living. Unfortunately, much of this
discussion has focused on genealogies of Greek and Roman antiquities
internal to European governmentalities, rather than the emergence of
critical cleavages within biopolitics at the intersections of neoliberalism
and late liberalism. I will come back to this. Third, critical theorists focus
on the conditions of emergence of the otherwise rather than the origin of
the other. As Deleuze put it, sounding much like the geneaological Foucault, the point is not to discover the eternal or the universal, but to find
the condition under which something new is produced.14 And fourth,
critical theorists consider these differentially distributed zones of vulnerability and abandonment as spaces in which, at least potentially, a new
ethics of life and sociability could emerge. These four points are critically
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connected. The potentiality of living otherwise ethically emerges from the

differential capture and distribution of embodied and exposed life and
from the zones of indistinction they create.
Thus, rather than forgetting the body or assigning it to some nether
realm, contemporary critical theorists have attempted to specify carefully
what aspects of body and matter are implicated at different levels of social, political, and cultural analysis. What this work has made clear, however, is that at various moments a division opened within ethical work
(travail thique) between those who reflect on and evaluate ethical substance and those who conduct their lives in relationship to itor perhaps
are it: are the prime material of ethical substance. Should theory and practice celebrate these spaces as fostering (or, more minimally, providing the
conditions of) practices of freedom in Foucaults sense?15 Should they
celebrate these spaces as potentials for creating robust alternatives to late
liberal normativity and its publics? Should we bracket those spaces where
life is denuded and focus on the miraculous moments when, from within
the bowels of the unlivable, new life appears because these moments give
us hope that something might change?
To put this in a slightly different way, if the potentiality of living otherwise emerges from the differential capture and distribution of embodied
and exposed life in late liberalism (in the difference between corporeality
and carnality), then what qualities of embodied living are we as critical
theorists hoping to impose on others in the concrete spaces of neoliberalism and late liberalism? And how do we explain why some people keep
on getting on while others do not? Why, in Killer of Sheep, does Stan persist beyond the point of exhaustion for other people in his neighborhood?
Muscle and will, effort and endurance: what do we imagine are the social
origins of these practical concepts? How are they a part of the technology
of power and the ethics of substance that should interest us?
The following addresses these questions by tracking the problem of
endurance faced by alternative social projects that have grown up in the
shadow of the 1970s. Rather than blackbox the problem of endurance
and will, I foreground their material conditions. I begin with friends and
colleagues of mine in Australia, whom I have mentioned in the previous
chapters. I focus on a project we are working on collaboratively to develop in their country: an augmented-reality project based on the global
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positioning system. Although my friends do not use the term ethics,

they constantly discuss the proper way of living within their world when
what they believe to be proper action is not supported by the power of
action as this action is embedded in everyday life and bureaucratic orders.
I then turn to an alternative food movement in the United States in the
context of the post-9/11 security state.
Virtual Realities
In 2008, in the middle of Anson Bay, at the mouth of the Daly River in
the Northern Territory of Australia, I was crashing about in a ten-foot tin
dinghy with friends of mine, and some kids in our care. They are Indigenous and Australian. I am neither. The adults and I are all roughly the
same age, though I am the oldest. We had known each other for twentyfour years at that point. We were out on the boat that day doing preliminary work on what we were calling the mobile phone project, a digital
project that seeks to use mixed-reality technology to embed traditional,
historical, and contemporary knowledge back into the landscape. Imagine a tourist, or one of our great-great-grandchildren in the same area.
They open our website, which shows where a gPS-activated mixed-reality
story is located, and then download this information into their smartphone. Now imagine this same person floating off the shore of a pristine
beach in Anson Bay. She activates her gPS and video camera and holds up
her smartphone. As she moves the phone around she see various hypertexts and video options available to her. Suddenly the land is speaking its
history and culture without any long-term material impact on the landscape. And the person can only hear this story in the place from which
it came.
On that particular day we were trying to get to Banagula, where many
of the stories would be located. Banagula is a beach on the southern shore
of the vast and semi-remote estuarine Daly River. It was the dry season,
when the tides forcefully rush into and out of the Daly River. As they did,
our dinghy reared up and slammed down in the open sea. To move the
boat anywhere but straight into the waves would capsize the boat. To continue straight into them was giving us head concussions and hypothermia.
The motor we had bought, cobbling together our various monetary and
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social resources, was not powerful enough either to lift the dinghy above
the waves or to navigate them with firm intent. This was the only boat
available to us, and it had a hole in it. There was no paddle. No one had life
vests. We worried about the fuel we were expending, having had only so
much money to fill up the few plastic containers onboard. The one worry
we didnt have was food. We were skilled hunters and we had collected
a bounty of road kill along the way, some of which was on board. In our
immediate surround, other boats, powered by enormous motors, cruised
past us, smoothly lifting well-groomed white bodies across the water.
Why were we doing this? A simple answer would be that we thought
our mobile phone project might help reanimaterather than reproducea local understanding of the relationship among place, people,
and knowledge that is oriented to the production of mutual obligation
rather than detached truth, even while it might provide the basis for a
new media tourist enterprise. For my Indigenous colleagues to know is
to practice an embodied commitment to place that over time becomes an
embodied obligation. To know is an exercise, an askesis, whose goal is to
produce embodied obligation between places and its peoples. But as in
Stans case in Killer of Sheep, these exercises of the self must be supported
materially. Thus, we all hoped that this form of knowing might produce
a dual form of valueepistemological and capital. In the meantime, like
Stan, my Indigenous colleagues must find a way of enduringof capacitating the will to endureuntil these material supports are in place. Their
bodies must be able to endure the transition. The equipment in which
their bodies are embedded must be able to endure the transition.
Like Stan, my friends live in a world that is hardly ready to hand. If
ethical substance is the material of ones reflexive actions, the material of
their reflexive action exists within a given organization of power that continually throws them in the vertiginous gap of being and becoming and
failing to become. The major federal legislative accomplishment effecting
Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, the Aboriginal Land Rights
Act of 1976, only obliquely addressed the conditions of their lives. They
grew up in a small Indigenous settlement during the heyday of cultural
recognition (self determination). But while they practiced the rituals
and knew the traditional narratives that composed the surrounding lands,
they failed to meet the narrow legal definition of the local descent group.16
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And the men and women in this boat are hardly atypical. While national
publics celebrated the redemptive powers of self-determination, the local
condition of Indigenous life hardly improved. If you are Indigenous in
Australia it is statistically probable that your life is and will be very much
worse than that of other Australians in terms of health, education, wealth,
life expectancy, and mental outlook. Take Linda Yarrowin, who was thirtyfive at the time we made this trip. By then she had lost five of her nine siblings (to septicemia, tuberculosis, pneumonia, collision with car, throat
cancer). Her father and his brothers had died from aneurisms and kidney
failure when they were in their mid-fifties, near to the average life expectancy of Indigenous men. In 2007, Linda and the others on the boat had
abandoned their natal community because of a wave of horrific violence
there, even though in leaving they lost a rare thing for Indigenous young
adults, permanent jobs in education and infrastructure. The riot that led
them to make the decision to leave was so notorious that the local government promised them homes in the area where we were working on the
cell phone project.
Thus, when I refer to those of us on the boat, the we that I conjure is
both a joint and divided being. Whereas in Killer of Sheep, Burnett rarely
shifts focus from the shared experience of African American members
of the Watts ghetto, for those of us on the boat, not all members share an
equivalent relationship to a variety of resources, nor are we the outcome
of equal kinds of social investments and the futures. We are engaged in
a joint social project and yet each of our projects is slightly askance the
other. We are a unified social group from the perspective of this social
project and yet the we is divided, and this division is not merely between them and me. Each of them has a different individual project,
as will become clear over the next two chapters, because of larger or
smaller differences in upbringing, ability, and aspiration. But apropos
to the discussion at hand, they and I are starkly divided according to a
broad set of social statistics. And these statistics are not outside the boat.
The boat is the artifact of our various potentials. My friends know where
to find used and exhausted objects we can recycle into living materials;
I can funnel salary and research funds and bureaucratic connections.
But none of this is enough; and none of it could ever support more than
what we have. Our affective attachments and anxieties are also different
113
Leaky Miracles (by Elizabeth Povinelli)

Profiles of the surviving and deceased relatives of those Indigenous Australians
involved in the Anson Bay Mobile Phone Project
FEmALE
mALE
ConDition*
Surviving
13
14
1 renal disease
7 homeless
3 diabetes
1 heart disease
15 not known
Deceased
Average age at death
31
25
4
2
61
2
4
67
8
4
44
21
16
43
Siblings
3 infant mortality
1 vehicular
1 tuberculosis
1 septicemia
1 cancer
1 renal disease
1 murder
Their Parents
Surviving
Deceased
The Parents Siblings
Surviving
Deceased
* Condition refers to existing condition among those surviving, and condition at

death among those deceased. Of the 27 surviving siblings, 15 were either healthy or had
conditions that were not evident at the time of the survey.
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though we had then known each other for twenty-four years. When I
leave this boat and then Australia I enter a very different set of localities
and demanding environments than they do. All of this is made harder
by the 2007 Intervention, when state funds were radically curtailed for
projects such as ours. And then, by the fall of 2008, the market mechanism was in total shambles. Every capital enterprise we approached to
help finance the training and infrastructure of our project wanted reassurances that an immediate market product could be produced. And
the state refused to fund any projects that could not demonstrate a market outcome.
We eventually made it to Banagula. On other days we dont make it
back or do so barely. But we keep meeting and trying to raise resources
to support the project. We are neither defeated, nor are we successful. We
persevere. But if the most general purpose of this project is to coconstitute
human bodies and geontological place by using the multimedia capacities of the Internet to reinforce local protocols about land use, knowledge
acquisition, and embodied obligation, then the actual lives supporting
this ethical practice hardly seem sufficient to achieve its goals. We are a
miniscule group if one takes even the smallest step backward from this
scene. The context of these peoples lives may be typical, but their will
to persevere is not. I could give you a variety of statistics about the percentage that this small group of people represents from any of a variety
of social perspectives. Behind us are enormous crowds of people who
cannot, could not, or did not survive the initial exclusions of recognition
built into the politics of recognition that subtended self-determination
and the subsequent abandonments of the federal Intervention. So small
is this percentage that their existence as a group of people persevering in
the sea is indeed miraculous.17
It is true that doing something keeps everyone from sliding into nothing; a point I will return to in the next chapter. But getting anywhere in
this context involves a variety of illegal and quasi-legal actionswhich
again differentially affect us. I can lose my visa privileges. They can be incarcerated, as little infractions become a criminal record. For instance, the
same vehicles that Altman and Hinkson describe as creating the conditions for a new type of Indigenous territoriality are often unroadworthy
and unregistered.18 Driving infractions slowly accumulate, often leading
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to jail sentences.19 And as they continually get nowhere, they continually

lose kids to prison, bodies to addictions, and toes, feet, and then kidneys
to diabetes, reducing the number of people on the boat. Money decisions
must be made about plane tickets, food, petrol, alcohol and cigarettes, or
car registration. Today, someone has found a training program in conservation management. Today, grants I have submitted creep forward. Why
does a certain strand of critical theory put such hope in potentiality? Does
it matter whether they can endure this precipice? And which form of endurance will they find themselves inhabiting, the kind that makes them
hardened, calloused, and indifferent to life or strengthens their attachment to life?
It is exactly here that social analysis faces a blackbox. We know that
certain people strive (conatus) to persevere either individually or in relation to certain social projects. And we know that sometimes this striving results in robust counterpublics, and that these counterpublics sometimes become hegemonic forms of life. But can social analysis account for
why?20
Potential Realities
Rather than these questions of endurance, resistance, and will, critical theory has by and large focused on two other problems that arise in
the vicinity of alternative social projects. On the one hand, it asks what
are the conditions in which new forms of life emerge, and, on the other
hand, it asks how one judges (evaluates, assesses) one form of life over
another. Much of the most heated debate in contemporary critical theory
has revolved around these two questions as they are differently addressed
by normative and immanent social theory.21 I have already mentioned
Deleuzes argument that the perpetual variation between vis existendi
and potentia agendi provides a space where new forms of life can emerge.
Michel Serres, the philosopher of science whose work helped found the
new science studies of Bruno Latour, provides a more materialist account
of the same in his romping account of the parasite. Serres plays on the
dual meaning of parasite in French, as an organism that lives on or in
another organism and as static or noise. For Serres, static, or noise, is the
indwelling outcome of every space of building.22 His understanding of
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building is broad. A discursive formation, an architectural structure, and

a geological foundation are all instances of a building. The institutionalized discourse of self-determination that my colleagues grew up within is
a building in Serress sense. And because it was a building, it immediately
created static insofar as some clearly fit its hallways of recognition, some
clearly did not, and others partially did and partially did not.
My colleagues in the boat, for instance, were the ideal objects of the
discourse of both cultural recognition and self-determination that was
dominant from the late-1970s through the turn of the century. They were
taught the stories and rituals relevant to the land that surrounded the Indigenous community in which they were born. And they believed that
they should teach their own children these traditional knowledges and
practices in turn. They should pass it down through the generations is
how they put it to myriad lawyers who arrived in their community during a contentious land claim that stretched from 1976 to 2010. But knowledge, practice, and belief were not sufficient under the legislative regime
in which land claims were heard. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976
also demanded that they be members of a specific kind of descent group
with a specific kind of historical relationship to the land under claim.
While a small number of community members passed, my colleagues
on the boat failed this genealogical reckoning.23 And the riots that drove
them out of their community were, in part, fueled by these divisions of
the law as practiced in the community, creating more static.
But the boat they are now sailing in is also a building, and one already
decomposing from the static built into it by the time they could afford
it. And they, and I, are buildings insofar as our carnality is the static produced by the disciplines of corporeality we differentially face. When we
combine these two buildingsthe boat and our bodiesthe result of
this history of differential building becomes clearer. They and the boat are
cosubstantially decomposing in the world as it is given to them. Like the
engine that Stan bought, this boat would not be available to my friends
they could not afford itunless and until it was like them, an item no one
else wanted. The boats we use and the cars we drive for the mobile phone
project, for instance, are composed of copper wires, corroded from the
salt environments to which they are exposed, the broken nature of their
protective shields, the lack of money to replace wire or shield, the habitu-
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ated relationship to a partially working world, and the low level of camouflage and espionage that using and being in sublegal equipment entail.
This way of life is recycled back and forth across forms of materiality.
Their paths of thought and existence are traced through and in these
assemblages of materiality.24 Those copper wires and the boat and engine
that cant lift above the waves are a part of my friends bodies as certainly
as their cartilage and blood pressure. The entire contraption of it- andus slams into our differently cared-for tendons, exhausting all, but some
more seriously than others. Then tendons become one more thing that
must be repaired without the proper resources to do so. In short, materiality (carnality)flesh and machineemerges out of as much as it is the
late liberal and neoliberal regime (corporeality) that addresses us all but
all of us differently.
No one is going to kill us or lock us up for trying to succeed, though
many of this group will be locked up for using illegal resources; they are
just going to let us exhaust ourselves. They are making a wager that few
people will be able to be like Stan or the group on our boat, so few that
the otherwise we represent will never be able to sustain itself, let alone extend, thicken, and become dominant. Late liberalism knits together internationally a careful weave of sovereign killing (capital punishment and
assassinations), criminalization of life staples such as certain food, drugs,
and forms of protective gear, and self-righteous neglect. All three tactics,
insofar as they presume universal access to legal forms of self-subsistence,
are legal forms of bad faith.
In other words, those of us on the boat trying to cross Anson Bay are
not being killed by the state in any way that would be recognizable as
state killing. As Foucault observed, the state only rarely exercises its right
to kill. Instead it directs life, letting those who wish to swim against the
tide to do so until they cross a line or exhaust themselves. And, as Serres noted, the struggle for recognition rarely commences before the outcome is certain: There is no war. Or there is only war when the result
is certain. There is murder but not war. There is no equality. There is no
face-to-face.25 Most opposition to alternative social projects happens in
a different way. An authorless wager is made that very few people will be
able to continue to preserve in the face of prevailing material obstacles.
They will not be able to sustain their perseverance. So the wager is made
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to wait until an alternative social project exhausts itself, produces marketable values, or becomes a serious threat to late liberalism.
Lets say a coast guard catches us without life jackets on an unsound
boatwe might be fined. This fine wouldnt be calibrated according
to our incomes. Something like this happened. In July 2009, this same
group of friends and I were in Darwin looking for material to fix a car
when a fisheries and water official came to the door of one of the houses
we keep in Darwin. The official wanted to discuss a fine he was, perhaps,
obligated to give one of my friends, the named owner of the boat we use.
A few months before, the boat had stalled again, this time drifting off to
sea. After some time, realizing that the seas would not run in their favor
this time, they set off a boat alarm that signals an emergency. They were
rescued. But no one told them that, because the boat was not equipped
with the necessary safety equipment and was overloaded with people,
they would be heavily fined. My friends were lucky that day. The official
used his discretion to lower the fine significantly. Even so, if my friends
were forced to pay the fine they would have to decide whether to skimp
on fuel for the boat, food for the month, or shoes for their children; to
take a job that might pay better but would never give them the temporal and material resources to make this trip across the bay. Because it
appears to be their choice, no one seems to be killing their will to be
otherwise.
But static is neither abstractly positive nor negative. Serres notes,
Noise is a joker necessary to the system. It can take on any value, and is
thus unpredictable so that the system is never stable.26 Take, for instance,
another boat ride for the same project in 2008. At a place called Bamayak,
four of us got off the boat to look inland for a water hole. The rest motored
off to go fishing. When, near sunset, we returned to the beach where wed
gotten off, our boat was nowhere in sight. There we were, stuck in a region
without human population or infrastructure. We had found swamp water
deep in the hinterland, and there were shellfish in the mangrove swamps,
so we werent going to starve or die from thirst anytime soon. But no one
wanted to spend the night warding off the plague of mosquitoes sure to
come at sunset. After a while, we spotted a small dinghy on the horizon
coming slowly toward us. On board were three white people. We recognized them as part of an exclusive, expensive tourist fishing outfit that
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operates just off Indigenous lands. When we asked if they could spare a
bottle or two of water they told us they didnt have much. It was clear that
we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. And we could see their huge
mother ship anchored offshore, no doubt keeping the beer chilled for
their return.
Oh well, alls well that ends well. Just before the dusk raised the whir
of mosquitoes, we saw our boat on the horizon, heading toward our
shore. They also had been stranded. The motor had refused to start. Why
it stopped working and why it started working again soon became the
topic of a heated conversation. We traded possibilities, which soon sorted
themselves into three: engine failure, say, a faulty spark plug or saltcorroded wiring; punishment from maroi, old people who lived in the
landscape, who were punishing us for never visiting them; the Christian
God, who looks after everyone if they believe in his son Jesus Christ. We
mulled these possibilities over. People took various positions and various
combinations of positions in the argument on the boat. But it wasnt clear
whether we could hold these three possibilities simultaneously, nor what
the goods and futures offered by each would do in the worlds we variously
inhabited. It was 2008, after all. Every day we heard on the television and
radio, and read in the paper, about a national emergency in relation to
the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. The states obligation to self-determination was being thrown out
the window. Did being in a world of maroi do anything, explain anything,
lock anything together in such a way that it made other statements and
practices practical or impractical, self-evidently true or absurd, coherent
or incoherent, sane or mad? But in this incoherence and madness, we are
obliged to feel this problem, we find ourselves responsible for it, even if
in the negative formation.
It may be exactly this experience of obligation and responsibility that
makes our adventure an ethical act, and the geontological an ethical substance in Foucaults sense. But we are not trying to become something
different. We are instead trying to extend something over space and time
that has no viable language outside this iteration of its persistence. We are
trying to be within a social imaginary in which the substance of human
life is cosubstantial with geological/geographic life. We believe, to various degrees of conviction, that the essence of their ancestors, whose route
Road Kill
we are following, is at places like Bamayak and Banagula. And we believe,

with more or less conviction, we are in fact inside these ancestors as we
trace their movements across the sea. We cannot repeat their movements.
To trace is not to repeat. But we nevertheless recycle the experience of
the flesh into our resolution to continue to move. We say to each other
we will never forget. We repeat, as if it were a trauma, how cold we were,
how broken our backs and brains were, how certain we were that the
boat would tip, how our experience must have been like the experience of
their ancestors. We transform the noise of the boat into a difference between white people (or other white people) and us, and it becomes the
embodied source of the seriousness of our exercise of belief. But we are
not trying to become otherwise, we are trying to be the same, and this is
enough for us. Until, that is, we have exhausted our resources and the resources of othersan event never that far off our horizon.
While the dynamic between corporeality and carnality is a general condition of human social lifealong with the peregrinations of endurance,
resistance, and will this dynamic produceswhat aspect of this dynamic
is put to work depends on the alternative social project. To demonstrate
this, let me turn to another alternative social project focused on engines,
energy, and endurance.
Project X
If you look up the name Project X on the internet, you will find that it
refers to a movie, a place, a building, and an idea about the radical ecological movement. The movie Project X, starring the young Matthew Broderick, critiques animal experimentation through a sentimental story about
an air force pilot and a chimpanzee who has been taught sign language.
Project X is also a social project located in a small intentional radical faerie
community in central Tennessee. In 2006, one member of Project X, Sandor Katz, published The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, a book on the
radical food movement. Some of the movements he discusses in the book
include feral foraging, dumpster diving, food gleaning, and road kill collection. Like many books written for the progressive Left, The Revolution
Will Not Be Microwaved is written in a mixed genre: a to do and how to
do book. Like The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbeys lightly fictional
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account of environmental sabotage in the Southwest, it urges people to

change their lives and tells them how to do so. Among its many helpful
suggestions, Microwave provides readers ways of distinguishing between
edible and inedible road kill. Rigor mortis, for instance, is not an indication of inedibility.
In the early 2000s, Katz began a recycling project. His idea was to convert locally obtained used deep-fry oil into motor fuel for his community.
The waste products of capitalism would become the energy of an alternative community. The idea was to turn a commodity into an anticommodity and thus, in the long run, turn an exhausted object of capital into
a viral form that reworks the logics and socialities of the mainstream
from which it had come. From his home on the mountain, Katz carefully experimented with the various waste oils used in surrounding commercial outletsdumpster diving local donut shops, Chinese restaurants,
and hamburger joints. Everything he hauled back to the community had
been heading to local landfills or illegal dumps. When he had refined the
conversion process, he approached various local restaurant owners and
explained the project to them. He asked if he could bring by special containers into which they could pour their used oil. Some owners refused
because they thought his project was weirdor that he was, or his community was. Others refused because they said it added an extra burden
to their job. Katz explained that it actually simplified their waste disposal
practices. Others said yes. But over time, chatter arose about charging for
the oil. If Katz wanted the waste oil, what seemed like the waste product of commodity production must be a commodity. It could be objectified, quantified, and priced in a market. Katz didnt give up. Diverted and
frustrated, he nevertheless continues, if not on this specific radical food
project, then on another. His endurance is notable, and noted in many
online and local articles about him in the green press.
Project X is the product of the long and contested legacy of the radical ecological movement with intellectual and strategic tentacles in anarchist, Marxist, labor, and radical democracy movements. Organic intellectuals provide local and online communities with trenchant critiques
of capital markets, humanist discourse, and liberal social relations.27 Katz
is part of this loose network and thus sees the material he seeksused
cooking oilas an effect of a specific set of social relations and their
Road Kill
existence within a specific social imaginary. Waste oil is only waste and
oilit has the qualities and modalities of waste and oilfrom within
the social machinery of capital. Oil, and specific oils, is the corporeal
effect of a specific construction of materiality, a manufacturing process,
and its technical and social relations of production. Waste is a termand
a set of attitudesused to refer to the errant, unintegrated remainder of
this construction process.
But if Marx understood nature to be the historical residue of human
activity, Katzs deep-ecological point of view roots material unfolding in
a posthuman perspective. In an online interview Katz foregrounds the
interpenetration of beings: In every breath that you ever take without
going to the grocery store, there are untold numbers of different microorganisms, including not only bacteria, but fungi, and who knows what
else.28 These breaths and these substances are produced and dwell in
industrial forms of agrocapital but are not reducible to these forms.
Insofar as they are not, they are capable of creating new forms and
aggregations of life and exemplify the distinction between the orders of
carnality and corporeality. Oil is burned or cannot be burned under certain technological conditions, but in being burned it produces something
else. It produces a material remainder within the organization of neoliberalism and late liberalism that then provides the material conditions in
which new social projects can be built. This material dynamic between
corporeality and carnality sweeps into itself an assemblage of interlocking
concepts, materials, and forces that include human and nonhuman agencies and organisms. The flesh that Katz is working with is not humanist
flesh. Nor is there any easy separation between flesh and nonflesh. For
Katz and supporters of the deep ecology movement, the separation of
the flesh from nonflesh, human flesh from bacteria and fungus, entails
not only the act of separation but also a claim about sovereigntywhat
carnal forms, and in what configurations, have the right to exist, survive,
be killed? What can be exhausted because this exhaustion is necessary
for the endurance of something else? Deep ecology, posthumanism, and
biopolitics would seem to converge around a central problem even as the
issue of exhaustion raises, like a worm curled in the heart, the problem of
endurance, of what endures and what can explain the fact of endurance.
Thus only in the most severely restricted and artificial sense does capi-
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tal saturate the material conditions of the world. It may produce and commodify a kind of industrial substance (oil) in order to be a commodity
(have exchange value) that can produce another kind of commodity (a
deep-fried food with certain qualities); and make a commodity chain that
divides the world into commodities and wasteful excess. Capital makes oil
and waste simultaneously. But, for Katz, it also makes a different kind of
excess, a difference beyond capital, outside the containment or definition
of capital. This excess has at least two dimensions. It has the dimension
of substance: forms of being that emerge from new biotic habitats. And it
has the dimension of relationality: forms of relationality that can emerge
from the striated possibilities of these new substances and habitats. Katz
seeks to intervene in this process by recycling capital waste production
into an anticapitalist social movement and a set of new social relations
that will underpin them.
But even as Katz and others engage in a practice of life whose ethical substance is biospheric, their project is liable to absorption by capital
whose economic horizon is global. Not long after Katz began his biofuel
project, biofuels emerged as a significant sector of the consumer market and commodity speculation. Biofuel was, of course, just one sector
within a more generally frenzied market in commodity speculation. Each
nation made use of different kinds of materialsin Australia it was ores
and minerals; in the United States, biofuel; in Africa, precious metals
and stones; and in oPEC nations, oil. At the height of the commodity
boom, the Australian dollar came close to parity with the U.S. dollar, further suppressing the financial underpinning of the mobile phone project
I discussed in the last section. As U.S. corporate agriculture shifted from
the food to biofuel market, the price of basic food products such as rice,
flour, and corn rose significantly. This led in turn to a new or intensified
exhaustion of people in places such as Egypt, Central Africa, and Indonesia, where government-subsidized staples and rocketing prices created
a crisis of government.29 In a draft report, A Note on Rising Fuel Prices,
not intended for circulation but widely available on the Internet, Donald
Mitchell notes that the World Banks index of food prices increased 140
percent from January 2002 to February 2008. He attributes this precipitous increase to a number of factors but singles out the large increase in
biofuels production in the US and EU.30 Practices cultivated by people
Road Kill
like Katz in one zone of social abandonment were absorbed into regulated and unregulated liberal and neoliberal capital that in turn led to the
creation or intensification of new zones of social abandonment.31 What
we witness in all these alternative social projects seeking to develop a new
ethical substance, such as Katz is trying to door to sustain one such
as we were doing in our boatis an entwinement of endurance and exhaustion. We can think of the exhaustion of both flesh and material from
two perspectives: the exhaustions produced by and then reabsorbed into
the system, such as waste oil, and the exhaustions produced when trying
to create alternative ethical substances. In encouraging these new substances and relations, which actually dwell in the world even though they
have no proper dwelling there, Katz and others produce themselves as a
form of excessthings that can be exhausted, killed, placed in suspended
animation, or redeployed in a market. As Katz notes, many of the practices he describes violate statutory laws and social norms, to say nothing
of placing the practitioner under the general cloud of opprobrium that
settles over a radical environmental activist.
In the United States, a series of federal acts has labeled radical environmentalists as the number one domestic terrorist threat. The most
notorious of these federal acts are the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
of 2006, which amended and renamed the Animal Enterprise Protection
Act of 1992, and the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2007. The amendments codified in the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act are significant in two ways: first, they define violence
from the perspective of the offended party; second, the promotion, circulation, or support of violent acts include reporting on them in online
forums. Another thing that was new was the focus that the Federal Bureau
of Investigations placed on enforcing the most extreme readings of the
law. Managers of these online forums could be, and were, prosecuted. The
first examples of this new zeal were the so-called ShAC-7 (the corporation, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, and six activists associated with
it) and the Sacramento prosecutions of Earth Liberation Front members
and the emergence of a cross-agency strategy called Operation Backfire
targeting radical ecological movements.32 The ShAC-7 were not prosecuted for engaging in violent acts but for taking a political position in
relation to them in an online forum. The federal prosecution presented
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numerous witnesses who testified to having been incited to commit violent acts after reading the forum and to having experienced the forum and
other street activisms as violent threats.
As proposed in 2007, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, amended to the Homeland Security Act, would
receive an estimated budget of $22 million over four years. In it, violent radicalization would be defined as an extremist belief system for
facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or
social change, while homegrown terrorism would be defined as the use,
planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United
States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the
United States government, the civilian population of the United States,
or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
Ideologically based violence would be defined as the use, planned use,
or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individuals political, religious, or social beliefs. The
act would establish a National Commission on the Prevention of Violent
Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism to examine and report on facts
and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States. The commission would have a
restricted lifespan; it would be terminated thirty days after its final report.
But, following the termination of the commission, the secretary of homeland security would establish or designate a university-based Center of
Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States to assist federal, state, local, and tribal homeland security officials, through training, education, and research, in preventing violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism in the United
States. It would require the secretary to conduct a survey of methodologies implemented by foreign nations to prevent violent radicalization and
homegrown terrorism; and to report to Congress on lessons learned from
survey results. The bill also would support efforts by the Department of
Homeland Security to prevent ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism that violates the constitutional and civil rights or civil
liberties of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.33 The bill passed
the U.S. House on an overwhelming vote of 4046 but then stalled in the
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Road Kill
All of these major and minor legislative changes also triggered innovations in the prison system. Green activists were placed in newly created
Communication Management Units along with other so-called terrorists. Communication Management Units, colloquially known as Cmus,
were created in 2008, outside the congressional review process, in order
to house inmates who, due to their current offense of conviction, offence
conduct, or other verified information, require increased monitoring of
communication between inmates and persons in the community in order
to protect the safety, security, and orderly operation of Federal Bureau
of Prisons facilities and protect the public. The rationale for moving
members of the radical ecological movement into Cmus is the same rationale for prosecuting themthat their communicative function within
the movement provides the movement with its ability to act covertly
and anonymously.34 To date, there are two known Cmus, one located in
Terre Haute, Indiana, and the other in Marion, Indiana. These new prison
spaces and new prison populations provide employment opportunities
for local populations, a point not lost on the governor of Michigan, who
offered to use his prison system to house Guantanamo Bay detainees.35
In short, working excess, Katz and others risk becoming excess. And
this excess simultaneously provides the conditions of new postcapitalist
forms of sociality and new, commodifiable, forms of repressive violence.
Katz is well aware of this risk even though his activities are not allied with
the violent-action wing of the green movement. The threat of exhaustion haunts his surrounds. In his vicinity are others who felt the force of
federal prosecution, in their case for tree spiking, and have shifted the
mode of their politics to antiviolent, local fostering of alternative communities.36 Some still believe that only violence will force a change
by moving the center further to the radical Left. But they are no longer
fit enough, or can no longer imagine the internal resources for living on
the run.
The issue of exhaustionof getting burned outis thus, not surprisingly, a substantial matter in the radical ecological movement. In writings and interviews Katz and his interlocutors continually contrast the
vigor of his body and spirit with the status of his body as hiV positive.
What can account for his endurance in the context of internal and external predators? Or his nonexhaustion in the face of the zones of state abandonment in which he lives and attempts to convert the excesses of capital
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into the enduring fuel of a counterlife? We can think here of the exhaustion of flesh and material. In celebrating Katzs amazing endurance, and
finding ourselves less interested in those who lack it, we see the point I
made above. Critical theory and progressive activism invest in the endurance of life in spaces of state and social abandonment because they consider these spaces capable of providing a potential for cultivating a new
ethics of life and sociality.
But if ethics is a realm in which we not merely reflect on but act at the
intersection of right conduct and the good life, then critical theorys ethical relation to life within these extreme zones of potentiality is fraught,
to say the least. The life worth living is not necessarily found within these
zones of maximal potential because the zones create such reduced conditions of life that the political desire for them to spawn or foster alternative worlds can seem naive at best and sadistic at worst. But once we
view potentiality as socially constituted and materially distributed, then
we find ourselves in the morally viscous realm of excess, exhaustion, and
endurance, a realm that includes affective, physical, and social conditions
that can depress the brain and immune system, rupture organs as well as
bonds with families and friends, and orient violence inward. If we must
persist in potentiality, we must endure it as a space, a materiality, and a
temporality. As we all know, materiality-as-potentiality is never itself outside given organizations of power. Stan and those of us in the boat, for
instance, strive to persevere within a neoliberal form of biopower. Thus
the potentiality for living otherwise emerges from the differential capture
and distribution of embodied and unintegrated life in neoliberalism and
from the striated zones of indistinction and abandonment they create.
When looked at in this way, the ethics of substance has a quite complex
topological relation to the biopolitical management of life.
As much as Stan, Katz, Lindamy colleague on the mobile phone
projectand her family share certain exhausting conditions of neoliberalism and late liberalism, to understand the different modalities of this
sharing, we must remember that the biopolitical is a spacing rather than a
space.37 As we move from the intentional communities of central Tennessee to Indigenous northern Australia, we see some of the contours of this
biopolitical spacing. Unlike Katz, my Indigenous colleagues are not trying
to overthrow capital but to live otherwise within its seams. They do not
Road Kill
choose to drop out. They were born at the far end of liberal capitalisms
exhaust system. As a result they engage as a matter of course in the exact
activities that Katz promotesferal foraging, dumpster diving, gleaning,
and road kill collecting. And, as a result, their practices of recycling can
be formally described as stealing or unlicensed food production and consumption from the perspective of law. They move around within the gray
economy of substanceunregistered and unregisterable cars and boats,
unlicensed gunsthat can lead to the bright lights of legal detention that
further mark their bodies in such a way that they are driven deeper into
social zones of abandonment and excess. Moreover in the Australian case
the biopolitical is marked by the division of the autological subject and
genealogical society.38 The embrace of the customary by the politics of
recognition was demonized by the politics of the neoliberalism as if the
customary were a quality of the Indigenous rather than the internal limit
of Western capital, colonialism, and democracy.39
Enduring Immanent Critical Theory
And so where are we left? If it is true that to be in these spaces of abandonment, exhaustion, and excess radically reduces being and true also
that it is being in these spaces that provides the possibility of being otherwise, then what should an ethically informed politics be? Should a political movement work to make these spaces less lethal and enervating? But
what if it is exactly this enervating lethality that is the condition of this
particular kind of world-making activity? And what about the fact that, no
more than Stan, my colleagues may not want to be potentiality, or mere
potentiality, or potentiality like this? They want to strive to persist in the
being they find proper to the world, but in another mode. To return to
some transcendental fixed point, or a set of normative, even if revisable,
horizons is, in the light of these lived worlds, a means of avoiding the
nature of the given world exactly at the moment when the given world
is what needs to be theorized. It is true that norms provide a feeling of
safety insofar as they provide an experience of possible judgment and assessment and, retroactively, a place of certainty. But these norms hardly
make these spaces disappear for those who inhabit them.
Critical theorists can cut into the accumulationabandonment
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regulatedunregulated chain (AA . . . RU) at various points. In

this case Habermas, for instance, focuses on the rejuvenating moment
when unregulated publics are absorbed into the stultified being of regulated publics, rather than on the conditions of existence in so-called unregulated publics. Other critics likewise move quickly past the stakes of
the well-known fact that the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions that shape embodied materiality also deform it toward
the transitions and thresholds of becoming that these deformations provide.40 To what are we committing ourselves if we commit to a freedom
that is the undefined and undefinable trajectory of a radical otherwise in
our worlds scenes of abandonment? This otherwise may lie in shattering
the life-world in which a person finds herself situated, but it also might
mean maintaining a life-world under constant threat of being saturated
by the rhythms and meanings of another. The conditions of excess always
sit side by side with conditions of exhaustion and endurance that put into
question the neat capture of substance by capital and other biopolitical
projects and complicates the simple ethical investment in the thresholds
and transitions of becoming within biopolitics. In these situations, to be
the same, to be durative, may be as emancipatory as to be transitive. To
live the present as if it were this future demands that a social world learn
how to maneuver illegally. Those who do must hide out within this environment, appearing to be in a time they are not even as they must go on
heightened alert because the time they are in is a time no one wants to
recognize.
Where one intervenes in this chain is a matter of obligation and implication rather than detached impartial adjudication. And so critical theorists take responsibility for the variety of positive political positions they
take to these spaces, including severe systematic oppression and ordinary
callous disregard. What we read in them, whether we pause the play button as Stan and Bracey stand before the broken engine or pause it on the
day that my friends and I survive another trip to Anson Bay, is a rhetorical choice with ethical substance. Will we stand so narrowly on the side
of potentiality that the engine stays on the truck, the road kill never rots,
and the head doesnt concuss as our boat slams into the next wave.
Chapter Four
Events of Abandonment
Hitting the Exhaust Pipe
Chapter 3 began with a scene from Charles Burnetts 1977 film Killer of Sheep. The scene slowly
follows the films protagonist, Stan, and his friend
as they lug a used car engine down a winding
set of stairs and heave the engine onto the back
of a borrowed truck, only to have it fall off and
crack as they begin to drive away. In chapter 3,
the interest was the dilemma of ethical substance
when read from the perspective of the materiality
of becoming otherwiseof embodied potentiality and endurance for the part that has no part
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in late liberalism. But one could easily turn the scene in a slightly different direction so that it highlights a different aspect of the problem of embodied potentiality and endurance in late liberalism. From this angle we
would remain standing in the domain of ethical substance, but we would
be looking at how the nature of social events contributed to the ways
that life and death, endurance and exhaustion, and hope and harm are
distributed in late liberalismand how this distribution is made ethically and politically sensible and compelling. After all, from one vantage
point the loss of the engine is not a big deal. It cost the protagonists fifteen dollars in 1977, which, taking inflation into account, would be about
fifty-five dollars today. Indeed, Killer of Sheep seems especially interested
in exploring the modes of exhaustion and endurance that are ordinary,
chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime.
There are many scenes that tease at viewer anxiety organized around the
dramatic and spectacular: a group of neighborhood kids try to move an
empty freight train carriage along the tracks as one of them lies in front
of its wheels, his head hanging across the rail; a small girl is left alone in
an old truck on an inclined street after weve seen that the brakes of the
truck are not that reliable. But these scenes never culminate in the kind
of violent event that a generic modern viewer might anticipate. Indeed,
the film is remarkably devoid of blood or violence except for that which
occurs in the slaughterhouse. No one is killed if we exempt the sheep, not
something we should casually do. Nevertheless, no humans are tortured.
No police grace the film, though their specter is constantly invoked.
The absence of explosive and intensified violence is notable, given the
setting of the film. Burnett was filming in Watts twelve years after the
1965 uprising. But the absence of cinematic violence allows Burnett to
conjure another form of violence: the violence of enervation, the weakening of the will rather than the killing of life. Stans wife remarks on his
bottomless exhaustion, and viewers see him in a constant state of somnolence. Something and yet nothing has happened to cause Stan to be
so exhaustedit is hard to point to anything as the event in relation to
which his exhaustion is the effect. Instead his hope and despair are conjured through the endurance of the exhaustion of numerous small quasievents. Little things pile up. But these little things dont recursively enclose or intensify in such a way that a thisness is easily formed. It is hard
to pull a thisness out of the ongoing flow of the everyday because so much
decomposition happens below the threshold of awareness and theorization. The event is a pile of clothes in the washroom, a roll of linoleum in
the kitchen. Sometimes these quasi-events are the result of a purposeful aggregation of energy, of a project, such as Stans attempt to buy the
engine or put down a new kitchen floor. But whether aggregated into a
project or remaining in the diffused background of everyday life, these
quasi-events rarely appear to be catastrophic in the ordinary sense of the
word. They are not, for instance, the kind of event that riveted the United
States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The engine is not the ceiling of
the New Orleans Superdome. It is not a modernist wonderthe largest
fixed-dome stadium in the worldwhose fragility in the face of a natural
event transformed a catastrophe into a sublime event and intensified an
ethical demand that even a president couldnt simply fly over.
The imperceptible relationship between quasi-events and ordinary life
poses a set of problems to the usual way we think about ethical and political demand. After all, life is, or might seem to many people within late liberalism to be, what happens around, between, or in spite of the periodic
rupture of the ordinary. But the ordinary does not exist. The ordinary
is a statistical projection of a variety of socially distributed ordinaries
what the texture of the ordinary is for some is not for others. As a consequence any discussion of the relationship among ordinary exhaustion,
quasi-events, and endurance in the late liberal governance of difference
must be situated within the various ways that eventfulness is distributed
in late liberalism, such that people experience the kinds of events that
make up their lives not only as ordinary but generalizable. We can think
of the ordinary as the local spacing of eventfulness. This complex spacing makes it difficult to answer such questions as Who, if anyone, is killing Stan? and What are the conditions that make the claim that Stan is
being killed so nonsensical and impractical? Broad claims made in the
wake of Agambens work on the camp become unhelpful.1 That Watts is
a concentration camp and that Stan has been reduced to bare life, or that
we are all in a camp and all of our lives have been stripped bare, do not
help us understand how various forms of eventfulness distribute the texture of enervation and endurance in late liberalism.
With Stan in the background I want to focus this chapter on modes
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of lethal events and thresholds of ethical and political claims. As should

become clear, this chapter engages Judith Butlers work on vulnerability
even as it makes an intentional turn into the sociality of materiality and
more specifically into the social topology of quasi-events and spectacular
events, small breakages and catastrophic ruptures. I do so to suggest how
the complexity of these spacings makes sensible the relationship between
kinds of events and an ethics of harm in late liberalism. Much of the best
thinking in the critical theory of life and death has focused our attention
on large-scale killings. In Society Must Be Defended, for example, Michel
Foucault outlined the complex entanglements of sovereign, disciplinary,
and biopolitical forms of power at play in the machinery of Nazi genocide.2 Achille Mbembe situated this industrialized European savagery in a
history of African colonization, where colonists experimented with spectacles of irrational, excessive killing.3 And yet, what we are now witnessing
in late liberalism conforms to neither of these histories and formations of
killing. In most places, late liberal power does not exercise itself through
the spectacular display of drawn and quartered bodies, nor through the
biological racism of German National Socialism. Neoliberalism works
by colonizing the field of valuereducing all social values to one market valueexhausting alternative social projects by denying them sustenance. When the state does kill it often does so through secret detention
centers outside the reach of habeas corpus.
In short, if chapter 3 examined ethical substance from the point of view
of the endurance and exhaustion of the material assemblage of alternative
social projects, this chapter examines how late liberal modes of making
die, letting die, and making live are organized within and through a specific imaginary of the event and eventfulness. Who and what are made accountable for various kinds of events? What kinds of affects, such as grief,
are appropriate to various kinds of harmful events? What forms of condemnation or approbation are appropriate to the people held responsible
for them? How do these various modalities of the event rivet scholarly or
political attention, or rivet their attention only if transformed through statistical practices into a catastrophic event? How is eventfulness utilized
put to workby market and state actors to make sensible the social distribution of life and death?
Its Nothing
Late liberal societies hardly lack the neighborhoods and dingy broom
closets that so interested Burnett and Le Guin. No less than the citizens
of Omelas, members of these societies are fully aware of the existence of
these spaces in their polis and make decisions about the relation between
the suffering that occurs in them and their own well-being. And these
neighborhoods, flavelas, residential towers, and rural ghettos are witness
to the full range of quasi-events that interested Burnett and Le Guin.
These run down, often fetid spaces are periodically the occasion for public hand-wringing, outrage, and scandal. In Australia, for instance, Indigenous rural and urban communities are open broom closets of poverty,
disease, and despair. But if you walked through them you would not necessarily see the decomposition that composes them. Take for instance Indigenous housing in the far north of Australia.
To be sure, Indigenous housing in rural ghettos and town camps can
rapidly unsettle an unsuspecting visitor. A year before the sea voyage I
described in the last chapter, a schoolteacher visited a sixty-six-year-old
woman who was dying of oral cancer in an Indigenous communitythe
birthplace of those on the voyage. Inside the cinder block house where
the dying woman lived were a series of rooms, unfurnished except for old
stained mattresses on the floor, where dogs with scabies sometimes slept,
a single steel-framed bed in the front room (what most Australians would
call the den), and a wobbly table on which stood a broken television set.
In the kitchen were carcasses of various animals and fish, opened jams,
loaves of bread, sugar, tea, bowls and pans with days-old remainders of
cooked food, and running through them all various sizes of cockroaches.
The inside toilet had been backed up for weeks. There was no hot water.
When we bathed this dying woman we boiled water on the stove in old
flour drums. Sewn through all of this were the syringes, empty pill bottles,
new and used bandages used to care for this woman, and beer cans, wine
coolers, and other addictive substances her relatives were using as they
stayed there. Many people on the porch were drunk, stoned, or hung over.
Not far distant, a fight had broken out between the two sides of the community, part of the longstanding war that would eventually drive my
friends off the community. Following the discussion from the last chapter,
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we might say that the house was in an extreme condition of noise. When
the schoolteacher entered the house she too entered a heightened condition of static. She found herself unable to cross the doorframe, and then
found herself blushing, hot, with what she later described as embarrassment. The scene she witnessed, the broken nature of the dying womans
home, the ruined infrastructure, the infestations of insects and vermin,
the garbage and medical waste strewn about paralyzed her. Who she was
before she crossed the doorframe was different from who she was afterwards. What or who was to blame?
For this schoolteacher the doorway was a threshold that marked out
an event, experienced as a rupture in her ordinary life and its taken-forgranted conditions and rhythms. The immediate and long-term ethical
and political implications of this rupture are difficult to know. From conversations that I had with her, I got a sense that she suddenly experienced herself as a deeply habituated being rather than simply herself and
as someone who had taken certain basic material conditions of life for
granted. But for how long and to what end this experience lasted I do
not know. Perhaps she changed the party she voted for in subsequent
elections. Perhaps she looked at people differently on the street. Perhaps
she blamed non-Indigenous people. Perhaps she blamed Indigenous
people. Perhaps she blamed the state. Perhaps she blamed traditional
Indigenous culture. All of these possibilities were available to her. Conservative critics were at that very moment blaming Indigenous people
for refusing to care for the all-but-free housing they received from the
government. Some anthropologists were arguing that Indigenous uses of
housing reflected the persistence of traditional culture in modern life. So
this narrative went, because Indigenous people are traditionally oriented
to disposable housing they treat their houses like bush camps. According
to these anthropologists the solution is to educate Indigenous families
about the nature of the modern home. Not surprisingly, some advocates
of the federal Intervention leaned on this anthropological reasoning to
support a shift in the way Indigenous housing is financed and managed.
Privatizing Indigenous housing would, they argue, inculcate an ethos of
modern material responsibility.4
But the specific experience of the schoolteacher is not a general experience. Experiential events are not existents in the sense that many people
take rocks to be existents. Experiential events emerge from the rhythms in

which human and nonhuman material composition and decomposition
are ordinarily encountered. While Serres may be right that in all systems
noise and building coexist, in some systems, like Indigenous housing, all
buildings threaten to become all noise.5 And this noise can become what
life sounds like, more like a hum than an explosion, the sound of the ambient background. A number of scholars have tried to dishabituate this
sound by amplifying it. Take for instance the work of Tess Lea and Paul
Pholeros.
Pholeros, along with Paul Torzillo and Stephan Rainow, is a founding
member of Healthabitat, a consortium of architects and doctors who promote a functional intersection of environment, health, and design. Lea
was, at the time, the director of the School of Social and Policy Research
in Charles Darwin University. Faced with the pervasive public discourse
about irresponsible Indigenous people Lea and Pholeros proposed a new
functionalist approach to housing. They adopted the basic principles of
Healthabitat for assessing the relationship between housing and health. Is
a house capable of providing the means of washing people; washing their
clothes and bedding; removing waste water effectively; reducing the impact of overcrowding, improving nutrition through the ability to store,
prepare, and cook food; reducing the negative effects of animals, insects,
and vermin; reducing the health impact of dust; controlling the temperature of the living environment; and reducing hazards that cause injury? If
not, the structure might look like a house, but it is not a house. With these
basic principles in hand, Lea and Pholeros documented how Australian
government demands that Indigenous housing be built within a restricted
budget produce homes with toilet pipes that dead-end beneath the house,
floors without supports, stoves whose copper plating will wear off within
months of intensive use. If the material house is an illusion when no
system of institutionalized expectation is in place to connect the physical structure (house) and the range of functions it is assumed to be able
to provide to the resident, then the house is not a house, they argue, no
matter what it appears to be from the outside.6
But these pseudo-houses dont explode. They and the things that inhabit them slowly decompose according to a rhythm that feels natural. This decomposition occurs in a system of concepts, materials, and
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forces that locks together human and nonhuman agencies and organisms. For example, on July 10, 2009, I was driving in the Northern Territory of Australia along a back highway that connects the Darwin suburbs
to the Palmerston suburbs, a distance of about twenty-five kilometers.
In the small rented truck with me were several Indigenous friends and
colleagues of mine, some of whom I have known since they were teens:
Gigi Lewis, then thirty-five, her partner, Rex Edmunds, then forty-six, and
three young teenage boys in their care. We were moving some household
items, including a washing machine tied down in the back of the truck,
from Gigis mothers house in Darwin to Gigi and Rexs new house in
Palmerston, and in the process moving Gigis family from a state of quasihomelessness into government housing. As we paused for a red traffic
light, Gigi showed me two large staph infections growing on her leg under
her skin and I show her the staph infections I had on my forehead. Rex
was drinking in the backseat, relaxing after a long week of laying a water
pipe in a small rural community, Bulgul, located about three hundred
kilometers south of Darwin. The water pipe was part of the infrastructure
of an augmented-reality project that we and another set of families had
been working on for the previous two years, in collaboration with various
Northern Territory government agencies and libraries and the local university.
However, between the idea of the project and the effects we hoped
the project would produce and the actual project lay a material and discursive world. And although it should be common sense at this point it
is still necessary to note that, while the actual world stood between all of
us in that truck and the idea we had of the project, the actual world does
not address all of us in the same way. We are and are not the same thing
in the sense that we may be an aggregation vis--vis our intentions to
build this augmented-reality project, but we are constantly disaggregated
by the world around us. Take for instance our efforts to lay the pipeline.
To accomplish this task we decided to rent a small trench-digging machine, which meant driving into Darwin to rent it, dig the ditch the same
day, and then drive it back. Our other option was to dig the hundredmeter trench by hand through sun-baked, hardened soil with crowbars
and pickaxes. But to rent the trench digger we needed a credit card and
the ability to pay. Of the ten Indigenous adults working on the project,
and their extended family, no one had a credit card or the ability to pay,
so we used mine. On the long drive down to Bulgul, on one of the many
dirt roads, several attachments on the trench-digger flew off, which meant
several of us had to drive back along the road to find them. When we
finally got the trench-digger off the truck, Rex learned to use it by using
it. Relatives in the region with access to sympathetic construction firms
donated the piping. We collaboratively consulted on how to attach various parts of the piping and how to bury it as we attached the parts and
buried the pipe. After finishing there was a little leakage at the tap. More
than wed like to have seen, but not so much that we were willing to dig
up the entire pipeline after an exhausting day.
What is at stake here then is the materiality of our idea as it encounters different agencements. These arrangements shape and direct actions
such as our decision to move large household appliances a day after returning from Bulgul, no matter that we were all exhausted, because my
truck was still available (I was leaving in a couple days for the United
States). But these arrangements also continually and slowly decompose
that unity. When we reached our destination, we were chagrined to discover that the lid of the washing machine had flown off. Or, maybe, we
hoped, we had never put it on the truck and so we would find it at Gigis
mothers house. But when we drove back to Darwin, carefully following
our tracks, there it was on the side of the road, crumpled and flattened
from having been repeatedly run over in rush hour traffic. The lid could
not endure the conditions of my friends lives any more than our bodies
seem able to fully cope as a constant feeding ground for bacteria. The
next morning I left the apartment at the university where I stayed when
in town, and drove to their house, where they were still lamenting the lid.
Without it the machine would not run and wash the clothes that housed
the bacteria that gave us staph sores. How would they afford a new washing machine? Why hadnt someone tied down the washing machine more
carefully and securely? Dont blame me, I said, guilty because I had been
among those securing the washing machine to the back of the truck. I
am blaming Rex, Gigi said, He was drunk. Not really, said Rex, and
besides, We are getting somewhere. One of Gigis daughters laughed,
and asked, Wheres that? Were still alive, Rex said. Were still trying,
Gigi agreed conciliatorily.
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Gigi and Rexs claim that their family was getting somewhere on the
basis of little more than the fact that they are still alive and trying condenses
a set of tacit references to a shared background. For nearly two years prior
to moving into their new home in Palmerston, they and the other Indigenous members of the augmented-reality project had been homeless. Prior
to that they had spent their lives, as had their parents and grandparents,
in a small rural Indigenous community across the Darwin harborthe
community where the schoolteacher visited the woman dying of cancer.
They had grown up in the shadow of the land rights movement and the
celebration of Indigenous cultural difference more generally. Land rights
and cultural recognition in Australia was exemplary of the logic of care
in late liberalism. By making a space for traditional Indigenous culture,
the state argued it was making a space for this traditional culture to care
for Indigenous people. But land rights legislation, and public discourse
on Indigenous culture more generally, differentiated among Indigenous
people on the basis of the tradition effectthe assessment of different
Indigenous people on the basis of their correspondence to a modernist
anthropological understanding of the clan and its territory.7 In caring for
Indigenous people in this way, land rights placed a division into Indigenous social worlds that then internally divided Indigenous communities.
However imperfect, this way of life started to unravel in 2007. As reported in the local Darwin newspaper, on March 15, 2007, Gigi and her
family and five other families were threatened with chainsaws and pipes,
watched their cars and houses being torched, and their dogs beaten to
death. Four families lost rare, well-paying jobs in education, housing, and
water works. Why they were driven outwhat caused this explosion of
violencecannot be answered, except in the most narrow sense (soand-so hit so-and-so and then their friends got involved), without immediately being drawn into discourses of care and harm in late liberalism
and neoliberalism. For instance, the newspaper did not report that Gigis
grandparents, and most of the senior and now deceased members of the
community, had continually petitioned the government to recognize all
community members as traditional owners irrespective of their clan affiliations in order to avoid creating internal divisions and the violence
they feared would flow from them. Instead follow-up news stories insinuated that traditional land struggles were to blame for the riot, that the
violence was caused by ancient clan conflicts rather than by the modern
creation of clans as a way of managing difference in late liberalism. Public meetings were held, attended by the leaders of Department of Family,
Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in the Northern
Territory Labor government, in which the displaced people were held up
as examples of the failures of land rights policies to protect Indigenous
people living in communities outside their traditional country. The families driven out were promised new housing, schooling, and jobs at Bulgul,
a site closer to their traditional countries. Fifty people promptly moved to
Bulgul and set up a tent settlement.
But then, on June 21, 2007, the then prime minister of Australia, John
Howard, declared a national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Indigenous
people living in remote communities, or those like my friends who were
promised housing in or nearer to their traditional country, were told to
move closer to the cities where infrastructural and service delivery costs
were lower, even if doing so would endanger their lives. The people who
made the promises to the displaced persons confronted the budgetary
consequences of these promises and suddenly became difficult to reach.
In the year that followed, the income of two of the six families driven off
went from roughly $AuD28,000 to $AuD12,000 per year after they lost
their permanent jobs and were moved onto the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP, a work and training program within
a social welfare framework, loosely called work for the dole).
We continue to push the project, no matter hostile relatives in the region, government agencies refusal to help erect a shed paid for by private
contributions, the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression,
and the everyday obstacles of their poverty and others racism. But since
being run out of their community their income has been slashed in half.
And so the used cars they can afford break down at a faster rate than they
can afford to fix them. Their secondhand boats are stranded offshore without petrol. Neighbors call the police for quality-of-life infractions. And
other relatives with nowhere to spend the night sleep in makeshift tents
on nearby beaches or in overcrowded flats. And still other relatives, involved in assaults and petty thefts, must be bailed out of jail. My friends
quickly moved from being a big event that demanded address to being
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just another nondescript moment in the chronic condition of Indigenous

life in the Northern Territory.
Nevertheless, it was exactly within this play of historically specific
forces that our augmented-reality project emerged, supporting immanent
critiques claim that such spaces of indeterminacy provide the conditions
for new forms of life. Before the riot and the Intervention, I had been
working with these same families and others on a digital archive whose
initial content would come from material I had accumulated over the
previous twenty-five years working with the parents and grandparents of
project members. The digital archive was going to be part of the Northern
Territory Librarys innovative Library Knowledge Centers. The Northern
Territory Library had already established ten Library Knowledge Centers in remote communities; we were petitioning to become the eleventh.
These digital archives were anchored to a bricks-and-mortar model of
the library, meaning that they were located on a dedicated computer in a
building on a community. But after March 2007, this computer, this building, and this community were suddenly not available to the project members. After November 2007, it was becoming clear that no other building
would be built at Bulgul. Rather than emptying the space for alternative
social projects, however, these new formations of neoliberalism and late
liberalism opened up the possibility of designing something that more
tightly connected the digital archive with a local epistemology in which
knowledges end was not truth, though truth was a critical anchor of
knowledge, but embodied obligation.
But will their bodies and the material that supports and eats through
them endure long enough to embody this obligation? The last chapter
tried to answer this question by focusing on the materiality of endurance. But another part of the answer rests on whether anyone will notice
the decomposition occurring. As my reference to my friend Gigi and my
exchange about staph infections at the red light suggests, bodies also
occasion this kinds of quasi-events. Since 1969, one year after the federal government was given the power to legislate on behalf of Indigenous Australians, the commonwealth government listed health as one of
four domains for Indigenous development. In 1976, the commonwealth
government commissioned the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs to conduct a review of Aboriginal health. It
released its report in 1979, the contents of which were so scandalous that
the federal government started a $50 million five-year Aboriginal Public
Health Improvement Program in response. The program, administered
by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, focused in particular on inadequate water, sewage, and power systems in rural Aboriginal communities.8 Unfortunately, the crisis in Indigenous health has continued to make
front-page headlines, periodically prompting the organization of special
inquests and parliamentary committees at the federal and state levels and
the reorganization of government agencies responsible for Indigenous
health, education, and welfare. Although the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that after adjusting for age differences between the populations, Indigenous Australians were twice as likely to report their health as
fair or poor as non-Indigenous Australians, the bureau also notes that the
statistics it compiled are likely to be underestimates of the true rates of
illness in the Indigenous population because of the under-identification
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in these data collections.9
This longstanding and appalling state of Indigenous health periodically
prompts the question of what or who is to blame and, consequentially,
what is to be done.
It is a somewhat arbitrary decision to begin the history of the lethal
conditions of Indigenous worlds in 1969. Since colonization, British administrators, the Australian state, and a variety of domestic and international publics have asked and answered the questions of what and who
is to blame for the fetid state of Indigenous life. Prior to the federal governments listing of health as one of four critical domains in Indigenous
affairs, not merely the poor health of the Indigenous but also their high
death rates were discussed, explained, and managed in terms of a series of
historically fluctuating accounts of the causes and cures of social pathology. In the early years of Australian federation, the lethal conditions of
Indigenous life were justified in social Darwinian terms. Full-blooded
Indigenous subjects would be allowed to live a somewhat traditional life
as they faded into human evolutionary history, while mixed bloods
would be slowly interbred with the white population until all traces of
cultural and genetic difference disappeared. From the perspective of a
future world in which Indigenous people would be museum pieces, the
immediate suffering of living people will have made ethical sense.
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Contemporary statistics mapping Indigenous health and welfare are

dramatic, but the diseases they refer to are not. The typical illnesses that
afflict Indigenous people are chronic and endemic, infectious and cumulative, not spectacular and catastrophic. They are the illnesses of the poor,
typically staphylococcal and streptococcal infections, parasites such as
scabies and giardia, circulatory diseases, diabetes, respiratory diseases,
musculoskeletal conditions, kidney disease, eye and ear problems, and
mental and behavioral disorders. It can be hard to see these illnesses in
their normal physical state. Their effects on mortality are usually slow and
corrosive. One thing leads to another. For instance, the chronic nature of
group A streptococcal infections contributes to diseases of the circulatory
system for Indigenous men and women, leading to hospitalization rates
two to three times those of non-Indigenous men and women. The risk of
septicemia from chronic staphylococcal infectionswhich are common
and for the most part untreatedin rural communities is constant.
The problem is that pointing to the quasi- events that lead to these
catastrophes can quickly trivialize the problem. Quasi-events are a general condition of human social life. (My shoestrings snap all the time.)
They are widespread (quasi-events occur across every actual and conceivable organization of social life); they confound response (their slightness
often occurs below the level of accountability); and they resist causeeffect characterization (it is hard to say when they occurred let alone what
caused them). But these general characteristics of the quasi-event mask
the fact that they always occur within a socially differentiated world. For
instance, the force of will on which my friends rely to continue to try to
create the mobile phone project meets the rhythm of these decomposing worlds. So much is jerry-rigged. So much exists in the gray zone between the legal and illegal. There are very few places in which something
like ease of coping can be seen. And all of this everywhere and everything
is never anything huge. Its always a lid. A telephone call missed. A maybe
this or maybe thata neither, neither. Spinoza may have thought that an
entity that does not strive to remain in being isnt an entity, but this might
not matter so much to the folks who give up and hit the bottle. The weakness of the will is coextensive with the wobbly order of the everyday.
Speaking about the way that mass media reduces eventfulness, rather
than the problem of eventfulness per se, Brian Massumi discusses how an
events specific content is short-circuited into an endless series of like

events: Retroactive analysis is replaced by a shudder and a shrug, memory quickly elided by expectation.10 To trivialize Massumis point, our
flying lid was just the latest in a series of flying objectsfor instance, just
a week before, a second-hand esky (cooler) lid flew off, making the esky
unusable as an esky but functional as a bush bathtub. So why dont we tie
things down? Or tie them down better? Give it a little more effort? Who
is to blame for not having done so? Where is the failure of our project?
And when did it happen? Has it happened already?
This Is Something
If we are to keep the esky lid from sailing off into the ever-expanding air
of like events that slowly wears away the will to sustain alternative social
projects, the case to take the lid seriously, to care for and about it, must
be made in the contemporary spacings of harm and eventfulness in neoliberalism and late liberalism. I would be surprised if most Australian citizens would confuse their mode of happiness with the mode of happiness
of the fictional citizens of Omelas. Although they share some of the same
characteristics, the broom closets perforating Australia do not work the
same magic on Australians as they do on the citizens of Omelas. Things
are not that good. The middle class is periodically squeezed between rich
and poor. There are mortgages to worry about. There are new individual
labor contracts to negotiate. In Le Guins imaginary society, nothing but
a robust happiness acts as a comparative backdrop to the everyday abuse
of the small child. Not so in Oz. True, like the fetid space of the broom
closet in Omelas, Indigenous communities are often cruddy, corrosive,
and uneventful. An agentless slow death characterizes their mode of lethality. Quiet deaths. Slow deaths. Rotting worlds. The everyday drifts
toward death: one more drink, one more sore; a bad cold, bad food; a
small pain in the chest. Any claim that these forms of decay matter can be
referred back to the general condition of human lifeeveryone is slowly
dying! But unlike Omelas, these kinds of deaths only periodically fix the
gaze of national and international publics. When they do, they dont do
so in a way that unambiguously concretizes their ultimate, or immediate,
cause, agent, and effect. Who is killing these people? What is killing them?
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Answers must yield to the complexity of an entire system. One can see
why a subject within late liberal society dreams of something decisive,
clear, sublime.
Late liberal subjects do not have to be awoken from sleep to see deathscapes with much clearer borders, agencies, and intensities. In contrast to
cruddy, cumulative, and chronic lethality are special forms of enemy and
spectacular forms of death that capture and rivet the imagination of late
liberal societies and act as an alibi for the concentration and consolidation
of state executive power. Certain kinds of enemies, events, and history are
seen as having a spectacular, even sublime, quality: they cut time in two;
they present decisive ideological struggles; and they demand that exceptional measures be taken. Those within late liberal societies seeking to
increase state surveillance powers cite these decisive kinds of enemy and
devastating images of airplanes, nightclubs, and towers exploding and
vomiting forth singed and dismembered bodies. The lethal state of Indigenous life hardly competes with the society of the terrorist spectacle:
bodies in hoods, in naked piles, attached to real or fake electrodes. Bodies
disappear only to reappear with drill marks. These forms of violence seem
to oppose and stand outside of the everyday uneventful forms of misery
and dying that characterize Indigenous life. These new terrorist forms of
death are spectacular in outward form. In appearing to be spectacular,
they seem to create the ontological necessity to respond ethicallya demand that we take sides. And citizens and their governments do.
Take for instance, the Australian governments response to the Bali
nightclubs bombings. Those spectacular killings were continually cited
alongside an omnipresent, invisible domestic and international terrorist threat when the conservative government of John Howard sought to
modify the Crimes Act of 1914. Passed in 2005, amendments to the Crimes
Act gives the Australian Security Intelligence Organization the power to
detain any person for up to seven days without charge if he or she is suspected on reasonable grounds of being involved in any terrorist activity.
During this time, detainees are prohibited from exercising their right to
have a lawyer present; to silence; and to protect themselves against selfincrimination.11 While Australia does not have a declaration of rights
that enshrines freedom of speech in general, the High Court of Australia
found a specific implied right of freedom of political speech in Australian
Capital Television v. Commonwealth (1992).12 It is exactly this more circumscribed right that the amendments to the Crimes Act restricted. What has
especially worried free speech advocates is the definition of terrorist activity under the advocacy clause. There, a terrorist is defined as anyone
who advocates the doing of a terrorist act (whether or not a terrorist act
has occurred or will occur), including praising the doing of a terrorist
act in circumstances where there is a risk that such praise might have the
effect of leading a person to commit a terrorist act.13
These carceral forms of state power, premised on actual and potential spectacularly catastrophic mass deaths, incited mass protests and engaged public and private consciences. In November 2005, in major cities
throughout Australia, thousands of people marched against the new
crime amendments. The news media highlighted, and in some instances
violated, the far-reaching scope of the new terrorist laws. Beyond the specific crime amendments, these protests were aimed at what many left or
progressive people saw as an uncritical alliance forged by the Howard
government with the Bush administration that compromised fundamental Australian principles of social and personal justice. For example, while
Australia has a long history of strongly opposing the death penalty domestically and internationally, since the Bali bombings of October 2002
there has been a significant silence about the death penalty for terrorists. And while no troops are stationed in Indigenous communities to
shoot at armed and unarmed people resisting the lethal state of Indigenous life, police have faced a number of Indigenous riots in places such
as Red Hook, Palm Island, and, most recently, Aurukun, after alleged
police abuse and murder. The Howard government has stationed Australian troops in foreign nation-states, ostensibly as part of humanitarian
efforts. For instance, troops entered East Timor to stop the carnage
that erupted as Indonesia withdrew from the region. However, critics argued that the government, after decades of refusing to intervene against
Indonesian atrocities in the region, was merely attempting to gain strategic control over the Sunrise Oil Field. Likewise, critics saw the Australian intervention in the Solomon Islands as compromised by the governments refusal to publicly renounce a first-strike policy in the Asian Pacific
and its continual references to the Islamic fundamentalist infiltration of
the Pacific via Southeast Asia.
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There is serious debate about why Howard, whose government predated by four years the U.S. Supreme Court appointment of George W.
Bush to the presidency in 2000, made such a firm commitment to the
international unilateralism of the U.S. neoconservative movement. Some
have argued that Howard is a true believer whose political thinking ultimately derives from Milton Friedmans school of laissez-faire capitalism,
developed at the University of Chicago while Leo Strauss taught there.14
As a result, so this story goes, Howards foreign policy could be easily
adapted to the Straussian neoconservativism of the current Bush administration with its deep, resonant ties to Carl Schmitts theories of political
theology. Others have insisted that Howard is an extraordinarily skilled
modern prince, astutely morphing his partys message to fit shifting public anxieties about the location of economic, social, and political threats
and never letting belief get too much in the way of securing and holding power. Whether believing or not, Howards allegiance to the liberal
democratic parliamentary system seems shaky, if not outright hostile, to
some of his critics. For instance, Ian Duncanson argued that the Howard
government reflected a kind of Peronism in which the separation of
powers, foundational to liberal democracies, was replaced by elections
in which victories become empty mandates to pursue previously undisclosed or hitherto non-existent policies and by opportunistic opinion
polls in which majority opinions act as plebiscites on single issues.15
Indeed, Howards refusal in the mid- to late 1990s to countenance even
a hint of contemporary national responsibility for past historical wrongs
carried out against the Indigenous population foreshadowed rather than
reflected the U.S. neoconservative disdain for guilt-saturated liberalism.
But for whatever reason, this strong state rhetoric continually foregrounds and creates spectacular scenes of killing. Two other examples
suffice. One occurred in late August 2001 as the United Nations World
Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, was under way.
The Norwegian vessel Tampa picked up some 433 asylum seekers who
found themselves trapped on a sinking ship as they traveled from Indonesia to Australia. The asylum seekers were mainly Afghani people fleeing the Taliban. The Tampa sought to drop off its unintended passengers
on Christmas Island. On August 27, Howard declared that the asylum
seekers would not be allowed into Australia or Australian territory, in-
cluding Christmas Island. Instead, Howard pushed ahead with the socalled Pacific solution, the use of economic incentives to entice the nearbankrupt state of Nauru to establish a detention center for asylum seekers
attempting to enter Australia. As many have noted, Nauru agreed to set
up these detention camps in exchange for Australian foreign aid after its
material resources had been exhausted by a history of British and Australian extractive capital. Still more shocking was Howards stance on
the children overboard controversy. It was alleged that some families
threw their children overboard in order to force the governments hand.
Howard figured this decision as a sign of the barbarous cunning of these
asylum seekers.16 Prior to the establishment of the security state in Guantnamo Bay (which, as we know, swept up the Australian David Hicks),
Howard was testing how far the international community was willing to
go to stop what he and his government readily admitted were potentially
permanent detention camps. These camps were just, argued Howard, because they were good for Australian nationalism. Very quickly international human rights groups at the Durban conference, as well as members of the United Nations, denounced Howards Pacific solution as a
violation of the U.N. refugee convention.17 How could they not, if for no
other reason than that this solution, like the post-9/11 U.S. mantra that
the government must protect the homeland,18 had shocking resonances
with fascist rhetorics of the Second World War?
This new expression of sovereignty does not show itself in public
spectacles of drawn and quartered bodies or inflamed racist rhetoric. It
is tucked away in distant detention centers. It is important to note that
mandatory detention has been part of the migration policy of Australia
since 1992 and that it was a Labour government that removed the 273day limit on mandatory detention. In other words, it is not simply the
neoconservative movement that is responsible for the fetid conditions
in detention camps on Nauru and Manus Island and on Australian soil,
such as at the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre.
As early as 1998, Amnesty International cited the mandatory detention
of adults and children as a violation of human rights, noting the U.N.
Human Rights Committee had found Australia in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In the eight years that
followed, various U.N. committees and commissions have investigated
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the conditions of detention camps in Australia. In July 2002, a delegation

from the office of the U.N. high commissioner for human rights stated
that the camps were offensive to human dignity.19 Later that same year,
the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention characterized this detention regime as bordering on the extrajudicial because of its automatic
and indiscriminate character, its potentially indefinite duration and the
absence of juridical control of the legality of detention.20
The Howard government steadfastly refused the recommendations
of Amnesty International, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N.
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and other human rights advocates, arguing that the detention policies were lawful because they had
been written into law under the Migration Act since 1992. No humanitarian exemption applies if the government lawfully states the exemption
of certain humans from humanitarian conditions. The Australian High
Court has agreed, finding in favor of the government in two cases decided in 2004. In Behrooz and Ors v. Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, the High Court found
that the inhumane conditions of the detention camps did not annul their
legality.21 In Al-Kateb v. Godwin, the High Court found that unsuccessful
asylum seekers could be held indefinitely in these same fetid camps if they
could not be returned to another country.22 Hunger strikes, mouths sewn
shut, the absence of physical and mental health facilities: the law easily
survives the inhuman conditions it creates, fosters, and inhabits. It was
only after the 2006 discovery of two seriously mentally ill Australian citizens mistakenly confined in these campsone of whom claimed, as part
of a psychotic delusion, that she was Germanthat the Howard government reversed state policy. Mandatory detention was abolished. Asylum
seekers can now challenge their confinement.
A second example of the kinds and modes of eventfulness characterizing the strong state and riveting public response occurred in July 2006,
as Israel began a sustained attack on Lebanon. The devastation in southern Lebanon and Beirut was massive, as was the humanitarian crisis. The
Australian news media showed extensive footage of refugees streaming
down roads as Israeli jets bombed nearby, refusing to guarantee civilians
safe passage. Various states organized the evacuation of their national citizens from Lebanon, hiring cruise liners and freighters and making room
on military vessels. But the Australian governments effort to hire a vessel

to evacuate its citizens was continually stymied. Members of the large
Lebanese community in Australia accused the government of abandoning its citizens and, according to some, doing so because of its support of
the Israeli offensive. Strongly protesting any suggestion that it was in any
way slow to respond, the federal government insisted that the real cause
of the crisis was the weak Lebanese state. As the crisis dragged on amid
images of bodily and material carnage, members of the conservative public added another culprit to the weak Lebanese state: they openly questioned how much public finance should be spent on evacuating people
who were dual citizens and spent most of their time in Lebanon. Were
these real Australians? Didnt they choose to put themselves in harms
way? The federal government vigorously denied that these kinds of questions affected their actions. The problem was purely logistical. Other state
and public events leading up to the war, however, provided a fertile discursive ground for suspicions of a new, virile form of racial discrimination
in Australia: the government passage of new security laws in 2005 said
to address domestic and international Islamic terrorism; the public race
riots in Cronulla in 2005; and the ongoing public debate about the loyalty
of Muslim clerics and immigrants, especially Sheikh Feiz Mohammad,
who now resides in his ancestral village in north Lebanon. On July 22,
2006, twenty thousand people marched in Sydney against the Israeli attack of Lebanon and the governments attack on Muslim civil rights.
Any attempt to understand the social imaginaries characterizing lethal
conditions within late liberal societies must take into account these two
very different forms, modes, and qualities of killing found there: strong
and weak state killing, and the modes and forms of agency, causality, and
eventfulness on which they rely: late liberalism and neoliberalism. Thus
the Australian government could blame the weak condition of the Lebanese stateits inability to disarm Hezbollahfor the war itself and for the
humanitarian crisis it triggered. Yet, from another angle, the biopolitical
regime of an increasingly weak post-Fordist state continues to spread its
practical ideology of agency and value deeper into the tissues of everyday life. New organizations of production, circulation, and consumption
produced in the wake of the Keynesian state continue to dismantle any
collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.23 Even
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Australia, with its strong history of social equity (as opposed to the more
vapid value of social equality), is slowly installing neoliberal markets and
cultivating the neoliberal subjects who will occupy them.
It is at the intersection of these state and market forms and forces and
the shifting governance of difference that the lethal conditions of late liberal societies must be understood. And these lethal conditions need to
be understood not merely in terms of the facts on the ground but also
in terms of our scholarly attachments to certain modes of time, eventfulness, and ethics. The security states ability to capture countervailing
energies and imaginaries is not restricted to those who march, protest,
and organize against the security state, but also includes those who think
critically inside and outside the universities.
If we are interested in how the assignment of responsibility and the
demand for an ethical and political response are embedded in the discourse and experience of the event, then we need to understand, on the
one hand, how difficult it is to experience the ethical call of events that
do not strike us as catastrophic or sublime and, on the other hand, how
the divisions of late liberalism, especially the division between the freesubject (autological subject) and the customarily constrained subject
(genealogical society), is always at hand to interpret the ultimate cause
and purpose of these events. In other words, any attempt to understand
the social imaginaries characterizing lethal conditions within late liberal
societies must take into account the topological relationship between
forms, modes, and qualities of killing (strong and weak state killing); the
modes and forms of agency, causality, and eventfulness on which they rely
(event, quasi-event); and the divisions of difference at hand to account
for them.
But how do we critically reflect on the conditions and ethical demands
of lethality in late liberal societies when life and its imaginaries are located
at the catachresis of strong and weak states and catastrophic and quasievents, late liberalism and neoliberalism? It seems to me that two avenues need to be followed. Along the first, we would examine violence and
lethality from a perspective that does not assume the qualities, vitalities,
and borders of the catastrophic itself. Several scholars have been pursuing this project.24 In Life and Words, Veena Das notes the anthropological attachment to the kind of violence that characterizes the catastrophe.
Concentrating on social being in the wake of two catastrophic events

the gendered violence during the partition of India and Pakistan and the
massacre of Sikhs in the wake of the assassination of Indira GandhiDas
argues that it is not only the events themselves that are world-annihilating
but the slow rhythms of death in their wake. Likewise, in a recent essay,
Lauren Berlant juxtaposes forms of biopower within the current regime
of capitalism to the forms of sovereign power accumulated by the terror state.25 Her case study is obesity. Her aim is to make visible endemic
forms of death that are experienced as the attenuated background conditions of ordinary life and are resistant to typical accounts of causality,
subjectivity, and life-making. How do scholars find the right distance or
right scale from which to sketch the slow rhythms of this lethal violence? How do we focus attention on the broom closets that pock late liberalism in the context of the spectacular machine of the killing state and
its equally vicious adversaries?
A second tactic is to make visible and compelling the nature of this
kind of lethality by relying on the science of statistics. By design, statistics
transfigure one kind and mode of eventfulness into another. They transform the borders, qualities, scale, and agency of quasi- events into selfevident eventfulnessif we can even use the term event in the domain
of the chronic, slow, but as of yet unrealized form of lethality found in
Indigenous worlds. Indeed, as Foucault and others, such as Ian Hacking,
have shown, the statistical imaginary allowed the state to conjure knowledge of its population, and the population as such, in terms of its health
and mortality, vitalism and malaise.26 Yet the deployment of a statistical
imaginary to awaken a slumbering critical public and reason faces a central paradox. By transforming the invisible, dispersed, and uneventful into
the visible, compact, and eventful, statistics obliterate the very nature of
this kind of death. Rather than understand this kind of lethality within its
own terms (its dailiness, ordinariness, livedness), we demand that it conform to the spectacular event and its ethical dictates of empathic identification. As a result, nothing new happens. No alternative ethical formations are initiated. It is not even very clear how these statistics puncture
the inured nature of suffering in local communities. Many Indigenous
friends of mine do not see the deaths in their communities as a form of
state killing unless an agent of the statesuch as a police constable
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literally kills them. The cruddy, cumulative, and corrosive aspects of life
have spread so deep into the everyday that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein says,
there is nothing more I can say other than that is what is.27
Sinking In
If we need to examine epistemological techniques that transform quasievents into catastrophic events, then we also need to understand how the
very nature of the quasi-event makes it an effective means for shifting
accountability away from neoliberalism onto those who suffer in neoliberalism. And, we need to understand how these quasi-events are where
the struggle to maintain an alternative social world is at its deepest if also
its most tenuous and subtle. In other words, the politics of the otherwise
occurs at moments that themselves have the nature of the quasi-event.
Take, for instance, an interaction between a young Indigenous man in
his late thirties and his family. The young Indigenous mans social profile is typical of most people of his age living in his community. Despite
the horrific nature of the following account, if you met him, you would
often see him in good spirits. This young man characterizes himself as an
alcoholic. Like everyone in his family, he has had sores (staphylococcal and streptococcal infections) on and off since he was a child, bearing the scars on his body. He has high blood pressure but does not take
his medication regularly. He was hospitalized for congestive heart failure,
just as his mother was in her last stages of oral cancer. His father died of a
stroke when he was in his teens. His mothers youngest brother died years
earlier of kidney failure associated with septicemia. His younger brother
has a congenital heart condition. Three weeks after he was released from
the hospital, his eldest sister was taken to the hospital with septicemia.
Her treatment resulted in massive congestive heart failure. Although told
by doctors and family to stop drinking, this young man started drinking
again within a week of his release from the hospital. Further, what would
perhaps be more surprising to the sensibilities of many Australians, he
demanded that his family members drive him to a local shop to buy alcohol with the money he had saved during his hospitalization. When family
members refused, he angrily told them he could do what he wanted with
his body. He knew the risks; they were his to take; how he gambled with
his life was his business. These were his words, risk, gamble, my body.
Only the future could say whether he won or lost his gamble, was right or
wrong in his approach to this world of misery.
Forty years his senior, his aunt vehemently disagreed not only with his
account of the location of his risk but also with the underlying logic of his
social imaginary. To his statement that his body was his alone, she replied,
No, that is not your body; that is my body. When you die, my body will
suffer and die. When she referred to her physical risk, this woman was
not simply referring to a generalizable empathic form of grief. She was not
saying, I will mourn you as an individual. Her brother was this young
mans father. Thus, she and he share one body: They are both murrumurru (long yam), an ancestral being from which they both substantively
descend as surely as an average non-Indigenous Australian believes that
he or she shares the genetic substance of his or her mother and father. In
other words, the woman was attempting to mobilize a discourse of socially cosubstantial corporeality against her nephews social imaginary of
individuated bodies engaged in private wagers. His language of privatized
loss, and its incumbent discourse of individual risk, was not met by the
risk of another private loss but by an appeal to a cosubstantial distribution
of life, health, and social beinga position much closer to Le Guins than
to the young mans.
As a second instance we could return to my friends and me, who
were driving around Darwin and Palmerston with the washing machine
strapped onto the back of my rented truck. If the washing machine is
built to survive some determined amount of uses, every time it is used it
is suffused, my friends think, with the formative effects of human sweat
on things and places. Sweat (minthene) is a persons essential substance
layered with the essential substances from which it was formed, including human and nonhuman beings and the organic and inorganic nature of
specific places. It passes down from ancestors and passes into places out
of which it passes again into people. The ordinary and extraordinary examples are multiple. Hunting implements smell their users. Uncles press
their sweat on nephews in ritual, as do aunts their nieces. Landscapes react both in a general way, and according to the specific ancestral beings
who inhabit them, to different peoples stink. And as people live in these
landscapes, shit and piss in them, burn and bury their clothes and other
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things in ritual, the land itself begins to be change substantially. And, in

this mutual coming-to-be, substantially interpenetrated human and landscapes acquire new obligations with regard to each other. When does this
happen? What is the event that signals this turn? It is hard to say. It is a
matter of argument and persuasion within and across various Indigenous
and non-Indigenous publics. Potentiality in being that may never achieve
an actuality and yet is discussed and assessed endlessly as a potential.
But as for the washing machine we were carting from Darwin to Palmerston, my friends said that it was already on the fritz because too many
people were using it. But when they said that too many people were using
it, they were not merely referring to a numerical calculation but a substantial condition. Washing machines, after all, slush sweat through them.
Based on this understanding of sweat, they shouldnt be used by everyone and anyone. But what if there is only one machine for hundreds of
people, then what? Does reference to sweatto the intersubstantial nature of organic and inorganic entitiesbecome nothing but an excuse;
they just dont want anyone to touch their washing machine. Some of their
relatives think so. Others worry out loud that this discussion of animating sweat and living landscapes is devil worship. They pray to a Christian
god who tells them to reject all practices and accounts of the world that
do not place the superordinate power of Jesus Christ front and center. In
other words, is this belief in sweat and its geontological effects functional
in Wittgensteins sense: does it work in the world as that world is organized? Or does it only partially work, with much in reserve?
The state and businesses do not greet these social imaginaries of lethality, individuality, and responsibility in the same way. After more than a
decade of conservative leadership under Howard, Australia has witnessed
a distinct shift from a strong social welfare state to a form of neoliberalism
and its concomitant economic and dominant discourses of privatization
and the individualization of wealth, value, and destiny. During his government, Howard pushed through the privatization of state holdings, including airlines, telecommunications, and health care; rolled back social
welfare; assaulted the trade union movement; and shifted the source of
public care from the state to the private individual and family.28 In the
course of these changes the causes, meanings, and practices of health have
taken up several strains of a neoliberal logic.
Thus by the time that the nephew and aunt fought, state and business
were amplifying and channeling the nephews rather than the aunts social
imaginary into agencies of social life in such a way that the one is sensible,
practical, and productive, while the other is insensible, impractical, and
sterile. They divide the complex histories and intersubjectivies of the aunt
and her nephew into stereotypes of the battle of ancient law and modernity. The aunt is hardly some pristine adherent of an ancient order. And
by the time the aunt makes her argument, the language game of individual
risk has already organized social, economic, and political life increasingly
around the neoliberal view of her nephewthat bodies and values are
poker chips in individual games of chance and that the social is an impediment to the production of value. This view has social ramifications
that are especially hard on the poor. As Craig Calhoun concisely puts it,
privatizing risk makes individuals bear the brunt of hardships that are
predictable in the statistical aggregate without effective mechanisms to
share the burden, let alone reduce the risk.29 Privatizing risk creates and
fosters a language game in which the social is practiced as nothing more
than an aggregate of individuated risk calculators working according to
mathematically predictable econometric models. I am not in you. You are
not in me. We are merely playing the same game of chance whose truth
lies not here and now between us but there and then in who wins and who
loses. No one is killing me. I am killing myself. Maybe . . . well see . . . the
future will tell.
To see how these new approaches to risk work their way through state
agencies, take, for instance, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
(AihW), a bureaucratic arm of the federal government. When the AihW
released its report on Indigenous health and welfare in 2006, it reported a
relationship between socio-economic status and health . . . with people
at the lowest socio-economic levels experiencing the highest rates of illness and death.30 The AihW seemed to be saying that the agents of harm
may be pathogenic, but the vector of harm is socioeconomicstructural
racism is killing these people.31 The answer to the question of what, or
who, is to blame for the stubborn persistence of Indigenous ill health depends on what is considered a social vector, as opposed to an individual
choice.
This wasnt exactly what the AihW was claiming. It immediately quali-
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fied its claim by stating, Socio-economic status does not alone explain
the variations in health status that exist between groups in society.32
According to the AihW, to understand health status one must look beyond socioeconomic status to individual risk and behavioral practices.
Indeed, from a neoliberal point of view, the social is the aggregation of
these individual behaviors. The sentence poverty is a risk to your health
is quickly denuded of force within a neoliberal language game that reduces risk to individual choice. The behaviors that put one at risk, according to the AihW, are associated with individual choice (immunization,
smoking, diet and exercise, and high blood pressure) rather than racial
discrimination.
Thus, what wonder that the conservative Howard government was
able to respond to the question of what, or who, is to be held accountable for the lethal conditions in Indigenous communities by pointing, at
one and the same time, to the individual and her culture, but never at
the sociopolitical conditions in which these emerge. Cultural and social
logics of exactly the sort articulated by the aunt are, according to Howard,
an impediment to the maintenance of a unified social fabric and to the
fostering of an entrepreneurial spirit among Indigenous people. Indeed,
they are said to be the cause of poverty along with longstanding federal
and state commitments to Indigenous social welfare. When Indigenous
people stop seeing their social worlds from the perspective of local cultural sense or from state-backed social welfare, then they will emerge
from poverty and with this emergence gain the health that all other Australians have. But the nephew is also to blame by choosing to harm himself through alcohol consumption.
Then, then, then. . . . Local men and women are quite familiar with the
temporal ethics of this future anterior. Needless to say, it is the aunt who
is sober, the nephew who is not; the aunt is outside the logic of life as a
set of privatized risks, the nephew is not. Nevertheless, as an incentive
to Indigenous people to take up the nephews position, Howard committed his government to withdrawing federal economic support from
rural Indigenous communities as part of the mainstreaming of Indigenous people and policy. Is this withdrawal, seen throughout late liberal
worlds, a form of state killing? Howard would say, clearly not. In his corner are many Indigenous men and women. Noel Pearson, an Aboriginal
activist, has famously and forcefully argued that state welfare, when applied to Indigenous peoples, is a technique of numbing Indigenous and
non-Indigenous people to the radical state of dysfunction in Aboriginal
communities.33 For Pearson, Indigenous subjects are so destroyed and so
used to their destitution that only liberating them from a failed social welfare net and local social imaginaries will save them. In the future, according to Howard, Pearson, and others, the young mans stultifying life will
be shown to have been the vigorous beginning of a new day for Indigenous welfare. The evidence will not be in for quite some time, of course.
Was self-determination and its manifestation through the social welfare system a failure? What if we do not accept that the social welfare net
and local social imaginaries are not working in some general way but only
in a specific way? Why arent they seen to be working? What isnt working? Much of the public debate focused on true feelingwhether Mal
Brough really cared about Aboriginal children, whether John Howard
didnt really care, or whether neither of them cared and both of them
were simply engaged in a land grab or seeking a poll boost.34 For instance,
whatever we call the Community Development Employment Program
work for the dole, dole top-up, community development schemethe
best statistics show that the program raised the personal income and employment of rural Indigenous men and women.35 Assessing the relationship between employment, physical and mental health, and vague sets
of life qualities is much harder, and not merely because it confronts an
exceedingly difficult statistical task. Assessing the relationship between
employment and other social indices is difficult because first one has to
agree what a social ill is, or an instance of social care. This said, if the CDEP
doesnt lead to so-called normal employment, and normal employment
is considered the ultimate social good because of how it helps the efficiency of the market and corporate profit, then the CDEP has failed, no
matter that it preserved and enhanced local lives. In neoliberalism to care
for others is to refuse to preserve life if it lies outside a market value. Thus
Howard and Kevin Rudd can say that life will get much harder for Indigenous people but that this harm is a good.
But no matter how we transform, or dont, quasi- events into catastrophes, the contemporary assessment of responsibility for these quasievents and catastrophes emerges within the tensions among social wel-
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fare, laissez-faire, and neoliberalism and between these and late liberalism.
To ask and answer the question of who is to blame for the slow catastrophe in spaces such as African American neighborhoods and Indigenous
ghettos is to take a stance within liberalism as it organizes markets and
difference. Likewise, to care for others is to make a claim; it is to make a
small theoretical gesture. To care is to embody an argument about what
a good life is and how such a good life comes into being. Thus the arts of
caring for others always emerge from and are a reflection on broader historical material conditions and institutional arrangements. The point is
not, therefore, to argue that someone really cares or doesnt really care.
In the first instance, the question is, what do we believe care to consist of,
such that when we experience a form of relating to one another socially,
we experience that form of relating as a form of caring for others?
What we believe care to consist of is directly related to where we believe failure resides or what we believe failure consists of. Perhaps the
arts of care should be oriented to the potentiality within the actual, to
removing the actual hindrances that impede groups strivingwhether
they are striving to change their world through a social project or to remain as they are within a world changing around them. The arts of care
would then focus on the differential distribution of the ease of coping.
Caring would sink into the recesses of the everyday, the ordinary, and the
mundane. What it would discover there is that everything is jerry-rigged.
Rather than menacing terrorists, they would find people trying to make a
small, frail shelter.
These issues do not need to be addressed if we are dreaming of future
worlds in which no one has these sores or these life expectancies, even as
others are never impeded in their quest to accumulate as much wealth
as possible. But the actual cost-benefit analysis occurring is not the balance between the risk of untreated staphylococci or streptococci versus
the risk of developing a drug-resistant form, but the risk of untreated
staphylococci or streptococci within certain populations and the cost of
investing in poverty-stricken communities for the short or long term. The
presupposition underlying the treatment of infections in indigenous communities is that the communities themselves will remain fetid. Within a
neoliberal state, any social investment that does not have a clear end
a projected moment when input value (money, services, care) can be re-
Health conditions
Health conditions
among Indigenous
among Indigenous
and non-Indigenous
and non-Indigenous
Australians, 20012006
20012006
Australians,
Australian
sources : Australian
((sources:
Bureau of
of Statistics
Statistics
Bureau
and
Australian
Institute
and Australian Institute
of Health
Health and
and Welfare)
Welfare)
of
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placed by output valueis not merely economically suspect but morally

suspect, no matter the life-enhancing nature of the investment.
We should not be surprised by this way of assessing failed forms of
state welfare. After all, the neoliberal weak state and strong market do not
produce and distribute life, its qualities, vitalities, and borders, evenly or
equitably. Nor do all forms of lethality produce the same qualities, visibilities, and intensities as others. Lethality is apprehended and perceived and
is discussed, explained, and managed in terms of historically fluctuating
accounts of agency, eventfulness, sociality, and normality. Even tsunamis,
earthquakes, and hurricanes that generate terrific waves of empathy and
generate moral capital for those who demonstrate outrage leave in their
wake a nonplussed public. When the waters recede and the ground stops
shaking, empathy also evaporates as ethical sense settles back into doxic
accounts of poverty, its causes and consequences. Cost reemerges as a
central issue for how to calculate who can or should be protected, relocated, cared for, as was the case for my colleagues, discussed in the previous chapter, who were driven out of the community where the nephew
and aunt lived. Here we see how prescient Le Guins suspicion of the
ethics of empathy is. Empathy asks us to put ourselves in someone elses
shoes. What would it be like to be them? To be in this tidal wave, that
fetid broom closet, that cultural condition? And yet, this very actthis
ethical gestureinitiates a separation between you and me. I am not substantially the result of your tsunami or your staphylococci. As a result, to
give to you can end up seeming like a taking away from me because mine
seems to be mine. Never has Le Guins basic point that all goods are generated in a system of distributed misery seemed so hard to fathom, so impractical, and yet so close to late liberal reality.
Chapter Five
After Good and Evil, Whither

Sacrificial Love?
Christ is alive! let Christians sing.
The cross stands empty to the sky.
let streets and homes with praises ring.
love, drowned in death, shall never die.
BrIAN WreN, 1969
The Good and the Evil
Late in his second term George W. Bush told a

reporter why he had given up playing golf: I feel
I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best
as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.1 Unsurprisingly, Bush was excoriated and lampooned
for equating the sacrifices of war and the game
of golf. But in making this awkward equivalence
Bush seemed to signal a deeper division between
an administration prone to understand its actions
in a millennialism of good and evil and critics of
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the administration who advocate a broader approach to the collective responsibilities of wartime sacrifice and the possibilities of wartime sacrificial love. If the nation is at war, then why are sacrifices asked only of the
military and their families and not of the citizenry more generally? And
how does waging a war premised on an absolute division between those
who stand with us and all others square with another message preached
in Christian pulpits every Easter season: the message of a sacrificial love
offered not merely to friends but, more profoundly, to enemies?
As much as many might wish to hold the Bush administration responsible for every last bit of the mischief of our times, this we cannot
nail to its coffin: Bushs is not the first U.S. administration to promote
a Christian-inflected millennial governance. His administration has certainly pressed the cause. We are only now beginning to appreciate the
organizational ties connecting specific Christian groups and the various
arms of the state apparatus.2 Scholars and activists have been particularly
worried about the ties between the U.S. military and specific evangelical
groups and about religio-political litmus tests used for appointments to
the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.3 But
equally worrisome are the complex entanglements of conservative Christian movements in neoliberal state functionsnot merely the states
public embrace of religious groups for the outsourcing of federal social
service funding, but also the states covert ties to conservative Christian
agendas, such as the personal and business connections among the Bush
administration, the Family Research Council, and Blackwater Worldwide.4 But the second Bush was not the first.
Twenty years prior to the George W. Bush administration, Ronald
Reagans belief that he was living in the end-time helped shape his foreign policy.5 I would not be the first to note that the Evil Empire provided a discursive footprint for the Axis of Evil. And long before Bush
and Reagan, the concept of manifest destiny, as Ernest Tuveson wrote in
1968, expressed a specific U.S. Christian millennial utopianism in which
America was understood to have been chosen by God to arbitrate a global
war between good and evil.6 Therefore, what may be more disturbing
than yet another U.S. administration articulating yet another millennial
fantasy is how this fantasy seems to have drifted across the Atlantic and
Pacific, encompassing the Blair ministry in Great Britain and less publicly
After Good and Evil
the Howard ministry in Australia.7 And, equally unnerving, is how the

notion of millennial good-and-evil civilizations may have been in play in
debates about whether the European Union (EU) constitution should
make reference to Christianity or a Christian culture. This debate is especially unnerving insofar as it occurred in a context in which the civilizational struggle between good and evil is often figured as a battle between
good and bad Muslims.8 Thus German chancellor Angela Merkel told
reporters at the 2007 European Commission meeting that, while she did
not hold out any hope for the inclusion of a reference to the Christian
god in the EU constitution, she could not close her eyes to the lack of religious freedom in Turkey for Christian denominations. While, therefore,
the sociologist of religion Jos Casanova is certainly right that the United
States is as much an exception to European secularism as a bunkmate of
it, it is also true that we are witnessing a host of possible convergences
between the United States and Europe as the politics of recognition mutates from a social struggle over the worth of the other to a faith-based
certainty about the evil of the other.
But as the golfing fiasco suggests, beyond good and evil, or coiled within
their heart like a worm, is another rhetoric of governance that surely preceded the smoldering landscapes of New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, London, and Madrid but just as surely has intensified in their heat: namely,
the complex crossings of the figures of sacrifice and sacrificial love in late
liberalisms governance of alternative social worlds and projects. It is how
this crossing helps reveal the mutations of late liberalism in the wake of
the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent emergence of a security state that
concerns this chapter. And more important for the purpose of this book,
these complex rhetorical crossings provide a dense knot where late liberal
figurations of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance aggregate harm
and suffering in such a way that every ethical and political claim of an
alternative social worlds can be deferred. Thus while I obviously tread on
a terrain occupied by contemporary debates in secularism, my interests
are not in secularism but in how discourses of sacrifice and sacrificial love
shelter late liberalism from critique.
Although emerging from similar gospels, these two rhetorical figuresgood and evil and sacrifice/sacrificial loveseem to index and
express competing political and social visions and allegiances. On the
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political and social Right, foreign policy is figured not as sacrifice or sacrificial love but as a millennial struggle between good and evil. And, according to Bush, God is not neutral in this struggle.9 From the point of
view of progressive Christians such as James McGinnis, founder of the
Institute for Peace and Justice, the Christian concept of sacrificial love
offers an alternative to these conservative Knights of Faith.10 Tacking between the concept of sacrifice and the concept of sacrificial love, such
progressive critiques castigate the Bush administration for its refusal to
stress the collective sacrifice a nation is normally called on to make in
times of war. If the United States is at war, then all Americans should be
asked to make the necessary social and economic sacrifices of warnot
merely to give up golf. Perhaps if Americans had been encouraged to
think of themselves as at war, then the orgy of spending encouraged by
the housing bubble would have been replaced by a more circumspect sacrificial logic. The exorbitant margins of profit demanded of corporate executives as the price of Wall Street investment might have been tempered.
But We the People was, instead, rewritten as He and I the Competitors, the first person and the nonperson who need not even be specified
lexically.11 McGinnis, for instance, argues that Christian sacrifice teaches
us to share burdens felt by individuals of a community among the community and that Christian sacrificial love teaches us to turn our cheeks to
our enemies. Beyond good and evil lies another message, the cultivation
of modes of sacrifice for the other that defines sacrificial love.
Here we see that where the Bush administration in its critiques has
focused on good and evil, to the exclusion of sacrifice and sacrificial love,
a space has opened for a broader discussion about a certain deficit in late
liberal thought. For all the administrations early emphasis on compassion, critics argue, it has discouraged the kind of neighborliness that is
collective in its imaginary, public in its burdens, and sacrificial in the face
of the need of the other. For all the rhetorical emphasis on faith, religion emerges in administration policies only as a site for state outsourcing and the social production of individualized risk. Compassion means
little more than sympathy for others unable to leverage the kinds of capital necessary to make huge profit at the center or margins of the market.
Under considerable pressure Bush did begin to acknowledge the suffering and sacrifice consequent to his war policies. In a prime-time ad-
After Good and Evil
dress delivered on June 28, 2005, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Bush
stated: Every picture [from the war] is horrifying, and the suffering is
real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the
sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our
country.12 Is the sacrifice worth it? Answering this question actually presupposes two prior discussions. The first is the discussion of modalities
of expenditure and abandonment in our times, from expenditures and
abandonments whose social weight is barely noticeable to those whose
social weight begins to unravel the social order, from the soft deaths of
pastoral care to the hard deaths of sovereign killing, from making live to
making die. In other words, deciding that this or that sacrifice is worth it
depends on how we narrate forms of killing and making die, making live
and letting suffer, in the various domains of social lifepolitics, market,
and civil society. And this discussion presupposes a second.
The question whether this or that sacrifice is worth it opens the events
of suffering and dying, if not to the problematic of being and time, then to
the problematic of being and tensethe narrative relation among social,
economic, and political values and subjective finitudes and how, where,
and whether subjective finitudes are seen to occur and lead. We can begin
to see what is at stake here if we rephrase what Bush said in this way: Is
the sacrifice worth it? It is if we establish a specific relationship between
violence and redemption that will define the social imaginary of suffering and dying. If we can do so, killing and dying will be understood and
experienced as a mode of birth, as a way of bringing new being into existence. For instance, insofar as killing can be narrated in the future perfect,
it can become a way of giving; violent death becomes sacrifice and ceases
to be scandalous.13 Indeed, by denying the present perfect of suffering and
death, we can make suffering and death something to strive for, celebrate,
and memorialize.
Given its penchant for memorialized denial, the very narrative of sacrifice and sacrificial love presents a set of dilemmas for progressive critics
when they mobilize these narratives against the millennial imaginary of
good and evil. And this is what interests me here. How do discourses of
sacrificial love coordinate violence and redemption in such a way that suffering and dyingthe mortifications of the flesh of othersare continually read from the perspective of the future perfect, the redeemed end of
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a perfected social field? Sacrificial love constructs a complex self-reflexive

totalization in which the present becomes a mode of pastness by being
projected into a perfected future. This future perfect swallows up the possibility of a more complex mode of dwelling in the fractured present. In
the background of my argument is Carl Schmitts notorious claim that
under no circumstances can anyone demand that a member of an economically determined society . . . sacrifice his life in the interests of [its]
rational operations.14 Equally relevant is Benedict Andersons question
as to how an imaginary political formation can lead so many millions of
people into colossal sacrifices.15 But rather than from the perspective of
the state or the nation, I want to think about these issues from the perspective of the diffused discourses of liberal secular sacrificial love. What
are the dilemmas of posing sacrificial love as an antidote to the millennialism of good and evil?
The Knights of Faith
One of these dilemmas comes from the increasingly explicit religious

overtones of sacrificial love. Critical theorists were accustomed to the
challenging rhythms of late liberal governance and the harms it causes
othersthe sacrifices that must be made or withheld, the love that must
be given or deniedwhen these rhythms were understood as occurring
within a secular framework. Yet a new difference has emerged within liberalism to disrupt these arrangements, signaled but not contained by discussions of good and evil and sacrifice and sacrificial love. The Christian
Knight of Faith is suddenly let loose in secular democracies, basing its
allegiances on scripturally backed faith. Many critics thought that this
Knight of Faith had been safely contained in private consciousness and
church service. Then, just like that, he rides into the center of secular politics, constitutional democracy, and the political theory that has supported
them, disrupting the ongoing feast, disturbing the given time of political
difference. Some see him as the end of the liberal secular era. Others see
him as the answer to the metaphysical malaise of the multicultural moment. But many on the political and social Left and Right think that there
is something about the way he loves sacrifice and sacrificially loves that
provides critical insight on the ethical shape and future of liberal gover-
After Good and Evil
nancesomething internal to the logic of sacrifice and sacrificial love

that emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition and that can renew the
democratic order.
It would be hard to underestimate the critical commotion that political faith has caused in critical theory. One of the doyens of political
theory, Jrgen Habermas, warns that religious traditions and communities of faith have gained an unexpected political importance not merely
in the Islamic-dominated societies of the Middle East and Southeast Asia
but within the heart of Western civilization.16 Christian faiths are no
longer content to restrict their religious fervor and conviction to the inner
sanctum of individual conscience or church. In the United States, politicians court voters by making explicit professions of faith. In Europe,
questions of religious identity and political inclusionthe inclusion of
Turkey in the EU and of Christianity in the EU constitutionprompt
heated debates about the relationship between Christian faith and European civilization. For those, like Habermas, who understand secularism
as a precondition of constitutional democracyand of liberalism more
generally as a broad and diverse governmental doctrine and practice of
liberty and equalitythe appearance of Christian faith in the heart of
Western political society raises troubling questions.17 How does the man
of religious convictions fit within the procedural routines of pragmatic
public reason without doing violence to them? How can religious conviction be incorporated into secular public reason when the routines of truth
production and verification are not merely different but often confrontational?18
Habermas may have only recently awakened to the figurative force of
Christianity in the shaping of constitutional democracies. But more than
150 years ago Karl Marx argued, in On the Jewish Question, that the perfected Christian state emerged only when the state gave up Christianity as
a state religion. The liberal democratic state and economy could become
Christian only when Christianity became a private matter. Or, put another way, democratic sufferings and death would become a true theodicy
of sacrifice once states became theologically neutral. Of course there are
many complex readings of On the Jewish Question. One understands
liberal forms of secularismincluding the dynamics of the public sphere,
the market, and the citizen-state that have interested Habermas since the
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publication of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphereto presuppose certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities genealogically related to Christianity and its various disciplines of truth. Thus when we
refer to the secular West, liberal society, or constitutional democracies,
we are referring to a set of multiplex transpositions that mutually reorganized, and made sense of a divide between, the religious and the secular.19 Contra Marx, the state did not become Christian when it gave up
Christianity as a state religion; it became so when the practices of the self,
internal to Christianity and the modern democratic society, were reorganized. In short, secularism and Christianity, and the political and religious more generally, were mutually reconstituted in complex historical
encounters within and outside of Europe. If the secular West is Christian, so this argument goes, it is not because Christians are a majority
within the North Atlantic or because people of religious conviction have
hijacked the state but because secularism and its governmentalities (including the seemingly contrastive French and Anglo-American models of
national inclusion) and Christianity and its practices of the self came to
presuppose compatible modes of social, communicative, and corporeal
comportment and their relation to truth production. As a result, studies
of religion should not define religion and then extract social truths or
ethical principles from this definition. Studies of religion should instead
focus on how people, in coordinating the political, economic, and religious dimensions of social life, make sense of accumulation, expenditure,
and abandonment.
These practices of social coordination are not what have riveted recent critical theory, although I will come back to them shortly. Instead
of examining how people coordinate political, economic, and religious
principles and practices and how these practices of coordination, among
other things, organize, account for, and maneuver around the paradoxes,
contradictions, and problems within actually existing liberal democracies,
many critical theorists seek to distill from Christian doctrine an essential Christian form that can serve as a basis for providing constitutional
democracies a universal and/or transcendental foundation in a postmetaphysical world. And it is to sacrificial love, more specifically, that critical
theorists have turned, with surprising frequency, as that which offers a
revolutionary ethical foundation for democratic governance.
After Good and Evil
Take, for example, Slavoj ieks recent writings on what he calls the
most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and the revolutionary
insights of the Christian legacy (postmodern politics, liberal democracy,
and Christian sacrificial love).20 To understand what is at stake in his writings, we need to begin with his opposition to what he calls multicultural
globalization. iek believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the emergence of neoliberal capitalism left the progressive Left without
grounds for making convincing claims about social conscience, democratic justice, or human rights. Against those who would reestablish
democratic justice on a multicultural foundation, iek argues that multiculturalism is an impediment rather than a solution to the problem of
judgment and justice. For him, multiculturalism collapses justice, ethics,
and subjectivity to the iterative sameness of the market, evacuating any
possibility of establishing a transcendental ground on which antagonistic
claims about conscience, justice, or human rights can be made or adjudicated. Where there is no antagonism, so the argument goes, there can be
no meaningful difference, and, contrastingly, where there is antagonism
without transcendental ground, there can be no means for adjudicating
meaningful difference peacefully. Because the postmodern Left occupies
both of these contradictory positions at the same time, it cannot oppose
the vicious extremes of capitalism, the emergence of religious fundamentalism, or the xenophobias of the racist Right. All must be loved equally,
and all should have equal opportunity for thriving; conversely, all must be
equally despised and destroyed.
As much as iek skewersand misconstruesthe so- called postmodern Left, he is also aware of the varieties of radical evil that have
accompanied a specific social groups claim over the content of the Universal: colonialism, anti-Semitism, slavery, homophobia. For iek, only
Christian sacrificial lovethe relationship of absolute love to the radical
other that Christ established on Golgothaoffers a revolutionary means
of avoiding the radical evils associated with projects that specify the content of the Universal and projects that empty out the possibility of Absolute Judgment. The Christian model of sacrificial love, the phantasm of
the Crucifixion, is a fragile absolute in which we are commanded to love
not merely our friend and neighbor but, more radically, our enemy. This
command unplugs Christian subjects from the specificities of their so-
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cial roles and, insofar as it does so, unplugs their political decisions from
their social and ethical boundaries, providing a Universal foundation to
constitutional democracies currently adrift in a postmetaphysical world.21
In the shadow of the happy event of the Crucifixion, Christians can die in
relation to the given world while catching a glimpse of Another Space.
Unplugging is an act, a temporal event, that changes eternity itself by redefining the possibility of the world. And here we see ieks memorialization of suffering and death by an absolute denial of the present perfect
nature of subjective finitudethat there is a form of killing and dying
that does not need to be experienced, because it can be experienced as
a form of radical birth. Death can remain a joyous denial. So can killing.
Someone or something is killed, extinguished. Someone did the killing.
But iek, Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger can reassure one another that
this is a minor issue in the context of the major event of the Good News.22
iek is not alone in his march to Golgotha in search of an ethical
foundation for liberal governance. Nor am I alone in noting the return to
religion beyond religion in recent critical theory. John Roberts has discussed this ethicoreligious turn in the work of Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, iek, and Roy Bhaskar, differentiating among a
weak Messianic tradition as exemplified in Derridas writing, a strong
Messianic tradition in Badious and ieks writings, and an ecumenical libertarianism in Bhaskars and Negris writings. Roberts argues that
these diverse thinkers situate an ethics of conviction as a passionate act
and this passionate act as the ground of responsibility: Ethics becomes
a site of the passionate political judgment and decision.23 Passionate political judgment finds its apotheosis in sacrificial love, and the paradoxical
nature of this passion finds its apotheosis in the work of Derrida.
Derrida began addressing the political potential and paradox of JudeoChristian discourses of sacrificial love and the political responsibility and
ethical obligations of Europe to the other (what has been promised
under the name of Europe) in a series of essays stretching back to the
mid-1990s.24 These mediations are, of course, deconstructive in nature,
seeking not to resolve the impasse of reason witnessed at Calvary but instead to locate the obligation of the North Atlantic to the radical other in
this impassethe mysterium tremendum, the awefulnessof the Christian gift of death. The gift of death cannot be rationalized by any proce-
After Good and Evil
dure of liberalism. Nothing could have justified the sacrifice of Isaac or

can justify that of Christnot ethics, not custom, not hatred, not crude
gestures to glimpsed absolutes. Thus the decision to (be the) sacrifice
is a radically singular event, a moment of absolute aloneness, of being
without community in order to be with a god who at that exact moment
is absolutely alien. At the moment of decision, Abraham and Christ are
left decisively and devastatingly isolated (the obfuscation of Abraham in
response to Isaacs queries; the cry of Christ, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?). They face the bar of the absolute on one side and the bar
of community censure on the other. Worse, as Derrida notes, unqualified
lovethe affective subjectification of truthis necessary for the paradox
to function qua paradox. Yahweh would not have demanded the sacrifice
of Isaac if Abraham had not had an absolute, unique, and incommensurable love for his son.25
Absolute relation to the absolute: This law of sacrificial love would be
awful enough if I were only under the ethical command to love my neighbor to such an extent that I would make the ultimate sacrifice for him or
her. This new law, the legacy of Europe as the name of a promise for a
future world, demands of me not merely a determination of how close a
person and his or her ethnos must be to me for the person to qualify as
my neighbor, a determination made especially difficult by the contemporary global economy of communication and intercourse. Given the complex socioeconomic matrixesthose globalized and globalizing forms of
state, market, and mediathrough which I am connected to so many
people, entire continents are my neighbors even though they are perfect
strangers. Globalization has punctured the older nature of the neighbor.
Entire populations, ethnicities, tribal areas, and regions may be toiling
away to produce the conditions of the good life in Europe and the United
States without most Europeans and Americans knowing their names or
where they live, let alone on what grounds they should be judging them
as friend, neighbor, or enemy.
But these problems of discernment are as nothing when put in the
context of the new law of love. This new law also demands of me that
I sacrifice myself for friend, neighbor, and enemy alike. I must sacrifice
what I love most dearly, what is irreplaceablemy Isaac, my future, my
selfto another who makes no sense to me and might want to annihilate
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me. Derrida insists that the totality of the annihilation of this law of sacrificial love cannot be underestimated. If I were merely commanded to
love my neighbor as much as I love myself, or in the same way that I love
myself, then when I died, I could believe that some part of me would live
on. This is especially true if I imagine that I am the product of a cultural
or civilizational horizon. I can then imagine that my neighbor would carry
me forward in my absence. Not so with my enemy. The new law, the fulfillment of Abrahams interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, ruptures the security of
this continuity in community and the communitarian illusion on which it
is based. In killing myself for my enemythe Absolute OtherI am extinguished in my particularity and my generality. My self, my ethnos, my
entire aspirational horizon will be consumed by this terrifying demand.
Yet, to the fascination of Derridas ethical reflections, this is exactly what
Yahweh asks of Abraham. And in making this demand on Abraham, Derrida argues, God not only asks him to commit this abominable sacrifice
for the other but also becomes an absolute stranger to him. No known
or knowable system of justice can justify it. There is only an absolute
otherness that demands absolute obedience beyond common, ethnic, or
ethical sense. Maybe this is why the holy hide away in desert caves: lest a
stranger appear on the horizon, demanding this ultimate sacrifice. Yet this
is the dowry that Europe carries, what is internal to the call for recognition of the Christian legacy of Europe in the EU constitution. For it was
exactly in the shadow of an increasingly virulent, religiously and racially
inflected, European stance against immigrants that Derrida wrote, and
wrote against Schmitts too-easy distinction between the private enemy
(inimicos) and the public enemy (hostes).26
What obligation, Derrida asks, does this impasse of love, justice, and
obligation impose on the North Atlantic?27 How can this law claim a
moral imperative over anyone when it cannot ground itself in any sensible order of ethics, justice, or sociality? Should a stranger appear to a
penitent, coming from the South or East or within the West, or flying
toward her across a brilliant morning sky, how does the penitent know
whether this stranger is bound? Is this law transitive? Must she do unto
me as I would do unto her? As I watch her approach, I cannot assume
that she knows this directive or, if she knows it, feels obligated by it. This
stranger may never have heard these words before or may have heard of
them only as a report from an alien, perhaps unholy, place. Indeed, a for-
After Good and Evil
eign state might severely regulate or ban outright certain Christian sects,
their broadcast channels, and their emissaries to keep its citizenry from
being exposed to these unholy words. Other states might react by passing resolutions supporting freedom of religion through trade sanctions.
But maybe the stranger is closer to home, one of us. Perhaps she is a practicing sociobiologist who espouses a theory of the selfish gene, thinking
that altruistic love is biologically absurd. For her, this directive does not
command the status of a general moral imperative. It is (merely) a local
code or custom, spoken at a specific place, a specific time, open to anthropological analysis. She would not agree that any general political theory
should be animated by these words. What do I do with her? Something
must be preserved, but it is not clear what, or who. Can she live among us?
Can I kill her to preserve the law of love? What else can I kill to preserve
my law of sacrificial love?
These and other attempts to elicit an ethical dynamic from a reading of
Christian doctrine have forged a new, for some frightening, alliance between conservative theologians and the critical Left. iek takes pride in
upending the usual oppositions between the critical Left and the religious
Rightand in cementing his reputation as the perpetual provocateur. Yet
to be persuaded by these readings, we must first accept that religions, and
Christianity in particular, can be definedthat doctrines and paradoxes
exist in them and can be analyzed independent of their social conditions.
We must already abide within a certain social imaginary of liberalism in
which concepts have an abstract and objectified being and agency that
can be detached from the social routines of their formation and citation.
We must think that Christianity is a thing with qualities and essences before we can find it secretly working its ethical magic within the domains
of the modern democratic state. But what if Christianity were not a thing
but part and parcel of a set of social maneuvers within liberal democracies? What if Christian sacrificial love were not a paradox but part of the
means by which the paradoxes, contradictions, and violences of actually
existing liberalism were stilled if not resolved? If Christian sacrificial love
were not a paradox but a means of maneuvering around extant politicaleconomic contradictions, then the first task we would face would be to remember that the narrations from which we draw this paradox are always
already within the natural history of discourse.28
Take, for example, the Abrahamic and Christian narratives from which
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these critical theories extract their accounts of sacrifice and sacrificial

love. These narratives do not exist outside social time. They participate in
the social life of referentiality and performativity insofar as they consist
of both a narrative event and the event of narrationthe continuously
retranslated, internal referential space of the stories and constant retelling and rereading of this space. When we read of Abrahams journey to
Mount Moriah and of Christs Passion, culminating in his death on the
cross, from the point of view of the narrative event, Abrahams arm is
always raised, and Christ crucified is always looking toward heaven. But
when we examine the same sacrifices from the point of view of the act of
narrationthose of us who read about Abraham hearing Yahwehs voice
in the winds of Mount Moriahthese paradoxical extremes dissipate as
death falls away as the ultimate reference. From the point of view of the
act of narration, we know that nothing actually happened or that, in happening, a tortured death was the condition for a radically new form of redeemed life. In short, we already know that in Isaacs case Yahweh held
back Abrahams hand. And for all the talk about his ultimate sacrifice,
Christs death is continually referred to as the act of redemption (Christ
is alive! Let Christians sing. / The cross stands empty to the sky). His
marked body, now lily white, bears testimony to the fact that his killing
was not. We enter the world of Lacanian algebra. There is at least one
man who was killed but did not die. Not all killing kills. There is at least
one killing that creates life. Empathy may allow us to feel the excruciating
physical and psychic pain of Jesus stretched out on the cross. But because
we read these texts, or listen to them, we know after the first hearing that
Isaac is lifted off one stone and that God rolls back another. We cannot
know otherwise.
The second task we face is to situate these narrative events in the complex relays and transpositions across the orders of social life. When we do
so, the Christian logic of sacrificial love that so captivates iek seems
to have little formative force in the contemporary secular public sphere.
When we look at contemporary public discussions of friends, neighbors,
and enemies in places like the United States, Western Europe, and Australia, it is easy to argue that discourses of sacrificial love have ceased
to obligate citizens or states. Certainly, the so-called war on terror has
helped no one cultivate unconditional love for the radical other. Sacri-
After Good and Evil
fices abound, but sacrificial love is rare. Indeed, we see an increasing confidence among liberal democrats in claiming and justifying an absolute
intolerance for competing forms of religion and politics. Red lines demarcate difference, especially where difference becomes a call to arms.
The war on terror cannot be held responsible for the appearance of
these red lines. Defenders of the liberal public spherein both deliberative and substantive varietieshave always held to some red line to
absolute difference. Indeed, we would be hard pressed to find a subject
within liberal democracies who believes that there is no horizon of otherness past which sacrificial love could not, at least theoretically, extend.
Very few people seem willing to unplug themselves unconditionally from
their social and ethical horizon. A nonsacrificial love might be easier to
findfor instance, the position of some Christian evangelical churches
on homosexuality: Love the sinner, hate the sin. But the kind of relation
iek sees Christian sacrificial love establishing with the Absolute Other
is rare, and where it might exist there are laws proscribing it. Caveats proliferate. Dilemmas abound. Legislation piles up. Should the acceptance of
strangers depend on whether they seek to join us in making a joint economic, social, or political world or seek to kill us and our way of life? Are
we creating strangers among us by refusing to embrace cultural difference
in the public sphere and confront the persistence of class inequalities in
the market? Is French republicanism causing the recurrent rioting in the
suburbs of Paris, or is it a bulwark against racism?29 At the minimum,
most liberals agree that tolerance should be extended if the other is willing to do the same, if the difference between the other and me is not so
great as to annihilate me, and if the other can make this difference legible
to me within the deliberative public sphere. At the maximum, consensus
begins to fall apart. We argue whether there are cases in which we should
even empathize with others, let alone die on their behalf. Indeed, cultural
conservatives argue that encouraging our children to empathize with religious suicide bombers may lead them down a treacherous slope that ends
in jihadist camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Yet for those like Habermas who see the liberal public sphere as the
best foundation for political society, the factual limit of tolerance does
not negate the normative orientation of liberalism to revise reflexively
its most fundamental assumptions about justice and the good life. In-
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sofar as liberals continue to be committed to alleviating the pain that

their political and social beliefs and practices unnecessarily cause others,
the fact that red lines must be drawn and that caveats will proliferate
around them does not alter the orientation of the public sphere to sacrificial lovethe abandonment of their cherished ideals for the sake of
better, less harmful ideas. Indeed, that some liberals point to this willingness to sacrifice their beliefs in the face of the pain of the other is what
distinguishes liberal democracies in the global market of governmental
formsstrongman oligarchies, communist free markets, theocratic capitalism, and socialism. And liberalism can accomplish all of this by doing
little more than articulating a very ordinary affect (empathy) and a very
ordinary communicative procedure (deliberation) into a massive political
force.
Bad Forgeries
It is easy to draw a genealogical relationship between the liberal dialectics of empathetic deliberation and the theological command that we lay
down our life for the other. One can argue, as Charles Taylor and others
have done, that insofar as liberalism seeks to base justice and the good
life on the general perspective of humankind rather than on the particular borders of self, ethnos, and nation, these movements write Christs
signature into the secular.30 But if we think that there is a Christian sacrificial logic, then as much as there is a Christian signature within the very
dynamic of affective public reason, this signature also has all the signs
of a bad forgery. A profound shift has occurred. We are no longer under
the unconditioned command that we give our life for our enemy. We are
under a very conditioned command that we hone our abilities to know
when it makes sense for us, and them, to give a gift of death that does not
really kill. Take, for instance, ubiquitous guiding statements of the practical public sphere such as Lets start with what we can agree about and
We need to be able to live with impasses. These practical statements
refer to and entail the self-evident dependency of liberal justice on the
horizon of unfolding time and the perspective of ends. In liberal systems
of law and public reason, present-tense judgments about moral limits and
the economic impoverishment of others are referred to a future horizon
After Good and Evil
of rectified sense and bodies. In other words, the tense of public deliberation reflects and reinforces the commonsense tense of sacrificial love. It is,
as Michael Dillon and Julien Reid note, the liberal way of making war
wrapping various kinds of killing within the imaginary of making life.31
So doxic are these statements that many people must struggle to remember that, as much as we might wish it did, empathetic deliberation
does not provide a pause button on social practice and its unfolding. As
much as we might wish it would, social time does not stop and wait for us
to sort things out. As other folks are deliberating their fateand I think
that this point cannot be overemphasizedthe subjects of dominant repugnance, or subjects who challenge dominant modes of life intentionally or not, continue to live. They eat. They sleep. They hope or despair.
They maneuver around a world in which they areand they know they
area social problem. Their lives might be crushed in the meantime. But
empathetic deliberation allows the liberal subject never to have to encounter the people assigned to the brackets of the disagreeable. They do
not exist in the present because I bracket them in order to proceed, nor
will they exist in the future because this future is imagined as a place in
which they do not exist. In short, empathetic deliberation can claim a
genealogy to Judeo-Christian sacrificial love because it uses this spiritual
relation to assign the disagreeable and uncomfortable to the historically
undead.
A similar discursive maneuver around sacrificial love occurs in contemporary sovereign politics. To be sure, as they stare into the pit that
mars Manhattan, many Americans do not hear the theological command
to give up their lives for those responsible. Nevertheless, many people say
that their sons and daughters, their spouses, or their parents are making
exactly this kind of sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the United
States consumes its way to economic prosperity, or speculates its way to
economic catastrophe, these people say that their loved ones are willing
to make a principled death far from suburbs and malls. And this time no
god holds back the hands of the slayer. The public may be barred from
doing so, but families and friends see the bodies of their beloveds returned to them wrapped in flags. The mortician repairs the torn body, but
for a final internmentuntil, for some, the redemption of the dead. These
individuals and families have made what the second President Bush and
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others have described as the selflessness of ultimate sacrifice.32 They

have given their lives for a higher good. They have laid down their lives
or returned in physical and psychic piecesfor another.
But the rhetoric of sacrifice and sacrificial love is not univocal. It unfolds over time and across other discursive spaces. Take, for example,
Bushs rhetoric of sacrifice in such national rituals as his prime-time addresses to the American people. In his initial dramatic address to the nation on September 20, 2001, Bush makes reference to the ultimate sacrifice, but to whom he was referring is unclear: was he referring to the
attackers willingness to sacrifice their lives for their radical visions, or to
the attackers willingness to sacrifice others? (By sacrificing human life
to serve their radical visionsby abandoning every value except the will
to powerthey follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism.) Referential clarity seems easier to establish in Bushs first State
of the Union address, after the attacks. Again Bush deploys the imagery
of sacrifice, but this time it is clearly the terrorists who are willing to
make the ultimate sacrifice. (And terrorist leaders who urged followers
to sacrifice their lives are running for their own.) And it is America that
is catching up with this new world of sacrificial offerings. (For too long
our culture has said, If it feels good, do it. Now America is embracing
a new ethic and a new creed: Lets roll. In the sacrifice of soldiers, the
fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could
look like.) It is not until his second State of the Union, sixteen months
after the attacks and shortly before the U.S. military was busy trying to
cover up the abuses at Abu Ghraib, that Bush finally evokes the Christian
ideal of sacrificial love. (America is a strong nation, and honorable in the
use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice
for the liberty of strangers.) By 2004 he insists that Americans never forget the sacrifices of their friends (As we debate at home, we must never
ignore the vital contributions of our international partners, or dismiss
their sacrifices); by 2005, the sacrifices of their parents (the security
purchased by our parents sacrifice); and by 2006, the sacrifices of the
military families (Let us never forget the sacrifices of Americas military
families. . . . Our men and women in uniform are making sacrificesand
showing a sense of duty stronger than all fear).33
After Good and Evil
War critics can say that these discursively unfolding references to the
sacrifices of war do not make the deaths of men and women in Iraq and
Afghanistan sacrifices. We should lament the loss of life in Iraq because
those who have died did not have to die in an illegal and unnecessary
warBush and Cheney sacrificed these men and women for power and
profit. But saying this might too quickly dismiss the performative force
of such rhetorical maneuvers and, more troubling, too quickly skirt past
how deeply counterdiscourses are tethered to a compatible imaginary.
We can agree that Bushs sacrificial rhetoric masks the callous disregard
that men who hunger for state and market power have for the lives of the
U.S. troops and Iraqi citizens. And we can agree that most people in the
battlefield are not agreeing to be the sacrificial lamb. Everyone, or those
in their right minds, is trying desperately to remain alive and in one piece.
Actuarial probability shows that someone will diethat many will die.
But no one wants to be that one or to have his or her beloved be that one.
And so Humvees are provided with extra plating. Military engineers try
to beat improvised explosive devices by jamming radar frequencies. Families raise moneyor trim it from already stretched budgetsto send reinforced body armor to their kids, siblings, or spouses in the battlefield.
Meanwhile, U.S. financial speculators are selling the poor and members
of the middle class mortgages that they know will bankrupt them. Are
Americans living through a perverse era? Yes. Does this perversion negate
the performativity of sacrifice as a national rhetoric? Yes, and no.
As horrifying as these facts are, they do not negate the rhetorical force
of sacrifice and sacrificial love that Bush and others evoke. The cynical
reason of the progressive Left does not puncture the rhetoric of sacrificial love, because it merely contests the particular end to which a life is
given rather than the general problem of sacrifice as a life-giving process.
To say that the killed and maimed have died or are dying in vain suggests that there is some horizon of redeemed life where this killing and
maiming would be rectified. In other words, sacrifice plays the role of
the empty signifier, in Ernesto Laclaus sense, creating centering effects
in the realm of the political for critics and supporters of the war.34 For
some, the real site of sacrifice is, and should have remained, Afghanistan.
For some, the real site of sacrifice is Iraq. (If we put our faith in poll numbers, in 2003 seven in ten Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had
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a role in the 9/11 attacks. In 2006, 43 percent believed that Hussein was
personally involved in the attacks, while 85 percent of the active soldiers
in Iraq believed this.)35 For them, the war is in self-defense. For some,
this horizon is the principle of freedom, making the war against Islam
the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.36 For others, the
sacrifice is for the defense of Christianity itself, a Christianity that believes the End of Days depends on the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in
Jerusalem. (And if reports from military classrooms and training grounds
are correct, the U.S. chain of command is increasingly evangelical, with
God as its ultimate commander in chief.37) For still others, an increasingly disillusioned group, the sacrifice was for Iraqis and Afghans themselves. They enlistedor saw their deployment as helpingto lift Iraqis
and Afghans out of the misery of (Islamic, dictatorial) oppression. Bush
referred exactly to this redemptive form of killing when he insisted that
he would not withdraw American troops from Iraq prematurely lest their
ultimate sacrifice be in vain.
The centering effect of sacrifice and sacrificial love enfolds not only
the many occupational forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan but also the
countless counterinsurgents and civilians killed alongside them. All are
articulated within the same logic that transforms the killing of occupation
forces, innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and the variety of antioccupational forces into a unified form of sacrificial life. Deaththeirs and
oursis given so that something can be remade into a truer, higher form
of being that we might catch a glimpse of as we make the ultimate sacrifice. Not only is our death a sacrifice in this sense, but the deaths of the
enemies who arrived on my doorstep unexpectedly on 9/11 in New York
and Washington and 7/7 in London are opportunities from this perspective. Even extrajudicial killings are sacrificial in this sense. It is from
this perspective that U.S. soldiers are dying for the enemy. They are dying
so something will be born anew. Once again, but this time in sovereign
war making, the democratic state can narratively articulate its political
strategy to Judeo-Christian sacrificial love because it uses this spiritual
legacy to assign massive killing to the redeemed horizon of the undead.
The same no one who was whispering the creed of sacrificial love in
the ears of those standing at Ground Zero in Manhattan is whispering
in the ear of the neoliberal market. Even if a specific theological figura-
After Good and Evil
tion of self-denial provided the discursive and subject conditions for the
emergence of Western capitalism (if we follow Max Weber), the resultant
political economy of capitalism seems to have opened rather than closed
a gap between the law of ontotheological self-sacrifice (crucifixion for
the other) and the law of economic self-aggrandizement (individualized
profit maximization), wherein, as I noted above, the We the People of
the national imaginary becomes the he and I who never have to meet.
Since the 1970s, market conservatives and, increasingly, labor democrats
in the United States and Europe have promulgated a promarket philosophy that emphasizes privatization and individualization as the way of alleviating poverty. To right and left we have watched the slow dismantling
of the neocorporatist compromise that lasted from the end of the Second World War to around 1973 and the collapse of the Bretton Woods
Agreements. In the wake of this collapse we are witnessing a shift in the
practical business of the state as a mechanism of wealth redistributing
to the practical business of the state as a source of corporate wealth and
welfare through tax breaks and finance. Social, economic, and political
life is increasingly organized around the neoliberal view that bodies and
values are stakes in individual games of chance and that any collective
agency (other than the corporation) is an impediment to the production of value. And the privatization of risk creates and fosters a language
game in which the social is practiced as nothing more than an aggregate
of individuated risk calculators working according to mathematically predictable econometric models. I am not in you. You are not in me. We are
merely playing the same game of chance, whose truth lies not here and
now between us but there and then in who wins and who loses. No one
is killing me. And I am killing no one. We are each only responsible for
ourselves.38 And every actual hardship I suffer can be referred to a future
generationoften comprising ones own childrenthat will do better,
no matter that every generation has among it many people not making as
much as others or not quite making it at all. As Hannah Arendt put it in
even darker times, The fact that with monotonous but abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individuals did not prevent their
judging themselves in terms of individual failure or the world in terms of
specific injustice.39
As with the empathic public sphere and the war on terror, the mar-
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ket would seem to hold little promise if we are looking for people fulfilling the command that they lay down their lives for enemies, neighbors,
or friends. It is pretty brutal out there in the North Atlantic. Whether
we accept David Harveys claim that the Iraq war signals a new American empire or Giovanni Arrighis that it signals the end of an Americandominated phase of capitalism, the rise of Chinese manufacturing, Brazilian enterprise, and Indian technologies has put renewed strain on the
North Atlantic economies.40 Every day newspapers report a new viciousness in private equity in the United States. The collapse of the mortgage
bubble brought on as much by predatory loans and speculative greed as
by gullible or swindled homeowners occurs side by side with less publicized but equally vicious predations. On September 23, 2007, the New
York Times reported on a widespread investment practice in which private
equity firms acquire nursing homes, dramatically reduce costs by cutting
care, and thus increase their profit margins so that they can be sold for significant gains.41 All of this can be satirized to great profit. But in any case,
sacrificial love hardly seems the proper way of characterizing the practices
of this new economy.
Once again progressive critics should be skeptical of the compassion
of market neoliberals. And once again, given the sensibleness of this skepticism, we need to ask why the rhetoric of sacrificial love can have such
a powerful illocutionary force nonetheless. In previous chapters I noted
that social welfare is neither a success nor failure in the abstract. It is a socially mediated way of assessing the social world. If neoliberalism understands all social investments that do not have a clear enda projectable
moment when input values (money, services, care) can be replaced by
output valueas failing economically and morally, then it might be hard
to defend social programs which presuppose a world in which the state
should care for the most vulnerable.
In a similar way, the question Is the sacrifice worth it? can be answered in the affirmative only if a specific relationship between violence
and redemption defines the social imaginary of suffering and dying. If
mortified bodies are read from the perspective of the redeemed end of
individual responsibility, then the present-tense harms generating goods
for some but not for others can be stretched across the horizon of time in
such a way that the harms themselves become goods. Suffering and dying
After Good and Evil
can always be referred to a horizon of time where they are transformed

into thriving and birthing. Compassionate conservatives are the first to
admit that the kinds of changes they are demanding will be tough, even
catastrophic, for some. But in the end, where, as Derrida notes, the truth
of the ontotheological man lies, a new day will come, a new epoch, a rectified and cleansed body. If not the present workers bodies, then their
childrens. Or if not them, then some person, at least one person, who is
killed will not die.
So what is to be done when what lies beyond good and evil, sacrifice
and sacrificial love, provides a means of memorialized denial of human
suffering? To answer such a preposterously large question is beyond the
scope of this chapter. I can, however, note three difficult issues that face
those bold enough to wade into the questions opening. First, the difference between a normative horizon, even a horizon whose normative
structure is figured as paradoxical, and the incessant play of actual immanent tactics needs to be squarely addressed. Is there anything more
to be gained by investigating the actual language games of sacrificial love
as they operate across the denominated domains of late liberalism, markets, publics, and sovereignties than by remaining the critical reading of
theological and philosophical texts? What exactly is this gain? After all,
iek, and perhaps Derrida, might argue that just because the unplugging potential of sacrificial love has little formative force in contemporary social life does not mean that it couldnt. Likewise, iek and Derrida
might argue that just because discourses of sacrificial love are currently a
bad forgery does not mean that they could not be written in the actual signature of the Fragile Absolute. Derrida, in particular, has demonstrated
the horrifying stakes of an ethics of sacrificial love when read from the
perspective of absolute other and then moved into the incessant activities of public and bureaucratic life.42 Moreover, the enormous existential
energy that sacrificial love has provided those who face personal harm,
of whatever sort, as the likely consequence of their resistance to a failed
social order cannot be glibly dismissed. Michel Foucault may well have
been right that pastoral care emerged not as an exit from power but as a
new formation of power.43 But the example of Cesar Romero, the Catholic archbishop of San Salvador and one of the spiritual leaders of liberation theology, demonstrates the counterdiscursive potentials within this
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new formation of power. What other grounds might allow for such leaps
of progressive faith that renounce the body, its finitude and difference, as
greater than the social good? And this leads to the last area that must be
carefully investigated. Can something other than sacrificial love lie beyond the millennial governance of good and evil? Here, perhaps to the
surprise of some, we find that we have a variety of options. Arendt is
an obvious touchstone. For her, the concept of Greek immortality provided an ethical ground for political life far removed from the transcendental antiworldliness of Christianity.44 The willingness to suffer and die
remains central in Arendts political philosophylife is not, after all, the
first value of Arendt, or the second or third. But the wager of death does
not take the hero from the world. Among the ancient Greeks, a heroic
death allowed a person to remain in the world as an immortal, and this
heroic death bequeathed to those left behind the task to bear the burden of a fractured present through the narrativized remembrance. But the
Greeks are not the only ones, or even the first. Buddhist meditations on
the corpse meet new globalized technologies of massacre in Thailand.45
Indigenous geontologies try to refigure the economies of abandonment
in Australia.46 What might be the fates of these refusals of good and evil
on our fragmented presents?
Conclusion
Negative Critique, Positive

Sociographies
At the very end of The Ones Who Walk Away

from Omelas, Ursula Le Guin does something
shocking for someone so clear sighted about the
ethics of abandonment and the politics of social
injustice. She lets some of the citizens of Omelas
walk away from the searing paradox of the child in
the broom closet. Worse, she does not say where
these departing citizens are going. She tells us that
they seem to know where they are going. But she
doesnt give us any hint of what they are thinking
or what the new world they hope to bring into
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Conclusion
existence will look like. And so she lets us watch them walk away from
Omelas with little more than a suggestion that this emigration is a profoundly ethical act. But those who leave Omelas leave the child behind.
Why dont they stay and fight, or burn down Omelas if that is what it
would take to liberate the child?
How more realistic does Charles Burnetts Killer of Sheep seem, ending
as it does with the protagonist Stan working in the same slaughterhouse as
when the film began. We do not see anyone walking out of Watts. Burnett
ends his meditation on race, poverty, and hope by showing Stan pushing
a group of sheep down a metal corridor to their slaughter. And throughout, Burnett foregrounds the near impossibility of escaping Watts when
the equipment that residents have on hand is not reliablewhen Heideggers famous ease of coping has not been built with them in mind.
Take, for example, one scene in the film: Burnett follows the attempt of
Stans family and friends to spend a day at the seashore. They borrow a
car that has clearly seen better days. It begins to break down almost immediately, finally falling to pieces halfway to the shore. Stan and his family
and friends stand on the side of the road, stranded between Watts and the
coast. But while many viewers might not see anything revolutionary in
these scenes, Burnett sees otherwise. For Burnett, Stan is hopeful because
he has decided to persevere and fight on despite societys place for him.1
He remains something inspirational insofar as he continues to strive to
persevere in being.
Burnetts hopeful take on social transformation, when viewed unflinchingly from inside the material conditions of the part that has no
part in late liberalism, provides an interesting rejoinder to those who demand to know the positive content of an alternative form of social life
before setting off on a journey. And it provides an interesting challenge
to those who would demand a normative solution to any critique of the
actual world. Like Burnett, many critical theorists might seem to open the
question of the social otherwise only to leave readers with nowhere to go,
no description of where or what an elsewhere might consist of, and with
nothing in ones pocket but sheer persistence in the face of a set of seemingly unmovable barriers. This, many argue, is especially true of the hope
that immanent critique places in spaces of radical potentiality. If this is
hope, skeptics say, it is a very denuded and awkward form of hope. What
Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies
good does immanent critique do for a practical politics if, after stripping
social life bareexposing the brutality of social injusticeit provides it
with no alternative clothing?
Three kinds of criticism are typically leveled at narratives that focus
on moments of sheer potentiality such as we see in The Ones Who Walk
Away from Omelas, Killer of Sheep, and this book: that they lack a normative direction around which a practical politics could be built; that
they are parasitical on a given normative world; and that they reflect the
precritical political positions of the author. The first argument asserts that
there is something wrong with a form of knowledge that does not propose a positive, alternative shelter for the exposed body. A fundamental
rule of scholarship has been broken: every critical social analysis must
have a normative horizon against which progressive action can orient
itself and social movements can be assessed. Immanent critique and critical theory are, instead, mere parasites of the normative.2 Although I have
not discussed his work in this book, Theodor Adorno and his concept of
negative dialectics is a favorite hobbyhorse of these kinds of criticisms.
Prior to the charges against the philosophers of potentiality, there were
charges against the determinate negations of Adorno. His understanding of negative dialectics as parasitic on the ordinary nondialectical mode
of capitalhis argument that the purpose of negative dialectics was to
point out specific contradictions between what liberal capital claims and
what it actually deliversallowed critics to characterize negative dialectics as providing little more than an aesthetically ornate style of skepticism and aloofness.3 To say, not this, does not tell us what then? or
where then? Where are all those people going, those who walk away
from Omelas? And to say, as Burnett does, that the protagonist of Killer
of Sheep is hopeful for nothing more than his continued willful striving
leaves us no insight into how he is able to capacitate his will or how he
will move from willful striving to positive living.
Moreover, according to critics, when theorists do provide substantive answers they are wildly naive and abstract from a policy perspective, and because these theorists are not neutral and disinterested, their
conclusions are untrustworthy.4 Critical theory, and especially immanent
critique, doesnt seek to find the truth of the world, according to these
critics, but rather attempts to shape the truth of the world to reflect its
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political beliefs. This criticism has spawned second-order debates about

the sources and grounds of neutral and disinterested knowledge, especially the infamous disinterested nature of the view from nowhere. Philosophers such as Thomas Nagel argue that the view from nowherethe
ability to view the world from a detached perspectiveis a feature of
cognition unique to human beings. But social literary historians such as
Mary Poovey have claimed that this perspective is irreducibly associated
with specific (Western) social imaginaries that were then universalized through power-saturated institutions such as capitalism and liberal
democracy.5 And finally, still other critics find fault in this way of doing
scholarship by pointing out what look like moments of overt or covert
hypocrisy on the part of the critic. For instance, I have written extensively
on the cunning of cultural recognition in Indigenous land claims even as I
have agreed to aid Indigenous friends and colleagues by supporting their
land claims. And I am currently helping imagine and find financial support for an Indigenous grassroots project on mixed reality that I will then
proceed to engage critically.
How should these charges against immanent critique and critical
theory be addressed? Clearly the answer cannot be that scholars agree to
remain silent about people like Stan, the anonymous child in the broom
closet, my Indigenous friends in Australia, and the practitioners of alternative spiritual practices in the United States, until they can give a substantive account of the sheltered place of justice awaiting them at the end
of their voyage. As this book has attempted to demonstrate, this incitement to wait, to be patient, to bracket harm until the impasse has been resolved and the account given, is part and parcel of how power is organized
in late liberalismit is what begins the dialectic among recognition, espionage, and camouflage.6
Given the complexities by which harm is represented and apprehended within late liberalism, it seems to me that if we are to address the
above criticisms it would do us well to begin by addressing whether negative dialectics is in fact negative, and in what ways potentiality emerges
from actuality. For instance, we know that negative dialectics is negative
in the sense that it attempts to demonstrate how the achievement of identity and unity is built on the violent suppression of difference and diversity. Negative critique was developed to make visible the nonidentity be-
Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies
tween claims of social unity and claims of social difference and diversity,
and to make palpable the nonidentity between claims about normative
worlds and actual worlds. Negative dialectics insists that we must rigorously demonstrate the noncorrespondence between what is claimed and
what is, and the techniques of power that allow the claimed world to appear not merely as the actual world but the best of all actual worlds. One
must unwork this identitymake it unworkabletransform it from the
background that allows an ease of copying for some but not others. The
activist and personality from New Yorks Lower East Side, Valerie Solanas, made a similar point in her SCum Manifesto, wherein she called
for the unworking of capitalism. SCum will become members of the
unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and
unwork. For example, SCum salesgirls will not charge for merchandise;
SCum telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCum office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy
equipment. SCum will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to
unwork at.7
In other words, negative critique and critical theory more generally
dont lack a relationship to normativity. They shift the focus on normativity from a horizonal to a background perspective. And it is exactly as
background that normativity provides critical theory with a specific kind
of positivity. What appears to be a radically empty gesture (not this) is
revealed to be a positive act. The citizens of Omelas who say not this
act insofar as they make a statement. Stans continual refusal to collapse
under the weight of a thousand mute obstacles (not that) should be
understood as a series of quasi-events that provide the preconditions
in which some new social content might be nurtured. My Indigenous
friends, who are trying to create an augmented reality project that would
then support them socially and economically, continue to do something
as long as they refuse to do nothing. All of these fictive and real characters
are acting positively in a social world that is built in such a way that it is
unreliable for them whether or not the statement not this immediately
produces a what then. Not this makes a difference even if it does not
immediately produce a propositional otherwise. Each of these differences
is unique because of their differential distribution across the social worlds
of late liberalism.
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Conclusion
There is another way that critical theory provides positive content

through the parasitical activity of stating not this. In this case, critical
theory does not aim its understanding on those within alternative social
projects but on those for whom the world seems to work just fine. Solanus
is an exemplary critic in this sense. She seeks to make the world unreadyat-hand for those for whom it has worked smoothlyso smoothly that
there seems little difference between the world as a normative projection
and the world as it is differential lived.
There is a final way that critical theory and immanent critique is a positive exercise. Insofar as the focus of a critical theorist emerges from the
worlds in which she is immersed, these worlds imprint themselves on the
movement of critique. This is why the content of critical theory is never
capable of being neutral or disinterested. For instance, whether right or
wrong, convincing or absurd, my understanding of tense, eventfulness,
and ethical substance as technologies of late liberal governance is a positive imprint of the social worlds in which I have been immersed over the
last long while. The imprint these social worlds have made on my work
is not a pure copy of their worlds any more than the voyage my friends
made to Banagula, described in chapter 3, is a pure repetition of their ancestors voyages. These are tracings that will then be traced. All of these
tracings are the prehistory of a new positive form of life even as they are
the conditions for not this and not that. All of them set the table for
guests who will shout that the food is tasteless, the wine weak, the conversation stifling; or find that they finally feel full.
Notes
Introduction. The Child in the Broom Closet
1 Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,

866.
2 Ibid.
3 James, The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life, 141.
4 Peirce, Letter to Lady Welby, 111.
5 See, for instance, Bernard Williamss discussion of
the critical importance of the project for the health
of the subject. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck.
6 Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 69.
7 Or, as one critical reading of this story suggests, one
must be willing to annihilate oneself. See Simon, William Jamess Lost Souls in Ursula Le Guins Utopia.
8 Derrida, The Ends of Man.
9 See, for instance, John Feketes reading of Le Guin
and Delany. Fekete, The Dispossessed and Triton.
10 Nagel, The View from Nowhere.
11 Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, 112.
12 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Fraser, Rethinking Recognition; Povinelli, Radical Worlds.
13 Foucault, Des spaces autres, 47.
14 Foucault, Des spaces autres.
15 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 101.
16 Deleuze, On Spinoza, n.p.
17 Ibid.
18 The idea may have an objective (extrinsic) reality insofar as it represents a thing. It also has a formal (intrinsic) reality insofar as it is a thing independent of
what it represents. See ibid.
194
Notes to Introduction
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Agamben, Absolute Immanence.

See ibid. and Agamben, Homo Sacer, 44.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid., 187.
Ibid., 163.
Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear, 25.
See Jakobson, On Language; Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel.
Benveniste, Subjectivity in Language, 227.
tienne Balibar reflected on the distinctions of teleology and eschatology in a
reflection on Derrida and Althusser. There teleology is said to be the doctrine
of the historical and intellectual process as realization of an already given end
or telos, a process with a conscious or unconscious purpose, while eschatology
refers to the extreme or ultimate moments and events which immediately
precede or accompany the end of history and its reversal into eternity. Balibar, Eschatology versus Teleology, 64.
In The Performativity of Foundations, Benjamin Lee explores the complex
temporal performative dynamic of modern democratic constitutionality, including the different modes of time invested in reference to God and the people
and entailed in the institutional dynamics of democratic constitutional process.
See Lee, The Performativity of Foundations. We can also here think of Walter
Benjamins discussion of the difference between constituted and constituting
violence. See Benjamin, Critique of Violence.
See Povinelli, The Empire of Love.
Das, Life and Words; Biehl, Vita.
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 26.
Ibid., 2728. See also Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
In an interview Althusser noted, Proletarians have a class instinct which helps
them on the way to proletarian class positions. Intellectuals, on the contrary,
have a petty-bourgeois class instinct which fiercely resists this transition. But
this instinct is the consciousness and practice which conform with the objective
reality of the proletarian class struggle. Thus the proletariat need only be educated. Not so the intellectual: The class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and
hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized. Althusser, Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon, 13.
In 1944, the leaders of Allied forces met at Bretton Woods Hotel in New Hampshire to plan for a joint postwar economic policy. For a general discussion of
neoliberalism, see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Wallerstein, The End of the
Worlds as We Know It; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Palley, From
Keynesianism to Neoliberalism.
37 For a discussion of the effects of the arrangement on Europe, see Eichengreen,

The European Economy since 1945.
38 Chapman, The Accord.
39 MacKenzie, The Material Production of Virtuality, 356.
40 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 12.
41 For the debate about the relationship between global migration and the nation
state form, see McKeom, Melancholy Order; Trouillot, Global Transformations.
42 Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing.
43 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 159205. Harvey is not the only scholar
to consider the history of U.S. imperialism. Because the claims and counterclaims are not really concerned with the actual history of empire, Eric Hobsbawm is critical of approaches, whether on the left or right, that assert that the
United States (or the Bush administrations) claim of global supremacy cannot
account for the specific dynamics or trajectories of the United States. Hobsbawm, On Empire, 61. See also de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.
44 Harvey, The New Imperialism, 146.
45 Ibid.
46 Coulthard, Subjects of Empire.
47 Fudge and Owens, Precarious Work, Women and the New Economy; Milanovic,
Worlds Apart; Leonhardt, For Many, a Boom That Wasnt.
48 Mbembe, Necropolitics.
49 Cornia and Court, Inequality, Growth and Poverty.
50 See, for instance, the work of grassroots globalization networks. Appadurai,
Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.
51 Hardt and Negri, The Multitude.
52 Whatever actually happens, these moments of the historical singularity of capital help us understand capital as an economic-institutional figure before which
a field of possibility opens up. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 165.
53 See Melville and Owen, China in Africa.
54 The inadequacy of the G8 in the management of the current global economy
is not merely an external challenge posed to it by the G20, but something acknowledged by members of the G8. See, for instance President Barack Obamas
call for an expanded G16 at the Italian-hosted G8 summit at LAquila in July
2009.
55 Wallerstein, The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization, n.p.
56 Even if we wished to differentiate between capital and the market, as does Fernand Braudel, it is increasingly unclear what forms of life are becoming explicit
markets. See Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism.
57 Judt, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy.
58 Brown, American Nightmare.
59 In a matter of weeks, Australias boom has gone bust. Now economists at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, among others, are forecasting that Australias econ-
195
196
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
omy will shrink this quarter and next, tipping the land down under into a recession for the first time since 1991. JPMorgan sees the jobless ratea record low
4% just 10 months agorising to 9% by 2010. Wiseman, Boom in Australia
Goes Bust as Global Slowdown Hits.
Andrews, World Bank Says Global Economy Will Shrink in 09.
Freedman, Zoellick Calls 2009 a Dangerous Year as Crisis Curtails Trade.
Sen, Capitalism beyond the Crisis.
In the same month, the prime minister of China, Wen Jiabao, facing a rapid slowdown of growth and the subsequent displacement of labor, chastised American
unregulated capitala form of capital that many economists believe China had
aspired to.
Brown, Regulating Aversion; Markell, Bound by Recognition.
Fabian, Time and the Other.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 222. See also Arendts description of the
messianic (prophetic) mode of facism in which the Leader is always right in
his actions and since these are planned for centuries to come, the ultimate test of
what he does has been removed beyond the experience of his contemporaries.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 81.
Arendt, Foucault, and others long ago outlined some of the genealogical conditions of the social. Arendt argued that the Social emerged from and rearticulated the classical division between the biological processes and the realm of
necessity located with the private realm and actions of freedom located in the
public realm of political action. Foucault focused on the emergence of the social
with the emergence of the nation as a new ground and reference of legitimate
power (biopolitics) and knowing (probability). Both emphasized the increasing self-evident nature of the referent, the social, to the human worlds in which
human life consisted. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 3849; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, esp. 21338.
Thus I am perhaps closest to Foucaults understanding of writing a general history as opposed to writing a total history insofar as the latter claims a total description that draws all phenomena around a simple centera principle, a
meaning, a spirit, a world view, an overall shape, whereas the former would
deploy the space of a dispersion. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
and the Discourse on Language, 911.
Burns, British Multiculturalism Criticized.
See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Bhabha, Interrogating Identity; Fuss,
Identification Papers.
Spinoza, Ethics, 168.
Butler, What Is Critique?
It is in fact what allows political theorists of multiculturalism, such as Will
Kymlicka, to say that immigrants, indigenous people, and the unmarked settler
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
present the nation with distinct modalities and claims of belonging. Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship, 1033.
Waldron, Indigeneity.
Ibid., 55.
Deloria, The World We Used to Live In; Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human;
Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe; Watson, Aboriginal Sovereignties.
Coulthard, Subjects of Empire; Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood. That settlement is
an ongoing historical struggle is a point that Waldron is aware of. His discussion of Indigenous rights is explicitly situated in the ongoing conflict between
the Palestinian and Israeli states. See Waldron, Indigeneity.
For a longer discussion, see Povinelli, The Empire of Love.
Anderson, Imagined Communities; Kelly and Kaplan, Represented Communities.
Anderson, Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism, 33.
Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian, 16.
Ibid., 17.
See Padgen, The Fall of Natural Man; Todorov, The Conquest of the Americas.
The infamous notion of domestic dependent nationalism was elaborated across
the so-called Marshall Trilogy, Johnson v. MacIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v.
Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832).
The justices insisted that, legally, the treatment of Indians in conquered territories did not provide a precedent for the status of Puerto Ricans, who were prior
subjects of Spain. Yet the language of Downes v. Bidwell resonates with the landmark decision of Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia in 1831, which rendered Indians as members of domestic dependent nations, foreign to the rights
guaranteed by states and territories, but domestic for federal purposes. As alien
races, Puerto Ricans were rendered foreign in a domestic sense by their perceived resemblance to alien races deemed to be incapable of self-government at
home. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 10.
Wilson, The Sense of the People; Duncanson Scripting Empire. See also Ford,
Settler Sovereignty.
See, for instance, Reynolds, Dispossession.
Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground.
See, for instance, Goldberg, The Threat of Race.
Fassin, Going Dutch; Fassin and Fassin, Da la question sociale la question raciale?
Koacolu, The Tradition Effect.
Hilgers, Autochthony as Capital in a Global Age; Lan, Guns and Rain; Geschiere and Jackson, Autochthony and the Crisis of Citizenship.
Bentley, The Fourth Dimension.
197
198
Notes to Chapter One

Chapter One. The Part That Has No Part
1 As part of this debate see Austin-Broos, Making a Difference, and Lattas and
Morris, The Politics of Suffering and the Politics of Anthropology.
2 Pearson states that Sutton provides hope that the debate on Indigenous policy
is becoming much more forthright and that issues that habitually have been
skirted around or alluded to only in anthropological code are being discussed
with a refreshing bluntness. Pearson, Face Reality of Violence, n.p.
3 Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, 85.
4 Ibid, 43.
5 Not surprisingly Sutton was also part of the academic backlash against socalled postmodern anthropologists who supposedly refused to abide by the selfevident nature of these differences, let alone their hierarchical relationship. See
Sutton, The Politics of Suffering.
6 Fabian, The Other Revisited, 143.
7 Ibid., 140.
8 For Rancire, to count as political, an act or movement must involve more than
power, the power to rebel, or the power to suppress. These may be mere instances of policing, which he understands as an order of bodies that defines
the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees
those bodies are assigned by the name to a particular place and task; it is an
order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible
and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as
noise. In other words, for Rancire, policing is not so much the disciplining
of bodies as a rule governing their appearing and a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.
In contrast to policing, the political is manifested when a part that has had no
parta part that has been treated and understood as nothing but noisebecomes visible, palpable, and articulate. Rancire, Disagreement, 29.
9 Ibid.
10 Under pressure from human rights activists, the federal government made the
program voluntary.
11 Jane Simpson, Ploughing Salt into the Ruins of the NTBroughs Endgame
with CDEP and the Little ChildrenBob Gosford ( June 24, 2007), University of Sydney, Transient Languages and Cultures blog, http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/
elac.
12 Laura Beacroft and Melanie Poole, Overview of Northern Territory Emergency
Response.
13 See Anderson, The Intervention.
14 As of the writing of this book, the Labour government is discussing how it might
reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act without suspending the Intervention.
15 The full text reads: A national welfare card that will allow the Government
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
to control payments to negligent parents across the country will be unveiled

in Tuesdays budget. The debit cardto be introduced in selected Indigenous
communities before being rolled out across Australiawill ensure half of the
cardholders welfare payments are spent on approved goods and services, such
as food and clothing for their children, rather than wasted on alcohol and drugs.
The card will not carry a photograph but will be PIN-coded to prevent it being
sold on the black market and abused by welfare-dependent parents. Karvelas,
Welfare curbs on parents, 3.
See the transcript of Rudds apology, Kevin Rudds Sorry Speech.
First Nations Summit website, www.fns.bc.ca.
Aboriginal Rights Coalition, Data Shows Intervention Is a Disaster: National
Rallies Planned. www.aboriginalrightscoalition.com.au.
See Reconciliation, Aboriginal Child Abuse and the NT Intervention. www
.reconciliation.org.au. See, also, the differing positions of Marcia Langton and
Irene Watson: Langton, Its Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable
Lives; Watson, Sovereign Spaces: Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples.
Scrymgour, Whose National Emergency?; Martiniello, Howards New Tampa.
See Cunningham, Another Minister Quits, n.p. See also Lea and Pholeros,
This House Is Not a House.
Franklin, Swan Cuts Deep as Revenue Sinks. Commenting on this proposal in
Despair and Defeat Also a White Problem, David Burchell first conjures the
bemused Aboriginal to note the fickle romantic fantasy of white liberals: A
colleague of mine ran into a bemused Aboriginal bloke at a reconciliation meeting some years back. The young man couldnt quite work it out. After facing hostility and suspicion for much of his life, suddenly here he found himself feted as
a kind of saint, merely for being Aboriginal. Everyone wanted to know what he
thought; nobody wanted to disagree with him. They all laughed at his jokes. It
was intoxicating, but also unnerving. My colleague told him not to lose his head.
At some point, he explained, white liberal opinion (among whom he countered
himself) had fallen in love with a particular view of Aboriginality. But it wasnt
a platonic love. Sophisticated urban liberals, with their hi-tech lifestyles and
their busy lives, cleaved to the idea of a traditional, spiritual Aboriginal culture
so radically different from their own. It worked for them. One of the differences was between domestic violence, which was white and family violence,
which was black. But now we know that domestic violence is much the same
phenomenon in black and white communities. Thus testing out this policy on
blacks might actually help whites wake up and see they are the same.
Productivity Commission, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage, Key Indicators
(Canberra: Australian Commonwealth Government Printers, July 2009). See
sections 4 and 6.
Little Children Are Sacred, 12.
199
200
25 Robinson, Secrets in the Shadow.

26 Graebner, The End of Liberalism. Moynihans report was attacked by the
Right, which argued that the cause of the pathology was the welfare system
itself. See Murray, Losing Ground.
27 Smith, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation, 85.
28 See Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, 15386.
29 See, for instance, episode 2 of Mark and Olly: Living with the Machigenga:
Mark & Olly Eat the Most Powerful Hallucinogenic Drug on Earth. www
.youtube.com.
30 For a full range of opinions on the legal recognition of the ritual use of ayahuasca,
see the AyahuascaSanto Daime Online Library website, www.santodaime.it.
31 Controlled Substances Act (1970), 21 U.S.C., ch. 13Drug Abuse Prevention
and Control.
32 uDV New Mexico Ayahuasca Case: Timeline and Overview of Events (last
modified March 2009), Vaults of Erowid website, www.erowid.org.
33 Plaintiffs Original Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, filed in the
United States District Court for the District of New Mexico, November 2000.
34 See Cookson, Regulating Religion, 11848.
35 To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief
superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become
a law unto himself. Employment Div., Oregon Dept. of Human Res. v. Smith, 494
U.S. 872 (1990).
36 Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 12032.
37 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. 2000bb 1(a) and b(1 and 2)
(1993).
38 (1) the term Indian means a member of an Indian tribe; (2) the term Indian
tribe means any tribe, band, nation, pueblo, or other organized group of Indians, including any Alaska Native village (as defined in, or established pursuant
to, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act [43 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.]), which
is recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the
United States to Indians because of the status as Indians; (3) the term Indian
religion means any religion(A) which is practiced by Indians, and (B) the
origin and interpretation of which is from within a traditional Indian culture or
community. American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994,
Pub. L. No. 103344, 3(c)13, 108 Stat. 3125 [H.R. 4230], (1994).
39 State of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. James W. Mooney, aka James W. B. E.
Mooney, Linda T. Mooney, and Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American Church of
Utah, Inc., Defendants and Appellants, 2004 UT 49, 1, 98 P.3d 420, 502 Utah
Adv. Rep. 16 (Utah 2004).
40 Greenhouse, Sect Allowed to Import Its Hallucinogenic Tea.
41 Rancire, Disagreement, 2734.
Notes to Chapter Two
42 For a historical account of a prenational form of Indigenous empire, see Pekka,

The Comanche Empire.
43 Amanda Macdonald first made me think about the politics of persistence in her
presentation, If Everybody Could Just Settle Down: Representational Insistence in Lieu of Resistance in the Pre-Postcolony New Caledonia, delivered at
the Conditions of Settler Colonialism symposium, Center for Contemporary
Critical Theory, University of Chicago, May 25, 2008.
Chapter Two. The Brackets of Recognition
1 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.

2 Rothwell, No Question of Turning Back, n.p.
3 Huntington, Clash of Civilizations; see also Aazmi, From the Graveyard of Civilizations.
4 Clegg, Defeating Terror the British Way.
5 Gadamer, Truth and Method; de Man, Allegories of Reading; Derrida, Des tours
de Babel.
6 Derrida, The Ends of Man.
7 Hopkins, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Radical Interpretation, 255.
8 Davidson, Radical Interpretation.
9 Sahlins, How Natives Think; Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.
10 Davidson, On Saying That, 101.
11 Davidson, Communication and Convention.
12 Davidson, Belief and the Basis of Meaning, 153.
13 Davidson, Radical Interpretation, 137, my emphasis; for a trenchant critique,
see Cutrofello, On the Transcendental Pretensions of the Principle of Charity.
14 Mamdani, Culture and Human Rights.
15 Markell, Bound by Recognition. See also Brown, Regulating Aversion. For a discussion of second order discourses, see Silverstein, Metapragmatic Discourse and
Metapragmatic Function.
16 Haraway, When Species Meet.
17 For an exchange between Singer and Williams, see Schaler, Peter Singer Under
Fire, 77102.
18 The debate took place in one of Singers classes on March 2, 2002, at Princeton
University. For Johnsons account of their exchange, first published in the New
York Times Magazine, see Johnson, Too Late to Die Young, 20128.
19 Singer, To Defame Religion Is a Human Right, n.p.
20 I discussed this distinction in Introduction: Critical Common Sense in The
Cunning of Recognition.
21 Silverstein, Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.
22 Thus Paul de Man argued that Peirce was essential to a deconstructive under-
201
202
Notes to Chapter Three
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
standing of rhetoric. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 89. See Peirce, Pragmatism, 40910.
Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James.
Of course there is some debate among philosophers about this. My own reading of Heidegger is influenced by Arendts student William OGrady, and by the
external realism promoted by Dreyfus and Carmen. See Dreyfus, Being-in-theWorld; Carmen, Heideggers Analytic.
Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 130.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
See Miller, Extimit.
See, for instance, Baker and Morris, Descartes Dualism.
Singer, To Defame Religion Is a Human Right.
Shared Responsibility Agreements were announced after the Howard government decommissioned the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
(AtSiC). See Council of Australian Governments (CoAg) Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Shared Responsibility
Agreements (2005), www.indigenous.gov.au.
Derrida, Force of Law.
Walsh, The Animal Enterprise Protection Act.
See para. 22.
Ibid.
See, for instance, Der Derian, Decoding the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America; Masco, Survival Is Your Business.
Bruce Mehlmann, Putting Biometrics to Work for America, Biometrics Consortium Conference (2002), Arlington, Va., www.itl.nist.gov.
Chapter Three. Road Kill
1 Langton, Mobility Disability, 459. Langton is quoting from Oedel, The

Legacy of Jim Crow in Macon, Georgia.
2 Altman and Hinkson, Mobility and Modernity in Arnhem Land.
3 Norton, Black Independent Cinema and the Influence of Neoliberalism, n.p.
See also Massood, Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions.
4 Smith, The New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality; Carter, The Politics of Rage.
5 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
6 Foucaults emphasis on the critical role of the physiocrats, and of political economy more generally, in the emergence of an art of governance whose rationale
and object was life has struck more than a few political theorists as closely echoing Hannah Arendts reflections on the emergence of the Social and through it,
the stranglehold of life on modern politics. See Foucault, Security, Population,
Territory. Like Foucault, Arendt saw the political economists, and their most
vocal critic, Marx, playing a key role in this transformation of the antilife stance
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
of the Greek polis to the life-enhancing logic of the Social. But if Arendt was
clear, if controversially so, about her stance on the relationship between life and
necessity, Foucault was less clear on the relationship between his thinking about
biopolitics and substance. See Arendt, The Human Condition.
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 26.
Ibid., 2728. See also Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
Note that Rosi Braidotti uses the term material, or more specific bodily materiality rather than substance. Indeed, she explicitly refuses the metaphysics
of substance although the concept of being is central to her work. See Braidotti,
Metamorphoses, 65116.
Butler notes, Humanist conceptions of the subject tend to assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 10.
See Braidotti, Metamorphoses. Butlers more recent work likewise attempts to
foreground the fundamental vulnerability of the exposed body as a modality of
existence that is neither ontological nor desubstantial. See, for instance, Butler,
Precarious Life.
Massumi, A Shock to Thought, 83.
Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 79.
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, vii.
Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.
See Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition.
Altman and Hinkson, Mobility and Modernity in Arnhem Land.
See Johnson, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
Made more poignant by the fact that he suffered debilitating bouts of depression, William James wrote on conditions in which conflicts of the will arise.
Take for instance, he writes, freezing mornings when we know we must get out
of bed, and yet the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel,
and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again as it seemed
on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act.
For James, what causes us finally to rise is not more will but less inhibition. At
some point there are no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and up we
go. James, Will, 691. See also, Richardson, William James, 80.
For instance, Nancy Fraser and Nancy Hartsock critiqued Foucaults concept of
docile power as leaving no site for resistance and no ability to evaluate one form
of resistance over another. They argue that without a fixed point, or normative
horizon, against which progressive action can orient itself and social movements
can be assessed, nothing can emerge and nothing can be discriminated. See, for
instance, Fraser, Foucault on Modern Power; Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power.
Noise is sterocal: it makes the occupation of an expanse intolerable and thus
gets it for itself. Serres, The Parasite, 94.
203
204
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, 187268.

Serres, Parasite, 219.
Ibid, 66.
See Risor, Twenty Hanging Dolls and a Lynching.
Tom Philpott, Interview with Underground Foodie Hero, Sandor Katz
(May 17, 2007), website of Grist, www.grist.org. For another profile on Katz,
see also, Bilger, Natures Spoils.
On July 3, 2008, the British newspaper the Guardian broke the story of a secret
World Bank report showing the dramatic effect of a mandatory increase of biofuel percentage in cars in the West on prices of food oil in the rest of the world.
Chakrabortty, Secret Report.
Mitchell, A Note on Rising Food Prices, n.p.
Biofuels are not the only waste products that can enter the circuit of capital. A
host of scholars have begun studying startup companies specializing in cord
blood banking. Cord blood is blood extracted from the placenta or umbilical
cord that contains stem cells, which are now celebrated as having the potential
to treat genetic diseases. Once treated as waste products of reproduction, the
blood within the placenta and umbilical cord is now the basis for public and forprofit cord storage banks. The Australian sociologist Catherine Waldby has examined how in the process the gift economy of tissue donation has been transformed into a speculative commercial enterprise. See Waldby, Umbilical Cord
Blood.
For the green perspective on Operation Backfire, see Will Potter, Animal Rights
Activist Jailed at Secretive Prison Gives First Account of Life Inside Cmu
(June 25, 2009), website of GreenIsTheNewRed.com, www.greenisthenewred
.com.
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007,
H.R.1955, 110th Cong. (2007).
See, for instance, the case of Scott DeMuth, who was jailed for contempt of
court for refusing to speak about how interviews conducted for his dissertation research on the intersection of Native American and environmental activism might shed light on an Animal Liberation Front action at the University
of Iowa. See Will Potter, FBI Harasses Sociology Professor Who Has Spoken
Against Labeling His Student a Terrorist (May 18, 2010), website of GreenIs
TheNewRed.com, www.greenisthenewred.com.
Saulny, Michigan Prison is Considered for Detainees, n.p.
See, for instance, Bari, Timber Wars.
As Braidotti argues, becoming a minority is not a general principle, as Deleuze
sometimes seems to suggest. For Braidotti, the process of becoming a minority
always emerges within the given differentials of life, the central distributing
function being sexual difference. Indeed, her extraordinary commitment to the
Notes to Chapter Four
unmovable axis of sexual difference has led her to demonize queer theory from
a majoritarian point-of-view. See Braidotti, Metamorphosis, 65116.
38 Povinelli, The Empire of Love.
39 See Duncan Kennedys classic essay The Structure of Blackstones Commentaries.
40 See Braidotti, Metamorphoses.
Chapter Four. Events of Abandonment
1 See Agamben, Homo Sacer.

2 For Foucault, mass extermination was the exercise of sovereign power on behalf
of the population, a term he sometimes uses interchangeably with race. See
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Roberto Esposito distinguishes between the
biologics of the Nazi biopolitical regime and a positive biopowers; see Esposito,
Bios.
3 Mbembe, Necropolitics.
4 We cannot sit back and continue aimlessly with a welfare dominated housing
model where Government drip feeds housing to Aboriginal Territorians, a
model that bleeds money, doesnt work and encourages welfare dependency.
From Giles: Call for Royal Commission into Indigenous Housing, news release by Adam Giles, October 5, 2009, Website of the Country Liberal Party,
www.countryliberals.org.au. The privatization of public housing in Australia
is part of a much larger neoliberal strategy; see, for instance, Fennel, Project
Heat.
5 Serres, The Parasite.
6 Lea and Pholeros. This Is Not a House, 191.
7 The function of tradition in the governance of difference is not restricted to the
Indigenous context. See Koacolu on the tradition effect in Turkey, in The
Tradition Effect.
8 Summarized from Indigenous Health Policy Timelines, Australian Indigenous
HealthInfoNet Archives, March 10, 2009, www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au. See
also Anderson, The National Aboriginal Health Strategy.
9 From Australian Human Rights Commission, A Statistical Overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia, Social Justice Report,
2008, www.hreoc.gov.au/Social_Justice/statistics/index.html.
10 Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear, 25.
11 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act, no. 2 (Cth.) (2005).
12 Australian Capital Television Pty. Ltd. and Ors v. Commonwealth (1992) 117 CLr
106.
13 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act, no. 2 (Cth.) (2005), sched. 1, sec. 9.
14 Garran, True Believer.
15 Duncanson, The Peronist and the Ghost in the State of Australia, 111.
205
206
Notes to Chapter Four
16 Warhurst, The Australian Federal Election of 10 November 2001.

17 For a general discussion of the Tampa Affair, the Children Overboard allegations, and the Pacific Solution see Marr and Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Select
Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident, and Weller, Dont Tell the Prime Minister.
18 See Hauerwas and Lentricchia, Note from the Editors.
19 The press widely reported this comment, made by Prafullachandra Natwarlal
Bhagwati, special advisor for Asia and the Pacific and U.N. envoy to the U.N.
Human Rights Commission, after his visit to the Woomera Detention Facility in
2002 and the Howard governments immediate reaction. See, for instance, Australia Rejects UN Criticism on Camps (August 1, 2002), BBC website, news
.bbc.co.uk.
20 For a discussion of the history of international reaction to these policies, see
Crock, Saul, and Dastyari, Future Seekers II, 2013.
21 Behrooz and Ors v. Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural
and Indigenous Affairs, (2004) hCA 36, 12532.
22 Al-Kateb v. Godwin, (2004) hCA 37, 241.
23 Bourdieu, The Essence of Neoliberalism, n.p.
24 For an overview see Vigh, Crisis and Chronicity.
25 Berlant, Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).
26 Foucault, Security, Population, Territory. See also Hacking, The Taming of Chance.
27 Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
28 For instance, having finally gained control of both houses of parliament in 2004,
Howard radically transformed labor relations by introducing Australian Workplace Agreements. These individual agreements made between employer and
employee replaced the awards system, in which pay packages were negotiated
among the federal government, industry, and the trade union movement.
29 Calhoun, The Privatization of Risk, 257. See also Baker and Simon, Embracing
Risk.
30 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Welfare Unit, Socio-Economic
Context of Indigenous Health (November 23, 2006), website of Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, www.aihw.gov.au. See also Paradies, A Systematic Review of Empirical Research on Self-Reported Racism and Health.
31 See Altman and Hunter, Indigenous Poverty.
32 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Welfare Unit, Health.
33 For a different approach to indigenous poverty, see Brock, Outback Ghettos.
34 See Scrimgeour, How Think Tanks Are Misleading Us on Aboriginal Childrens
Health.
35 See the 2000 analysis of Altman and Gray, The Effects of the CDEP Scheme on
the Economic Status of Indigenous Australians.
Notes to Chapter Five

Chapter Five. After Good and Evil
1 The interview was announced and excerpted in Bush Has Given Up Golf for
Troops, on Jonathan Martins blog, Politico, www.politico.com (May 13, 2008).
2 Much of this information is emerging only because of judicial pressure. See, e.g.,
Abramowitz, Service Logs of White House Visitors Are Public Records, Judge
Rules.
3 Critics are worried by the influence of fundamentalist Christian groups like
Military Ministry, a national organization and a subsidiary of the controversial fundamentalist Christian organization Campus Crusade for Christ. Military Ministrys national website states that it targets basic training installations
and has converted thousands of soldiers to evangelical Christianity. See Leopold, Military Evangelism Deeper, Wider Than First Thought. A top adviser
to Gonzales, Monica Goodling is quoted as having judged prosecutors on the
basis of whether they were sufficiently conservative on the core issues of god,
guns + gays. Lightblau, Report Faults Aides in Hiring at Justice Dept. Similar
problems were reported at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Vice
President Dick Cheneys office was reported to have removed statements on
the health risks posed by global warming because they did not comply with the
Bush administrations political and market ideology. Revkin, Cheneys Office
Said to Edit Draft Testimony.
4 For the connections among the White House, Blackwater, and the Family Research Council, see Scahill, Blackwater.
5 Ostling, Harris, and James Castelli, Religion: Armageddon and the End
Times, n.p.
6 Tuveson, Redeemer Nation. See also Weinstein and Seay, With God on Our Side;
Wagner-Pacifici, The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National
Security; Chang and Mehan, Discourse in a Religious Mode; and Hartnett
and Stengrim, War Rhetorics.
7 See, e.g., the comment by the former prime minister Tony Blair that if you
have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other
people. If you believe in God, its made by God as well, in McSmith, Blair:
God Will Be My Judge on Iraq, n.p.
8 See, e.g., Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
9 George Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People
(September 20, 2001), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
10 James McGinnis, Teaching Peace after 9/11 and the War on Iraq: The Most
Weighty Task for Christian Leaders and Educators (n.d.), at the Institute for
Peace and Justice website, www.ipj-ppj.org.
11 Emile Benveniste famously noted that the third person should be, more precisely, thought of as the nonperson and was not always specified lexically. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 72831.
207
208
Notes to Chapter Five
12 President Addresses Nation, Discusses Iraq, War on Terror (June 28, 2005),
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
13 In a reading of Herman Melvilles civil war poem Shiloh, Michael Warner examines how violence can be made scandalous. See Warner, What Like a Bullet
Can Undeceive.
14 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 48.
15 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
16 Jrgen Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 1, 2.
17 See Ratzinger and Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization.
18 Habermas attempts to answer these questions in Between Naturalism and Religion.
19 For a genealogy of the secular, see Asad, Formations of the Secular.
20 iek, The Fragile Absolute, 1.
21 iek, A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism. See also Rancire, Disagreement; and
iek, Fragile Absolute.
22 Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization.
23 Roberts, The Ethics of Conviction, 37.
24 Most notable are the essays compiled in Derrida, The Gift of Death and Derrida, The Politics of Friendship. For the quotation, see Redfield, Derrida, Europe,
Today, 374.
25 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 65.
26 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 29.
27 Derrida discusses the peregrinations of obligation across The Gift of Death and
The Politics of Friendship.
28 I borrow the phrase natural history of discourse from Michael Silverstein and
Greg Urban, who use it to refer to the process by which moments of speech
are moved through social institutions in such a way that they appear to be socially neutral, authoritative pronouncements about social life. See Silverstein
and Urban, The Natural History of Discourse.
29 For a critical account of contemporary debates over race and racism in France,
see Fassin and Fassin, De la question sociale la question raciale.
30 Taylor, A Secular Age.
31 Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War.
32 President Bush Addresses American Legion National Convention, (August 31,
2006), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
33 Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (September 20, 2001); State of the Union addresses for January 29, 2002; January 28, 2003 January 20, 2004; February 2, 2005; and January 31, 2006, http://
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
34 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 69.
35 Milbank and Deane, Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds. See also
Zogby Poll (February 28, 2006), www.zogby.com.
Notes to Conclusion
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
President Bush Addresses American Legion National Convention.

Weinstein and Seay, With God on Our Side.
See Calhoun, The Privatization of Risk; and Baker and Simon, Embracing Risk.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 315.
Harvey, The New Imperialism; Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century.
Charles Duhigg, At Many Homes, More Profit and Less Nursing.
Derrida, The Gift of Death.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 11560.
Arendt, The Human Condition, esp. 6878.
Klima, The Funeral Casino.
Povinelli, The Empire of Love.
Conclusion. Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies
1 Norton, Black Independent Cinema and the Influence of Neoliberalism. See

also Massood, Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions.
2 Maybe it need not be said, but those who criticize immanent critique do not
have the same positive view of parasites that Michel Serres does. See Serres, The
Parasite.
3 Adorno, Negative Dialectics. For the link between negative dialectics and critical
theory, see OConnor, Adornos Negative Dialectic. See also Buck-Morsss classic,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics. For a critique of negative dialectics, see Howard
Williams, Adornos Negative Dialectics.
4 Pippin, Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory.
5 See Nagel, The View from Nowhere; Poovey, The Liberal Civil Subject. See also
Taylor, Sources of the Self.
6 As an example, we can take the long, complex history of exchange between
anthropology and the colonial world that Talal Asad described with his characteristic nuance. This complex dance between ethnographic empathy and state
espionage has taken a new turn since Asad first described the handmaiden tale
of anthropology in the colonies. Now some anthropologists have created businesses that work the seams between ethnography and covert state operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq. See Asad, On Suicide Bombing; McFate, Anthropology
and Counterinsurgency; Stannard, Montgomery McFates Mission. See also
Wax, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War.
7 Solanus, Scum Manifesto, 72.
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Index
Abandonment, 19, 167, 170; economies of, 2930; ethics of,

187; social, 58, 78, 125, 128; zones of, 44, 99, 109, 129
Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, 90
Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act, 90
Aboriginal Land Rights Act, 90, 117
Absolutes, 172; fragile, 171, 185
Abu El Haj, Nadia, 197n88
Abu Ghraib, 180
Actuality, 89, 107, 156, 190
Adorno, Theodor, 189, 209n3
Affect, 3, 5, 89, 12, 1516, 31, 86, 8889, 92, 115, 128, 134, 173, 178
Afghanistan, 165, 177, 179, 181, 182, 209n6
Agamben, Giorgio, 910, 133, 194nn1925, 205n1
Agencements, 7, 139. See also Arrangements
Agency, 14, 61, 72, 15153, 162, 175, 183
Aggregation, 11, 16, 32, 133, 138, 158
Al-Kateb v. Godwin (2004), 150, 206n22
Al-Qaeda, xvii, 80
Alterity, 82, 92, 98
Alternative social projects, 58, 30, 32, 70, 7680, 89, 93, 95,
103, 110, 116, 11819, 121, 125, 134, 142, 145, 165, 192
Althusser, Louis, 1, 16, 48, 102, 115, 194n29, n35
Altman, Jon, 202n2, 206n31
American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1994),
6465, 200n38
American Legislative Exchange Council, 95
Anderson, Benedict, 3537, 168, 197nn7980, 208n15
Animal Enterprise Protection Act, 64, 94
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 64, 95, 97, 125
226
Index
Animal Liberation Front, 94, 105, 204n34
Animal rights, 8586, 94, 121
Anthropology, x, 14, 4950; of otherwise, 10
Anticolonialism, ix, 2526, 2829, 98, 79
Anti-commodity, 122. See also
Commodity
Anti-Semitism, 171
Appadurai, Arjun, 195n50
Archive, digital, 142. See also Augmented
reality
Arendt, Hannah, 183, 186, 196nn6667,
2023n6, 209n39, 209n44
Arrangements, 5, 7, 1617, 20, 35, 60, 82,
109, 139, 160, 168
Arrighi, Giovanni, 18, 184, 195n40, 195n42
Asad, Talal, 208n19, 209n9
Askesis, 15, 106, 112
At-hand, 13, 30, 52, 81, 152; ready-to-hand,
29, 112; unready-at-hand, 192
Augmented reality, x, 6, 110, 138, 140,
142, 191
Austin-Broos, Diane, 198n1
Australia, x, 67, 1617, 2324, 30, 3435,
3844, 4752, 5556, 5860, 11011,
11315, 12829, 13738, 14052, 15457
Australian Capital Television v. Commonwealth (1992), 147, 205n12
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 157
Australian Security Intelligence Organization, 146
Autological subject, 13, 26, 28, 34, 35,
4041, 43, 68, 70, 7273, 75, 81, 100,
129, 152
Bakhtin, M. M., 194n27
Balibar, tienne, 194n29
Bali bombings, 14647
Behrooz and Ors v. Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural
and Indigenous Affairs (2004), 150,
206n21
Benjamin, Walter, 194n30

Benveniste, Emile, 12, 194n28, 207n11
Berlant, Lauren, 153, 206n25
Bhabha, Homi, 30, 196n70
Biehl, Joo, 14, 194n32
Biofuel, 124, 204n29
Biopolitics, 9, 21, 4344, 1059, 123, 128
30, 134, 151
Biopower, 128, 153, 205n2
Blackwater Worldwide, 164, 207n4
Blair, Tony, 164, 207n7
Bodily practices, alternative, 71
Body-without-organs, 107
Bourdieu, Pierre, 88, 202n26, 206n23
Braudel, Fernand, 196n56
Brazil, 19, 6263, 66, 96
Bretton Woods Agreement, xvi, ii, 17, 25,
29, 183, 194n36
Brock, Peggy, 206n33
Brown, Wendy, 22, 26, 195n58, 196n64,
201n15
Bush, George W., 18, 44, 64, 71, 14748,
163, 164, 16667, 17982
Butler, Judith, 33, 1067, 134, 194n34,
196n72, 203nn1011
Camouflage, x, 2931, 7879, 89, 93,
95100, 190. See also Espionage;
Recognition
Canada, 41, 55, 104
Capital, 20, 29, 68, 105, 112, 115, 122, 124
25, 12730, 189; agro-, 123; extractive,
149; moral, 162; power, 19; speculation, 18
Capitalism, 17, 2021, 25, 122, 153, 190;
American, 60, 184; crisis of, 24; laissezfaire, 148; liberal, 129; neoliberal, 171;
unworking, 191; Western, 183
Capital punishment, 118
Care: agency of, 72, 184, 156; arts of,
2526, 56, 160; civilizational, 25; forms
of, 58, 61; logic of, 140; pastoral, 167,
185, social, 159
Index
Carmen, Taylor, 202n24
Carnality, 108, 110, 11718, 121, 123; errantness and, 109. See also Corporeality
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 77, 201n1
China, 19, 20, 2324, 97
Christianity, 62, 170, 175, 182, 186; conservative, 164; culture of, 165; faith and,
166, 16869
Chronotrope, xi, 56, 16
City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), 6465
Civilization, 28, 80, 91, 165, 174; borders
and boundaries of, 86; division of, 13;
securitization of, xvii. See also Care;
Tense
Civil rights movement, 60
Civil society, 17, 167
Clinton, Bill, 60
Colonialism, 30, 38, 104, 129, 171
Commodity, 2324, 122
Commodity speculation, 124
Common politics, 72
Commonsense, 31, 138, 179
Communication Management Units, 127
Communitarian illusion, 174
Community Development Employment Scheme (CDEP), 5355, 90, 141,
159, 198
Compassion, 166, 184
Compassionate conservatism, 185
Conatus, 9, 103, 116. See also Striving
Constitutional events, 13, 67
Constitutional protection, 51
Constitutions: Australian, 39; democracy and, 93, 16870, 172; EU, 165, 169,
174; powers of, 66; process and, 194;
scrutiny and, 65; U.S., 63, 64, 66, 68,
126
Controlled substances, 64
Controlled Substances Act, 42, 63, 65, 68,
7071, 96, 200n31
Corporeality, 117, 118, 155, 170; carnality
vs., 10810, 121, 123
Coulthard, Glen, 18, 35, 195n46, 197n77

Counterpublics, 7, 33, 116
Crimes Act (1914), 14647
Cultural difference, 26, 97, 140, 177
Culture, 28, 68, 8284, 86, 106, 111, 158,
180; African American, 60; capacity
for care and, 26, 72; Christian, 165;
crisis of, 25, 72; enterprise, 53, 57;
Indigenous, 49, 5859, 61, 136, 140
Darwin Aboriginal Rights Coalition, 56
Das, Veena, 14, 81, 15253, 194n32
Dasein, 88
Davidson, Donald, 82, 201n8, 201nn1013
Death: death penalty, 147; death rates,
143; deathscapes, 146; distribution of,
3, 5, 4041, 132, 134; forms of, 4, 22,
167; gift of, 178; governance and, 19, 51;
life vs., 10, 51; meanings of, 12, 92; sacrificial, 172, 176, 179, 18182; slow, 99,
145, 153; spectacular, 19, 153; zones of
indistinction and, 910
Deep ecology, 123
Deleuze, Gilles, 89, 109, 116, 193nn1517,
203n14, 204n37
Deliberation, 17879; communicative,
85; in public sphere, 8586, 177; reason
and, 86, 89; sense and, 89, 91, 100
Deloria, Vine, Jr., 35, 197n76
De Man, Paul, 88, 201
Demanding environment, 52, 88, 92
Democracy, 20, 27, 65, 122, 129, 168, 190;
democratic order, 169; fictive, 24; justice and, 171; society and, 85, 170; state
and, 165, 175, 182; suffering and, 165
Deontology, 34
Department of Family and Community
Services (Australia), 60, 141
Derrida, Jacques, 5, 81, 93, 17274, 185,
193n8, 194n29, 201n6, 202n31, 208n25,
209n42
Descent group, 6970, 90, 112, 117
Detention, 129, 134; mandatory, 149, 150
227
228
Index
Detention camps, 149, 150
Difference, x, 9, 31, 71, 75, 88, 101, 109, 143,
160, 186; absolute, 13, 48, 177; cultural,
26, 97, 140, 177; divisions of, 152; governance of, 34, 43, 50, 52, 67, 133, 141,
152, 190; indifference and, 15, 83, 84;
Indigenous, 61, 67; meaningful, 171;
political, 168; social, 5, 25, 28, 29, 30,
40, 42, 77, 100, 191
Digital archive, 142. See also Augmented
reality
Dispossession, 25; accumulation by,
1819; Indigenous, 18, 35
Diversity, 80, 191
Dreyfus, Herbert L., 202n24
Durative present, 2, 3, 12, 58
Durative tense, 3, 12, 32, 49, 78, 83, 96,
98, 130
Dwelling, x, 33, 1067, 125, 168; sciences,
32
Dynamis, 9
Earth First!, 95, 105
Earth Liberation Front, 9495, 105, 125
Ease of coping, 144, 160, 188
East Timor, 147
Eichengreen, Barry, 195n37
Embodiment, 45, 10, 14, 30, 42, 10910,
121, 128; material, 130; obligation and,
112, 115, 142; potentiality and, 16, 106,
131; reason and, 100; social dissonance
and, 6, 83
Empathy, 4, 162, 176; deliberation and,
17879
Employment Division v. Smith (1990), 65,
68
Empty signifier, 181
Endurance: of alternative worlds, 10, 14,
29, 41, 121, 125, 131; distribution of, 3,
5, 11, 40; ethics of, 44, 79; event and,
13234; forms of, 116; materiality and,
142; miracles of, 45, 122, 12728; nar-
rative of, 12, 104, 130; social origins of,

110; theoretical stakes of, 3132, 123
Enemy, 146, 171, 173, 178, 182; private
(inimicos) vs. public (hostes), 174
Energeia, 9
Enfleshment, 4
Enterprise culture, 53, 57
Enterprise subjects, 59
Environmental activism, 125
Environmental protection, 105
Environmental Protection Agency, 164,
207n3
Environmental sabotage, 122
Epistemological value, 112
Epistemology: categories of, 35; horizons
of, 81; presuppositions of, 14; techniques of, 154
Equality, 118, 169; lack of, 19, 60; legal,
104; social, 152
Errantness, 109, 123
Eschatology, 1213, 194n29
Espionage, x, 2931, 43, 7879, 93, 9799,
118. See also Camouflage; Recognition
Esposito, Roberto, 205n2
Ethical acts, 225, 118, 120
Ethical concern, 9
Ethical demands, 13, 30, 133, 152
Ethical gesture, 162
Ethical horizons, 81, 177
Ethical imperative, 4
Ethical investment, 130
Ethical obligation, 21, 32, 107, 172
Ethical substance, x, xi, 3, 5, 1011, 1516,
2932, 34, 40, 4243, 79, 101, 1067,
110, 112, 120, 125, 13032, 134, 165, 192
Ethical wager, 1
Ethical work (travail ethique), 11, 15, 106,
110
Ethics, 2, 5, 13, 14, 7678, 83, 107, 143,
162, 174, 111, 152, 158, 171, 175; of abandonment, 187; biopolitics and, 43; of
empathy, 162; of endurance, 44, 79;
Index
eventfulness and, xi; foundations of,
170, 172, 186; futures and, 23, 130,
143, 173
Ethnographic narration, 49
European Union, 89, 165
European Union Constitution, 165, 169,
174
Evangelicalism, 65, 164, 177, 182
Eventfulness, x, xi, 35, 11, 1314, 2932,
34, 4142, 79, 13334, 14445, 15053,
162, 165, 192
Events, 2, 10, 17, 35, 44, 83, 108, 121, 146,
156, 167, 173; catastrophic, 3, 1314, 32,
13234, 144, 147, 15254, 179, 185; constitutional, 13, 67; experiential, 136, 137;
extraordinary, 14; intimate, 13; lethal,
134; like, 145; linguistic, 12; narrated,
12, 49, 176; perceptual, 14; political,
52, 71, 72, 76; public, 151; quasi-, 45,
1314, 84, 92, 13235, 142, 144, 15254,
159, 191; social, 132; spectacular, 134,
141, 153; sublime, 133; temporality and,
36, 172; tense and, 11, 34, 39, 40; violent, 132
Eventualization (evenementialization), 15
Evil, 44, 163, 16468, 18586; radical, 171
Exhaustion, 3, 5, 32, 40, 44, 99, 110, 123
25, 12730, 13234
Existential phenomenology, 88
Existents, 13637
Extimacy, 89
Fabian, Johannes, 26, 30, 49, 52, 196n65,
198n6
Fanon, Frantz, 25, 30, 196n7
Finitude, 44, 167, 172, 186
First Nations, 55
Food movement, 111, 12122, 129
Fordism, 102, 151
Formations of power, 1056, 134
Forms of life, alternative, 14, 25, 95, 109,
188
Foucault, Michel, 5, 7, 1011, 15, 2122,

27, 32, 1056, 10910, 134, 194n36,
196nn6668, 202nn56, 205n2, 206n21
Fraser, Nancy, 32, 193n12, 203n21
Freedom: individual, 41; liberalism and,
27, 59; market, 105; practices of, 15, 110;
religious, 165, 175; societal difference
and, 2729, 48, 50; of speech, 86, 146
Friendship, 6, 73
Future anterior, 2, 3, 5, 1213, 28, 36, 44,
77, 96, 158
Future perfect, 16768
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 81, 201n5
Gaia Theory, 104
Gender, 107, 153
Genealogical descent, 6768, 70, 117
Genealogical determination, 27, 61
Genealogical imaginary, 27, 6168
Genealogical principles, 67, 70
Genealogical reckoning, 117
Genealogical society, 13, 2628, 3435, 43,
49, 68, 70, 7273, 75, 81, 100, 129, 152
Genealogy, 61, 179
Geneva Convention, 64
Geontology, 16, 115, 120, 156, 186
Global market, 2325, 97, 173, 178
Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente
Unio do Vegetal (2006), 43, 5152, 62,
64, 72, 7677, 97
Governance: colonial, 25; of difference,
28, 34, 43, 50, 52, 67, 133, 152; late liberal, ix, 29, 34, 43, 5052, 75, 79, 133,
152, 165, 168, 192; liberal, 22, 24; of life,
22, 51, 107; millennial, 64, 186; neoliberal, 24, 50, 79, 152; of the prior, 13,
3439, 4143, 6670, 7273
Governmentality, 22, 25
Green Movement, 43, 64, 122, 127
Habeas corpus, 134
Habermas, Jrgen, 32, 85, 130, 169, 172,
177, 208nn1618
229
230
Index
Habituated being, 136
Habitus, 88
Hacking, Ian, 153, 206n26
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 64, 97
Haraway, Donna, 83, 201n16
Harvey, David, 1719, 184, 194n36,
195nn4344
Hate speech, 85, 86, 89
Healthabitat, 137
Heidegger, Martin, 88, 102, 202n24
Hermeneutics, 15, 83
Heterotopic, 5, 7, 15
Hezbollah, 151
Homeland Security Act, 126
Homophobia, 171
Hope, 1023, 179, 18788
Hospitality, 104, 105
Howard, John, 17, 48, 5259, 71, 141, 146
50, 156, 15859, 165
Human rights, 14950, 171
Huntington, Samuel, 28, 8081, 201n3
Illocutionary force, 184
Immanence: critical theory and, 8, 10,
1416, 3233, 103, 129; life and, 42; obligation and, 33; philosophy and, 9; social field and, 98; social theory and, 116
Incommensurability, 30, 32, 86; legislation and, 8991; semantic, 81; state
regimes and, 91; understanding and, 89
Indeterminacy, 10, 7273, 81, 142
India, 1819, 20, 153, 184
Indigeneity: critical theory and, 41; dispossession and, 18; geontology and,
120, 186; health and, 113, 137, 14344,
157, 161; native title and, 40, 90, 113, 115,
117; politics of the prior and, 3436;
self-determination and, 54, 57, 61, 104;
sexual abuse and, 5860; sovereignty
and, 49; state relations and, 39, 57, 158;
territoriality and, 5354, 90, 115; traditions and customs of, 47, 50, 59, 61, 66,
129, 136, 159
Individualization, 156, 183

Indonesia, 147
Inequality, 19, 60
Injustice, 4, 60, 76, 183, 187, 189
Institute for Peace and Justice, 166
International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, 149
Interpretants, 2, 88; affective, 83, 87; energetic, 83, 87
Interpretation, 8183, 87, 89, 92; act of,
88; force of, 86
Interpretive maneuverability, 68
Intimate event, 13
Intolerance, 43, 75, 76, 7981, 8384, 92,
177
Iraq, 20, 165, 179, 18182, 184
Islam, 25, 28, 86, 147, 151, 169, 182
Israel, ii, xvi, 40, 15051
Jakobson, Roman, 194n27
James, William, 23, 88, 193n3, 202n23,
203n20
Jihadist camps, 177
Judeo-Christian tradition, 169, 172, 179,
182
Judgment, 6, 32, 71, 76, 80, 90, 96, 98, 129,
178; absolute, 171; political, 172; reflexive, 93
Justice: hierarchies of, 35; impasses of, 76,
93, 99, 174; intolerance and, 92; lack
of, 4, 60, 76, 183, 187, 189; liberal, 26,
85, 17778; multiculturalism and, 171;
Rawlsian, 34; social, 93; tense and, 2
Justification, 19, 29, 80, 92, 94, 99
Kelowna Accord, 56
Keynesianism, ii, xvi, 21, 103; state, 17, 22,
29, 151
Killer of Sheep, x, 1013, 110, 11213, 13132,
18889
Killing: honor, 40; narratives of, 29, 119,
152; sacrificial, 44, 167, 172, 174, 176,
179, 18183; spectacular, 19, 94, 134,
Index
146, 148; state, 58, 118, 15153, 157; techniques of, 22
Lacan, Jacques, 88
Laissez-faire, 2022, 29, 101, 148, 160
Land rights, ii, 90, 104, 140
Language games, 88, 106, 157, 183, 185
Late liberalism, ix, 3, 1112, 16, 2529, 34,
36, 42, 43, 5052, 71, 75, 7980, 83, 101,
118, 133, 152, 165, 168, 192
Lea, Tess, 137
Lebanon, 15051
Le Guin, Ursula, x, xi, 1, 35, 1214, 45,
76, 101, 108, 135, 145, 155, 162, 187, 193n1
Left, 33, 56, 147, 168, 183; anarchist, 19, 94;
critical, 175; postmodern, 171; progressive, 121, 147, 171, 181; radical, 127; revolutionary, 19
Lethality, 44, 129, 146, 15253, 162
Letting die, 22, 29, 44, 9495, 134. See also
Making die
Letting suffer, 167
Liberal Democratic Party (Great Britain), 80
Liberalism: diasporic, xi, 6, 16; governmentality and, 22, 25; intolerance and,
43, 7576, 7981, 92, 177; justice, 26,
7677, 85, 92, 171, 17778, 190; Keynesian, 103; laissez-faire, 2122; late, ix,
3, 1112, 16, 2529, 34, 36, 42, 43, 5052,
71, 75, 7980, 83, 101, 118, 133, 152, 165,
168, 192; neo-, 1617, 1925, 98, 129, 134,
154, 159, 184; postcolonial, xi, 6, 16; in
public sphere, 77, 86, 169, 17778
Liberation theology, 185
Liberty, 169, 180
Life: aggregations of, 30, 32; anti-, 186;
arts of, 108, 118; attributes of, 103; bare,
31, 133, 189; conditions of, 77; death
vs., 10, 51; distributions of, 5, 155; edge
of, 78; embodied, 109; enhancing, 23,
44; ethical relation to, 44, 109; everyday, 81, 111, 133; form of, 10, 14, 25, 29,
31, 104, 109, 118, 154, 179, 192; geological, 120; good, 5, 6, 44, 85, 128, 160, 173,
177; hegemonic, 30; immanent, 42;
making, 153; logic of, 158; political, 186;
possibilities of, 8, 10, 16; practice of,
124; proper, 44, 104; space of, 109; social, 5, 10, 14, 144, 170, 176, 188, 189; way
of, 140, 177; world, 18, 79, 93, 99, 130
Little Children Are Sacred, 23, 48, 5354,
58, 90
Local Government Act (Australia), 90
Logos, 50
Love, 8, 92; absolute, 171; altruistic, 175;
law of, 173, 175; nonsacrificial, 177; sacrificial, xi, 3, 5, 1213, 4445, 16372,
17476, 178, 182, 18486; unconditional, 176
Lusaka Declaration of the Commonwealth on Racism and Racial Prejudice, 104
Making die, 22, 29, 58, 62, 95, 98, 134, 167
Making live, 22, 29, 62, 134, 167
Mamdani, Mahmood, 82, 201n14, 207n8
Manifest Destiny, 38, 164
Markell, Patchen, 26, 82, 196n64, 201n15
Market: biofuel, 124; capital, 122; class inequalities and, 177; conservatives and,
183; efficiency in, 159; financial crisis
and, 115; forms of, 8, 13, 17, 20, 29, 78,
106, 152, 160, 183; global, 2325, 97, 173,
178; multiculturalism and, 171; neoliberal, 18, 2124, 105, 151, 152, 162, 182,
184; Smiths vision of, 24; values of,
95, 119, 159
Marx, Karl, 123, 16970, 202n6
Massumi, Brian, 10, 106, 108, 14445,
194n26, 203n12, 203n17, 204n24, 205n10
Material composition, 8, 16, 109, 137
Materiality (Matiere), 10, 15; assemblages
of, 118, 123, 134; discursive construction
of, 14, 1089; sociality of, 134; substance and, 79, 106, 108, 128, 13031
231
232
Index
Material responsibility, 136
Mbembe, Achille, 19, 134, 195n48, 205n3
Media: communicative, 100, 173; mass,
144; mixed, 43; multi, 115; new, 112;
news, 59, 147, 150; print, 37
Messianism, 172
Metaphysics of substance, 1068
Middle East, 169
Millennialism, 163, 166; governance and,
16465, 186; imaginary, 167
Mobility, 102
Mode of production, 102, 151
Mode of transformation, 41
Moral evaluation, 10, 16, 106
Morality: capital and, 162; of conduct,
10, 106
Moral limits, 178
Moral reason, 31, 77, 89
Moral reflection, 10, 16, 106
Moral sense, 1, 13, 8689, 91, 100
Mortgage bubble, 181, 184
Movements: conservative Christian, 164;
ecological, 34, 9495, 104, 12223, 125,
127; food, 111, 12122, 129; Green, 43,
64, 122, 127; social, ix, 2526, 2829, 50,
79, 98, 101, 103, 124, 189
Moynihan Report, 60, 200n26
Multiculturalism, 25, 71, 196; failure of, 28,
59, 171; globalization and, 171; state, 29
Muslims, 40, 8081, 151, 165
MV Tampa, 56, 148
Narration, 175; act of, 176; event of, 12,
176; time of, 12
National Animal Interest Alliance, 9495
National Association for Biomedical Research, 94
National Commission on the Prevention
of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, 12526
Native American Church, 65, 6869, 73
Native Title Act, xvi, 40, 61, 90
Nauru, 149
Necropolitics, 19
Negative dialectics, 18991, 209n3
Neighbors, 166, 171, 17374, 176, 184
Neoconservativism, 29, 87, 14849
Neoliberalism, 1617, 1925, 98, 129, 134,
154, 159, 184
Noise, 5051, 73, 82, 116, 119, 121, 13637.
See also Parasites
Normative worlds, 7, 31, 189, 191
Normativity, 110, 188, 191; achievement
and, 22; commitment and, 32; governance and, 106; horizon and, 129, 185,
189; orientation and, 177; projection
and, 192; public, 100; structure of, 185;
theory of, 33, 189
North Atlantic, 170, 172, 174, 184
Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act (2007), 43, 5458,
6061, 7172, 76, 78, 84, 90, 97, 100,
115, 136, 142
Obligation, 34, 61, 63, 84, 130, 156, 172,
174; embodied, 112, 115, 142; immanent,
32, 33; state, 120
Office of the Registrar of Indigenous
Corporations, 91
Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American
Church, 69
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,
The, x, xi, 16, 14, 27, 45, 76, 84, 101,
105, 135, 145, 18788, 191, 193n1
On the Jewish Question (Marx), 169
Ontological duality, 9
Ontological necessity, 146
Ontological reduction, 108
Ontology: of being, 107; categories of, 35;
of potentiality, 9, 14, 16
Operation Backfire, 125
Organic intellectual, 122
Other, absolute, 174, 177, 185
Otherwise: anthropology of, 10; be-
Index
coming, 121, 131; endurance of, 118;
politics of, 154; propositional, 191;
radical, 130, 10; social, 5, 16, 29, 188;
sources of, 7, 99, 109, 110, 119, 128;
spacing of, 15
Pacific Solution, 149
Pakistan, 153, 177
Palestine, 40
Parasites, 116, 144, 189, 192, 203n22. See
also Static
Paris suburbs, 177
Pastoral care, 167, 185
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 2, 8788, 193n4,
201n22, 202n
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PEtA), 86, 105
Performative tense, 13
Performativity, 12, 106, 176, 181
Perseverance, 11516, 119, 128; in-being,
9, 103, 188
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 60
Phonos, 50, 51
Poiesis, 33
Policing, 43, 50, 52, 71, 75
Politics: cosmology and, 4950; culturalization of, 26; eventfulness and, 52,
7172, 76; of the otherwise, 154; policing and, 43, 50, 52, 75; semiosis and, 88;
theology and, 148; theory of, x, 35, 42,
82, 16869, 175
Pornography, 53, 87, 89
Postcoloniality: liberalism, xi, 6, 16;
movements, 101, 103; worlds, 79
Postmetaphysical world, 172
Postmodernism, 171
Potentia agendi, 9, 11, 15, 31, 116
Potentiality, 9, 128, 188; embodied, 106,
132; ethical substance and, 10; part
that has no part, 43, 75; sociology of,
1416
Poverty, 53, 58, 84, 103, 135, 141, 158, 160,

162, 183, 188
Practical reason, 13, 97
Present perfect, 1213, 27, 31, 36, 40,
4950, 77, 96
Present tense, 1112, 44, 178, 184
Principle of charity, 82
Privatization, 17, 105, 156, 183
Productivity Commission (Australia), 58
Profit, 2122, 24, 159, 166, 181, 18384
Progressive left, 121, 147, 171, 181
Projects: alternative (social), 58, 30,
32, 70, 7680, 89, 93, 95, 103, 110, 116,
11819, 121, 125, 134, 142, 145, 165, 192;
individual, 5, 78, 28, 113
Project X, 121
Public reason, 31, 8385, 153, 169, 178
Publics: alternative, 105; counter-, 7, 33,
116; regulated, 130; subaltern, 100; territorial, 102; unregulated, 130
Public sphere, 37, 170, 176, 208; deliberative, 83, 85, 177; empathetic, 178, 183;
liberal, 77, 8586, 169, 17778; secular,
169; substantive, 177
Quasi-events, 45, 1314, 84, 92, 13235,
142, 144, 15254, 159, 191
Race, 3941, 73, 1034, 151, 188
Racial Discrimination Act (Australia),
5455
Racism, 48, 5455, 69, 102, 104, 134, 141,
148, 149, 151, 157, 158, 171, 177
Rancire, Jacques, 50, 52, 72, 198n8,
200n41, 208n21
Ready-to-hand, 29, 112; at-hand, 13, 30, 52,
81, 152; unready-at-hand, 192
Reagan, Ronald, 29, 60, 105, 164
Recognition: brackets of, 43, 75, 7780,
93, 96, 9899, 179; cultural, xvi, 23,
2526, 2931, 4243, 48, 50, 52, 61, 72,
84, 90, 104, 112, 117, 140, 190; late liberal, 50, 52, 7980, 83; modalities of, 79;
233
234
Index
Recognition (continued)
politics of, 23, 4243, 50, 54, 75, 7778,
97, 115, 129, 165; trembling of, 7980,
8384, 8689, 9192
Reconciliation, cultural, 23, 48
Recycling, 122, 124, 129
Redemption, 4, 99, 167, 176, 179, 184
Referentiality, 176, 180
Regulatory regimes, 90, 105
Religion: conviction and, 16970; expression and, 43, 6264, 6667; minorities
and, 6667; progressive, 166, 186
Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(1993), 6370
Rhetoric, 28, 44, 50, 88, 14849, 16566,
18081, 184
Risk, 81, 127, 154, 160; individual, 155,
15758; individualized, 166; individuated, 157, 183; privatized, 15758, 183;
security, 22, 29
Roberts, John, 64, 6667, 7071, 9697
Sacred sites, 90
Sacrifice, 32, 163, 174, 183; sacrificial love,
xi, 3, 5, 1213, 4445, 16473, 17577,
17982, 18486
San Salvador, 185
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 28, 93
Schmitt, Carl, 148, 168, 174, 208n14
SCum Manifesto, 191
Secular democracies, 168, 170
Secularism, 92; politics of, 165, 16869;
public reason and, 169, 178; in public
sphere, 16970, 176, 178
Semantics, 81, 82, 86, 88
Semiosis, 88
Sen, Amartya, 24
Sense: common-, 31, 138, 179; deliberative, 89, 91, 100; ethical, 143, 162, 174;
moral, 1, 13, 8689, 91, 100
Serres, Michel, 30, 11617, 119, 137, 203n22,
204n25, 205n5, 209n2
Settlers, 38, 39, 41, 67; citizenship and, 37;

nationalism and, 3435, 37, 40; state
and, 3536, 72, 104
Sexuality, 15, 40, 1067, 177; abuse of,
xvii, 23, 42, 48, 5455, 5860; dysfunction and, 48, 50, 62; minorities and,
105; panics and, 43, 51, 60, 71; regulation of, 60
ShAC- 7, 125
Shared responsibility agreements, 91
Silverstein, Michael, 201n15, 208n28
Singer, Peter, 8485, 89, 201nn1719,
202n29
Slavery, 60, 171
Social imaginary, 120, 123, 155, 157, 167,
175, 184
Social welfare, 2223, 53, 105, 113, 141, 156,
15860, 184
Sociography, x, 6
Solomon Islands, 147
Southeast Asia, 23, 147, 169
Sovereignty, 49, 67, 123, 149; act of, 90;
identity and, 38; killing and, 118, 167;
monarchical, 37; politics and, 179;
power and, 22, 39, 134, 153; settlers
and, 197
Soviet Union, 171
Spinoza, Baruch, 810, 33, 103, 144, 160,
193n16, 196n71
State apparatus, 43, 51, 164
State of Utah v. Mooney (2004), 6970
Static, 11617, 119, 136. See also Parasites
Statistical imaginary, 153, 157, 159
Stolen generation, iii, xvii, 55
Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program, 57
Striving, 9, 33, 103, 160, 189
Subjective finitude, 44, 167, 172
Subjectivity, 153, 171
Sublimity, 3, 13, 13233, 146, 152
Substance, ix, 14, 41, 44, 12324, 12829,
155; alternative ethical, 125; ethical,
Index
x, xi, 3, 5, 1011, 1516, 2932, 34, 40,
4243, 79, 101, 1067, 110, 112, 120, 125,
13032, 134, 165, 192; metaphysics of,
1068. See also Materiality
Sutton, Peter, 2, 4749, 5961, 73, 76,
198nn35
Taylor, Charles, 7, 178, 193n12, 208n30,
209n5
Teleology, 1213
Tense, x, 26, 30, 37, 42, 93, 99, 179, 192;
alternative ethical, 3; being and, 11, 44,
167; civilizational, 27, 40; durative, 3,
12, 32, 49, 78, 83, 96, 98, 130; durative
present, 2, 3, 12, 58; ethical, 3; future
anterior, 2, 3, 5, 12, 13, 28, 36, 44, 77,
96, 158; future perfect, 167, 168; imperfect, 3; past perfect, 12, 13, 27, 31, 36, 40,
49, 50, 77, 96; power and, xi, 39, 51, 62,
75; present, 11, 12, 44, 178, 184; present
perfect, 167, 172; social, 3, 11, 13, 29, 31,
34, 4041, 43, 5052, 62, 7273, 75, 77,
165, 167; subjunctive, 31
Terra nullius, 39
Terror, 18, 34, 80, 83, 93
Terrorism, 64, 95, 97, 151; domestic, 125,
152; homegrown, 12526; laws against,
94, 125, 14647; as spectacle, 146
Thailand, 186
Thick description, x
Tolerance, 85, 95, 97; lack of, 43, 75, 76,
7981, 8384, 92, 177
Tracings, 192
Trade unions, 17, 105, 156
Tradition: belief and, 48, 111, 117; culture
and, 130, 140; custom and, 43, 51, 73;
effect of, 40, 140; land and, 14041;
law and, 4960; life and, 143; marriage
and, 59; narratives and, 112
Traditional owners, 61, 140
Translation, 8182
Travail ethique, 11, 15, 106, 110
Truth: abstract, 42, 112; commonsense,

31; embodied, 142; final, 23, 185;
games, 21; governance of, 105, 170,
173; habitual, 26; production of, 89,
169; social distribution of, 2728, 36,
73; translation and, 81; undecidability
and, 86
Turkey, 40, 165, 169
Undead, 179, 182
Undecidability, 81, 86, 89
United Nations Human Rights Council, 86, 150
United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, 150
United Nations World Conference
against Racism, 148
Unready-at-hand, 192; at-hand, 13, 30, 52,
81, 152; ready-to-hand, 29, 112
View from nowhere, 7, 190
Violence: communal, 5859, 113, 14041;
criminalization of, 64, 95, 12528; extraordinary, 14, 132, 146, 15253; foundational, 13; frontier, 39; redemption
and, 167, 184
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act (2007),
12526
Vis existendi, 9, 11, 31, 116
Volition, 7, 51, 70, 84, 95
Vulnerability, 44, 106, 109, 134
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17, 20, 194n36,
195n55
War on terror, 18, 34, 64, 80, 151, 17677,
183
Warner, Michael, 7, 193n12, 208n13
Watts, x, 102, 113, 13233, 188
Welfare state, 22, 23, 55, 60, 66, 94, 105,
143, 15659, 162, 183, 184
Williams, Bernard, 67, 85, 193n11,
201n17
235
236
Index
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 154, 156, 201n7,
206n27
Worlds: actual, 19, 42, 50, 72, 79, 103, 138,
158, 188, 191; alternative social, ix, 5, 7,
10, 44, 52, 7677, 79, 89, 154, 165; postmetaphysical, 172
Woomera Immigration Reception and

Processing Centre, 149
iek, Slavoj, 17172, 17577, 185,
208nn2122
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at
Columbia University. She is the author of The Empire of Love: Toward a

Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (2006), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002), and Labors Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal
Action (1993).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Povinelli, Elizabeth A.
Economies of abandonment : social belonging and endurance
in late liberalism / Elizabeth A. Povinelli.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
iSBn 978-0-8223-5066-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
iSBn 978-0-8223-5084-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. LiberalismSocial aspectsUnited States.
2. LiberalismSocial aspectsAustralia.
3. Social structure.
I. Title.
JC574.P684 2011
330.1dc222011015672

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