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Barbarians & Savages

Brad Evans & Michael Hardt

Saturday, 10 July 2010

BRAD EVANS: One of the most important aspects of your work has been to argue why Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology needed to be challenged. With the onset of a global war machine that shows absolutely no respect for state boundaries, matched by the rise of many local fires of resistance that have no interest in capturing state power, the sentiment that “History is always written from the victory of States” could now be brought firmly into question. On a theoretical level alone, the need to bring the Nomadology treatise up to date was an important move.

But there was something clearly more at stake for you than simply attempting to correct and canonize Deleuze and Guattari. One gets the impression from your works that you were deeply troubled by what was taking place with this newfound humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political terrain demanded a rewriting of war itself — away from geopolitical territorial struggles that once monopolized the strategic field, towards biopolitical life struggles whose unrelenting wars were now to be consciously fought for the politics of all life itself — then the political stakes could not be higher. For not only does a biopolitical ascendency force a reconceptualization of the war effort — to include those forces which are less militaristic and more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra: “war by other means”) — but also, through this process, a new paradigm appears that makes it possible to envisage, for the first time in human history, a global state of war or a civil war on a planetary scale.

While it was rather easy to find support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990s — especially when the indigenous started writing of the onset of a fourth world war that was enveloping the planet and consuming everybody within — some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the invasion of Iraq, which was simply geo-politics as usual. The familiar language that has been routinely deployed here would be of US exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this revival of an outdated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in Multitude that this account can be convincingly challenged with relative ease. Foucault has done enough himself to show that liberal war does not demand a strategic trade-off between geopolitical and biopolitical aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps more to the point, especially within a global liberal imaginary. And what is more, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was when major combat operations were effectively declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My concerns today are more attuned to the post-Bush era, which, going back to the original War on Terror’s life-centric remit, is once again calling for the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more worrying still, given that the return of the Kantian-inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and much needed departure from the destructive but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con. What do you feel have been the most important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? Is it possible to detect a more intellectually vociferous shift taking place, which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous on a planetary scale? Would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global rule?

MICHAEL HARDT: The notion of a global civil war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally, war is conceived (in the field of international relations, for instance, or in international law) as armed conflict between two sovereign powers, whereas civil war designates conflict within a single territory in which one or both of the parties is not sovereign. War designates, in other words, a conflict in some sense external to the structures of sovereignty and civil war a conflict internal to them. It is clear that few, if any, of the instances of armed conflict around the world today fit the classic model of war between sovereign states. And perhaps even the great conflicts of the cold war, from Korea and Vietnam to countries throughout Latin America, already undermined the distinction, draping the conflict between sovereign states in the guise of local civil wars. Toni Negri and I thus claimed that, in our era, there is no more war but only civil wars, or, really, a global civil war. It is probably more precise to say, instead, that the distinction between war and civil war has been undermined in the same way that one might say, in more metaphorical terms, not that there is no more outside but, rather, that the division between inside and outside has been eroded.

This claim is also widely recognized, it seems to me, among military and security theorists. The change from the framework of war to that of civil war, for instance, corresponds closely to thinking of armed conflicts as not military campaigns but police actions, and thus a shift from the external to the internal use of force. The general rhetorical move from war to security marks in more general terms a similar shift. The security mantra that you cite — “war by other means” — also indicates how the confusion between inside and outside implies the mixture of a series of fields that are traditionally separate: war and politics, for example, but also killing and generating forms of social life. This opens a complicated question about the ways in which contemporary military actions have become biopolitical and what that conception helps us understand about them.

Rather than pursuing that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how the shift in the relationship between war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war. In a war conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their actions primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of international law. Whereas those inside are, at least in principle, privilege to the liberal framework of rights and representation, those outside are not. When the relationship of sovereignty shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such limits of the liberal ideological and political structures. This might be a way of understanding why contemporary military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of human rights and liberal values. In turn, this same relationship relates to what many political theorists, like Wendy Brown, for instance, analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political sphere at the hands of neoliberal and neoconservative logics. In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and outside of sovereignty, liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the use of violence over what was formerly the outside on the one hand, while on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in what was formerly the inside.

BRAD EVANS: What I am proposing with “The Liberal War Thesis” borrows from some pioneering works, which have already started to cover the main theoretical ground (Mark Duffield, Michael Dillon, Julian Reid). Central to this approach is an attempt to critically evaluate global liberal governance (which includes both productive and non-productive elements) by questioning its will to rule. Liberal peace is thus challenged, not on the basis of its abstract claims to universality — juridical or otherwise — but precisely because its global imaginary shows a remarkable capacity to wage war (by whatever means) in order to govern all species of life. This behavior is not to be confused with some militaristic appropriation of the democratic body politic — a situation in which liberal value systems have been completely undermined by the onslaught of the military mind. Rather, this undermining exposes the intricate workings of a liberal rationality whose ultimate pursuit is global political dominance. Traces of such an account can be found in Michael Ignatieff’s book Empire Lite, which notes how the gradual confluence between the humanitarian and the military has resulted in the onset of an ostensibly humanitarian empire that is less concerned with territory (although the State no doubt still figures) than it is with governing life itself for its own protection and betterment. Liberalism as such is considered here (à la Foucault) to be a technology of government to strategize power, which necessarily takes life as its object. As a technological implement, it is compelled to wager the destiny of humanity against its own political strategy. Liberalism can therefore be said to betray a particularly novel strategic field, in which the writing of threat assumes both planetary (macro-specific) and human (micro-specific) ascriptions. Although it should be noted that it is only through giving the utmost priority to life itself — working to secure life from each and every threat posed to an otherwise progressive existence — that its global imaginary could ever hold sway. It is no coincidence, then, that the dominant strategic paradigm for liberals is global human security. What could therefore be termed the liberal problematic of security naturally registers as a liberal biopolitics of security, which, in the process of promoting certain forms of life, equally demands a reconceptualization of war. Ultimately, not every life lives up to productive expectations let alone shows its compliance.

In a number of crucial ways, this approach offers both a theoretical and empirical challenge to the familiar international relations scripts, which have tended to either valorize liberalism’s visionary potential or simply castigate its misguided idealism. Perhaps the most important of these is to insist upon a rewriting of the history of liberalism from the perspective of war. Admittedly, there is much work to be done here. Not least, there is a need to show with greater historical depth, critical purpose, and intellectual rigor how liberal war (both externally and internally) has subsequently informed its juridical commitments and not vice versa. Here I am invariably provoking the well-rehearsed “Laws of War” sermon, which I believe more accurately should be rephrased as the “Wars of Law.” Nevertheless, despite this pressing need to rewrite the liberal encounter in language whose familiarity would be capable of penetrating the rather conservative but equally esoteric specialist field of International Relations, sufficient contemporary grounds already exist which enable us to provide a challenging account of global civil war from the perspective of liberal biopolitical rule. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s The Liberal Way of War encapsulates these sentiments, with the following abridged passage worth quoting:

A biopolitical discourse of species existence is also a biopolitical discourse of species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal way of rule is simultaneously also a problematization of fear and danger involving threats to the peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in pursuing the peace and prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence is a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species ... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war ... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is enough ... [However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing.

This brings me to the problem of inside/outside. It is possible to account for the conflation of the two by acknowledging the onset of a global political imaginary that no longer permits any relationship with the outside. One could then support the kind of hypothesis you mention, which, rather than affirming the best of the enlightened liberal tradition, actually correlates the hollowing out of liberal values to the inability to carve out any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood, and so forth. But this approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further critical doubts about the postmodern/post-structural turn in political thought, and it is misleading. The collapse of these meaningful distinctions is not inimical to liberal rationality. To the contrary, the erosion of these great dialectical interplays now actually provides liberalism with its very generative principles of formation. I felt that you began to explore this in Empire by noting how Foucault’s idea of biopolitics was inadequate to our complex, adaptive, and emergent times. To rectify this, Deleuze’s notion of “societies of control” was introduced, which is more in line with contemporary systems of rule. My interest in this, however, is what actually lies behind: namely, the realization that societies of control are informed by a fundamental change in the biopolitical account of life, which, although affording life great potentiality, presents it in an altogether more dangerous light. This is what I would term the “liberal paradox of potentiality” — revealing contemporary liberalism’s irresolvable biopolitical aporia. On the one hand, the body liberated from the former disciplinary regimes is a body whose capacity to be free is assumed to increase exponentially — not implying that every situation presents a certain degree of freedom, or, for that matter, that one can simply “be free,” but that freedom is something which needs to be continually produced. And yet it is precisely because a body is now endowed with adaptive and emergent qualities — capable of becoming other than what was once epistemologically certain — that a life sets off more alarms. After all, who knows what a body is now capable of doing? Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza thus seems rather prophetic. For what a body is capable of becoming is the war cry heeded by contemporary security practitioners, which is reflected in recent developments in counter-terrorism. A marked shift is now clearly taking place in this field, which is moving us away from the traditional actions-based (punish after the event) or intentions-based (punish if intentions can be established) approaches, tending instead towards a more pervasive capabilities assessment (punish if one can establish the capability to strike).

MICHAEL HARDT: I find it interesting how the decline of the division between inside and outside does not undermine liberal rationality, as you say, from the perspectives or in the fields of international relations and security studies, although it does undermine the logic of a variety of liberal and radical democratic projects in the field of political theory. It seems to me that the collapse of a meaningful distinction between inside and outside is inimical to liberal democracy — or radical democracy — for these authors. For the critique and/or redemption of liberal democracy in political theorists such as William Connolly and Wendy Brown, a discrete and bounded space is required for the effectiveness of liberal rights, formal equality, freedoms, and representation. Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the people, Chantal Mouffe’s concept of hegemony, and Etienne Balibar’s idea of citizenship (even in a supranational context such as Europe) all similarly require a delimited sovereign space and a specific population. The focus in all these cases, it seems to me, is not on the outside or the conflict across the inside/outside border, but rather on the circumscribed nature of the inside. The people to whom these notions of liberal or radical democracy apply must be determinate and limited. That is not to say, I should repeat, that the projects of these political theorists require the definition of an enemy or focus on mechanisms of exclusion, but rather that they rely on a definite conception of the “inside,” that is, a coherent social body (such as a people) and a delimited sovereign space (whether national or not).

Perhaps this disjunction regarding the status of liberalism between International Relations and Political Theory is due, in part, to disciplinary differences that make it difficult to communicate between those fields. Perhaps it is due also to the ambiguous topological metaphor of inside and outside, which might be doing too much work here and thus leading to confusion. In addition, some difficulty certainly arises from the different meanings attributed to the term “liberalism.” We already have the problem of a primarily economic conception of liberalism (more prevalent in Europe) that refers to the freedoms of trade and markets, and a primarily political conception (more prevalent in North America) that emphasizes rights, the rule of law, constitutional freedom, and so forth. In your work, however, as well as that of Dillon and Reid, and perhaps more generally in the field of International Relations, there seems to me a somewhat distinct idea of liberalism, which is certainly based on juridical notions of the international rule of law but also highlights humanitarianism and the preservation of life as grounding principles. This is perhaps why the discourse of liberalism in International Relations moves so easily into questions of biopower — and also why the division between inside and outside is not necessary as a ground here. Tracing the meaning of liberalism across these disciplinary fields to separate the terminological differences from the differences in argument can certainly help clarify the question.

More interesting, though, is the possibility that the disjunction I’m highlighting is not merely explained by metaphorical ambiguities and terminological differences but really points to a conceptual and political conflict, which is revealed by looking at the issue and phenomena from different disciplinary perspectives. In other words, perhaps if political theorists were to adopt the disciplinary framework of International Relations scholars in this case, they would be forced to question their grounding in a coherent “inside,” that is, a determinate population and a circumscribed space of sovereignty, for liberal or radical democratic projects. In turn, such an exchange might force International Relations scholars to think more critically about what kind of democratic projects are possible in a context in which the division between inside and outside has declined.

BRAD EVANS: Agreed. There is a need for much greater cross-fertilization of ideas across the disciplines not only to permit more sophisticated meaningful critiques but also to have a more fruitful search for common political alternatives. To begin this process (with the intention of outliving it), I would suggest that we need to be more definitive about “What is liberalism?”. While it could be argued that the “many liberalisms” we can speak of show the richness of the tradition, one can speak the language of freedom and give juridical pronouncements without ever acknowledging the liberal recourse to war and violence. To my mind, the only way these various disciplines can be brought together is to insist upon an inclusive understanding of liberalism that factors in both its political and economic dimensions. How else could we assess whether the ideal matches reality? Such a “political economy” perspective will be resisted in many quarters, especially since it implies a need to show how the tremendous political power and moral suasion (that liberalism wields on a planetary scale) rests upon the power of economy. What is more, if we take a political economy perspective, liberal rationality is revealed as primarily driven by biopolitical imperatives, which, in turn, force us to acknowledge that notions of sovereignty/law are merely one generative principle of liberal formation. We can simultaneously appreciate that the juridical/emancipation story, with its definitive sense of grounding, assumes secondary importance behind the biopolitical task of making life live in productively compliant ways.

Looking at this from a global perspective, it could then be argued that the “nomos as camp” hypothesis, with its impending “states of exception,” makes no conceptual sense, especially given the collapse of those neat demarcations that once permitted the Schmittean decision. Foregrounding instead the internal problem of emergence — with emergence here associated with the propagation of all types of circulations — liberalism replaces the state of exception paradigm with an internal state of unending emergency, capable of leaving life “bare” within the remit of law. Not, then, the camp as nomos, which even some liberals have been glad to announce, but a nomos of circulation.

If we accept this new biopolitical security architecture, then it inevitably follows that the sovereignty over life becomes purely contingent. For not only are territorial integrities irrelevant when the political destinies of life are at stake, but, given the highly complex and adaptive strategic situation, there can be no universal value systems or grand blueprints to follow. This is especially acute in zones of instability, when not only is life subject to the forces of biopolitical experimentation, but the liberal commitment to democratic regimes and political rights becomes subject to contingent factors as well. There have been, for example, many occasions when the most sacred of rights (that to life) has been cast aside for the most speculative utilitarian calculations. What once was the surest litmus test of one’s democratic credentials — election victories — has in recent times had liberals scrambling for new methods of de-legitimation. My personal favorite here is the story of the “democratic coup.”

A logical corollary of this is the mixture of the strategic fields you mention. It is no coincidence today to find renewed priority being afforded to the insurgent. The RAND Corporation, for instance, has, for some time now, been calling for a more comprehensive and nuanced strategic paradigm that incorporates counterinsurgency into the wider remit of the Global War on Terror. I am reminded of a wonderful observation Foucault makes in a few incisive pages of Society Must Be Defended in which he identifies the three key figures that make up the modern condition: barbarians, savages, and the civilized. Barbarians, he argues, are a function of sovereign power. Existing beyond the constitutional pale, although sometimes penetrating with purely destructive intent, they represent those lives that show no respect for the constitutional order and, hence, have and should be afforded no moral or political value. Savages, on the other hand, are a function of biopolitical power; open to remedy and demanding engagement, they represent those lives which are capable of being redeemed. No great conceptual leap of imagination is required here to draw out meaningful connections between barbarians/terrorists and savages/insurgents. Indeed, in the theaters of war today, one can write of that all-too-familiar historical tendency of waging war by getting savages to fight barbarians in order to prove their civilizing credentials. Even here, however, the lines in the sand have been blurred. Terrorists no longer occupy a place of exteriority to the political realm; they are fully included within the biopolitical order. What is more, the ability to set out clear parameters between the terrorist and the insurgent has proved rather elusive. This is compounded even further by a realization that terrorists are no longer simply intent upon wanton destruction but have shown a willingness to actually cross over to become insurgents, posing a much wider social problem. This approach is clearly evidenced in the recent United Kingdom CONTEST II National Security Strategy (2009). What is particularly striking about this document is the style in which these threats are presented. Terrorists are now presented in a manner which is biopolitically fitting: like some cancerous cell, not only are they seen to be capable of damaging a vital organ within the body politic, but they also now hold the potential to infect the wider bodily terrain. The significance of this sovereign/biopolitical merger can be read in two ways. First, through this coming together, it is possible to detect a certain reprioritization of affairs in which the once familiar problem of the sovereign encounter can now be dealt with biopolitically. And second, given that the biopolitical is now tainted by the specter of terror, then the biopolitical becomes truly moralized in that the war to redeem savages is equally a war to expel evil.

MICHAEL HARDT: I find intriguing and very productive your translation of barbarian to terrorist and savage to insurgent, along with the correlate that, from the standpoint of the sovereign, the latter couple has the potential to be civilized or redeemed whereas the formal couple does not. It strikes me that what is at play here, in part, are two relations to the body. In the first years of the new millennium, at the inception of the “War on Terror,” I recognized in much of US military theorizing a fascinating doubling and inversion regarding the body of the terrorist and the body of the US soldier. On the one side stood the horrifying, barbaric figure of the terrorist, defined by not only its power to destroy others but also its acceptance of corporeal self-destruction, characterized paradigmatically by the absolute negation of the body in the act of suicide bombing. On the other side stood the body of the US soldier that, it was thought, could be kept at a safe distance from all danger by technological innovations and new military strategies associated with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Precise missiles, drone airplanes, and other devices could aid a military strategy aimed at no soldiers lost — at least, no US soldiers. So, I was interested in the way that these two figures — the barbaric body guaranteed destruction and the civilized body guaranteed preservation — arose at roughly the same time and seemed to be bound together in dialectical negation.

You are right that the insurgent body occupies an entirely different position. It does not threaten self-destruction or corporeal annihilation. The insurgent must be transformed through the mechanisms of biopower just as the savage must be redeemed and civilized. It is interesting, in fact, that at the same time (in the military and security discourses) there has been a shift from the barbaric terrorist to the savage insurgent, as you say, there has been a parallel move away from the dreams of bodiless military actions and the strategic principles of the RMA. Anti-insurgency biopower is aimed at the transformable body. This gives us another level, I suppose, to the relation between war, biopower, and liberalism that you were insisting on earlier.

BRAD EVANS: Exploring the relations you identify between war, biopower, and the transformable body is one of the most important critical tasks we face today, especially since these relations force us to directly confront the legitimacy of liberal interventionism. Military interventions can, of course, be rather easily assigned imperial ascriptions. The scene becomes more complicated, though, when we encounter humanitarian interventions, which tend to be presented in an altogether more benevolent light. And yet, if the history of civilizing missions teaches us anything, then surely war is taking place there, too, albeit on different terms. We can see this reflected today in the way violence is understood. Barbarian violence is always subject to the neat them/us, outside/inside, evil/good, unreasonable/reasonable marks of absolute differentiation. Theirs is a violence that by its very nature is always unjust. Savage violence, in contrast, is seen to be an internal problem that is subject to a progressive/regressive imaginary. It is the product of local conditions of underdevelopment. Hence, unlike barbarian violence, which offers no possibility to remedy the cause (aside from outright elimination), savage violence is marked out by modes of relative differentiation, in which the source of the problem can be identified and, with enough resource allocation, the causes of conflict alleviated. Clearly, each of these different problematizations has its own unique relationship to power. For instance, given that resistance/insurgent violence is the surest indicator of a local population’s capacities for their own (un)making, then it necessarily follows that more liberal engagement is required. What is needed is the ability to turn regressive violent economies into more productive and profitable local conditions of possibility. That people may be resisting liberal forms of biopower and its “wars by other means” (the “other” having a figurative as well as strategic use) is never entertained.

As you mentioned, something different is taking place here than with the RMA’s terms of engagement. Displacing the full spectrum spatial doctrine, which sought to dominate land, sea, air, and space, primacy now tends towards a life-centric full spectral doctrine which aims to capture the more complex terrain of hearts, minds, bodies, and souls (the latter referring not only to what a body is, but what a body is capable of becoming). Invariably, in order for such a war to be successful, it is necessary, as Colonel Rupert Smith argues in his book The Utility of Force, to wage “war among the people.” The concept of zero casualties thus becomes a misnomer, since warfare can no longer be fought at a distance; instead, military leadership relies upon the most intimate micro-specific knowledge — what the anthro-military establishments now term “mapping the human terrain.” Ironically, then, this more humane liberal approach does not translate into a lessening of the war effort in order to secure the global peace, pacifying all non-liberal elements; instead, war becomes a normalized biopolitical condition in which the attempted closure of geopolitical space merely proves to be an initial experiment at setting out the all-embracing political terrain. Importantly, within such terrains, not only does the inside/outside lose its strategic primacy, but the meaningful distinctions which once set out the citizen from the soldier also enter into a zone of indistinction. Everybody becomes part of the liberal war effort. I, therefore, agree with the claims you made in Multitude that “war has become a regime of biopower,” which is intimately aligned with the task of “producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.” Indeed, with global liberal rule shown to be shaped by a commitment to war (globally and locally), unending or permanent war become a very real condition.

So, as you suggest, the relations between war and the body provide us with another (perhaps the most incisive) opportunity to challenge that formidable school of liberal thought. Indeed, once we begin to recognize that the ultimate object for liberal war is the productive/transformable body, it then becomes possible to begin questioning the transcendental or divine principle which allows liberalism to draw out such an unreserved global will to rule.

I want to turn to a crucial aspect of your work in Empire. You single out Kant and Hegel for particular critical attention. While I share your anti-Hegelian sentiments (especially regarding the dialectical method’s suffocation of political difference), it is the intellectual heritage set by Kant that really troubles me. Zygmunt Bauman is correct to observe, in Society under Siege, that “These days, it is a hard task to find a learned study of our most recent history that would not quote Kant’s Universal History as a supreme authority and source of inspiration for all debate of world citizenship.” One could even go further to argue that if there is a modern “image of thought” (to invoke Deleuzian conceptual vocabulary), then it is a Kantian image of thought, which, as you have indicated, not only demands that one needs metaphysics in order to think, but also, given that the world is reduced to ideal forms of representation, it exorcises any possibility of immanent political and ethical relations.

Despite these problems, Kant’s notion of “perpetual peace” has become a sort of manifesto for liberal internationalists and cosmopolitan theorists who advocate a shift towards a bounded/inclusive humanity. Whilst this notion of a bounded humanity is itself enough cause for political concern — not least since certain politicians have now made it their task to begin speaking on behalf of an endangered humanity, a formidable power which serves to provide humanity with an authentic voice — what worries me here is the strategy of deception that is taking place. For even though Kantian-inspired liberals continue to use transcendental humanitarian notions of universality in order to justify their global ambitions, a more critical eye would note how humanity has always been misplaced in this script. Humanity has never been the unifying transcendental principle for liberal theorists and practitioners since humanity is always assumed to be flawed. Why else would you require the continuous juridical watch if not to keep an omnipresent eye on the pious subject? Indeed, as Kant himself taught, given that the negative lacuna of juridical power alone is insufficient to ensure that life does not side with the unreasonable, then something beyond juridical power is also required.

Kant takes up this challenge in his essay on perpetual peace. In a part of the essay that contemporary liberals tend to ignore, Kant notes how ending conflict depends upon setting in place the right economic system. Thus, invoking what he termed “the spirit of commerce” (a phrase which Agamben recently notes has obvious theological connotations), for Kant, the task of settling conflict by reaching the highest stage of political development also rests upon the productive power of economy — something which clearly represents more than mere economic transaction and exchange. What Kant implied with his positive cosmopolitan ethic can be said to appear today in its full theological and economizing glory. Existing above and beyond the law, the unifying driver for liberal practitioners is not the humanitarian principle but the pure regulatory principle governing this flawed humanity. What then constitutes the divine principle for liberal practitioners is not the divine endowment of a universal freedom of rights or individual reason but the regulative and productive economy of life itself. When Tony Blair therefore remarked, in a very Kantian way, that the wars of the 21st century are global wars for the very politics of life itself, he was revealing more about the contemporary nature of liberal power than is readily accepted. For today, not only is the nature of threat being extended to give priority to the wider political problem of globally insurgent populations, but since this is also matched by a broadening of the security agenda (which is increasingly drawing into the same strategic framework non-political accidents), the productive economy of liberalism now begins to appear in all its divine earthly light.

MICHAEL HARDT: It might be interesting to set the liberal paradigm you are challenging back in relation to Carl Schmitt since, in a way, the movement we are tracing in the nature of warfare in the last few years might be understood in terms of a shift from Schmitt to Kant or, really, from transcendent forms of power and domination to transcendental ones. For Schmitt, the political has the same form as warfare since both are defined by the friend-enemy distinction. That is why, he insists, there is no relation between the economic and the political: in the economic realm (or at least in the capitalist market), one has no enemies, only competitors. Similarly, for Schmitt, the sovereign decision stands outside the constitution and the legal realm. In the liberal paradigm you articulate and identify with Kant, however, these terms are all scrambled. Liberal war is no longer separated from but rather identified with both economic life and the legal sphere. This is where I find useful the Kantian distinction between the transcendent and the transcendental — used a bit against the grain. The ground for politics and war is not located in the transcendent position of the sovereign but rather in the transcendental position of capital and the law. These are the dominant forces today that primarily determine the conditions of possibility of social life. And, as you point out, this liberal configuration of politics and war is perhaps just as theological as the sovereign, transcendent one, focusing now on the constant action required to limit the negative effects of and govern a humanity characterized by its imperfections. This theological-political difference might even be understood as separating Schmitt’s Catholicism from Kant Protestantism.

Aside from the pleasures of mapping out such correspondences, what are the political and theoretical consequences of this analysis of the liberal war paradigm along with the claim that it has become dominant today? One important consequence, from my perspective, is that it poses a limit to the utility of understanding politics today in terms of sovereignty. For the last decade, the concept of sovereignty has played an important and expanding role in political theory and focused attention on transcendent forms of power that stand outside the social and legal constitution, ruling over states of exception. The sovereignty paradigm has even led many theorists to decry new forms of fascism. The George W. Bush administration and its “War on Terror” certainly did provide numerous “exceptional” instances — such as the functioning of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, the officially sanctioned use of torture, the establishment of extraordinary rendition programs, the widespread violation of international law, the passage of the Patriot Act, and so forth — that were read, under the rubric of sovereignty, as essential to the current political scene. The liberal war paradigm suggests instead that, although such exceptional acts of a sovereign power should be challenged and defeated, they are not the essence of the current political situation. (And, in my view, this has not altered fundamentally with the change of US administrations but has only become more obvious in the wake of the failures of the Bush regime.) One problem for political theory is that focus on such dramatic instances has generally diverted attention from the primary, transcendental pillars of domination and war today: law and capital, which function through “normal” rather than exceptional means. The continuous juridical watch to police humanity and guard against the effects of its imperfections that you mention is matched by the naturalized social divisions and hierarchies constantly reproduced by capital. And the argument goes one step further to claim that, at times, war is necessary to maintain this liberal order, but the form, rationale, and ideology of such war rests on the values of the transcendental realms of economy and law.

Another consequence of this shift from a sovereignty paradigm to a liberal war paradigm has to do with the nature of resistance and alternative that each implies. Whereas critiques of and resistance to transcendent, sovereign forms of power do not generally nurture alternative powers, critiques of and resistance to the liberal paradigm do uncover powerful alternative subjectivities. The critique of capitalist political economy can reveal not only the exploitation but also the power of social labor. Capital, as Marx and Engels say, creates its own gravediggers as well as the subjectivities capable of creating an alternative social order. The critique of the liberal legal order, too, can bring forth powerful subjects of rights. The resistance to and critique of sovereignty, in contrast, offers nothing to affirm. In Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework, for example, what stands opposed to sovereign power is bare life. And the numerous recent analyses of various states of exception and new fascisms have generally merely combined moral outrage with political resignation. Perhaps equally important, then, to the ability of the liberal war paradigm to identify how power and domination primarily function today is the kind of subjectivity generated by the critique of and resistance to it. Recognizing liberal war as our primary antagonist can be an extraordinarily generative position.

Originally published in somewhat different form in Theory & Event.