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The Right to Breathe

Revolt is breaking out all over the world. It flares up, it peters out, then it continues its spread once more. It crosses borders, it rocks nations, it agitates continents. A glance at the map of its sudden outbreaks and countless eruptions reveals its intermittent advance across the bumpy political landscape of the new century. Its vast scale is matched only by its intensity. Its topography outlines a landscape in which confrontation turns to opposition, discord and open struggle. Protests spread, acts of disobedience multiply, and clashes intensify. This is the time of revolt.

The blaze of revolt may seem short-lived, the event fleeting. But revolt ought not to be considered merely ephemeral. Through all its surges and retreats, it comprises a global phenomenon, and one which promises to endure. Not even the pandemic has been able to put out the flames. At a moment when many were already reflecting on the disappearance of the pólis and the loss of public space, revolt resurfaced, overwhelming and uncontainable. It surged forth from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, from Rio de Janeiro to Beirut, and from London to Bangkok.

The fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis. George Floyd’s final words, spoken as his executioner continued to suffocate him – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become emblematic. The importance of these words is no accident but owes to a coincidence revealed by the secret synchronism of history. George Floyd’s terrible death was the result not of the virus stopping him from breathing but, rather, the work of a racist tyranny perpetrated through police techniques.

Suddenly, the right to breathe appeared in all its existential and political significance. ‘I can’t breathe’ rose up as the battle-hymn of revolt – both an accusation against the abuse of power and a denunciation of that asphyxiating system which steals the breath away.¹ In capital’s compulsive vortex – that catastrophic spiral that has turned the right to breathe into a privilege for the few – what comes to the fore is breathlessness of the exploited, those who have to submit to an accelerated, relentless rhythm, the most vulnerable, confined to an oppressive, anxious scarcity. ‘I can’t breathe’ has thus become the slogan that claims the right to breathe – the political right to exist.

But the killing of George Floyd is one of a long series of abuses that the forces of order have perpetrated using similar methods – often termed the ‘excessive use of force’. One commonplace notion holds that the police legitimately resort to violence in response to some other, prior violence. On this reading, as the police impose control, as they seek to pacify things, it is inevitable that a misstep will be made, that excesses will occur. Any resulting discrimination thus appears as an unavoidable anomaly, the malfunctioning of an otherwise correct system built on equality. But is this really the case? Or is the malfunction itself systematic – providing a glimpse of the fundamental workings of an inscrutable institution?

Abuses by police arouse such boundless indignation because they appear not as mere accidents but, rather, as revelatory acts – the tip of the iceberg for a whole system of violence built on discrimination. On the one hand there are blacks, and on the other whites; on the one hand the poor, and on the other the rich; and so on. So, these abuses are no mere anomalous application of the rules but the functioning of a mechanism that defines the political order. The police draw boundaries, choose, discriminate, allow some into the centre and push others back to the margins. For this reason, there is something rather misleading about an economistic reading that sees the police’s job only as a matter of normalization for the sake of increasing the wealth of the few.² Rather, the question of policing is part of the economy of public space. For this is where the right to belong and to appear is determined: who is allowed access, to circulate freely, to feel at home, and who is profiled, intimidated, chased into zones of invisibility, if not even jailed? There can be no denying the police’s segregationist use of power. This is a means of more or less brutally consolidating the supremacy of some – but isn’t this itself racism, state xenophobia? – and sharpening differences, which it makes plain for all to see.

This is not to say that the police are illegal. Rather, they are authorized by law to carry out extra-legal functions. They do not stop at administering the law but constantly re-establish its boundaries. Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘ignominious’ aspect of the police as an institution, situated in the ambiguous sphere where all distinction between the violence that founds the law and the violence that maintains it disappears.³ This ambivalence also helps to explain the police’s juridical extraterritoriality, which makes them an exceptional case even within the logic of institutional power. In short, the police monopolize the interpretation of violence, for they redefine the norms of their own actions and, appealing to ‘security’, increase their grip over individuals’ lives. Their violent sovereignty is as slippery as it is spectral.

For this reason, instances of police violence are no mere anomalies but reveal this institution’s dark, opaque foundations. These outrages are like snapshots which capture the police as they conquer space, take power over bodies, examine and experiment with a new form of legality, as they redefine the limits of the possible. If these scenes are the cause of such indignation, if they seem so ‘ignominious’, it is because they are the sign of an authoritarian power, the proof of the undeniable existence of a police state within the state of law (Rechtsstaat).

In this light, just as these acts of violence reveal the true essence of the police, they also shed light on the architecture of a politics which captures and banishes, includes and excludes. This is an architecture in which discrimination is always already latent. Suddenly we can see the borders of immunodemocracy, where the defence reserved for some – the guaranteed, the protected, those who cannot be touched – is denied to the others, the rejects, the exposed, reduced to superfluous, unwelcome bodies who can ultimately be got rid of. Coronavirus has made the immuniz­ation of the people within these borders even more exclusive and the exposure of those on the outside even more implacable. The police make this immunopolitics visible in the public space.

The revolt is no accidental response. It would be mistaken to consider it a simple explosion of anger, a directionless reaction against the incumbent suffocation. The scenes that have repeatedly played out in streets and squares, even despite the pandemic, are a direct response to the police’s actions – they are a way of taking back the square, restoring the presence of the excluded, and defending the rights of the undesirables.

The close connection between revolt and public space thus again becomes apparent. We find further confirmation of this in the protests that have targeted statues, especially in US cities. Some vilify these protests as iconoclastic riots; and yet, when we look at them more closely, we see that they express the need not only to reoccupy the urban landscape but also to rearticulate its memory. The struggle projects itself onto a past celebrated in monuments to Confederate generals, slave traders, genocidal kings, architects of white supremacy, and propagandists for fascist colonialism. Why go on living in this suffocating atmosphere, surrounded by these statues? If it is wrong to erase the past, it is no less of an error to reify it. Faced with the honours and glory conferred on butchers and oppressors, asserting the perspective of the conquered is an urgent necessity. This gives rise to a clash over rights and memory.

The pandemic has intensified a process that was already under way. It has aggravated an already latent discord between the disciplining of bodies, the militarization of public space, and struggles that express dissent, contradict existing divisions, and undermine the architecture of order. The preventative policing of relations is a regulated ‘shielding’ measure that culminates in the abolition of contact with the other, who is taken for a possible enemy and source of contagion. This police measure is always already the norm, the marker of immunodemocracy. Thus, the danger of the vibrant, uncontrollable mass, the hazard of the open community, and the spectre of revolt are all kept at bay.

The public space has long been disciplined and controlled. The right to demonstrate can no longer be taken for granted; today, marches, rallies and sit-ins require authorization. If the new revolts are ever more nomadic and transitory, it is no accident that they have taken to any number of sites far beyond the city squares, from the open sea to cross-border spaces and even the decentralized web. Hence the recourse to creative acts and unprecedented means of action. And hence their capacity to reinterpret even biosecurity measures such as antibacterial masks, which are now employed as an outward display of invisibility and openly declared anonymity. The political use of masks sublimates their use as a tool of immunity.

It is, therefore, worth asking whether a politics outside this regimented and surveilled public space is possible. It had become difficult to act in this space even before it was occupied by the sovereign virus. To answer this question, we ought to reconsider the mechanism of public space and turn our gaze to the anarchist extra-politics which is preparing itself through the new revolts.

Notes

1  1 See Donatella Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2021.

2  2 Even Foucault tended towards such a view. See Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason” [1979]’, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3. New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 298–325.

3  3 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Selected Writings, Vol. I: 1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 236–52.