The biopolitics of the war on terror

About this book

"The war against terror is widely represented as a conflict in which societies tasked with achieving security for human life are imperilled by an enemy dedicated to destroying the conditions for the flourishing of human life. Not simply an enemy that is motivated against the interests of common humanity, but an enemy which, in being so driven, resorts to subhuman tactics, and which therefore requires, paradoxically, a less than human response in defence of the integrity of human life." "Against such understandings, this book demonstrates why this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life, but a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being outright rejected. The future of humanity is indeed at stake in this conflict, but only in the sense that its resolution depends now on our abilities to exceed the horizons of existing understandings of what defines human life and its political potentialities. Building on the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Negri, this book examines the possibilities for such a movement. What forms might life take, it asks, when liberal understandings of humanity are no longer understood as horizons to strive for, but impositions against which life must struggle in order to restore its integrity? What forms does life assume when war against liberal regimes becomes the determinate condition of its possibility? Answers to such questions are pressing, this book argues, if we earnestly desire an escape from the current impasses of a war on terror."--BOOK JACKET.