The Weinstein and Westminster Scandals Should Make us Reflect on the Connection Between Power and Sexual Violence (2022 Redux)

 

2022 Introduction:

Not the snappiest of titles. This is the third in a series of "redux" posts republishing material which originally appeared on the Spectre-Online zine. This one from 2017 responds to the series of sexual abuse scandals, which in that darkest of years were seemingly ever-present in the news. What this essay argues for is a sort of political ontology of abuse, which tracks mass instances of sexual violence to institutional and cultural arrangements where relations of domination are prevalent. I begin with the news stories around Harvey Weinstein and other recent sexual abuse scandals before jumping to the historical example of slavery and the long shadow that institution casts over our understanding of domination and systemic violence. Then, in a form of argument one could call the Great in the Small I try to show how our commonplace thinking  about slavery (and by implication freedom too) masks what would be a more profound understanding of how power and domination function in the era of global governance.

Giorgio Agamben's writing on the significance of economy (the Oikos or household government) becoming the principle form of Western power, guides much of this analysis, as does my reading of nominally less radical thinkers like Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. The latter's concept of Neo-Roman freedom (or freedom as non-domination), which builds from an analysis of liberty and slavery in the ancient world, is I think a very useful one. At the time I was reading their work alongside the later Foucault, with all its fascinating takes on the government of self and others in Greco-Roman culture. But alongside the minutiae of Greek political education or Roman household management I was also - and still am - trying to think about these problems of social and political ontology from the perspective of globalised humanity.

The term one-world governance (not government!) is one I began using around this time. There is something of the provocation in it, insofar as it bears more than a passing resemblance to a common trope in conspiracy theories. The point of using it is to make a claim for a kind of negative universality, where the pure relation of domination (between parent and child) is potentially generalised by the total depoliticisation and economisation of humanity. That's the apocalyptic bit. What we are increasingly witnessing now as that system of governance  continues its collapse, is the full actualisation of the global civil war which has been gnawing at the margins of our world for decades. What will become of the eternal problem of domination and violence in human life when the institutions of the West ,which have now lost all legitimacy, collapse into the void which they have created?

 

(2017 text)

1). What started in October with the rapid fall of a once untouchable movie mogul has grown in the intervening weeks into a full blown crisis for institutions across Britain and the US. The British Prime minister has had to hastily convene cross party meetings and cobble together a semblance of an HR system at Westminster after a series of accusations against MPs and ministers from both sides of the house. Her defence secretary has had to resign after revelations of inappropriate advances toward journalists and lewd comments to one of his own female MPs. Her first secretary of state is also under investigation. While in the US, allegations against Harvey Weinstein ranging from aggressive propositioning to rape continue to accumulate.

The actress and producer Brit Marling wrote a powerful account in The Atlantic of her experiences with the mogul: "I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me"? The scandal across the pond has now claimed the career of Kevin Spacey and has expanded to encompass predictable questioning over the peculiarities of the film industry; its glamour, its shallowness, its obsession with young female flesh, often paired with less than youthful male co-stars. The same form of questioning was heard after the abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile was exposed in the UK, and has often been raised regarding the abuse carried out by religious institutions and care homes like Haut de la Garenne.

Given the breadth of institutions involved,  terms like sleaze or sex scandals that have in the past been used to refer to such revelations hardly seem appropriate. It's also worth remembering that this is only the latest salvo in the now permanent crisis of British institutions embroiled in accusations of systematic sexual abuse and cover-ups. The expression 'Sexual Abuse Scandal 'might as well be built in as an autofill for newspaper headline writers. And yet despite the near ubiquity of abuse revelations on the contemporary social landscape little is done to try and draw the commonalities together. We walk dumbfounded from one crisis another, each time raising up the same sense of shock and surprise. Perhaps the subject is just too large, and the issue of sexual violence too ingrained in the dark corners of human societies to be worth treating at a general level.

Certainly it seems that way in the case of the UK government's unwieldy public enquiry into historic sexual abuse allegations, which has had a turnover of leadership comparable to many Premier League football clubs. Framed in the way it has been, there is something almost inevitably self-defeating about its scope. How can an enquiry, which in its range and manpower becomes an institution in its own right, be able to investigate, appraise and recommend remedy for abuses committed in seemingly every type of institution in the land? Since the scandals in Westminster and Hollywood have predominantly involved the abuse of adult women the focus has understandably been on the issue of sexism and misogyny; just as in the case of Savile and child abuse in the Church the focus has been on paedophilia. I wonder though if there's not a more general way of capturing an important aspect of all these cases from Weinstein to Westminster, from the Catholic Church to care homes. Why not talk about relations of domination and their direct link with sexual abuse?

2). Our understanding of domination is strongly conditioned by the historical legacy of slavery. A dominated person is someone in chains, forced to work under threat of death. Their status is that of property, owned by a master and disposed of as they see fit. Slavery is also a complex institution requiring the collaboration and complicity of wide sections of the society in which it exists. Its eventual abolition across much of the developed world in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to multiple factors, only a few of which involved what we might now call "changes in attitudes". Since we tend to associate relations of domination with historical slavery and its outward appearance it has taken a long time for the issue of modern slavery to be taken seriously. Only in 2015 did the UK bring in the Modern Slavery Act which while being a step in the right direction of recognising modern relations of domination, in practice merely reiterates the common understanding of domination as "servitude and forced labour". It does little to break down precisely what constitutes a basic condition of servitude.  I'm bringing up slavery as it represents the most extreme example of a relation of domination. However unless we have an account of precisely what a relation of domination actually is in itself we won't be able to recognise less extreme forms, which I suggest are much more prevalent.

The Canadian philosopher Philip Pettit, drawing on the ancient (specifically Roman) understanding of domination cited three criteria for a person to be in such a relation. A person dominates another if:

-They have the capacity to interfere.

-On an arbitrary basis.

-In certain choices that the other is in a position to make.

This is a useful albeit somewhat formal definition, not least as it doesn't depend on the slave/freeman distinction. It also emphasises that it is the capacity to interfere, not actually occurring interference that is the dominating condition. By this account a person could be in a relation of domination relative to one person or group but not to another, and perhaps only within a particular field of choices. Think about Weinstein and Brit Marling again. As an aspiring actress and screenwriter her field of possibility crossed over with his field of influence. Relative to her he was "...this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me". The language here is not an accident. The power to anoint or destroy, to bind or loose, is symbolic of power at its most dominating. Think too about the power Jimmy Savile held over the children he abused and to an extent over the staff at the BBC, who, relative to him - the big star - were mere flunkies.

Another element of dominating relations which Pettit discusses is the absence of contestation. Put broadly, contestation is the ability of a person to find redress for an abuse, either through the courts, or through extra-legal means such as disciplinary proceedings or even local forms of community or family resolution. The capacity for contestation is a brake on the ability of the master to do what he wants with impunity (his arbitrium in the Latin understanding). Absence of contestation is a major contributing factor to the ability of a person to interfere with another on an arbitrary basis. There is after all nothing to stop them. Even in the presence of nominal procedures for redress, the ability of a person to challenge abusive behaviour can be thwarted by prejudice, the reluctance of others to assist owing to the influence of the perpetrator, or structural reasons which shield powerful people from the consequences of their actions.

These facts serve to remind us that relations of domination do not exist in isolation. Like the historical institution of slavery they require the active collaboration and complicity of a host of others. Think about how many people turned a blind eye to the behaviour of Weinstein. Think about the cover-ups and the advice given to women not to pursue complaints against high value stars and officials, or of the care home staff and police who refused to the believe the testimony of victims. And think also of the capacity rich and powerful people have to pay off complainants, to keep their abuse out of the public domain. Where money and influence are involved the network of power extends to the potential legal repercussions against those who speak out. And in a world where the media walk in step with politicians and the superrich, the threat of having one's life torn apart by their attack dogs is all too real.

There are often too many parties interested in seeing the structures of power which allow sexual abuse to remain undisturbed. For instance, to question how Savile was able to operate with impunity is to question the nature of celebrity and the role a monolithic institution like the BBC or Fox News (which has also been mired in scandal) has in raising them up. To question the power of politicians to abuse their staff similarly puts the whole form of parliamentary power under the microscope. At least it should, if the journalists involved were not also polluted by the same toxic material. A few individuals might quickly be made example of, if only to appease the sense of outrage and give the establishment time to reorientate itself; to put in more procedures and ensure the machine keeps on turning. Risk management, not justice, is the order of the day.

          3). The Romans had two ways of conceiving relations of domination. Where the power in question related to public power, such as the State or its institutions, they used the term Imperium, from which we receive the words empire and emperor. Where the power in question was private such as the family, or in the modern world a private corporation, the term used would be dominium, which relates to the domus, the home and consequently to notions of household management and property. It is the latter term from which we get our modern lexical understanding of slavery as related to private ownership and property rights more generally. This is not the place to elaborate on the complex genealogy of these concepts and how they have impacted on modern Law and our experience of power in social life. What seems clear, however, is that in the contemporary era the distinction between private and public power seems less and less tenable. The state and the non-state are no longer divided down lines which would be recognisable even to people living a century ago. The influence of transnational forms of governance such as the EU, IMF, the World Bank and huge communications and media corporations like Google, Facebook and News International threatens the centrality of the nation state as the key operator in political life.

           Another problem is that liberalism has tended to focus on the threat of state interference (imperium) at the expense of seeing how private domination, particularly that of large corporations has grown exponentially in the post-war era, given impetus by the developments in communications technologies and the internet. The global dominance of economy in human affairs means that one single form of governance, originating in notions of household management (combining the Roman domus with the Greek oikos) now holds sway. No longer does the State attempt to hold back the violence of the market, and no longer is private economy a bulwark against interference by the State. Under global capitalism State and market, public and private, operate as two elements of the same power. More and more of us today are subject to dominating relations produced by this total global economy, which sees everything and everyone in terms of measurable, calculable units.

Slavery, the most extreme form of domination has since the beginning been associated with sexual violence. It flows directly from the status of a person as the property of another to be enjoyed as they see fit. Sexual violence was routinely deployed against slaves of both sexes by colonialists in the Caribbean and slave owners in the United States. In the ancient world the master's sexual use of his slaves was a natural consequence of their thing-like status. Where restrictions on the sexual abuse of dominated persons have historically existed they have tended to take the form of appeals to the moral character of the master rather than the humanity of the victim. Codes of chivalry, notions of nobility or virtu, religious commitments and other such regimes have often been the sole restraint to unfettered rapine in peacetime as much as war.

In the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, a compendium of dream interpretations written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, it is considered a positive portent if the master dreams of sexually using his slaves, since it shows him deriving satisfaction from his property. Wherever relations of domination exist we find sexual violence, not because the absence of restraint allows pre-existing violent desires to go unchecked, but because such relations in themselves produce that violence. In a condition of domination my will is absent, completely or partially consumed by the other. What I want or don't want is irrelevant.  As Brit Marling wrote: "Consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it". Dominating power by contrast, whether by an individual, a bureaucracy or a State, is ultimately domination over the ability to refuse, to say no. Under domination one cannot refuse to comply. And under such conditions my body and person are available for use by the one who wields power.

                It's clear that the position of Brit Marling and of Westminster staffers, or even the victims of Savile was not that of slaves, but they were within relations of domination to varying degrees; limited, but enough to allow abuse to occur under certain circumstances. If this is the case we should then acknowledge that domination exists on a spectrum that correlates with an increased risk of abuse.  The thing-like quality of a person tracks with perfect symmetry this spectrum of relations of domination. The more dominated a person is - the more thing-like they become - the more their body is rendered as something for the master to take pleasure from as they desire. Sexual possession of the dominated body is not a pathology external to power, it is its most visceral sign. In an era when the household, the domus, the oikos, has become the model for globalised humanity, it is worth remembering that it is in the house that we find the most common and most acute relation of domination; that between parent and child. And it is also worthwhile remembering that of all human institutions it is within the household that most sexual violence takes place. Only in a return to politics, in opposition to globally triumphant neoliberalism, might humanity start to take the problem of domination in wider society seriously again; to see in every accumulation of power the real possibility of violence and to cut it off at the root, before the victims pile up.

New Year Musings 2: The Agamben Controversy and the Abolition of Death

 

"When thought and language are divided, we believe that we can speak while forgetting we are speaking. Poetry and philosophy, when they speak, do not forget that they are speaking, they remember language. If we remember language, if we do not forget that we can speak, then we become more free, we are not bound to things and rules. Language is not a tool, it is our face, the openness in which we are". (Giorgio Agamben - Quando la casa brucia (When the House is Burning))

XT - People who have been caught on the wrong side of the distinction between conspiracy and critical thought have paid a price. Giorgio Agamben has written more about the deep history and implications of emergency situations than most, yet the reaction to his numerous interventions on the pandemic have been to treat them as the ravings of a madman or conspiracy theorist.

TX - Isn't there always a danger for philosophers when they, so to speak, take up the role of activist for public thought? I note that Slavoj Zizek managed to publish a short book on the pandemic during the Spring. Isn't it a cliché that the work of thought only really gets going after the event? This has a certain tragic quality to it, one that many thinkers have nevertheless tried to overcome. Is not every philosophical intervention into the white heat of history bound to fail?

XT - The first thing to say is that nothing in Agamben's numerous interventions presented on the website of his Italian publisher Quodlibet depart from the extensive researches in his Homo Sacer series or elsewhere. That is what immediately struck me about the reaction, how it appeared almost like a betrayal; as if for some on the Left it's fine to make these claims about ancient history, or the Second World War, or even the United States during the Bush/Cheney administration, but to invite us here and now to recognise ourselves as subject to a potentially totalitarian regime, taking advantage of an emergency situation, that is too much! Apparently the entire literature on biopolitics and power built up over the past four decades amounts to nought once the crisis really strikes. I feel a lot of people have been caught out as lacking the intellectual and moral calibre to face this crisis.

TX - This is where the danger is, when you intervene at a point when the stakes are so high, and without recourse to the arsenal of researches and the defensive walls of citation. Popular writing cannot afford to demand too much from the public, as patronising as that may sound.

XT - Agamben's early interventions did not contain much theory, and I'll concede that their language could easily be misconstrued as denial of the seriousness of the situation. The first was after all provocatively titled "The invention of an epidemic" and referred to the response in Italy as frenetiche, irrazionali e del tutto immotivate misure di emergenza (frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures). But in his "clarifications" issued in March he identifies his object more clearly. "The problem is not to give opinions on the gravity of the disease, but to ask about the ethical and political consequences of the epidemic". A key question he raised was "what is a society that has no value other than survival?". No other value apart from survival amounts to only valuing bare biological life. This is the perspective that I drew on in my writing during April, touching on the famous frontispiece of Hobbes Leviathan which as Agamben has pointed out depicts an empty city over which the giant figure of Leviathan towers. The only human figures visible in the city are soldiers and what Agamben claims are plague doctors. Thus this canonical image of Western politics pre-figured the very real situation in cities around the globe during the early months of the pandemic. It also struck me that the way society was being mobilised, or rather demobilised, reflected some of Ernst Jünger's writing on modern warfare and what he termed "total mobilisation".

TX - The object of political calculation here is thus life, or life force, would that be better? Life is split into that part which gives force to the war effort and that which is expendable, i.e. the social life of the population. Everything becomes focussed on mere survival, survival of the organism, not of the form-of-life particular to human beings. It is then also worth remembering that the body politic and the individual bodies of the citizenry are not one and the same (this is another Hobbesian point). The State in wartime is gilded by a glorious logic of sacrifice, meaning the sacrifice of individuals to ensure the survival of the State.

XT - Yes, and that point has been absolutely borne out over the course of the pandemic. Everything is expendable apart from bare life, "productive" life, termite life. But even so, bare life can also be expended if the survival of the State requires it. Governments around the world have executed the pandemic response according to a logic of national security which is utterly caustic to the very thing in which name they are supposed to be acting, the democratic society of values and forms-of-life. Agamben recognised that the rationality of total mobilisation and the Security State, which we should remember has been with us for many years now in the post 9/11 world, takes on an even darker form in the case of a pandemic. He notes in one of his interventions that in Homer polemos epidemios is the term for civil war. It's an apt point since in what other way could we construe a national security response to an enemy that could be harbouring inside any person than as a kind of civil war?

TX - In Hobbes, the state of civil conflict is the commonwealth dissolved, is it not? Our obligations to the State are contingent on the sovereign power securing our safety and common defence. When that fails the State fails. It's hard to deny that despite all we've been through this year the virus is still rampant and people are getting fatigued with the government response. Does this hint at some hope?

XT - If we reject the form of social transformation assumed by the obstetric motif, which claims the seeds of a better future are cultivated in the conditions of the present, then some kind of general conflagration and collapse would appear necessary. I'm not sure I would want to call that hope, and sincerely I find hope to be a hindrance in considering the possibilities of a radical renewal of our species. Hope also binds people to the present arrangement of things, since hope in a practical sense is always hope in something. It might be more honest to concede that there is hope, just not for us.

"Not awaiting either a new god or a new man, we should seek, here and now, and in the ruins that surround us, a humble, simpler form of life — one that isn’t a mirage, because we have memory and experience of it, even if adverse forces within us and outside us repel it in forgetfulness". (Giorgio Agamben - Sul tempo che viene (The Times Ahead))

TX - Agamben's later publications on the pandemic have taken a starkly defeatist turn, a sense of tragedy run through them. Even his considerations on something such as face coverings take on a metaphysical quality. This is perhaps understandable for a thinker who has written on the face from a distinctly Levinasian position. This is the face as the call to ethics, as the seat of both singularity and the possibility of community; "The epiphany of the face is ethical". Epiphany means manifestation which derives from the Latin manifestare, to make public. Having a public face is the possibility of belonging to a community.

XT - That makes it very clear. Agamben's criticism of face coverings  is not from some silly US style libertarian position, but from the fear it will accelerate the dissolution of community. The references he made to biosecurity as a new political rationality also address this fear. He wrote in May that "advantage will be taken of this distancing to replace human relationships in their physicality, relations which have become suspect as sources of contagion (meaning political contagion, of course) with digital technological devices everywhere. University lectures, as the MIUR [the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research] has already recommended, will be stably online from next year on, we will no longer recognise each other by looking at each other’s face, which can be covered by a health mask, but through digital apparatuses that will recognise biological data that is compulsorily collected and any “gathering”, whether for political reasons or simply for reasons of friendship, will continue to be prohibited".

TX - Agamben's style always contains some degree of hyperbole, nevertheless is this not a little extreme? Where is the consideration of political economy for instance. No-one can deny that the pandemic response has been hugely damaging to Capital, and even if that was necessary to govern the emergency and secure the legitimacy of the ruling power, it can't surely go on forever?

XT - It is hyperbolic, but the basic points I think will be proved correct. Social distancing creates gaps between people, gaps which can be filled with digital technologies that will monetise what would otherwise have been physical personal relations. There is a huge amount of money to be made by capturing human interactions within a digital web. Advertising revenue for platforms and also all the opportunities afforded through data harvesting, not least opportunities to manipulate public opinion. This doesn't necessarily entail legislation or police enforcement, only the removal of certain opportunities and increasing the costs of others. Nudge economics is the predominant disciplinary apparatus of our time.  Also it's become clear that some kind of health passport will be needed to participate in society after the pandemic. This will remove the protections against sharing of health data and will ultimately lead to the empowering of insurance companies to grade individuals according to their health prospects, potentially leaving some "genetically compromised" people without access to certain services or life insurance. A sign of what's to come can be seen in Singapore where the government there has collaborated with Apple to produce an app called LumiHealth, a personalized program to encourage healthy activity and behaviours. One doesn't need to have a dystopian imagination to see how such technologies can be used by states and corporations for nefarious means, and at the very least such partnerships instantiate what I've called "one-world governance" which sees the distinction between public and private, government and industry break down. Big data is the area where this is occurring with greatest intensity.

TX - This concept of biosecurity needs more theoretical work in order to distinguish it from previous iterations of a similar kind, but it seems clear that the foundations for it were already here in the margins of other public policy strategies, notably national security, and disaster preparedness. There is a large body of literature on the confluence of different strategies and rationalities in these domains and how they have come together in response to real world events. The work of Andrew Lakoff, Carlo Caduff and Lee Clarke has been really useful in helping understand how the concept of biosecurity has been formed and migrated from infra-politics to the central domain of governance over the last 30 years or so. I note how the practice of risk analysis and worst cases has been central to the pandemic response world-wide, and how these approaches to knowledge were gestated in areas such as environmental protection, where they have generally been a success.

XT - Generalisation, that's a big part of the problem, where these technical approaches are used indiscriminately without taking account of other values, or indeed any values at all. The core tenet of technocratic governance is that it can rule without the need for values, and certainly without democratic contestation between values. It is a thoroughly anti-political project which drastically reduces the possibility of living according to a form-of-life. That for me is the big fear, and I share Giorgio Agamben's bleak assessment of the future. A society governed under a permanent state of emergency according to a risk assessed and health obsessed idea of humanity cannot be anything else but an ant hill. 

"Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organised around work and production, that tries to increase human capital by biopolitical means. That utopia is anarchist insofar as it represents a radical break with a form of life that declares pure life, continued existence, sacred. Suicide is the most radical rejection imaginable of the society of production". (Byung-Chul Han - The Disappearance of Rituals)

XT - Anselm Keifer's exhibition Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey was the standout art show of the year for me, not that I saw too many thanks to our mutual friend Rona. The vastness of those canvasses, the depth and creativity of the composition, it was really breathtaking. It was also undeniably dark, a darkness which in hindsight now appears prophetic. All of those huge canvasses depicting barren landscapes, seemingly bombed out, decimated by some unseen power, and then the connection the artist makes between runic language and modern string theory; all this implies a cosmic scope. One picture which really stood out for me was Die Lebenden und die Toten. It depicts the curved forms of what is clearly meant to be a parliament chamber set into a charred landscape. It even seems like the building itself is on fire, with plumes of black smoke billowing out of its centre. The viewpoint is from a distance, as if we the viewer have approached from over a ridge to be confronted with this scene of devastation. It's monumental in scale, 470 x 560 cm according to the catalogue which notes the image is suggestive of "panoptic power structures" in reference to Michel Foucault's work on early modern disciplinary power and Bentham's prison design.

TX - Perhaps then we should read the fact that the parliament, this place of law making, is on fire as reflecting Foucault's claim that in biopolitics there is an increasing weight placed on the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical power of Law. The Law here is made superfluous, it reigns over an empty landscape. I suppose it could also point symbolically to the overthrow of democratic law making, the coming of dictatorship or something like Cicero's famous remark silent enim lēgēs inter arma (In war the Law is silent). As you say the backdrop appears like a scene of devastation, like those photographs of No Mans Land on the Western front during the Great War.

XT - The wartime analogy would certainly be prophetic wouldn't it, considering where we are now. What has happened to legislatures the world over in response to the coronavirus pandemic? Are they not also burning, though we can't actually see it? Has it not been the case that rule by emergency powers and by ministerial decree has been the style in which this crisis has been governed?

TX - Burning is a rather forceful image, suggesting more than just a temporary state of affairs. And the destruction of the surroundings signifies that the war does not go well. Unless this was an act of arson. Did we burn the land and the parliament? Was there no-one else involved? No external enemy to blame for this outrage? What then might be the significance of the title Die Lebenden und die Toten (The Living and the Dead)?

XT - The Ius gladii, the supreme power, is the right over life and death, the right to absolve or condemn, but not a right over the dead themselves. Laws are made by the living for the sake of the living. If the parliament is destroyed then it's not a question of Law in the sense of the Rule of Law. We are looking at a destructive premonition  of anti-politics, a world governed according to technocratic management and algorithms. The fact that the landscape looks like a WW1 battlefield isn't a coincidence. It was during that conflict that destructive technology, technology created solely for the purpose of delivering mass death appeared. Machine guns, tanks, fighter aircraft, chemical weapons, long range artillery; the mechanised slaughter of the Great War was the death knell of the old world of bourgeois values. Destructive technology meant mass death, anonymous death, death as a statistic, as an unmarked grave. We don't see any bodies scattered across the scorched earth in Keifer's pictures. It's as if the technologies of mass killing have erased all trace of the corpses which would bear witness to the fact that it is individual persons who die, with names and faces, not mere termite life.

TX - Technologically dominated anti-politics means not only the potential for anonymous mass slaughter in war but what?...the abolition of death itself?, the erasure of the distinction between the living and the dead into one impersonal calculation?

XT - For me that is what the picture ultimately points to and which only really came into stark relief months later. The pandemic really has highlighted how adrift we are, both collectively and individually in terms of our relationship to death. We seem only able to consider our finitude from a technocratic, statistical perspective, which is to say a non-political perspective. There was a headline on the Guardian website around mid-November which said the death rate in the UK was the highest it had been in ten years. That's 2010, not 1910. I don't recall much campaigning in 2010 about our unacceptably high death rate. And besides, what is an acceptable death rate? Which deaths are considered avoidable and which are not? Is only immortality acceptable? Are not all those additional deaths caused by the shutdown of routine medical treatments, cancer screening  and cardiac care this year also avoidable? Where is the official mourning for them, who had the bad luck to get ill this year rather than last?

TN - The State maintains a monopoly over which lives are considered grievable. The history of modern warfare and in particular the War on Terror shows us that. Fallen Western soldiers are the glorious dead, whereas whole communities obliterated in the Middle East by missiles fired from a safe distance are just nameless "collateral".

XT - Indeed, and where are the worst-case predictions and badly labelled graphs for excess suicides during the current pandemic? Isn't it odd that in the presence of a pathogen for which there is no cure the media establishment carries on as if any additional deaths from coronavirus are a surprise. The very fact of death is a kind of scandal, the recording of which is perfunctory. Death is the nearest thing to us and yet we could not be more alienated from it. The "mortal" was one way in which the ancient Greeks understood the essential quality of human existence. Martin Heidegger wrote in 1939 that "Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either". Reducing the person to a mute statistic robs them of their death. All of this is a familiar theme of modernity. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of death as like the core of a fruit which every person carries with them. He laments the alienation of death in modernity which "hangs green, devoid of sweetness". Sweet death is a death in dignity, in silent pride; which is not the same thing as being rendered mute by being reduced to data. Such a lofty idea is completely absent from the image of anti-political, technological death, which is increasingly defined according to our ability to suspend or defer it. Death is considered a failure, a breakdown of productive capacity. At the extreme end of this logic is the non-death of mechanised slaughter in the concentration camps and modern asymmetric warfare; the fabrication of corpses.

TN - A society founded only on maximising production and optimising performance, governed according to the logic of big data and algorithms is one in which it is not only impossible to live according to a form-of-life but increasingly impossible to have a death. That is the darkest horizon towards which biosecurity points?

XT - I believe so. That being said it's important to note that in thinking about these things we are abstracting towards ideal forms, logics and political technologies, based on what can be observed and thought in the present. None of this is written in stone and with the coming storm of climate change and other social and economic pressures it's likely that history will have a few surprises for us and those who presume to govern us towards catastrophe.

TX - That sounds almost optimistic.

XT - I wouldn't go that far. But, human life takes the form of history in which contingency and potentiality can never be extinguished. Sometimes -and try not to laugh at me here - good things happen! I like Francis Bacon's description of his attitude towards the fate of our species, exhilarated despair.

TX - Can we have a slogan for this attitude? Something to paint on the external walls of our burning homes?

XT - Why not! How about Reject Fear. Cultivate Love. Embrace Death.