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Published in:
2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Objects of Surprise: Violence, Security, and Metaphysics
Author : Robert Jackson
Published in: Violence and the Limits of Representation
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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The philosopher and media theorist Wolfgang Sützl asserts that (following Giorgio Agamben) security has become the guiding concept for contemporary politics. If, as Foucault famously suggested, the guiding concept for the distribution of power was discipline, governance, and order, Agamben states that the distribution of power has operated on an exceptional basis; the securing of disorder: ‘What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation’.1 However, as Sützl admits, this provokes an abstract assertion. After all, what does security actually secure? Does security actually do anything apart from be bothered by insecurity? This implies that it is insecurity which supports security, because, quoting Sützl, it exists ‘without an outer boundary, it never encounters a place where it has completed its mission’.2