Foucault in Guantanamo: National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism

The exception and exceptionalism are not the same thing. Carl Schmitt’s right-wing stitch-up is to suture together the ‘real possibility’ of the exceptional event with the exceptional sovereign response to the actual event, conflating the two. Typically, the idea of an event invokes a temporal sequence of event-response, action-reaction. But the prerogative of Schmitt’s sovereign to decide on the exception inverts this sequence. The conflation of declaring the exceptional event on the one hand, and responding to the exceptional event on the other, effaces the event qua independent causal event, the event-in-itself. Schmitt uses the ideaof the exception to demonstrate the necessity of the exceptional sovereign response. Yet the institutionalised prerogative sovereign decision on the exception precedes the event, and is only justified by the event’s theoretical ‘real possibility’. In Schmitt, sovereign exceptionalism comes both before and after the exception. Schmitt’s argument undermines the possibility that the exception is the cause of and reason for exceptionalism. Under a modern metaphysics, the exception is theoretical, fleeting, contingent and inseparable from the sovereign act of naming, and under the corresponding logic of modern state sovereignty, sovereign exceptionalism is an inherent and permanent feature of sovereign rule.

What this demonstrates is that the exceptional event-in-itself is inaccessible to us. Nothing can be divorced from its naming, interpretation and representation. It is not a matter of the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘constructed’ because, for us at least, there is nothing outside of representation. We are Wittgenstein’s flies trapped in a glass.

Yet we are faced with the problem that sometimes we may suddenly find ourselves trapped in a different glass. This is certainly what has happened since the events of September 11th 2001. The terrifying, even sublime, openness of the event and its interpretation has proved to be a chimera. Particular discursive, representational and institutional structures have a tight hold on that event now. We are faced with the powerful claim that exceptional times require exceptional measures; the claim that the exceptionality of the event has brought about a profound state of newness that necessitates an exceptional set of responses. Except that the newness of the politics of the exception seems depressingly familiar and predictable, and always was. Did we ever doubt, on that fateful day, that the horrors unfolding before our eyes would not be met with American fire being rained down upon a distant land? Did we hold much hope that an American reign of fire would not ensue?

Undoubtedly, we find ourselves in a different glass, but we must consider that this new representational frame long-existed, waiting in the wings. The website for the ‘Project for a New American Century’ eerily stated, long before 9/11, that for the enactment of their desired imperialist manifesto to be deemed legitimate and therefore possible a national catastrophe akin to Pearl Harbour would need to happen. Some dreams have clearly come true.

We might instead consider that although there is no accessible outside to representation, multiple and competing representational frames exist alongside each other. At any one time some are more dominant than others. Untold political, cultural and material effort is poured into producing and reproducing these dominant representational frames. Likewise, much effort is put into the repression, refutation or delegitimisation of alternative, competing representational frames. As socially, culturally, materially and politically situated subjects we are not equally subject to these representational frames, dominant or otherwise. While some accept, promote, reproduce and positively live their received representational framework, others make every effort to resist and critique those received representations. While we are all products of the structures we are born into and live within, some accept these with joy while others challenge and question them.

Rationale

What I would like to do here is make some initial moves towards understanding the new glass we find ourselves looking through. I want to begin to understand how and why these claims to newness, exceptionality and necessity have proved powerful enough to bring about and legitimate some very exceptional practices. I specifically want to focus on the employment of torture by U.S. agents and the increased legitimacy these practices have been accorded in that country. Such practices do not appear to have hurt George W. Bush’s re-election battle. Indeed, the lack of concerted criticism of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in John Kerry’s campaign seems to reveal a national legitimacy to such practices. In this inquiry I hope to provide what Zizek calls ‘red ink’ - the critical language by which we can articulate our outrage and opposition to those practices.

It is true that there is nothing new about torture; it is an all-too familiar practice in many countries. So why pick on American torture? There is moral outrage and horror of course, but why should they be raised so markedly in the American instance and not in untold others? We must avoid the argument that such acts are not expected of Americans, of the ‘civilized world’. The colonial subtext of thatnarrative is patent. We should instead begin on the basis that there is nothing new about the violence of purportedly liberal regimes and their conflicting claims to be guided by high principles. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued in 1947, invoking Marx in turn, that «The purity of principles not only tolerates but even requires violence...It is not just a question of knowing what the liberals have in mind but what in reality is done by the liberal state within and beyond its frontiers. Where it is clear that the purity of principles is not put into practice, it merits condemnation rather than absolution». [1] Although liberal states preach peace and rights, they are in material and historical terms very violent. One should not judge a state or society by its principles alone but also by its practice, and indeed, such principles often ultimately rest on such practices. It is commonly accepted that U.S. agents have engaged in torture in numerous locations and at numerous times throughout 20th century history. Current practices can certainly be seen as the continuation of a violence that is endemic to liberal societies. Nevertheless, there is today something new that invites fresh condemnation and criticism. The way such practices are being carried out is different to before. What appears acceptable and legitimate to many today would not have been before September 11th 2001.

We might begin by sketching some of the reasons why current practices appear to be to different to previous forms of liberal violence. First and foremost is the global sovereignty that is asserted by such acts. There has been much reporting and speculation about the practices that go on in Guantanamo Bay. Of course, such claims are difficult to verify, but that is not of great importance here. What is important is that Guantanamo Bay is no deadly secret. Whatever practices are taking place there, they are done with a globally projected air of impunity. This asserted impunity is an asserted sovereignty. It is an assertion that the United States is an exception to the rule, that it need pay no heed to international law or norms. It is an assertion that it fears or expects no serious sanction. The camp’s intended status as a place of exception beyond U.S. law has been made public knowledge. U.S. agents, and perhaps third parties on their behalf, could be detaining and torturing untold numbers in secret locations across the globe, and there have been many suggestions that this is indeed happening. However, the existence of Guantanamo Bay has been officially publicised. Although the happenings inside Guantanamo are carefully guarded, the camp’s very existence is for domestic and global public consumption.

The apparent popular legitimacy of American torture also characterises the present predicament. There is a great symbolic investment in the institution of Guantanamo Bay. The discourse of strength and ‘taking the gloves off’ has clearly been successful. George W. Bush has now won electoral endorsement of his policies and the way he is waging the so-called ‘war on terror’. This suggests that current American practices have popular legitimacy.

More disturbingly there has been what is referred to as a ‘public debate’ on torture in some intellectual circles and in the American media. One startling example of a contribution to this debate can be found in a recent collection of essays by the popular philosopher John Gray, in which he argues for the incorporation of torture into legal systems. [2] In what is revealing language, he attributes the dubious credit of initiating this debate to «America’s most celebrated defender of civil liberties... Professor Alan Dershowitz.» [3] Dershowitz argued in media interviews that nothing in the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids the use of torture. Gray enthusiastically proclaims that «The world’s finest liberal thinkers are applying themselves to the design of a modern regime of judicial torture. At a time when civilization is under daily threat, there can be no more hopeful sign.» [4]

Gray argues that rather than pushing torture into darkened cellars to hide its moral stain (an outmoded historical relic, apparently), it should be incorporated into law. This is preferable for liberal societies and for the universal values they embody because «the rule of law is a core liberal value». [5] Torture was vilified by Enlightenment thinkers for its association with arbitrary power. Today is different, he argues, because torture will be used to defend the liberal civilization that those thinkers dreamt of, which now exists in the United States. Gray does not represent a braying mob led astray by jingoistic leaders. He represents the unshakable sense of moral superiority that lies behind the legitimacy accorded to current American practices.

Gray is at least right in his claim that part of the Enlightenment criticism of torture was that it was tied up with arbitrary power. Clearly, he does not believe that the present use of torture is tied up with arbitrary power today. This is of course highly debatable. More profoundly, what Gray’s argument reveals is that recourse to the language of rights is now highly problematic as a strategy of opposition. Gray represents the argument that torture is a defence of rights and liberal (and therefore, according to him, universal) values. «Today,» Gray argues, «torture is used to defend free societies from attack by their enemies.» [6] Torture is now the defence of rights against the enemies of rights, the defence of freedom against ‘the enemies of freedom’. It seems that we might need to go beyond Merleau-Ponty’s wisdom and question liberal societies not just on their actual practices, but also on the principles that are now at the service of, and served by, those practices. There is a danger that if we simply try to reassert liberal values we will, at best, enter into a rhetorical battle that we will lose, or, at worst, strengthen the discursive weapons of the new liberal crusaders. Gray is right that Montesquieu and Voltaire used the language of rights against sovereign power. Today, however, the language of rights is sovereign.

The Complementarity of Foucault and Schmitt

Sovereignty is what is in play. Exceptions have been declared, sovereignty has been asserted. Schmitt, who so sharply theorised the principle of sovereign exceptionality, has become an indispensable critical reference point, whatever one may think of him. The proclaimed universality of liberal values has been demonstrated to be not universal at all, but rather another of Schmitt’s fabled friend/enemy groupings, a decisive political antagonism. Whether or not we are in a ‘real’ state of exception is not important. The effects of current claims to exceptionality are real enough.

It is clear that ideas matter in politics and international relations. There is much work to be done here, many ideological battles to wage, much new critical language to be refined and disseminated. In this paper, however, I want to delve further into the actual functioning of sovereignty, of power. It is Michel Foucault who here offers an enticing invitation.

Michel Foucault’s detailed archaeologies of power provide us with methods of analysis that are, I contend, very complementary to Schmitt’s formulations. At the most obvious level Foucault’s approach is the exact opposite of Schmitt’s (and of course his politics are at the opposite end of the spectrum). The result is that Foucaultian methods can be used to analyse power in exactly the sites and practices that Schmitt clearly depends on, but only alludes to. In «Society Must Be Defended»Foucault gives an account of his methodology that reads like a step-by-step refutation of the Schmittian approach. First, not to look at power as if it has a single centre, but at its extremities, at its material means of intervention and actual apparatuses of violence. Second, not to analyse power at the level of intentions or decisions; not the ‘internal face’ of power, but the external points of exercise and application. Third, not to regard power as a homogenous mass of domination divided between the haves and have-nots. Power circulates in networks and is never terminal; individuals both submit to and exercise power. Fourth, not to begin analysis at the centre of power circulation downwards but from its infinitesimal mechanisms upwards. How are these micro-mechanisms colonized and annexed by more global mechanisms of domination? Fifth and finally, not to analyse mechanisms as mere appendages of ideology, but rather to explore how mechanisms get formed into ideologies and knowledges. Foucault summarises his general intention as to analyse not the juridical edifice of sovereignty, but its material operations, local systems and apparatuses of knowledge. [7]

Both «Society Must Be Defended»and Discipline and Punish, the previous work he is reflecting on here, are concerted efforts to move away from the highly centred model of sovereignty that political theory has been constructed around. In Discipline and PunishFoucault uses a historical approach to chart and explore various phases and modalities in the development of forms of power. «Society Must Be Defended» takes a similar approach, exploring how collective identities emerged as forms of resistant subjectivity to challenge the institution of monarchical sovereign power. Foucault’s innovations in the history of power are well-known as histories of the present. They accord us a critical understanding of how contemporary constellations of power developed.

Diverging slightly from this familiar Foucaultian frame, I want to draw particular attention to Foucault’s closing thoughts in «Society Must Be Defended». It is only in the final chapter of this recently-published lecture series that Foucault draws some of his historical strands into explicit arguments about the dangerous turns of 20th century politics. Foucault does this by forming a provocative synthesis of some of the different modalities of power he previously theorised. This method of synthesis unsettles the usual linear chronology of Foucault’s work to great critical effect. I will make use of this recombinatory device in this paper.

Before I provide an example of this form of synthesis I need to give a brief account of some of Foucault’s modalities of power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault detailed three different power assemblages and discourses. First was the ‘archaic mechanism’ of monarchical sovereign power, characterised by highly symbolic and exemplary vengeance, torture and excess. This was then slowly displaced by a second modality: the rise of discourses of contract and right, in which punishment is enacted not on behalf of the King, but on behalf of society and in recompense for the injuries done to it by crime and violence. Foucault’s innovation was to add a third modality of power to these recognizable models. What Foucault calls ‘disciplinary power’ developed as a less explicit and more meticulously concrete form of power. ‘Disciplinary power’ amounted from the assemblage of multiple new technologies, knowledges, micro-mechanisms and tactics constructed around producing and regulating ever more utile, efficient and productive forms of life at the individual and in turn social level. (By extension, in the final chapter of «Society Must Be Defended» Foucault returns to ‘disciplinary power’, broadening it to apply to the level of population and biological life itself in what he calls ‘biopower’. [8] Foucault developed the concept of biopower further in his subsequent book, The History of Sexuality volume 1.)

Foucault’s critical synthesis at the end of «Society Must Be Defended»invokes the first and last of these modalities of power:

«We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms - the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens, and the mechanism organized around discipline and regulation, or in other words, the new mechanism of biopower - coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.» [9]

For Foucault, the Nazi state represents a ‘paroxysm’ of two coexistent modalities of power, one old and ‘archaic,’ the other a recent innovation. (Before we draw too many conclusions he adds as an essential qualification: «Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point.» [10]) The crucial point is that the Nazi State is exemplary; the most extreme expression of these two logics of power. Foucault is also demonstrating what he expressed many times: that the emergence of new forms of power did not automatically mean the decline of old forms. Rather, new forms supplemented and transformed existing modalities of power. As Foucault explains regarding sovereignty and biopower: «I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right - to take life or let live - was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it.» [11] And again with regard to the growth of biopower subsequent to disciplinary power: «This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.» [12]

Foucault’s modalities of power have recombinatory qualities. They emerge in novel new combinations, constellations and syntheses in different times and places. In one sense, these innovations and transformations are expressive of the logics already contained within these discrete modalities of power. Taken together however, they express unique new political and technological circumstances. Following from Foucault’s invocation of the Nazi State as an extreme example, we might go on to analyse contemporary transformations of power as unique recombinations of previously existing modalities.

The present task is to try to understand the material functioning of contemporary exceptionalism. I want to suggest that in its novelty, its newness, we might begin to analyse contemporary exceptionalism as a recombination of already-existing discourses and mechanisms of power. We should make no sharp distinction between ideas and practices. The discursive functioning of contemporary claims to sovereign exceptionalism forms a continuum with the material functioning of the mechanisms and exercise of sovereign exceptionalism. As much as the capture of the ‘exceptional’ event was anticipated by already-existing discursive and institutional structures, the points of material application of those claims are integral to those prior structures. What Foucault offers, therefore, is a form of analysis that combines a history of different structures and assemblages of power with an understanding of how those structures inform and constitute their contemporary expression and exercise.

Regarding the current problematique, we might begin to imagine the continuum between ideas, history, discourse and practice as follows. In its claim to newness, contemporary exceptionalism rests on a metaphysics of the exceptional event as a causal rupture in the passage of normal time. Yet the sovereign prerogative of claiming and naming newness precedes the caesura of the event. Already-existing discursive and institutional structures constitute this sovereign prerogative. (Schmitt is the exemplary expression of this logic of modern sovereignty.) We are therefore presented with the analytical problem of explaining the newness of contemporary claims to exceptionality and the newness of their material effects without reifying the event-in-itself as casually exceptional. It is absolutely not a question of whether the event was real or not. Rather, the event is inseparable from its naming and representation; inseparable from the discursive and institutional structures that await its advent and anticipate its capture. The more difficult question of whether the event was exceptional or not reveals the politics of the exception, because the question simply cannot be answered either way without making sovereign claims; without the sovereign attempt to name. Of course there is political contestation over this naming, but it is not a contest one can simply go out and win. The contest is fought with discursive and institutional weapons in historically constituted fields that exist at the local, national and global level, materially, culturally and socially. The contest may not be over for us, but for many the sovereign interpretation of the event expressed self-evident truths, and therein lies the hegemonic quality of sovereignty. Those for whom the sovereign naming of the event rings true are those who accord that sovereign interpretation credibility and legitimacy. Those for whom the sovereign naming of the event rings true are those who confer popular and intellectual legitimacy on the practices of exceptionalism justified by that interpretation of the event. Some are those who enact the actual material effects of this sovereignty; those who constitute its apparatuses, its external points of exercise and application, its circulation and reproduction, its infinitesimal mechanisms.

In light of all this, a final working premise is that to obtusely oppose Foucault and Schmitt is somewhat counterintuitive. Schmitt’s sovereign is by no means an absolute ruler, the king of Foucaultian legend, the centred font of power, but rather he who most successfully understands and expresses the prevailing, dominant and decisive truths and oppositions of the day. Schmitt refrains from explaining these structures in terms of historical spirit, structure or dialectic. Rather Schmitt’s view of sovereign capacities and legitimacies is that they depend on a decisive political understanding of current sociological, technological and cultural circumstances. [13] These circumstances change much as Foucault understands them to: as an assemblage of dispersed innovations attributing to trends, as an accumulation of interests traceable at the social level, in response to new social and political problems and demands, and as the result of the birth of new technologies and new historical conditions.

Foucault’s invitation is to understand the how of power. Stressing the Foucault/Schmitt complementarity further, we need to inquire into the decisive political constellations of the present. How does ‘he’ who is sovereign (where ‘he’ is ambiguously metaphorical or actual) decisively tap into and modulate underlying and already-existing discourses and modalities of truth and power? What recombinations and syntheses of these historically-constituted modalities of power are in play in the apparatuses, external points of exercise, circulation, reproduction and infinitesimal mechanisms of American torture?

Torture/The Spectacle of the Camp

In an analysis of the contemporary discursivities and practices concerned, we can identify features that are recognizable from Foucault’s histories of power. I will begin, therefore, by making links between aspects of the present and Foucault’s various historically-situated power modalities. The question is how these disparate resemblances cohere to form a modality of power that can be called contemporary sovereign exceptionalism. Our foremost site for analysis in this instance is the camp in Guantanamo Bay.

We will turn first of all to the modality of power Foucault places at the historical and narrative beginning of Discipline and Punish. This first modality is ‘The Spectacle of the Scaffold’, representative of the great panoply of penalties and techniques used in the middle ages, the exemplary and symbolic expression of a terrible sovereign power; «Corporal punishment, painful to a more or less horrible degree.» [14]

Drawing on mainly French historical sources, Foucault describes this regime of torture not as «an extreme expression of lawless rage» [15], but as a measured, calculated, compared, hierarchized system of techniques and penalties. «It was a regulated practice, obeying a well-defined procedure; the various stages, their duration, the instruments used, the number of interventions made by the interrogating magistrate, all this was, according to different local practices, carefully codified.» [16] Of course, the litany of actual techniques used has few parallels in what we have heard of contemporary American practices. Today there has been no suggestion of hanging, the cutting off of hands or tongues, breaking limbs, burning and so on. There is, however, a different litany of procedures and practices that are «tantamount to torture», as the International Committee of the Red Cross is reported to have described it privately (due to its delicate political position and essential silent neutrality). [17] One of the most detailed accounts we have of Guantanamo is the report compiled by the ‘Tipton Three’. These are three British-Asians captured in Afghanistan before being transported to Guantanamo and held for 2 and half years. Eventually they were released and brought back to the UK where tellingly they did not face any criminal charges.

They describe being ‘short-shackled’, where the hands and feet are shackled together, the shackles cutting into the wrists and ankles, for periods of up to 8 hours. This was usually done awaiting interrogation, which sometimes never came. Short-shackling and extremely confined conditions generally left them with scars and permanent knee and back pain. They were placed in isolation for periods of weeks and months, over a year for some detainees. In isolation cells they were subject to both freezing and extremely hot air-conditioning, strobe lighting, and constant and repetitious loud music. They were systematically deprived of food, water and sleep. Many detainees were subject to severe beatings and intimidation and attack by dogs. Medical, often surgical, treatment was regularly withheld from those who needed it. The regular cells, or rather cages, were 2 metres square and exposed to the extreme Cuban sun, heat and cold. Exercise and showers, if any, consisted of a few minutes per week. They were denied knowledge of the date and time, and kept «without hope and starved of information.» [18] There appears to have been a concerted attempt to ‘break’ the detainees and many were pushed beyond sanity. They describe several hundred suicide attempts and «at least a hundred detainees [who] have become observably mentally ill as opposed to just depressed.» [19] They explain that «For at least 50 of those so far as we are aware their behaviour is so disturbed as to show that they are no longer capable of rational thought or behaviour. We do not describe in detail here the behaviour but it is something that only a small child or an animal might behave like.» [20] All were subject to repeated interrogations by a number of different organizations, including MI5, demonstrating British complicity. These interrogations were repetitious and often not coordinated with each other. All three detainees gave eventually gave numerous false confessions, which were only belatedly refuted by MI5 on account of their actual location in England at the time of their alleged sighting with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

We can draw many parallels with the early economy of power that Foucault describes. First of all is the opacity of the entire procedure. All detainees in Guantanamo are denied legal counsel. The Tipton Three were refused all information about their legal status and the fate that awaited them. They only found out from a guard that they were being represented in England by the lawyer Gareth Pierce, although British Embassy officials and MI5 refused to confirm this. Turning to Foucault’s historical account we can see some resemblances in the opacity and secrecy of the regime:

«[T]he entire criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque, not only to the public but also to the accused himself. It took place without him, or at least without his having any knowledge of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice, knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.» [21]

This bares little relation to the normal legal procedures of today, but of course, the Guantanamo regime is not a normal legal procedure. The criminal process, as Foucault describes it, was not simply arbitrary. Rather, it formed part of a ‘rigorous model’ of truth production that would be quite unfamiliar to us in the present day. The system depended on a complex and hierarchical economy of truths with an ‘operational function’. This broad range of truths included «true, direct, or legitimate proof», «indirect, conjectural, artificial proof», «manifest proof, considerable proof, imperfect or slight», «urgent or necessary’, «approximate or semi-full proof», and «distant...clues, which consisted only of opinion». [22] Foucault explains that these different proofs had different effects and functioned according to complex rules. Only ‘full proofs’ could lead to death, whereas a combination of ‘semi-proofs’ could lead to penalties just short of death. [23] «Imperfect or slight clues» were still enough to issue a writ. [24] These rules did not form a seamless modern ‘scientific’ system. Rather, their complexity meant that they were flexible, highly arguable, and more or less applicable depending on the specific crime and the status of the accused. As Foucault describes: «this system of ‘legal proofs’ makes truth in the penal domain the result of a complex art; it obeys rules known only to specialists, and, consequently, it reinforces the principle of secrecy.» [25]

The investigatory procedure in Guantanamo, as described by the Tipton Three, bares relation to these archaic procedures. There is no true/false duality. The ‘truths’ pursued by the investigators would not meet any modern legal standard of truth or proof, nor even meet any modern judicial purpose. The former detainees describe multiple interrogations by investigators from different groups who seemingly did not communicate with each other and were not aware of information that had already been given.

«At some interrogations we were shown photographs of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Rug Rats, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jackson, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Osama Bin Laden and famous people from different countries. Actresses for instance, Sharon Stone, etc. One American interrogator called Mike Jackson, from LA FBI, said that he had been sent by ‘the Queen’ according to him. He said that MI5 had sent him photographs because they couldn’t come and had asked him to ask us about them. These were photographs of British citizens. There was one English woman with blonde hair amongst the photographs. These were all surveillance photographs taken of people as they went shopping in Tescos, etc. or with their friends. Very different people came in fact with the same set of photos (all Americans) and none of them knew that we had already been asked about the photographs on other occasions. This in fact happened numerous times during the interrogations. We’d be asked the same thing again and again by different sets of interrogators who didn’t know the answers. There seemed to be no coordination of the information that they were getting or trying to get. The Army would come and show the pictures to us, then the FBI and then the CIA. They didn’t seem to pass information amongst themselves. And from the FBI different people would come from different departments.» [26]

Frequently before interrogation the detainees would be physically prepared or ‘softened up’ somehow. One detainee describes being taken from the shower, still wet, and placed in a room, short-shackled, with air-conditioning turned down to 40° Fahrenheit [4° C], for 7-8 hours. Halfway through on this occasion an interrogator entered and told the detainee that he could get him anything he wanted and was shown pornographic pictures. The detainee refused to talk and was left there, freezing and in pain, for the remaining hours. He subsequently contracted ‘flu and was deliberately denied medication. [27]

In Guantanamo, as it was in the period that Foucault describes, the production of truth forms part of complex economy of power. The means of investigation and the means of punishment coincide. In Guantanamo, as then, suspicion is the «mark of a certain degree of guilt as regards the suspect and a limited form of penalty as regards punishment». [28] It is the body that constitutes the central object and point of application of both the means of acquiring the truth of guilt, but also the point of punishment for the guilt that is already presumed: «The body interrogated in torture constituted the point of application of the punishment and the locus of extortion of truth. And just as presumption was inseparably an element in the investigation and a fragment of guilt, the regulated pain involved in judicial torture was a means of both punishment and of investigation.» [29]

Guantanamo cannot be explained in the regular terms of law or criminal investigation. The purpose of the camp’s location is precisely to separate the entire process from normal American legal procedures and constitutional rights. It exists in a state of exceptionality. As one of the Tipton Three explains: «we were never given access to legal advice. I asked at various points but they just said that this is not America this is Cuba and you have no rights here.» [30]

One intention of placing the camp literally ‘outside the law’ was to place it under the sole jurisdiction of the executive arm of the U.S. government, beyond the reach of both the legislature and the judiciary. This is a demonstration of Schmittian principles. If «Sovereign is he who decides on the exception» [31], then in this case the executive arm of the U.S government has asserted its sovereignty. [32]

The sovereign ownership of the whole process is the clue to the parallels between contemporary exceptionalism and the archaic economy of truth and power that Foucault describes. The opacity of the investigatory process demonstrates the exclusivity of sovereign ownership of the whole apparatus. The procedures of investigation/punishment relate not to transparent codes of law and scientific truth, but to the symbolic affirmation of sovereign power. As Foucault writes: «The secret ... form of the procedure reflects the principle that... the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign...» [33] 9/11 could have been treated as a criminal matter, with police resources allocated to it appropriate to the murder of 3000 people. However, the 9/11 attacks were both intended as, interpreted as, and represented as a symbolic crime against the sovereignty of the United States itself. The purpose of the practice of sovereign exceptionalism is not simply to apprehend, punish and restore law and order, but rather the «terrifying restoration of sovereignty». [34] A symbolic crime against sovereignty is not simply an affront to the law, but an affront to sovereignty itself. «It ... requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person. The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies». [35]

The body is a central aspect of all of this; it is a necessary component in what Foucault describes as the sovereign’s right of life and death. The body, marked by torture, bears the imprints of guilt, the marks of retribution that correspond to the terrible acts committed and the reaffirmation of sovereign power. Unlike the ideal of modern legal proceedings, the truth of the crime is not uncovered by Aristotelian ‘reason without passion’. The sovereign claims ownership of the crime and its truth and therefore claims ownership over the production and demonstration of this truth. The body is not simply the object of punishment, but the site of the production of sovereign truth and the inscription of the symbolic and material reality of sovereign power:

«The body, several times tortured, provides the synthesis of the reality of the deeds and truth of the investigation, of the documents of the case and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the punishment. It is an element, therefore, in a penal liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedure ordered around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and secrecy.» [36]

In its symbolic import the spectacle of Guantanamo, however shrouded in mystery, corresponds to the spectacle of public execution in the middle ages. «Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, at its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.» [37] Guantanamo is a contemporary echo of the archaic form of sovereignty that Foucault describes in such detail. As he explains: «in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power.» [38] [my italics]. The exceptionality of this archaic power lingers on in these synthesised remnants, reassertions and resurgences.

Disciplinary Power

There are no rights in Guantanamo Bay. The whole discourse and modality of right and reform has been deliberately circumvented. There is no economy of measured utility in the new relation of power, vengeance and punishment. The signs of code, measure, mastery, economy, efficiency, effects and example that Foucault describes as having replaced the archaic rituals of monarchy have been swept aside. Foucault relays the principles that guided such reform: «the reformers thought they were giving to the power to punish an economic, effective instrument that could be made general throughout the entire social body, capable of coding all its behaviour and consequently of reducing the whole diffuse domain of illegalities.» [39] The sites of sovereign exceptionality are not general. The specificity of the return of archaic and vengeful sovereign power is meant as a spectacle for consumption and affirmation, not as an economy of example and measured utility.

The exceptional practices legitimised by the discourse of exceptionality cannot be understood in terms of archaic sovereignty alone however. The assertions of sovereignty in Guantanamo are more to do with an extralegal, vengeful, spectacular, ritual, corporeal, juridico-epistemological complex that has been set up than with this new modality’s material apparatuses, points of exercise and infinitesimal mechanisms. For that we need to turn to Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power.

Foucault explains that historically, disciplinary power was not a sudden discovery, but rather an addition and coincidence of several new features which added to and transformed existing body-power relations. It developed as «an infinitesimal power over the active body», a power «of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the [bodily] mechanism itself - movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity». [40] Disciplinary power is a ‘mechanics of power’ built on a ‘political anatomy’, an elaborate assemblage of techniques and tactics for increasing the ‘capacities’ and ‘aptitudes’ of the body to the ends of productivity, utility and efficiency, while all the time subjecting the body to subtle mechanisms of control. [41] Foucault describes this new mechanism of power as coinciding with the birth of «an art of the human body». [42]

«What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.» [43]

Disciplinary power was spawned from and spawned in turn a whole series of techniques and knowledges of the body. Disciplinary power was to be constructed not around the spectacular ritual, but around an intricate focus on the smallest details of human life. [44] A more detailed knowledge meant a more detailed form of control and a corresponding increase in power and productivity. This knowledge of detail translated into a series of techniques for ordering the utility of the body. These included enclosure, where individuals were brought together and ordered into a productive system or machine, as in the barracks or factory; partition and cellularisation, where each individual could be observed in his or her particular tasks, habits and training; the creation of particular functional sites to correspond to social or economic needs, such as the asylum, the hospital and the port, whilst carefully regulating the results of concentrating multiple individuals in one place; and ranking, where individuals would be placed in a flexible hierarchy of positions and classes, to provide a means of quantifying development and a system of goals and targets for training and control to aim for. [45] The body was ordered according to the techniques of the timetable, which organised the time and rhythm of individual and group activity; the careful temporal structuring of bodily acts, focusing on the efficiency of individual movements in the process of, for example, loading and firing a rifle or operating a machine; the ‘correlation of the body and the gesture’, where correct posture, position and movement were carefully choreographed and instilled; a corresponding new relation of body and object, synthesised into a more efficient productive ‘machine’; the development of exhaustive use, fuller employment of time, more efficient forms of instructive signs and signalling. [46] All these techniques went towards an overarching body of tactics aimed at ordering the individual within a wider multiplicity. This brought with it such innovations as the classificatory table, the training exercise, the combined working day, new forms of architecture which fostered observation and ordering, and systems of ‘micro-penality’ built around a series of rewards and deprivations for every facet of time keeping, behaviour, movement, activity and so on. [47]

Of course, Foucault’s intention is to signal the development and origins of the present-day structuring of our work environments, schools, hospitals, cities, our very lives. The full social implications of disciplinary power are far beyond the scope of this paper. Indeed, Foucault’s innovations have become a defining part of the research agenda of the social sciences for over two decades now. What I am particularly interested in the are the multiple, exemplary instances of these techniques of power in Guantanamo Bay. We see much of this ‘art of the human body’ and corresponding ‘mechanics of power’ at work in Guantanamo. In the account given by the Tipton Three we learn that the lives of the detainees were controlled down the most minute of corporeal details.

The organisation of the camp closely follows Foucault’s rules of distribution. Enclosure goes without say. Partitioning and cellularisation would be expected; here it is taken to extreme levels with the employment of tiny, fully observable mesh cages rather than cells. We see a system of ranking and classification, closely tied up with coercion and control:

«They found out, through discussions with others and their own experiences, that the interrogators were applying a four tier system that was based on a degree of cooperation from a particular detainee. In this system level or tier four was considered the worst. Such detainees were often removed... and placed in a separate camp.... Level or tier one denoted the highest degree of cooperation.» [48]

In a continuation of these disciplinary themes, every detail of their action and behaviour was observed. This observation was used to build a detailed knowledge of each prisoner to extend further the regime of coercion:

«[W]e were also aware, in Camp X-Ray and later in Delta, that we were being listened to and our conversations were being recorded. On the question of observation I wish to add that being under constant observation was an additional stress... The observations conducted were not just in relation to what we were saying, but everything we did. They would look to see if we stared at women MPs [military police] or looked down when they walked passed. They looked to see if we used particular comfort items more regularly than others or had any habits that they could clearly identify. As an example, if we were suffering because of the small portions [of food], they would identify this as a weakness or alternatively if we required medical help, this would depend on our cooperation in interview. In my view it was clear that they were identifying weaknesses upon which they could play for the purposes of interrogation’.» [49]

Their movement was restricted to the extent they were caged in a space of 2 metres square, and even how they could move within that space was strictly controlled. In the first weeks they were given no exercise at all. As one of the Three explains that initially:

«We were allowed out for 2 minutes a week to have a shower and then returned to the cage. Given the extreme heat, we sweated a lot and the area obviously began to smell. During the day we were forced to sit in the cell (we couldn’t lie down) in total silence. We couldn’t lean on the wire fence or stand up and walk around the cage.» [50]

These conditions were relaxed slightly later on, but only provisionally as a further part of the system of control. We also see Foucault’s micro-penal mechanisms forming a core part of the structure of control, based around reward and deprivation:

«Comfort items included almost anything that was not screwed or welded down in the cages. Ordinary items such as blankets, towels, face cloths, toothbrushes, toothpaste and even regulation single Styrofoam cups were considered «comfort items». They were removed at the discretion of the interrogators or the guards depending on the standard of behaviour and the extent of co-operation. Comfort items were also used as part of a «carrot and stick» approach to their interrogation. If they cooperated, they were given or allowed to retain certain items. If they were perceived not to be cooperating, items were taken away.» [51]

Ostensibly this regime was geared towards the production of truth and intelligence, but it seems that power and coercion themselves became the principle bases of the process. The physical conditions of the detainees were tightly tied into a precise tabulation with their behaviour and level of cooperation:

«All three men say that they believe the conditions were designed specifically to assist the interrogators. They were able, with great precision, to control the behaviour of the detainees depending on the type of answers or the level of cooperation they believed they were getting. The interrogators had already made up their mind as to what they wanted and it often became a question of trying to gauge what they wanted to hear and give the right answer.» [52]

Although all these examples have a direct relation to the intricacies of disciplinary power that Foucault describes, there are some very obvious differences. Always, Foucault stressed that disciplinary power was not simply negative but productive. The aims were not simply brute repression but utility, efficiency and productivity. Superficially, Guantanamo serves the production of truth and intelligence, but we have heard how uncoordinated and unreliable the ‘truth’ produced is; in military newspeak Guantanamo has produced very little ‘actionable’ intelligence. On the other hand, the actual regime of corporeal and disciplinary control seems to be much more thorough. There has been no attempt at training, at reform, at shaping the detainees into something more utile and productive; quite the opposite in fact. The techniques and tactics employed are extreme forms of disciplinary power, but the ultimate aims and interests are of a different modality.

We will here invoke then, the synthesis of modalities, the recombination of historical discourses and techniques of power that I drew attention to earlier. In the later and less well-known fragment that I drew attention to, Foucault explained, with reference to sovereignty and discipline, that: «I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right - to take life or let live - was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it.» [53]

In Guantanamo I would invoke that synthesis but also invert it. Rather than the archaic institution of sovereignty, with its right of life, death, war, exceptionality and spectacular vengeance, being permeated by a network of productive new disciplinary tactics and techniques, I would argue that it is the old right of sovereignty that has come to penetrate and permeate the modern regime of disciplinary power. Foucault is of course correct that the old sovereign right never went away. The relentlessly challenged but nonetheless still robust principles of state sovereignty and the modern international system attest to that, as does the resurgent relevance of Schmitt’s sharp formulations on sovereignty. The central trope of Discipline and Punishwas to contrast and separate the old ritualistic forms of sovereign power from the minutiae of the new disciplinary techniques. This theme recurs constantly throughout the text. As Foucault explains here:

«Hitherto the role of political ceremony had been to give rise to the excessive, yet regulated manifestation of power; it was a spectacular expression of potency, an ‘expenditure’, exaggerated and coded, in which power renewed its vigour. It was always more or less related to the triumph.... Discipline, however, had its own type of ceremony. It was not the triumph, but the review, the ‘parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze.» [54]

The exceptional synthesis of the modalities of sovereignty and disciplinary power unsettles that juxtaposition. Foucault reserved this recombinatory device for extreme instances, to ‘paroxysms’ and perversions of the norm such as the Nazi state. Contemporary sovereign exceptionality takes the form of this extreme synthesis. Old sovereign rights are expressed through contemporary techniques of disciplinary power.

In the case of Guantanamo, familiar techniques of disciplinary power have been pushed to their very limits, to an exemplary, symbolic, vengeful paroxysm of normality. The sovereign right to make war against its declared enemies has come to be expressed through a disciplinary mechanics of power, built on a detailed political anatomy of thehuman body. In an exemplary, exceptional display of its might, sovereignty asserts that it is ‘always above its own laws’ by overriding any supposed constitutional or legal limits and asserting a total, extreme, exceptional, disciplinary power relation.

This exceptional sovereign power is discipline at the limit. There is a power relationship at work, a ‘productive’ relation that produces false confessions, small and petty victories, ‘docile bodies’. Nevertheless, at times in Guantanamo a political relation remains; many of the detainees offered resistance in any way they could. In Foucault’s understanding of power as circulatory, this resistance provides something for the ‘current’ of disciplinary power to work against. The overwhelming andinfinitesimal control of this sovereign disciplinary exceptionalism asserts itself through disproportionate responses to these small acts of defiance. As one of the Tipton Three recalls of a rather fitting small act of resistance to this American power: «On another occasion I scratched ‘have a nice day’ on my Styrofoam cup and this was seen as a disciplinary offence for which I spent another week in isolation.» [55]

We have hear that attempted suicides ran into «several hundred». [56] I would not like to conclude whether this should be considered the ultimate sign of abjection or the ultimate act of resistance. However, the disciplinary regime clearly interpreted such attempts as resistance. The logic is impeccable of course; death signals the end of disciplinary control. We hear of one shocking example:

«We were told by soldiers what happened to one detainee where we were not present. Someone called Michal from Saudi Arabia who we understand hung himself. His oxygen was cut off and he passed out. The guards took him down but then beat him up and now he is basically a cabbage. He is apparently slowly recovering. For a while someone had to feed him but we understood now he can eat by himself. We understand that he was in intensive care for over a year. He never went back to the block again. As well as being in intensive care he is apparently shackled to the bed by hand and foot.» [57]

In many cases then, the regime of control went beyond any productive power relation and crossed the line into absolute mental and corporeal domination. In many cases the disciplinary apparatus produced only bodies reduced to abject animality. As we have heard: «For at least 50 of those so far as we are aware their behaviour is so disturbed as to show that they are no longer capable of rational thought or behaviour. We do not describe in detail here the behaviour but it is something that only a small child or an animal might behave like.» [58]

National sovereignty

There does not exist today, at least in the present field of analysis, a permanent, generalised state of exception. However, claims that we are in a state of exception have certainly been made as an act of legitimation. It is under these claims that specific exceptions have been declared and enacted. Exceptions are not the norm. They only work as exceptions in relation to a norm. [59] The form of power at work in Guantanamo Bay emerges from a recombination of already-existing modalities of power. It is a ‘paroxysm’, an extreme perversion of those existing modalities; it is not the general form of power. Exceptionality exists in a relationship to the norm. It may change the norm, but here at least, it does not become the norm. Those who are made exceptional are set aside from the norm that remains. They can only be denied rights because a discourse and practice of rights exists elsewhere. This dialectical relationship is key. We cannot understand contemporary exceptionalism without it. How then, do we begin to understand this relation?

Although I have drawn many parallels between archaic forms of sovereignty and contemporary practices of exceptionalism, there are some important differences. Whilst monarchical sovereignty itself used exemplary displays of ritual violence to affirm that it was above its own laws and hence ‘exceptional’, the victims of that modality of power were not exceptions in the way the Guantanamo detainees are. The monarchical sovereign power that Foucault describes was not, if we recall, «an extreme expression of lawless rage», [60] but rather the general and entire economy of power. Those subject to its gruesome excesses were examples, yes, but not exceptions. Any subject who injured the king by breaking his laws could be subject his terrible, ritual vengeance. Today, however, there is no question of American citizens going to Guantanamo. American citizens are subject to the norm, those in Guantanamo to the exception.

The apparent popular, national legitimacy accorded to Guantanamo marks a further and central element of this complex relationship between norm and exception that Foucault has so far not been able to touch upon. This is where «Society Must Be Defended»can help us. In this series of lectures Foucault makes some radical departures from traditional political theory. He begins by rejecting the classic seventeenth century discourse on sovereignty, which sought to establish the proper limits or rights of sovereign power. This is because, «That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power.» [61] As I have relayed above, Foucault argued that we should instead account for power at its apparatuses, external points of exercise, circulation, reproduction and infinitesimal mechanisms. Foucault’s comments have been highly appropriate for our case, that of contemporary sovereign exceptionalism. The old liberal discourse of rights, limits and oppression is a flawed means of critique if, first, exceptional sovereign power is able to declare itself to be above those limits; second, this does not trigger a constitutional crisis; third, this receives popular legitimacy; and fourth, the language of liberty and rights becomes the handmaiden of the very suspension of those liberties and rights. Sovereign exceptionalism undermines individual rights, the exemplar of the ‘ideal’ genesis of the state in the constitution, and the law itself.

In fact sovereign exceptionalism does not simply undermine rights, constitutions and law, but somehow exists in a dialectical relationship with them. The classic liberal discourse on sovereignty is dualistic and as such cannot account for its own negativity.

Instead, and with much provocation, Foucault asks whether we can understand the basic and underlying relationship of power as one of war:

«If we have to avoid reducing the analysis of power to the schema proposed by the juridical constitution of sovereignty, and if we have to think of power in terms of relations of force, do we therefore have to interpret it in terms of the general form of war? Can war serve as an analyzer of power relations?» [62]

This hypothesis has attracted much attention, and I have dealt with this at length elsewhere. [63] In short, the answer he arrives at is no, war cannot serve as a general analyzer of power relations, at least not today. Of course, it is the way he gets to that answer that is interesting.

In «Society Must be Defended» Foucault argues that the discourse of the ‘nation’ emerged as a power claim against monarchical sovereignty. Collective identities emerged that denied the subjective individualisation under monarchical power that was expressed, for example, in the proto-liberalism of Hobbes. Instead, monarchical power was decried as the sedimented vestige of invasion, victory and subjugation. Collective identities then claimed their own much older laws and rights: those of Saxon tribes, Frankish nobles and so on. Thus the ‘nation’ emerged as a claim to war; a continuing war between competing ‘nations’ within the same territory, and later, a continuing war making up the very substance of history itself. Politics - the ‘civil’, ordered, pacified politics of the early modern political thinkers - was decried as the continuation of war by other means.

Much of Foucault’s analysis is of the discourses in play in the English civil war and those of the French nobility in absolutist France. Foucault’s real twist comes with the French revolution. One ‘nation’, the Third Estate, rises up to claim that it is no longer a particular expression of identity against a sovereign power that claims universality within a given territory, but rather the expression of universality itself. A nation seizes the state and becomesthe state. The ‘nation’ and the state come to coincide. The nation-state is born. In Foucault’s historical narrative this means many things. War is once again displaced from the social fabric and relegated to the border of both territory and normality. As such, history and society will no longer be understood through a relation of war, but rather, struggle:

«We now have, in contrast, a history in which war - the war for domination - will be replaced by a struggle that is, so to speak, of a different substance: not an armed clash, but an effort, a rivalry, a striving toward the universality of the State.» [64]

We have a new relation of inside/outside. The historical narrative that Foucault offers consists of three points. First, a rejection of the claims made by early modern political theory that the institution of sovereignty had banished war and anarchy to the outside, instituting civil order and peace inside. Second, a counter-claim that this ‘ordered’ society was in fact the continuation of war by other means. And third, with the union of nation and state, a new claim to peace inside and war outside or at the limit. In the new domain of peace, where war is displaced by struggle, war will become an exceptional moment only, and not the fabric of the civil order itself. As Foucault explains, «We will have a civil struggle, and the military struggle or bloody struggle will become no more than an exceptional moment, a crisis or episode within it.» [65] Instead of permanent civil war, there will be a continual political struggle forthe right and ability to express the meaning and identity of the nation.

The implications are powerful. These arguments are Foucault’s attempt to explain the origins of state racism, discourses of biological superiority and socialist discourses of degeneracy. But also, more generally, Foucault is offering a way of understanding 20th century forms of exclusion and violence. He might be asking the question, how did 20th century forms of national and revolutionary violence come to claim legitimacy historically?

The key is in the title. It is no longer the vengeful king who must be defended, the monarch who ritually and symbolically restores the institution of sovereignty when it is affronted. Once the nation-state has been born, it is society that must be defended. The old sovereign rights have been transferred from the king to the nation. It no longer the sovereign king who wages war on declared enemies. Rather, it is the sovereign nation.

«Society Must Be Defended» offers the final piece of new modality of power we have called sovereign exceptionalism. The lectures offer a way to understand Schmitt’s form of sovereignty. That is, not simply the sovereignty of a centred monarch or leader, but a sovereignty that depends on polarising the decisive social, historical and politicalconditions of the day. For Schmitt, radical transformations of the content of ‘the political’ were brought about by nationalism, the political organization of the working classes, mass society, and technologies of mass communication and mobilisation. «Society Must Be Defended»serves as an introduction to the historical conditions that Schmitt himself expresses in their sharpest form. War becomes not simply a sovereign prerogative but an expression of national virtue, an expression of the very strength of a society. This society is not simply a ‘civil society’, but a sovereign nation striving to express universality (perhaps a nation with a mission to spread markets, ‘civilization’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’). [66]

I have already suggested that sovereign disciplinary exceptionalism is an extension of the sovereign’s old right to wage war against ‘his’ declared enemies. I have suggested a transposition of that right onto the more recent modality of disciplinary power. The final element then, is the popular legitimacy of sovereign exceptionalism. Foucault’s history of the nation-state suggests that the old monarchical sovereign rights have been transposed to the nation. Just as it was the sovereign himself who was aggrieved when his symbolic power was challenged, today it is the sovereign nation that is aggrieved by the attack against its sovereignty.

I would argue that we might begin to understand the peculiar new modality of contemporary sovereign exceptionalism as follows. The declared and enacted right of war, vengeance, truth and exceptionalism is akin to that of archaic sovereignty. This is combined with the corporeal means of modern disciplinary and biological power over life. This synthesis is accorded national legitimacy by the principle of an aggrieved sovereign nation waging war against its enemies, affirming its virtue, strength, universality and historical purpose, and ‘defending its society’. In Guantanamo, we have national, sovereign, disciplinary exceptionalism.

Andrew W. Neal

Keele University