General Information
Course Description
The Globalization of Terror: Life as Insecurity- Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
This is a course devoted to the study of fear and terror as engines of globalization, particularly within the domain of what today is called the ‘war on terror’. ‘War’ is no longer confined to the battlefield, and its operatives are no longer the soldiers of yesteryear but a new kind of subject: one that embodies what theorist Reza Negarestani describes as the endo-militarization of peace (Negarestani 2006 and 2010), the tactical and indefinite extension of war into all spheres of life. This course will distinguish between the subject of ‘fear’ -- a political subject for whom security and sovereignty are all-important -- and the subject of ‘terror’ who in contrast is governed by the politics of insecurity and engages in a new form of war to the point of (self)annihilation. This subject that lives its own nihilation is only larval -- a subject driven by a nihilist eschatology rather progressivist teleology. This subject is driven to self-dissolution -- and yet herein lies its peculiar potency as a tactical rather than strategic agent of war. This kind of subject, which I have called the ‘larval terrorist’ (Biswas Mellamphy 2010), temporarily suspends and ultimately weaponizes the binary logic(s) of ‘war and peace’, ‘friend and foe’, even ‘self and other’. The focus of this course will be on the critical and theoretical unpacking of those overlapping bio-techno-political processes that have given rise to these new virulent forms of warfare, and particular attention will be paid in our analyses to the production of ‘larval terrorism’.
The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism’s ‘Theatres of Operation: Conflagrations of Contemporary Theory and Criticism’ and ‘Globalization of Terror: Life as Insecurity’ courses (THC 9612 & THC 9609) will be going on the Second-Ever CSTC Road-Trip, this time to The New School in NYC to attend the First International Cyclonopedia Symposium (http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/events.aspx?id=61278), where many issues taken up in THC 9609 & THC 9612 will be discussed. Upon their return they will be conducting a conference of their own, the 9609-9612 end-of-term conference ‘Enter the Fray: Theory & Criticism in the Newtork-Centric World’ (see the poster-jpeg), to which all are welcome.
