On Exactitude in Science we begin with the Empire, wherein the Art of
Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a
Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the
Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of
Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was
Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 1
In response to the 1:1 stasis of the Cartographers Guild and their perfect map, we call for a metaphysics of deviancy, an affirmation of the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winter and the tattered ruins of that map. We are the animality that the disciples of Geography are so keen to forbid.
In order to abolish tracing and establish new means of map making, we first recognize the impossible multiplicity of spatial locatedness and temporal simultaneity—that is, the fuzziness that is queerness, of all neatly drawn boundaries. Phallicized whiteness produces a constant forgetting of contradictions in order to maintain a cohesive self, which disavows its own past in favor of an easily digested narrative of subject perfection.
In contrast, our deviant metaphysics entails a traipse down the pathways obscured by Phallicized whiteness, and an examination of alternative political possibilities lurking in the cracks and fissures of the information superhighways
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender studies at Ohio
State University, Queering Freedom, pg. 188
But the map does not allow for this multiplicity of spatial locations or the
impossible temporal simultaneity in which it stands. The script of liberalism , which dominates the social map of phallicized whiteness , demands static and
demarcated locations , separable from others through clear and distinct
boundaries . One is either the oppressor or the oppressed : it makes no sense
to be both simultaneously . If one is going to claim both of these contradictory subject positions, one must at least claim them in a temporal succession. But the
queering of the “I” speaks from both , and often from many, simultaneous subject
1 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

positions on the map: the queer “I” does not suppress or repress this
multiplicity , even when it yields contradictory and thereby strictly
nonsensical utterances .
According to the map of power, for example, I should fight for the rights of gays and lesbians to be legally married. This right would produce material benefits in my own life, securing the rights and privileges of heterosexuality for my own relationship with my lover—e.g., the right to adopt children; the right to be insured through her employer or vice versa; the rights of tax deductions; the rights of joint property ownership without the economic and psychological cost of endless legal paperwork; and, perhaps most importantly, the right to hospital visitation. And yet I have argued against all of this. And
I have done so without offering any clearly demarcated future alternative that might assure us of the wisdom of foregoing this fight. Foolishness ? Or queer ? As Michael
Warner’s thorough diatribe against the politics of nor- malization shows,5 such may
be the effects of a queering “I” that emerges through the cracks of the
misaligned social map of power .
As Lugones points out, to perceive this misalignment requires acts of memory : the spatial disorientation of simultaneously occupying apparently
contradictory positions is also expressed in the differing modes of temporality at work here. Bodies in power in the social map of liberalism deny their
privilege and power through “a lapse , a forgetting , a not recognizing oneself in a description” (2003, 14) that may highlight differences within one’s allegedly
contained and cohesive self . Locked into a mode of fundamental self-deception, the oppressor cannot perceive the multiple subject positions in which the social map of power locates him/her/[them]: he/she/[they are] is an individual, not a body with multiple subject positions scripted upon it. And subse- quently, the body in power
“does not remember across realities” (2003, 14).
Limits presuppose that all things radiate in all directions. Difference is fundamental and is willfully contained in order to preserve political regimes. Do you want to be this sort of politician, opposed to difference in their very breath, or do you want to be a poet, open to all creative powers of action
Deleuze ’68. Difference and Repetition. Book by Gilles Deleuze. 1968. English Edition
1994 (Paul Patton) p. 51-53
There is a crucial experiencex of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an op- position, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist along- side the simplifications of limitation and opposition. A more profound real element must be defined in order for oppositions of forces or limitations of forms to be drawn, one which is determined as an abstract and potential multiplicity.
Oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlap- ping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities. Nor is it primarily a question of dissolving tensions in the identical, but

rather of distributing the disparities in a multiplicity. Limitations correspond to a simple first-order power - in a space with a single dimension and a single direction, where, as in
Leib- niz's example of boats borne on a current, there may be collisions, but these collisions necessarily serve to limit and to equalise, but not to neu- tralise or to oppose.
As for opposition, it represents in turn the second- order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarised in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth - that is, in a fictitious third dimension added to the others which does no more than double the plane. In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences. Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions
presuppose radiations in all directions. Stereoscopic images form no more than an even and flat opposition, but they depend upon something quite different: an arrangement of coexistent, tiered, mobile planes, a 'disparateness' within an original depth. Every-where, the depth of difference is primary. It is no use rediscovering depth as a third dimension unless it has already been installed at the beginning, enveloping the other two and enveloping itself as third. Space and time
dis- play oppositions (and limitations) only on the surface, but they presuppose in their real depth far more voluminous, affirmed and distributed dif-
ferences which cannot be reduced to the banality of the negative. It is as though we were in Lewis Carroll's mirror where everything is contrary and inverted on the surface, but 'different' in depth. We shall see that it is the same with every space: geometrical, physical, biophysical, social and lin- guistic (in this respect, how unlikely
Trubetzkoy's declaration of principle appears: 'the idea of difference presupposes the idea of opposition ...'). There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flat- tened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox - the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat?
In this sense, too, Leibniz goes further or deeper than Hegel when he distributes the distinctive points and the differential elements of a multiplicity throughout the ground, and when he discovers a play in the creation of the world. It seems, therefore, as though the first dimension, that of the limit, despite all its imperfection, remains closest to the original depth. Leibniz's only error was to have linked difference to the negative of limitation, because he maintained the dominance of the old principle, because he linked the series to a principle of convergence, without seeing that divergence itself was an object of affirmation, or that the incompossibles belonged to the same world and were affirmed as the greatest crime and the greatest virtue of the one and only world, that of the eternal return.
It is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference, and far from resolving difference by tracing it back
to a foundation, opposition betrays and distorts it. Our claim is not only that difference in itself is not 'already' contradiction, but that it cannot be reduced or traced back to contradiction, since the latter is not more but less profound than difference. On what condition is difference traced or projected on to a flat space? Precisely when it has been forced Into a previously established identity, when it has

been placed on the slope of the identical which makes it reflect or desire identity, and necessarily takes it where identity wants it to go - namely, into
the negative .1S The imprint of the Hegelian dialectic on the beginnings of
Phenomenology has often been noted: the here and the now are posited as empty identities, as abstract universalities which claim to draw difference along with them, when in fact difference does not by any means follow and remains attached in the depths of its own space, in the here-now of a differential reality always made up of singularities.
It is said that there were thinkers who explained that movement was impossible, but that this did not prevent movement from occurring. With Hegel it is the other way round: he creates movement, even the movement of the infinite, but because he creates it with
words and representations it is a false movement, and nothing follows. It
is the same every time there is mediation or representation . The representant says: 'Everyone recognises that ...', but there is always an unrepresented singularity who does not recognise precisely because it is not everyone or the universal. 'Everyone' recognises the universal because it is itself the universal, but the profound sensitive conscience which is nevertheless presumed to bear the cost, the singular, does not recognise it. The misfortune in speaking is not speaking, but speaking for others or representing something. The sensitive conscience (that is, the particular, difference or ta alia) refuses. One can always mediate, pass over into the antithesis, combine the synthesis, but the thesis does not follow: it subsists in its immediacy, in its difference which itself constitutes the true movement. Difference is the true content of the thesis, the persistence of the thesis. The negative and negativity do not even capture the phenomenon of difference, only the phantom or the epiphenomenon. The whole of
Phenomenology is an epiphenomenology.
This is what the philosophy of difference refuses: omnis determinatio negatio. ... We refuse the general alternative proposed by infinite representation: the indeterminate, the indifferent, the undifferenciated or a difference already determined as negation, implying and enveloping the negative (by the same token, we also refuse the particular alternative: negative of limitation or negative of opposition). In its essence, difference is the object of affirmation or affirmation itself. In its essence, affirmation is itself difference. At this point, does the philosophy of difference not risk appearing as a new version of the beautiful soul? The beautiful soul is in effect the one who sees differences everywhere and appeals to them only as respectable, reconcilable or federative differences, while history continues to be made through bloody contradictions. The beautiful soul behaves like a justice of the peace thrown on to a field of battle, one who sees in the inexpiable struggles only simple 'differends' or perhaps misunderstandings.
Conversely, however, it is not enough to harden oneself and invoke the well-known complementarities between affirmation and negation, life and death, creation and destruction (as if these were sufficient to ground a dialectic of negativity) in order to throw the taste for pure differences back at the beautiful soul, and to weld the fate of real differences to that of the negative and contradiction. For such complementarities as yet tell us nothing about the relation between one term and the other (does the determined affirmation result from an already negative and negating difference, or does the negative result from an already differential affirmation?). In very general terms, we claim that there are two ways to appeal to 'necessary destructions' : that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to

deny that which 'differs', so as to conserve or prolong an established
historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation. The two may coincide in particularly agitated moments, but they are never the same. No one passes less for a beautiful soul than
Nietzsche. His soul is extremely beautiful, but not in the sense of the beautiful soul: no one is more endowed than he with a sense for cruelty or a taste for destruction.
Moreover, throughout his work he never ceases to contrast two conceptions of the affirmation-negation relation.
Prohibitive law oversees the process of modern subject formation; it begins political contestation with appeals to the law and constrains possibilities of becoming according to that juridical form. What follows is the locking of discrete subjects into predetermined acceptable forms of life. We see this exemplified in events so simple as stopping at red lights with no one around, or the enjoyment of small transgressions like smoking weed while its illegal.
Who performs these acts? Our affirmation is an unraveling of the “youness” the law demands
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom, pg. 120
Framed in a Foucaultian approach, we can glimpse how prohibitions aid the emergence of this modern category of experience, subjectivity.10 As Fou- cault traces in his first volume of The History of Sexuality, the modern subject emerges as a subject of
desire as it responds to repressive laws . Repression sequesters specific objects, actions, and behaviors off from the acceptable, normal—even ‘natural’—realm of experience. It prohibits specific things, cre- ating taboos, which in turn incite desire for the forbidden fruits. Prohibitions exacerbate the lack that is at the heart of the
modern subject’s desire . And in late modernity, these prohibitive laws become
increasingly codified through the arms of both clerical and secular
authorities . The more codified they become , the more internalized becomes the source of transgression : the mandate emerges to submit to the laws of
desire if one is to become a subject.
A primary psychic dynamic at work in this law of desire is consequently the dynamic
of anxiety . Situated in a symbiotic relation with this particular conception of subjectivity as the site of desire, anxiety becomes one of the most intense and
powerful emotional registers of this subject. It seems to function as a primary
psychological register of phallicized whiteness in advanced capitalism, indicating the particular values at stake through its enactment: we are anxious about our most precious values . Whether one is becoming the right kind of subject or whether one can become a subject at all , for example, depends on whether one
desires normal experiences , whether one has transgressed the law in appropriate ways. The process of subjectivation before the law of desire becomes a process through which the transgression of prohibitions becomes the index of one’s subject position: as the phrase ‘boys will be boys’ tells us, white males are permitted innumerable, socially acceptable transgressions of the law (assuming they occur at the

designated time of life, early adulthood11); but black males fill our prisons more quickly than they fill our college classrooms. This process of subjectivation via
transgression , in turn, becomes fraught with anxiety : anxiety enlivens
subjectivity , attuning it to the nuanced borders and contours of the law. In a passage I return to below, Foucault suggests that anxiety may be “what discourse is , when it is manifested materially , as a written or spoken object” (1972, 216). Subjectivity, at least partially constituted as an epiphe- nomenon of discourse, is highly cathected through anxiety. And both are enacted through the dynamic of prohibition in late modernity.
Contemporary examples of these socio-psychic dynamics appropriately emerge out of actions and behaviors that are explicitly construed in the register of desire, the central thread of this subjectivity. (In cultures of phallicized whiteness, desire is always read specifically in the register of sexuality— and, more explicitly still, of genital sexuality, a phenomenon central to our queering of freedom.12) For example, in the prohibitions in the U.S. around the act of sodomy, the anxiety enacted in the prohibition is not about the act itself, but about the kinds of subjectivities produced through the prohibition. The anxieties attendant to prohibitions of sodomy respond to two possible subjectivities that might emerge on either side of the act: (1) political, and potentially
dangerous, subjectivities that might be produced by admitting to such an act— e.g., subjects not constrained by a sexual ethics of procreation; and (2) docile
subjectivities that refuse or even denounce the act —e.g., subjects deeply constrained by a sexual ethics of procreation , with its social and religious ramifications, and generally governed by laws of repression . Accepted ways of
transgressing this law , and of verbalizing such transgressions , fluctuate as the power and security of the law itself waxes and wanes . As cases regarding states’ laws against sodomy continue to come before the Supreme Court, we can gauge the levels of anxiety in the U.S. regarding not only sexuality, but more importantly the internalization of the law in creating the right kinds of subjects of desire.13
Liberal subject formation is the nexus point for gobal violence. It indoctrinates a global drive towards peace in the protection of life itself and seeks to cleanse all the areas of political difference. War is the essential feature of the liberal encounter.
Evans 10. Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the
University of Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations, “Foucault’s Legacy:
Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century,” Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010, pg. 422-424, sage
Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a
continuous recourse to war . While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been
declared .4 Denouncing the illusion that ‘we are living in a world in which order and

peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to disrupt the neat
distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of
peace/civic normality . War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map-­ ping out this war–peace continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is
underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale , it is now taken that they should be included . With ‘ liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the
pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that
liberalism might meet its own moral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it : ‘In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to making war .’ This is the
‘ martial face of liberal power’ that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is ‘ directly
fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired’
(Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing
war in its pursuit of peace : However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize , indeed
universalize , war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war . However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reid’s thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto-­ theological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes: ‘endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul-­ tures’
(Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems.
Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations , which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations (them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit from the possibility of scoring outright victory ,
retreating , or achieving a lasting negotiated peace by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex , dynamic , adaptive and radically interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why ‘any such war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in principle, continuous and unending process’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32).
Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-­chance divide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global Civil War’ into which all life is
openly recruited : Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a terrain of
global civil war , or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the

modalities of life itself . . . . What is at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an important depar-­ ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death – that is, who is to live and who can be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force
(Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the unification of the
species . This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith,
2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations.
Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war have always been aligned with forms of life . Liberal wars are no exception. Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most meaningful
expression through the battles waged in its name: At this point we can invert
Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by
other means . . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled: political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force – the shifting balances, the reversals – in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15).
David Miliband (2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo-­ sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own. The mental models of 20th century mass
warfare are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency . That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means. Miliband’s ‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale – hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of
Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there-­ fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs, vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in which the

destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the success of humanity’s
own political strategies . No coincidence, then, that authors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much controversy. Viewed from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the
advent of a global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life . Giving primacy to counter-­ insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-­up response in which sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel-­ opmental forms of progress (Bell &
Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary outlook , it collapses the local into the global so that life’s radical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global species
necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means . Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialism’s own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-­ tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for
Foucault in particular there was something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous simply because location dictates. With
enmity instead depending upon the complex , adaptive , dynamic account of
life itself , what becomes dangerous emerges from within the liberal imaginary
of threat . Violence accordingly can only be sanctioned against those newly
appointed enemies of humanity – a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the
species complete, for the sake of planetary survival . Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity requires
a new moral assay of life that, pitting the universal against the particular , willingly commits violence against any ontological commitment to political
difference , even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of

destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular
encounters . Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live – selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design – inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears
here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When ‘life itself’ becomes the principal referent for political struggles , power necessarily
concerns itself with those biological threats to human existence (Palladino,
2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making , the biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of
certain species types : ‘a race that is portrayed as the one true race , the race that
holds power and is entitled to define the norm , and against those who
deviate from that norm , against those who pose a threat to the biological
heritage’ (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a ‘ permanent
presence’ within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat – the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within – that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the
subject , since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be
exempt , for political modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in
order to go on living : Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone ; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of
life necessity ; massacres have become vital . . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When
Foucault refers to ‘killing’, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: ‘When I say “ killing ”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder : the fact of exposing someone to death , increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death ,
expulsion , rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this
process of elimination possible , for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing ‘a break in the domain of
life that is under power’s control : the break between what must live and what
must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of

political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze
(1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve
the destiny of a species , when the defence of society gives sanction to very real
acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity , that is when the
capacity to legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for
all our sakes becomes altogether more rational , calculated , utilitarian , hence altogether more frightening : When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-­power’ or ‘bio-
­politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing – the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most ‘ essential characteristics ’ of modern biopolitics is to constantly ‘ redefine
the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, it is within those sites that ‘ eliminate radically the people that are
excluded’ that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal
form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a ‘space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media-­ tion’ (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-­inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception – has certainly gained wide-­ spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the ‘exceptional times’ in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007;
Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the ‘Global War on Terror’ have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the
contemporary forms of violence that take place within the remit of
humanitarian discourses and practices , there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an essential feature of the
liberal encounter . Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the
analytical arena .

Liberalism demands that its subjects transcend material differences to embrace a universal humanity, yet it paradoxically requires the maintenance of rigid differences that foster competition amongst identities.
Freedom flows from neither of these—deviant metaphysic is an attempt to refigure transgression away from Phallicized whiteness, liberal freedom and identity politics
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom, pg. 17
So, why queer freedom? As queer theory has demonstrated for some time,
categories of identity narrow our field of vision , and subsequently our fields of
resistance . They constrict our experiences into parameters that are too sharply delineated and differentiated from one another: none of us experiences this
complex world as only a gender or a race or a class or a nationality or a
sexuality , and so on . The infamous ‘and so on’ already renders any such listing of identities incomplete. And yet identity categories , and the identity politics that they spawn , claim completion : they claim to totalize our experience of ourselves and of the world.
To queer freedom is not to disavow the political work of calling out the
power differentials buried in these identity categories: it is not to return us to the allegedly neutral space of ‘the human .’ To queer freedom is, on the contrary, to deepen our grasp of the historicity of these categories. The conflation of dominant subjectivities with the posture of neutrality that we find in our contemporary cultures of phallicized whiteness did not occur recently. It reaches back, at a minimum, to the emergence of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century and its valorization of particular kinds of labor, ra- tionality, temporality—and thereby of particular bodies, particular identities.
We need to return to those roots of classical liberalism and trace out its subtle valorization of these characteristics, if we are to historicize the cate- gories of identity that have since become some of its best tools.27
This work of historicizing our categories of identity is, among other activities, the work of queering freedom . It will both give us a deeper sense of how these categories emerged and show how the categories themselves intersect and interact to perpetuate the systems of domination in which we now find ourselves living. I develop much of this through the logic of the limit, a kind of logic that binds classical liberalism to
phallicized whiteness through the shared value of individualism —a cornerstone, in turn, of advanced capitalism . Individualism simultaneously demands two apparently contradictory moves: 1) that we transcend material differences and understand ourselves as “just human”; and 2) that we conceive of ourselves through the rigid categories of identity that lock us
into raced, sexed, classed (and so on) individuals. Individualism demands both identity and difference: the first of these perpetuates the Myth of Sameness , while the second reduces our subjectivities to the delimited categories of difference .
But these categories of difference are ultimately that which must be transcended—
erased —if we are to ascend into the treasured neutrality of humanity. And, even

more perniciously, these categories of difference only lock us into politics of
alleged resistance , wherein difference is pitted against difference (e.g., the old story of race or gender ), while the one who transcends such differences altogether
walks away unscathed . In Hegelian par- lance, difference is always only mediated by identity here. The logic of the limit shows how these concepts of identity and
difference are ultimately two sides of the same coin —namely, the currency of
phallicized whiteness . It also rings a loud cautionary note about the viability of any politics of resistance that grounds itself in identity .
The logic of the limit thereby helps to excavate how classical liberalism presents a hollow concept of freedom. In classical liberalism , freedom holds itself out as the
transgression of boundaries and liberation from constraint . For example, we might think that we will liberate ourselves from domination if we engage in
transgressive behaviors that violate our designated race , sex , gender , class ,
nationality , or religion . But the logic of the limit shows, as Bataille and Foucault among others also see, that such notions of freedom as the transgression of
boundaries or liberation from constraint only enmesh us further in the very
systems of domination we seek to resist. To queer freedom we must learn not only to
resist the limited notions of difference enacted in categories of identity , but to resist differently altogether .
Queerness is a challenge to the entire process of liberal legal subject formation; it percolates within and beyond alternative histories; it permeates intersecting flows across time and space, and penetrates straight through the ontology of order.
We affirm queerness then as the zone of indiscernibility that precedes content and expression of prohibitive law as a challenge to sense-making and thing-ordering. We affirm queerness as a confrontation to the cultural codes that habituate our thinking. The definition of word “human” means nothing to us, except a beheading that we are anxiously awaiting.
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom, pg. 138
The spaces of anxiety that Foucault invokes across his texts differ from this Derridean deconstructive practice of disrupting identity politics and the metaphysics of
presence that underwrites it. Not a parasitic practice that surfaces posterior to discourses, the spaces that Foucault invokes orient us toward the emergence of discourses. This is not to fall nostalgically back into a prediscursive space. It is, rather,
the site in which discourses shape themselves , a site of conflict , violence ,
disruption , discontinuity , struggle , contest , and endless movements . A
site of powers . Agonistic forces . Excessive possibilities . To confront this space is to confront the arbitrariness of the cultural codes into which thinking is habituated: it is to confront both the excessive possibilities that are reduced to

the order of the rational (where univocity still reigns as ideal) and the historicized character of what we take to be ‘ the order of things .’ It is also to
confront the ontology of order itself , an ontology without which we late moderns cannot think. Reading this space through Foucault allows me to emphasize both this excess prior to the cod- ification of discourse and the historicity attendant to that codification.
If queer emerges from a space of endless contestation, it shifts and changes with historical contexts and their differential forces of power. To queer is to turn that
historicity back upon itself , rendering order vulnerable to the excessive
possibilities swarming in the site of its emergence. It is to reinvigorate the endless space of contestation that haunts any claims to stasis, or ‘nature,’ or identity. To queer is to emerge out of the fleeting space in which meanings are shaped before repetition rigidifies the excess possibilities beyond recuperation. This is not a moment in any Hegelian self-consciousness . This is the space prior to the
emergence of that damning self-Other dyad : there is no self here and queer does not emerge against some Other . We cannot point to and identify ‘ that
which is queer .’ ( It is not a noun !) We can only track down its reverberations in the socio-psychic fields of our experience. We can only attune ourselves to its effects, listening carefully for the interstice in which social signifiers are contested and excessive possibil- ities revisited or birthed for the first time. To queer things is to transform
them , in ways we cannot anticipate : to queer is to foil anticipation and its
temporality of a future-anterior.
If to queer is to speak and act from a space in which meanings are endlessly contested, this is not the space of reason. We late moderns constantly jump over this space, superseding it without even knowing we have done so. We habitually live in the space of assumed reason. Despite our alleged hedonism, we consistently grant privilege , and even a moral imperative , to the meaningful over the meaningless .42 The
meaningless causes anxiety , a restlessness that cannot function and is
denied epistemological legibility . Rather than reducing it to the restful quietude and (alleged, apparent) stability of reason’s control, to queer embraces this
restlessness , antagonizing and exacerbating it . It causes anxiety in cultures of phallicized whiteness and their praise of reason. And it is this anxiety that takes on historicized forms, projected onto raced and sexed Others in cultures of phallicized whiteness, as we have seen over and over in these pages. This anxiety, expressed socially and psychically in the many forms of xenophobia, is bound tightly to the disavowal of meaninglessness, which we can only speak as a lack. Anxiety is the loss of reason , the
beheading of reason , the entering of kinds and modes of experience where reason does not reign. To queer is to veer off the rails of reason , causing sheer anxiety
in late modernity .
This is why we must learn to queer our pleasures : pleasures, or at least specific kinds of pleasures , answer anxieties . Not by laying them to rest through

submission to an external law that only attempts to erase them or, more simply in advanced capitalism, by putting them to bed with a barrage of chemical sedatives.43
Pleasures answer anxieties by taking their energy in more sustainable directions, in more pleasurable directions, in more free directions.
Crossing and re-crossing the forbidden boundaries of existence, deviant metaphysics – queerness – is a site of movement and becoming. It exceeds and confuses subjectivity as such. Put differently: “God, how the corpse’s blood is sand in the depth of sound”
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender studies at Ohio
State University, Queering Freedom, pg. 134
Despite my ignorance of such things in 1993, much ink has been spilled about the intersections of our intellectual and sexual predilections, particu- larly since the early
1990s. The advent of queer theory has generated an apparently endless stream of reflections on what these intersections might tell us about life in late modernity. And the ongoing domestication of that field of study by the academy, now codified as a fullfledged discipline unto itself, threatens to defuse any intellectual, erotic, or political edginess that such ink-spilling signified at one time. As numerous writers have documented, queer theory is a dangerous terrain that seems always to be in
danger of losing its danger .31 It is constantly in danger of being domesticated.
As a field of academic studies, queer theory is without doubt one of the most hotly contested, contentious, embattled, and even confused subdisciplines to emerge from the virtual implosion of disciplinary boundaries over the last fifteen years or so. This is a good thing, a good queer thing. It bespeaks the kinds of resistances to
categorization and demarcation that constitute this site of signification, “ queer .”
To be queer is not to assume a foregone identity . It is to enact, as David Halperin writes, “ an identity without an essence ” (1995, 61).
Queers have no proper identification papers , no passport .32 As Gloria
Anzaldu ́a writes, “I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races ”
(1987, 84).33

Reviewing theorists’ attempts to define this term, “queer,” quickly be- comes a humorous enterprise. The discourses run the gamut from a vague sense of a younger generation’s dissatisfactions with the categories of gay and lesbian to the intentional toying with the gender-sex-sexuality nexus to the vexed attempts to define that which (categorically?) resists definition.36 Mi- chael Warner, adeptly avoiding the impossible issue of definition, describes the “preference for ‘queer’ [as] represent[ing], among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization” (1993, xxvi). This lack of specificity be comes both the radical potential and the Achilles’ heel of queer: it serves as both the resistance to domestication and the submissiveness to commodifi- cation. If queer is that which dare not be defined, we are immediately on some strange terrain in the very attempts to speak of it. We need to attune ourselves to the meanings and implications of this
“aggressive impulse of generalization.” We need to heed Bataille and learn to think generally.
Because, of course, speak of it we do. Queer has saturated the discourses not only of g/l/b/t lives, but of American urban culture more broadly: it appears easily in headlines of the New York Times.37 As we speak of it, the problems attendant to any category, particularly those affiliated with the formation of identity, ensue. The term queer, despite the uses that twist and turn and undercut the always imminent threat of a rigidified, static meaning, nonetheless exercises a normative power over the fields in which it is de- ployed. Whether through class or race specificity, academic elitism, or market fetishization, the term queer has, despite its attempts not to do so, produced exclusionary effects in localized sites of its signification.38 It has, in many arenas, become a site of privilege par excellence, positioning itself as the refusal of identity that only the most privileged can afford or achieve. This is an unavoidable effect of category delimitation, even when the category is one that attempts to erase itself upon its moment of utterance. It is, as Butler quotes Spivak, that “necessary error of identity” (1993,
229).
In the face of such difficulties, the attempt to speak of queer , and particularly its possible enactments of freedom , is daunting . But urgent . As a bizarre site of signification that speaks of “bodies and pleasures,” not of identities and desires, it is a site toward which we are drawn—we, that is, who wish to resist.39 Or, to put it in the first-person voice of queering that still seems imperative, it is the site toward which I am drawn. I approach it as a site, a space in which signification contests its own occurrence.
I approach it as Foucault approaches Nietzsche’s genealogy, or Entstehungsherd, of the concept of goodness.
We offer this debate as a queer convivial gather, a becoming with, imagining an unpredictable becoming with rather than an overdetermined effacement of queer alterity, its inability to move or escape, which characterizes the status quo
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University,
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168
Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already

begun to transform queer theory, from Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to Deleuze and
Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity) (1987). I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may further complicate how subjects are positioned , underscoring instead more fluid relations between
capacity and debility . Conviviality , unlike notions of resistance ,
oppositionality , subversion or transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with modern narratives of progress in modernity),
foregrounds categories such as race , gender , and sexuality as events – as
encounters – rather than as entities or attributes of the subject .
Surrendering certain notions of revolution , identity politics , and social
change – the ‘‘ big utopian picture’’ that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay – conviviality instead always entails an ‘‘experimental
step .’’ Why the destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect – as a bodily matter – makes identity politics both
possible and yet impossible . In its conventional usage, conviviality means
relating to , occupied with , or fond of feasting , drinking , and good
company – to be merry , festive , together at a table , with companions and guests, and hence, to live with . As an attribute and function of assembling, however, conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive common , nor an ethics of individuatedness , rather the futurity enabled through the open
materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet . We could usefully invoke Donna
Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter value’’ here, a ‘‘becoming with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical
orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no absolute self or other ,15 rather bodies that come
together and dissipate through intensifications and vulnerabilities , insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-
endowed and debility-laden bodies . These encounters are rarely comfortable
mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel
oneself but just as quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the
political transformation is invited , as Arun Saldhana writes, through ‘‘ letting
yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other , in seeing his or
her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own
position in the world’’ (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own

dissolution and self-annihilation and less interested in a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to the
possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own emergence such that it is no longer needed – an openness to something other than what we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the very
terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual
reinvestment in its form and content , its genesis or its outcome , the
literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.