With Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony, C. Heike Schotten has written an urgent and provocative book that is indispensable reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of terrorism, the War on Terror, Islamophobia, settler colonialism and empire, Thomas Hobbes, the liberatory potential of queer critique, and the relationship between these. If this sounds like a tall order, it is. But Schotten delivers on all counts, masterfully weaving the canon of political thought, biopolitical studies, queer theory, and settler colonial and native studies into an intricate argument that reveals terrorism as the effect of a civilizationist moralism that valorizes some lives while marking others as and for death. The book is motivated by two overarching aims: first, to explicate the connection between settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and biopolitics to show that modern European sovereignty has been, from its conception, a settler colonial enterprise whose theoretical justification depends on the privileging of settler life through its distinction from natural life that is denigrated as a “savage” and near-death existence; and second, to articulate a queer politics of liberation that is uncompromising in its resistance to empire and—because such resistance is today branded as “terrorism”—unafraid in its demand for solidarity with “the terrorist.”
Schotten dedicates Chapters 1 and 2 to the first task of furnishing biopolitical analysis with an understanding of biological life as a political category that serves to justify, rather than undermine, settler colonialism and empire. To show that any appeal to biological life, even when celebrated as a site of resistance, surreptitiously reproduces the founding gesture of settler colonial sovereignty, in Chapter 1 Schotten examines the work of the “founding father” of the field of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben. Agamben claims that Western politics is characterized by the politicization of natural life by which the biological life of individuals is exposed to the unbridled power of the state. For Schotten, however, the distinction between natural life (zoē) and political life (bios) on which Agamben’s argument rests betrays a moralistic hierarchization of political over natural life. Identifying Hannah Arendt as the source of Agamben’s conceptual distinction between zoē and bios, Schotten further argues that his work inherits not only Arendt’s privileging of political life but also her association of natural life with slavery and her civilizationist condemnation of lives that do not rise to her Greek-derived standard of political existence as unfree, antipolitical, and “savage.” Moreover, Schotten carefully documents what she describes as Agamben’s “Holocaust Exceptionalism,” which posits the exceptional status of Jewish victims of genocidal violence and assumes Auschwitz as the reference point for any determination of injustice and suffering, a point of view that she insists is insufficiently attuned to other sites and forms of human suffering, such as that endured by Muslims as part of the War on Terror.
Having argued that Agamben’s work thus reproduces, rather than challenges, the civilizationist moralism that animates the War on Terror, Schotten insists on the importance of an account of this moralism as the appropriate basis for critique. Chapter 2 develops this account by presenting an extraordinary reading of Thomas Hobbes through the lens of Lee Edelman’s queer futurism, on the one hand, and settler colonial and native studies, on the other. In Schotten’s brilliant commentary, Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty is exposed not as a description of the means by which life can be preserved, but as a futurist effort designed to justify settler colonialism while simultaneously dissimulating this effort through a virtual denial of the existence of the native. It is impossible to do justice to Schotten’s sophisticated analysis within the scope of this review, but the argument goes roughly as follows. The state of nature is a state without a future insofar as it is what Hobbes, in Leviathan, describes as a state of “Constant Despayre” in which our only preoccupation is our present existence. The life whose preservation is guaranteed by the sovereign is, therefore, not exhaustively described by a set of biological functions: it also entails a psychological disposition of subjects who desire their future. Life in the full sense of the term, then, is the negation of the near-death existence of the state of nature, and sovereignty is established through a political act that creates the notion of biological life in distinction from which it inaugurates the life to be preserved.
Drawing on native and settler colonial studies, Schotten further argues that Hobbes’s association of the state of nature with “the savage people in many places of America” and its continuous displacement from a time to a condition to a place and finally to a metaphor for interstate relations effectively enacts the “logic of elimination” of settler colonialism by which natives are eliminated—through actual genocide or denial of their existence as natives—and settlers are retroactively naturalized as the native inhabitants of conquered territory (pp. 52–54, emphasis in original). By producing and denying the “savage” as the futureless other and a lethal threat to settler survival, Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty thus encapsulates the biopolitical logic of any futurist politics that requires ever new and ever more mortal enemies, be it Hobbes’s “savage” or today’s “terrorist,” as the negative foil against which the life worthy of protection comes into view.
With this account of the civilizationist moralism of settler colonial sovereignty in hand, Schotten is now in a position to outline a form of critique that is up to the task of resisting, rather than reaffirming, the futurist insistence on the survival of the settler polity and its determination of settler life as life simpliciter. Accordingly, Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Foucault and Edelman to actualize queer theory’s political potential as a queer liberatory politics that understands “queerness” as a structural position in relation to power and liberation as a radical antimoralism that refuses the moralization of settler life as the only life worthy of survival and protection. The result is a notion of queer critique as a radical left coalitional politics of struggle for the survival of all those who fail or refuse to conform to the norms of a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal settler polity—that is, of those who do not desire the particular (settler) life that is posited as life as such. Such refusal, or lack of the proper desire, cannot but appear as a mortal threat to life itself under the logic of settler colonial sovereignty. As a consequence, any form of critique that is genuinely emancipatory must take the form of affirmation of what settler sovereignty determines as death and as terrorism: “If the only options are … to side with a futurist, settler, and imperial ‘us’ (whether as avowed advocates of empire or its collaborationist liberal compromisers) or with a queered, ‘savage,’ and ‘terrorist’ other, the choice, I think, is clear: we must choose to stand with the ‘terrorists’” (p. 130).
There is no doubt that this position will appear to many as either gratuitously provocative or as a scandalous incitement to violence. But this objection says more about the rules of discourse that structure debates about terrorism than it does about Schotten’s argument. For “terrorism,” on her account, is not an objectively observable kind of violence to which one must respond, but rather the effect of the very civilizationist moralism that privileges settler life as the only life worthy of survival. Chapter 5 illustrates this theoretical argument by documenting the establishment of a U.S.-Israeli alliance against terrorism since the late 1970s, which determined terrorism as a lethal threat to the existence of Israel and a Western way of life—a determination that, as Schotten’s study of the American Right’s discourse of terrorism shows, continues to shape the discursive terrain on which any debate about terrorism is possible. Because the current discursive and political order immunizes itself against criticism by constraining the range of available positions to either being “with us” or “with the terrorists,” the way forward, for Schotten, is an affirmation of a stance outside of this order—a position that is impossible because it can neither be determined positively nor appear as anything other than terrorism from within the logic of settler sovereignty.
The theoretical structure of settler sovereignty that Schotten so clearly and compellingly identifies might, however, not be as totalizing in practice as it is in theory. To be sure, from the vantage point of settler sovereignty, any resistance to settler life appears as an attack on life as such. But this perspective is absorbed into political practice only gradually and never fully. Take as an example Israel’s relationship to terrorism, which precedes the period examined by Schotten by at least three decades. In the decade preceding the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist paramilitary group Lehi explicitly endorsed terrorism against British authorities in an effort to end Britain’s mandate for Palestine and against Arab and Jewish people who were perceived as obstacles to a colonial effort to conquer the land and establish Jewish sovereignty. Against accusations of being a terrorist organization, Lehi argued that terrorism was an “intentionally distorted concept,” disagreements over whose meaning were “typical Don-Quixotism if not intentional fooling,” and affirmed terrorism as the means of choice against “an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all” (“Terror,” in He Khazit 2, 1943).
This brief example allows us to raise questions about the material conditions by which terrorism was transformed from an instrument of colonization against a morally perverted enemy into that very enemy, the political practices in which the logic of settler sovereignty that fuels this transformation is instantiated, and the practices of contestation and disruption that are made possible by it at the same time as they disrupt this process. These questions are not intended as an objection to Schotten’s sophisticated and compelling theoretical argument. If I find myself wanting to hear more about the concrete historical conditions in which terrorism became the privileged site of modern settler sovereignty and about the ways in which the futurist logic of settler sovereignty has played out in these contexts, it is because I share her conviction that resistance is urgent and necessary. And although I agree that it is not the task of the theorist to dictate what should take the place of that settler colonial order and its theoretical logic that ought to be refused, alternative arrangements beyond refusal already exist in the political actions of those who are marked for death and in the lives they live in open refutation of the logic of settler sovereignty.
