Departure from Agamben

To understand this is to understand the ways that Arar's tortured body has symbolically functioned in the Canadian aesthetic community to reconstitute its members' relation to abandonment (the space outside of law) and the possibility of sacred violence. The repatriotisation of Arar and the return of the Canadian soldier were newsworthy precisely because it was in and through these figures – as read by the media and the Canadian public's response to them – that the aesthetic borders of Canada's political community were redrawn in profound, if seemingly contradictory, ways. It was through the telling of these bodies that the Canadian biopolitical body was re-enacted and the threshold criteria between politically qualified life and bare life, on the one hand, and illegitimate and sacred violence, on the other, were decided. Their public staging and their narration marked and effected what Jacques Ranciere might describe as a new ‘cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible’Footnote ¹⁵ – a new aesthetic order which is also and always quintessentially political. Politics is a bordering practice.

But, to study the ways in which sovereign decision is effected at and effects the borders of an aesthetic/political order is quite different from studying the ways in which the politics of the visible, the sensible and the speakable enable the coherence of something we might refer to as ‘sovereign decision’.Footnote ¹⁶ This article will focus on the latter and, in so doing, will mark its point of departure from Agamben. Criticising Agamben's tendency to attribute a logic to sovereignty, William Connolly draws our attention to the very materiality and messiness of biocultural life: ‘The very illogicalness of its materiality ensures that it corresponds entirely to no design, no simple causal pattern, or no simple set of paradoxes.’Footnote ¹⁷ Connolly suggests that it might be more helpful to think in terms of the particular ethos in which sovereignty is set: ‘[the] unconscious context of the thinkable and unthinkable, the habitually expected and the impermissible [that] enter into readings of constitutional texts and sovereign decisions.’Footnote ¹⁸ As Connolly explains, there is ‘an equivocation in the idea of sovereignty between acting with final authority and acting with irresistible power:’

This article's interest lies not only in the decisions made on high, so to speak, but in the social powers that have asserted themselves irresistibly in an around the decision to go to war – the social powers that have enabled the return of a sacrificial imaginary and the very possibility of sacred violence.

This is not something that can be directed or even entirely foreseen from above. In the words of Paul Kahn, ‘We are either enthralled or we are not.’Footnote ²⁰ If not, acts of killing and being killed become little more than senseless violence, abuses of state power, or suicide – in short, murder:

The Canadian government recognised and seized what may be described as an opening within the ethos of Canadian sovereignty – and, in so doing, fundamentally altered the aesthetic order. As asserted by various socialist websites, the decision to depart from a legacy of peacekeeping and participate in combat operations was certainly a strategic coup for members of the Canadian elite wanting to forge closer ties with the US and for members of the Department of Defence seeking an expanded mandate and budget.Footnote ²² But, it was a decision fraught with risk as it alone could not produce the outcome. It alone could not redraw the aesthetic borders of the Canadian community; although it was clearly a pivotal moment in the much larger ‘coup de force’ being waged from above and below. Allen Feldman argues that ‘[l]egitimation can be understood as constructed and mediated by two poles: the site of instantiation and the Archimedian point of the authorizing center.’Footnote ²³ But, he contends, that ‘[t]o simply study power at the “center” … is to collaborate the essential myth of formal rationalization.’Footnote ²⁴ It is also to miss power at its points of application – the sites of instantiation where the aesthetic order is redrawn. And it is to these – to the repatriotisation of Maher Arar, to the ‘return’ of the Canadian soldier and to the re-enactment of sovereignty's founding moment staged along the Highway of Heroes – this article will turn to next.

The repatriotisation of Maher Arar

I am using the term ‘repatriotisation’ to refer to the process by which Arar regained full status as a member of the Canadian juridical order after having been abandoned – held in a Syrian jail and tortured with the complicity of the Canadian government. Arar stood as a testament and spectacle of state-manufactured violence – as an exemplary figure of what Agamben calls bare life. He bore an ‘exceptional’ relation to the Canadian state through an inclusive exclusion – that is, his relation to the state lay in his capacity to be killed by it without the state having committed a murder or sacrifice.Footnote ²⁵ His torture dramatised this relation. In the process of repatriotisation, his status shifted from that of the purely racialised body of bare life to a body existing in relation to language, human emotion and reason – to politically qualified life. The repatriotisation of Maher Arar occurred at many points, beginning perhaps on 6 October 2003 when Arar was reunited with his wife and two children in Montreal after Syria freed him, but in more culturally significant ways thereafter: in a series of public and publicised statements, interviews, legal proceedings and an inquiry ending with Stephen Harper's apology (on behalf of the Canadian state) and an $11.5 million compensation package.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout, it was not only Arar's relation to the Canadian state that was being defined, but the borders of the Canadian aesthetic community – which were being drawn and publicly debated in the course of the multiple and varied decisions which finally led to the official apology and government-issued compensation.

On 27 January 2007, the front page of the Toronto Star announced details of the ‘The Arar Deal’. This was accompanied by a front page editorial pronouncing that ‘Canada and the US are on fundamentally different paths when it comes to matters of terrorism and human rights.’Footnote ²⁷ Herein lay the refounding of the Canadian political community – the we who do not torture – as negotiated in relation to the US and through the body of Maher Arar. The upholding of Arar's (racialised) body as (nevertheless) sacred life in opposition to unchecked sovereign power recalled a legacy that stood Canada in stark contrast to the US – as a more liberally progressive and less militarised polity. As Cowen explains, ‘The decline of militarism was a fundamental feature of Canada's new liberalism.’Footnote ²⁸ It is a legacy that harkens back to Lester B. Pearson's idea to diffuse tensions between Israeli and Egyptian forces fighting for control of the Suez Canal in 1956 by proposing the world's first ‘peacekeeping’ mission. But, it was a legacy solidified by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who sought to make Canada ‘a refuge from militarism’ by offering asylum to conscientious objectors of the war in Vietnam.Footnote ²⁹ Not coincidentally, Trudeau also oversaw the establishment in 1982 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was expressly intended to protect the rights of Canadian citizens against the state, to protect minorities against parliamentary majorities, to guarantee equality between the sexes, and to recognise multiculturalism as a Canadian value.

It was Canadian values, ‘rooted in a commitment to tolerance, to democracy, equity, and human rights, to the peaceful resolution of differences … [and] to social justice’,Footnote ³⁰ that were thought to inform Canada's military ethos – particularly its commitment to peacekeeping.Footnote ³¹ In the words of Sandra Whitworth, ‘Canada's image as the liberal internationalist state and neutral arbiter of conflicts was built in part on the myth of a benign and altruistic military.’Footnote ³² As part of this myth, Whitworth explains that Canadian peacekeepers were rarely depicted as warriors: ‘instead they appear donning the blue berets of the UN, normally assisting civilians in war-torn countries, and are seldom seen as even carrying a weapon.’Footnote ³³ Cowen further illustrates that as late as the late 1990s, ad campaigns for the Canadian Forces were explicitly intended to ‘speak to’ Canada's multicultural society and celebrate its diversity.Footnote ³⁴ A 1998 Canadian Forces memo, for example, stated that the Canadian military should be ‘presented not simply as a proud Canadian institution but as a force for global good.’Footnote ³⁵ Campaign slogans such as ‘Serving Canada, Serve the Global Community’ were suggested on the grounds that they would highlight Canada's diversity and commitment to ‘planetary social values’.Footnote ³⁶ All of this indicates that the official ethos of the Canadian security state stood in stark contrast to the senseless or imperialist acts of killing and being killed that came to be associated with the US. This ethos was not informed by a sacrificial imaginary, but, in contrast, by an image of itself as an exemplary example of a progressive liberal polity – committed to upholding human rights and the values associated with multiculturalism at home and abroad. As Sherene Razack noted with reference to peacekeeping, the Arar inquiry and the widespread condemnation of the Canadian state's complicity in torture, ‘neatly enable[d] Canada to tell a story of national goodness and to mark itself distinct from the US’Footnote ³⁷

From law to sovereignty

While the Canadian mythology was reaffirmed, I will suggest that state involvement in the torture of one of its own citizens nevertheless signified deep instabilities in the liberal imaginary. That torture was recast as an illegitimate practice within the borders of the Canadian aesthetic community was a victory of sorts, but the fact that this battle had to be waged was indicative of broader changes afoot. According to Kahn, torture is but one step from law to sovereignty – a point that will become prescient.Footnote ³⁸ The mere fact of Arar's torture signified this dissonance; it was but a piece of an emergent alternative imaginary that capitalised on a series of dissatisfactions with Canada's progressive liberalism and, more broadly, with the post-national, cosmopolitan imaginary that rose to prominence in advanced Western states following the end of the Cold War.

The ‘post-national imaginary’, as described here, can be linked to Canada's particular brand of liberalism as it refers to an imaginary in which the politics of killing and being killed for the sovereign (or national interest, otherwise defined) ‘give[s] way to an idea of a global order of law as the rule of reason.’Footnote ³⁹ Within it, all advanced liberal states become custodians of international order and the global good. Warfare, should it occur, ideally comes to more closely resemble policing – albeit with weapons suited to meet the challenges posed by new enemies. This is the imaginary which founded the dream of a ‘new world order’ (although not necessarily as envisioned by George Bush Sr.) and Francis Fukuyama's End of History thesis.Footnote ⁴⁰ Taken to its limit, this imaginary signals the end of sacrificial violence, not to mention the symbolic death of the warrior hero – unless, as in sci-fi movies, a warrior emerges who risks his life to save the planet and the whole of humanity.

But, as we know, this imaginary never fully materialised – owing both to rival ideological formations and deep instabilities within it. Fukuyama's latter work is indicative of the latter. Six years after celebrating the global triumph of market-oriented, liberal democracy and its prospects for global peace in his 1992 End of History thesis, he wrote of the dangers and limits of ‘the feminization of world politics.’Footnote ⁴¹ This sentiment was echoed shortly thereafter in a piece written for Millennium: Journal of International Studies by Martin Van Creveld.Footnote ⁴² While there were certainly other rumblings of discontent, it is the tensions animated in this particular discursive shift – the feminisation of the liberal democratic peace – that bear directly upon the possibility of the re-emergence of a sacrificial imaginary. Both Fukuyama and Van Creveld serve as exemplary examples of this discursive shift as both explicitly labelled the political and/or military institutions of advanced liberal democracies as feminised and linked their concerns about the limits of the liberal democratic peace precisely to this feminisation.

For them, the so-called feminisation of the peace is linked to women's increased involvement in military affairs in liberal democratic states – as members of the military and franchised members of the political community with influence over the military activities of the state. Both suggest that such involvement has had a pacifying effect on the liberal democratic state itself – with Fukuyama even suggesting this may even help to explain the absence of war between liberal democracies. The corollary of their arguments is that peace itself is a realisation of the feminine – and not, as it was once envisioned, the realisation of rational man. Herein seemingly lays the problem for these two authors. The now ‘feminized’ peace is presented as not only a constraint on war (pardon the tautology), but a constraint on masculinity itself.

If it is not yet apparent why this is problematic, Jean Bethke Elshtain elaborates in the following:

Insights gleaned from this quote can illuminate the arguments of Fukuyama and Van Creveld in two significant ways. First, it is worth noting that within their arguments, warfare and masculinity (at least, the ‘red-blooded’ variety) become repositioned as vital to the health of liberal democratic states. In an argument reminiscent of realist self-help logic, Fukuyama explains that insofar as ‘the democratic, feminized, postindustrial world’ still has to deal with parts of the world ‘run by young, ambitious, unconstrained men … masculine policies will still be required.’Footnote ⁴⁴ By this logic, ‘feminized policies’ – defined by Fukuyama as conciliatory and co-operative – ‘might be a liability’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The rise of the feminine, by this standard, becomes associated with weakness, naivety, and vulnerability. This becomes even more pronounced in the work of Van Creveld who argues that the increased participation of women in the military is ‘part symptom/part cause’ of its decline in advanced countries.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the following quote, Van Creveld compares the ‘advanced’ military (which he chides for now being in the business of keeping the peace) to the militaries in developing countries and explains why the former are found wanting:

Notable here is the fact that the waging of war is considered an achievement. But, this also illuminates a second point raised by Elshtain – that it is only in war that ‘the citizen comes to recognize the state as the source of all rights.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Contrary to viewing women's equality as the realisation of a rational and enlightened polity, Van Creveld reminds us that their (seemingly unnatural) fortune is at the behest of the state. This is linked to what Kahn refers to as ‘the step [back] from law to sovereignty’.

Kahn, in fact, concludes that ‘[l]aw exists within a sovereign sphere created and maintained by sacrificial violence.’Footnote ⁵⁰ But, it seems to me, this is warfare's achievement. This is an achievement of the sacrificial imaginary that is itself founded on the reassertion of the masculine. For while Elshtain suggests that warfare is a vital expression of the nation, what actually becomes apparent in the work of Fukuyama and Van Creveld is that it may be more accurately described as an expression of the masculine which itself becomes understood as vital to the nation. It is vital, amongst other reasons, because it is that which (re)founds the liberal democratic state. As Susan Jeffords explains, it is the re-empowerment of the state in war which ‘makes the advances of feminism, civil and minority rights, and so on suspect within the discourse of warfare, as they have achieved their goals primarily through state legislation and power.’Footnote ⁵¹ In the feminisation of the liberal democratic peace, the ‘progressive liberalism’ of advanced liberal democracy becomes read as excess to liberal democracy itself. The masculine is repositioned as the source of law.

The repositioning of the masculine as the source of law relies upon Western founding myths of sovereign liberal democratic states born and remade in the course of war; it relies upon a history that, to borrow Feldman's words, ‘represses historicity’.Footnote ⁵² As evidenced in Canada's Remembrance Day ceremonies and tributes, it relies upon a re-remembering wherein a clear, if not essential, line of continuity is drawn between the rights and freedoms that those in the advanced industrialised West enjoy today and sacrifices past. The figure of the warrior still features centrally in these (re)founding myths – such that rights and freedoms become inextricably bound to a heroic masculinity. As David Morgan describes:

On Remembrance Day, Canadians are asked to remember the sacrifices of the men who fought and died so that others could enjoy their freedom.

When it works, when the day is widely and meaningfully commemorated, the sacrificial imaginary lives on. But, when it does not, it is either because Canadians do not see an intrinsic connection between their current freedoms and acts of killing and being killed or are otherwise suspect of the heroic narration of violence. Sometimes the death of soldiers does not derive meaning from a sacrificial imaginary. As Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein has remarked, unlike the deaths of the soldiers in Afghanistan, peacekeeper deaths, for instance, ‘scarcely tweaked on the Canadian public’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Arguably they too died for a transcendent idea that was vital to Canada's imagined community – maybe even worth dying for. But theirs was not a sacrificial death. The point is that the return of an imaginary in which sacred sovereign violence becomes a possibility yet again – in which warfare can be conceived of as heroic and the warrior as noble – is neither natural, nor can it best be understood as an inevitable outcome of a sovereign logic. That it happened may tell us something about sovereignty and the sovereign imaginary, but it tells us very little about the social forces at play which enabled the return of a sovereign imaginary imbued with an ethos of sacrifice at this particular time.

An historic coup

As discussed, there were tensions residing in the global post-national imaginary that undoubtedly many of those unhappy with Canada's ‘peacekeeping mentality’ were sympathetic to. But, the fact is that these tensions did not really come to the fore of the Canadian political scene until the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Until then, peacekeeping remained what Whitworth calls one of the ‘core myths’ of Canada's imagined community, enjoying widespread public and government support.Footnote ⁵⁵ 9/11 was the first of two key events, the second being the decision to engage soldiers in armed combat, that were seized in a battle to redraw the boundaries of the Canadian aesthetic community – to reposition the ‘progressive’ of Canada's liberalism as excess and to recentre the masculine. It should be stated that there was nothing of the event itself that determined this outcome. After all, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, ‘we have [all] dreamt of this event … everyone without exception has dreamt of it – because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree.’Footnote ⁵⁶ White men were not the only ones who felt the violence of the singularity of American-centred globalisation; nor were they the only of its beneficiaries who wished for something more (and by this I mean other). There was nothing particularly masculine about the existential angst this event produced. What was particularly masculine was its negotiation – even if the momentarily imagined return of a world of enchantment (perhaps emboldened by a sacrificial imaginary) had some appeal for us all.

9/11 produced a disjunction in the world as we knew it, allowing an opportunity for, in the words of Bette Denich, ‘those who lurk off-stage with alternative scripts’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was an event in the Foucauldian sense, characterised as it was by ‘the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power … the entry of a masked “other”.’Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Chance’, according to Foucault ‘is not simply the drawing of lots, but raising the stakes in every attempt to master chance through the will to power, and giving rise to the risk of an even greater chance.’Footnote ⁵⁹ 9/11 enabled an imaginary of danger. It enabled the idea that globalisation itself was a source of danger – not, however, because of its stultifying and oppressive singularity, but, in the cultural negotiations that would follow, because of its plurality and its open borders.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Canada, the concern was expressed as multiculturalism that had gone too far. It was a concern initially levied by Americans. But it was enthusiastically adopted by neo-conservative politicians and defence lobbies within Canada to gain support for a right-wing agenda which included the highly controversial Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act whose provisions (for secret trials, pre-emptive detention and expanded surveillance) were widely perceived as incompatible with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Footnote ⁶¹ Cowen neatly summarises the terms of this security discourse as follows:

Paradoxically, it was the racialised other who was imagined as lurking off stage with an alternative script. Arar bore testimony to the contradictions.

Despite the contradictions, the imaginary of danger and its new security discourses altered the horizons of the possible and the desirable in Canadian politics – ‘giving rise to the risk of an even greater chance.’Footnote ⁶³ This chance was seized in 2005 when a new ‘political and military consensus’ emerged within Canada's governing Liberal Party to reassert Canada's place in the world by rebranding its military and directly engaging in the American-led war against terrorism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Afghanistan, according to political commentator James Travers, was deemed ‘the right place at the right time to demonstrate [Canada's] new capacity’ – a capacity which involved the deployment of combat troops to the Kandahar province of Afghanistan.Footnote ⁶⁵ The decision resulted if not in a reversal of the relationship of forces, as judged by public opinion polls, then at least a radical decentering of one of Canada's core myths. Steven Staples described the mission (that got well under way in 2006) as a ‘proving ground for the adoption of US war-fighting doctrine and a symbolic end to Canadian/U.N. peacekeeping.’Footnote ⁶⁶ As made evident by the social forces that irresistibly asserted themselves in and around the decision, it also provided a staging ground to test an alternative social orderFootnote ⁶⁷ – through the tales and tributes that pronounced the warrior's return.

Christopher Coker has written that ‘the problem we have with warriors derives from the problem we have with war itself’ – that so concerned has society become with the repudiation of violence that it fails to see (and increasingly prohibits its soldiers from realising) the glory and life-affirming nature of war.Footnote ⁶⁸ Coker believes that the life and humanity-affirming nature of war is realised in the warrior ethos – that is, a personal aesthetic commitment to test oneself in war, made noble when deployed in the service of instrumental reason or the state. Quite remarkably, in 2006 the Canadian media celebrated the return of the warrior ethos as a tribute to the soldiers in Afghanistan. But, whereas for Coker, it is through the nation that the warrior's actions become meaningful (such that the violence ought to be inherently read as the surface expression of a deeper and greater cause), I intend to demonstrate the opposite. In the Canadian context, it is through the warrior that the violence has acquired meaning and the aesthetic borders of the nation have been redefined.

More so than the government – which was duly criticised for its inability to explain the war to the Canadian public – it was the news media that rendered the violence intelligible. An eight-part series produced for the national Toronto Star newspaper by one of its foreign correspondents, Mitch Potter, offers an excellent illustration of this. Through it, I will examine what the intelligibility of the violence of Canadian soldiers can tell us about the nation as it is being re-imagined and its borders redefined. First, the violence is situated within a post 9/11 imaginary of otherness and danger – dramatised through Canadian engagements with the Taliban. Part one of the series is told from Potter's vantage point as an embedded journalist sharing the soldiers' nightly reprieve; a campfire has been set up on a temporary mountain base where the soldiers will rest for the night, albeit in inhospitable territory: ‘Eyes are watching tonight as the blackness settles in the barren mountaintop. Eyes that seek Canadian blood.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Potter introduces us to a brave new world. The necessity and inevitability of Canadian violence (at least for the purposes of defence) seem to follow naturally; yet the warrior's greater purpose is still to be revealed.

This occurs most starkly in part seven of the series – that tells the story of a Canadian soldier who was struck in the head with an axe by an Afghan teen while sitting and meeting with village elders. He was there, we learn, as part of the Canadian contingent's campaign to win the hearts and minds – ‘to extend the hand of friendship to the locals’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Potter quotes Lieutenant Schamuhn, a witness to the attack and one of the three Canadian soldiers who responded by shooting the attacker, as saying that before the axe struck he saw ‘pure poison hatred’ in the young Afghan's eyes.Footnote ⁷¹ As Potter explains, ‘[i]t was a look that sought death, for his victim, for himself. And all the Canadians on the ground could do was oblige.’Footnote ⁷² Here the violence moves beyond the realm of necessity and becomes part of a higher calling. Canada's racialised violence is purified, even spiritualised, such that the 14 bullets in the body of the Afghan teen signify only the murderous rage of the Afghan other.Footnote ⁷³

Second, the warrior is conceived as much more than an instrument of the nation's larger purpose. Rather, the distinctive qualities of the warrior, what Coker might refer to as the warrior ethos, become Canada's very link to the sacred.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Potter's account, the purity of Schamuhn's violence is only enhanced by knowledge of Schamuhn the man:

The warrior that emerges in this account is far removed from a previous public perception (documented in news reports as late as 2002) of the Canadian military as a racist and sexist institution.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here and in other accounts (although not always so literally) the traits associated with the symbolic figure of the soldier are themselves intertwined with the nation's heroic destiny and the nation as a transcendent idea – making possible his sacrificial death.

Third, the re-emergence of the warrior and sacrificial imaginary are enabled by and, in turn, invigorate the revitalisation of the masculine in Canadian culture. The revitalisation of the masculine is defined here as a positive revaluation of the attributes and characteristics associated with masculinity (if not individual men) and a negation or denigration of that marked as feminine. The gendering that takes place in Potter's series occurs (somewhat significantly) without blatantly negative references to women or that deemed feminine; rather it occurs through the subtle demarcation of spaces and bodies marked as feminine and masculine and the celebrated absence of the feminine from the world of warrior men. With one notable exception (to be discussed) women have no place in the world of men that Potter has gained access to. Part of the telling of the warrior gets told through women's absence – through the references made to the women left at home. We learn, for example, that five of the soldiers in Potter's platoon are soon to be fathers. One soldier reports that he is sad he will miss his child's birth, but emphasises his decision to remain was a choice. He chose to stay and his wife understands; he has ‘guys to look after as well’ who are counting on him.Footnote ⁷⁷ Here Susan Jeffords' insight is significant – that while the comradeship of war lessens differences between men, it is premised upon the one central difference, the difference of gender, which is often rendered invisible because it is solidified as natural difference.Footnote ⁷⁸

Indeed, an ongoing theme in these accounts is the choice the soldiers have made to not only serve their country, but, in true warrior spirit, to test themselves away from the comforts of domestic life – which becomes part of the process of becoming men. Some are following in the footsteps of their fathers. The following quote was taken from a father who speaks proudly of serving with his son and the other young men:

Notable here is that manhood itself gets identified in terms of a ‘militarized masculinity’ – one of the key attributes of which is, according to Whitworth, the willed negation of the feminine by the masculine.Footnote ⁸⁰

This leads to the less than innocuous side of Potter's romanticised account of brothers in arms and the less than innocuous operations of gender even in its most subtle forms. While the state's engagement in racialised practices of killing has been rendered visible (even if sacralised), the extent to which this is bolstered by the feminisation of war's alternatives (and a repudiation of that marked as feminine) has largely been hidden from view. In fact, when Potter addresses gender directly (rather than by its absence), we are reminded of the good fortune of Canadian women and of the rights for which this war is being fought. Potter's singular mention of a female soldier in part eight was of the woman (from another platoon) who ‘decided to play same-sex Good Samaritan’ by ‘sidestepping the [Afghan] boys’ to distribute toys to the Afghan girls who were ‘either too shy, or already too aware of cultural taboos, to accept gifts from foreign men.’Footnote ⁸¹ This story is a reminder of Fukuyama's argument that insofar as ‘the democratic, feminized industrial world’ still has to deal with parts of the world, ‘run by young, ambitious, unconstrained men … masculine policies will still be required.’Footnote ⁸²

In both cases, even the fight for women's rights paradoxically occurs within a context in which the reassertion of a militarised masculinity is deemed necessary for the possibility of law – such that even the female soldier functions as a sign of a benevolent white masculinity. Unlike Fukuyama, Potter does not feminise war's alternatives. But, he invites the reader to identify with the remasculinised soldier figure who openly bemoans ‘Canada's enduring love affair with the notion that soldiers are simply peacekeepers’ and ‘its culture of blithe pacifism’.Footnote ⁸³ Potter need not attribute these views to female bodies when the celebration of the warrior's unconstrained masculinity is only made intelligible as a repudiation of the feminine.

Elsewhere, the link between Canada's progressive or excessive liberalism and its feminisation is made much more transparent. In his book, Who Killed the Canadian Military? Granatstein (frequently cited by the media as a Canadian military expert) expresses this as follows:

The increased prominence of views such as these reflect the reaffirmation of a more boisterous and aggressive (white) masculinity, that is marked clearly by its oppositions – especially to the ‘enemy feminine’ that it has been pandering to for far too long.Footnote ⁸⁵

Its reaffirmation results not directly in the oppression of women, but in a redrawing of the borders of the speak-able and visible in increasingly narrow (gendered and racialised) terms. The Potter series spoke of the resentments that soldiers felt towards ‘anti-military Middle Canada’ for refusing to recognise that its peacekeepers have always (and necessarily) been soldiers first.Footnote ⁸⁶ More vividly, Chief of Defence, Rick Hillier, told the news media that some soldiers were ‘pissed off’ that so much news media attention was given to the treatment of detainees handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian soldiers – as this detracted positive attention from their mission.Footnote ⁸⁷ Further, in response to disciplinary action taken against a Radio-Canada journalist who publicly spoke in favour of the troops in Afghanistan, Prime Minister Harper took the unusual step of weighing in, saying that no one (not even journalists) should be ‘afraid or ashamed to defend the Canadian military’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Each of these examples is an instance of policing Canada's new aesthetic borders. As Nyers explains, elaborating Ranciere's concept of a police order, ‘[t]his is not a police that says ‘Stop! You're under arrest.’ Rather it is the kind of police that says, ‘Move along. There's nothing to see here.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Or, I might add, it is the kind that tells you when you have breached these boundaries – have, for example, made visible the issue of the Afghan detainees – and are in contempt.

It has worked in the Canadian case by affirming a sense of entitlement amongst those who Prime Minister Harper referred to as the ‘silent majority’ of Canadians (outside of Quebec's ‘pacifist tradition’) that he believed supported the war.Footnote ⁹⁰ Statistically, this majority is dubious at best, but its invocation invited those who supported the war effort and/or those who derided the perceived excesses of Canada's ‘progressive liberalism’ to feel entitled to usurp the space of a reimagined Canadian centre. It also entitled them to more confidently delimit the realms of legitimate speech and debate by demarcating alternative claims or points of view (difference itself) as contemptible, pitiable or otherwise out of bounds. This can be seen, for example, in Defence Minister Peter MacKay's mocking reference to another member of parliament as ‘delusional’ and ‘an unrealistic peacenik’ for comparing the current Afghan mission to the Soviet invasion.Footnote ⁹¹

At the local level, the unprecedented decision made by some municipal governments to demonstrate support for the troops by placing yellow ribbon decals on emergency vehicles was criticised by some in the media and some community groups as demonstrating neither neutrality, nor sensitivity to particular minority groups and others opposed to the war.Footnote ⁹² For some, the particular interests represented in this decision and in the more general trend to adorn one's car in yellow ribbon decals were fairly clear. Toronto Star columnist, Jim Coyle, writes:

If this was the message for some, the interesting point remains that it became possible for these attributes to signify patriotism and one's identity as a true Canadian.

The return of the Canadian warrior provided a venue, divorced from reason or the accountability of formal political debate, for white masculinity to tell its story, speak its desire, and become the only story that could be told.Footnote ⁹⁴ The latter point is important. While the narrative accounts that accompanied the warrior's return repositioned white masculinity as the source of law and voice of reason (despite its emotional resonances and childish taunts), they were not simply the purview of white middle class men. For one thing, they offered little or nothing to the white men that had either adopted an alternative expression of masculinity and/or who recognised that tightly delineated gender categories are constraints upon us all. For another, they had a much broader appeal; in a period of ontological insecurity, the figure of the soldier imaginatively (re)situated the nation deep within a sacred time and a historic rhythm of sovereign regeneration and renewal. The abstract nation of rights and freedoms (that redeemed us by separating us from our own bare life) was made palpable through blood and sacrifice. Canadian citizens could strive for greater representation and impartiality, but they returned from an ethos of law to sacrifice when they recognised masculinity as the source of law. The very possibility of the warrior's return, as the one story that could be heard, resided in the mystification of its particularity.

A re-enactment of the moment of sovereign revelation

Significantly, Maher Arar's story was not absent from this retelling; nor was it absent from the rebordering of the Canadian aesthetic community (centred upon the figure of the warrior) that followed. His was an affective presence. The seemingly irreconcilable narrative of the Canadian security state that Arar bore testimony to was not denied in stories of the warrior's return. As stated previously, Arar's story unfolded alongside that of the emerging warrior without being subsumed by it. It may, in fact, have partly enabled it – paradoxically contributing to the cultural backdrop against which the return of the Canadian warrior was made intelligible. At the very least, Arar's story (which was always the nation's story) complimented narratives of Canada at War (read through the warrior) in two important ways. As suggested previously, the repatriotisation of Arar and the condemnation of torture that followed reaffirmed Canada's ‘progressive’ liberal credentials vis-à-vis the US. The result was that even while Canada's aesthetic borders were being reimagined through the narrow lens of a revitalised masculinity, in comparison to American practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Canada's repudiation of torture signified its exemplary and ongoing commitment to the rule of law. Through a reaffirmation of the Canadian/American divide, an increasingly aggressive Canadian masculinity was able to position itself as mere necessity (in relation to feminised excess) and as central to law (in relation to an American masculinity that ostensibly exceeded law and reason).

More fundamentally, even while Arar's life was held up as ‘an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power’, the state's negation of this right was a powerful reminder of life's subjection to a power over death and ‘life's irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Arar's recollections of the state ‘making pain’ on a body whose speech possessed all the hallmarks of Canadian citizenship (politically qualified life) symbolically cast all Canadians as potentially bare life.Footnote ⁹⁶ Arguably, it was only through the process of whitening or the de-racialisation of Arar's body (even as he was paradoxically upheld in the media as a marker of race and, hence, a test-case of Canada's commitment to rights and equality) that he was able to regain entry into the polis or the city of men.Footnote ⁹⁷ Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who is still being detained in Guantanamo Bay, has not been so fortunate. The potential duality of Arar's body, which enabled him to be recast as citizen-subject of the white/racialised Canadian state is not insignificant. Symbolically, Arar stood in both for ‘every’ Canadian and for the generalised and mass images of the dead, wounded, starving, diseased and homeless – the ‘more than three billion people’ who, according to Ulrich Beck, ‘know no protection of their rights.’Footnote ⁹⁸ My argument is that it was through a simultaneous process of identification with and distantiation from the tortured body of Maher Arar that Canadians augmented the space between themselves and the figure of homo sacer – in the tributes paid to the Canadian war dead. Within this brave new Hobbesian world of terror, torture and lawlessness, Canadians were precariously separated from their own bare life and (re)cast as the lucky ones. If, as Agamben says, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereign power – as the exception that enables the normal and law itself – then we can see the (re)emergence of a sacrificial sovereign ethos in the very spaces in which Canadians simultaneously enacted their own bare/politically qualified life.

The crowds that greeted the hearses which carried the bodies of dead Canadian soldiers along the Highway of Heroes can be understood thus – as a staged re-enactment of the moment of sovereign revelation. The Highway of Heroes phenomenon also serves as an exemplary example of the social forces that animated and extended the remit of a government decision to engage Canadian soldiers in combat – enabling the return of a sacrificial imaginary and the rehabilitation of the warrior figure. Reportedly, events began in 2002 after four Canadian soldiers were killed as a result of bomb attack by an American F-16 jet in a friendly fire incident. A local reporter from Port Hope, Ontario documented the story of approximately thirty individuals who, after watching live coverage of the repatriation services at CFB Trenton, gathered atop a highway overpass to witness the funeral procession as it passed beneath them, making its 172 km journey to the forensic sciences lab in Toronto.Footnote ⁹⁹ A grassroots movement followed, gaining traction as Canada began major combat operations in southern Afghanistan in 2006 – becoming known as the ‘Highway of Heroes’ phenomenon:

Others solemnly salute as the procession passes. When in 2006, the federal government suddenly decided to deny media access to the returning dead bodies at CFB Trenton, in a move reminiscent of American President George Bush, the police, media, military families, and even the top military officials challenged the decision – with members of the police and military actively thwarting it by enabling media efforts to find ways around the ban.Footnote ¹⁰¹ What they recognised, which the Prime Minister seemingly did not, was that it was in and through the tributes to the war dead that sovereignty was revealed and violence became meaningful, even sacred. Within a month the decision was reversed and in 2007 the relevant stretch of highway was formally recognised with signs by the provincial government – designating it the Highway of Heroes.

Whether experienced with a sense of euphoria or deep reverence, I suggest that sovereignty appeared on the bridges to the extent that those who witnessed the procession were moved by it – and like any religious experience, it not only appeared, but was also called forth. Its meaning was temporal, conditional, and entirely contextual. This article seeks to trace (and illustrate) a correspondence between it and the story of Maher Arar and to map this onto the shifting power relations that have animated and seized the desires to rehabilitate the warrior figure. The result, I argue, is that the rehabilitation of the warrior figure is intimately bound with a rehabilitation of white masculinity as the source of law – saviour to Arar and saviour to us all. In the moment of sovereign revelation those who lined the highway overpasses (and who were otherwise moved by its telling) recognised their own ‘irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment’. In their gratitude they re-enacted their own bare life, but only momentarily as they also isolated and separated it from themselves, constituting the grace of the sovereign that would spare them in turn.Footnote ¹⁰²

Consider the words of a mother of a Canadian soldier who travelled to Kandahar to reflect upon the cause that her son and other Canadians have died for:

As in many witness accounts of processions along the Highway of Heroes, this mother remarks upon the good fortune of Canadian citizens and juxtaposes the profane and the sacred, linking the two in such a way that the banal and daily lives of Canadians are invested with great meaning.

Songwriters Aaron Hughes and Scott Campbell also illuminate these themes in their real or imagined account of being delayed in traffic behind such a procession. In their tribute song to the war dead, sacred sovereign presence is similarly revealed through the banality of everyday concerns:

As Kahn explains, ‘an effective politics of sovereignty must move from the finite to the infinite.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this case the infinite/transcendent meaning of the Canadian community becomes apparent through the finite bodies of the dead: ‘As the black cars approach, I felt my freedom passing by. Red and white flags on the bridges.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This is the definition of sacrifice according to Kahn: ‘the realization of a transcendent or ultimate meaning within the conditions of finitude.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is an experience of sovereign presence beyond logic or commodification that is potentially open to allFootnote ¹⁰⁸ – particularly in the mystification of its particularity.

But if, as Kahn says, ‘the condition from which the sacred redeems us is experienced as that absence of meaning that [in religious terms] is the Fall’,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ the path back to meaning cannot be grasped in the infinite; meaning can only reside within the finite and temporal conditions of the present. The moment of sovereign revelation can only ever be a staged re-enactment, linking today's warriors to warriors past in a particular and heroic rendering of the nation's past/present. It was a time that offered a mythic rendering of nation's history – one which repressed historicity (which Feldman describes as the ‘anthropological capacity to generate dispersal, difference, and alterity in time and space’) in order to engender a particular account of the present.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Indeed, the return of the Canadian warrior and sacrificial violence signifies not only the resurgence of Canadian militarism, but, to borrow the words of Jeffords, a ‘reaffirmation and reconstitution of the masculine in the modern polis.’Footnote ¹¹¹