°Codename: Kratos

August 23, 2005

Power does not hide, it declares itself. Yes, the shoot-to-kill policy in the UK is codenamed ‘Operation Kratos’.

racism is the indispensible precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. - Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.

Filed under: Biowar + Foucault
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5 Comments »

  1. Yes, power declares itself, but I wonder about whether or not it can (any more) justify its “murderous function.” I just wrote something about this here.

    Jon [August 23, 2005 @ 5:41 pm]

  2. You wrote: “the distinction between truth and error, innocent and guilty, intention and accident, is now strictly undecideable in our contemporary control society.”

    But I would not use words like “undecidability” so much as indifference. And here, we’re back to the indifference of democracy. It could just as well have been called ‘Operation Democracy’.

    Because indifference does not only play out at the level of an indifference to content that might generate an infinite expansion at the level of codes (identity, tastes, etc), but also as an indifference toward the content of political (and ethical) decisions. In any case, such indifference is girded by a strict demarcation of value and non-value, and imagining that racism (the demos) is not what is also at work here is to imagine that this indifference is not also a way of organising value, including the value of life.

    Oh, as for “legitimation” we will see. In any case, it matters little whether people do not believe what they go about doing. It matters what they do. Remember the brief discussion about habits?

    s0metim3s [August 23, 2005 @ 5:53 pm]

  3. “It matters what they do.”

    Indeed. In this sense, of course, the point is to insist on the continuing validity of certain forms of difference. But (and, yes, again back to habit) I doubt that such differences depend upon decisions, and so decideability.

    Jon [August 23, 2005 @ 6:13 pm]

  4. operation kratos

    Or, how to procrastinate — first a lovely chat with Camel, and then a ghoulish pun about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, inspired by Ange and Ms Minogue: I’m really not trying to “make a joke” out this….

    antipopper [August 25, 2005 @ 1:10 pm]

  5. Ok, touché. That is really very funny/disturbing.

    TCO [August 25, 2005 @ 4:37 pm]

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