Post-Political Global Non-Order:

Weber, Foucault, Agamben and the Reason of Regulated Chaos

Laurence McFalls, Université de Montréal1

The location of death within a series of meaningful and consecrated events ultimately lies at

the base of all endeavors to support the autonomous dignity of the polity resting on force.

– Max Weber (1915)2

This essay proposes a theoretical reflection on the confusion, both empirical and

theoretical, that surrounds the most fundamental concepts of global politics today. Since the

end of the Cold War, such categories as war and peace, friend and enemy, victim and

perpetrator, combat and compassion, order and disorder have become increasingly difficult to

distinguish. While it is possible to excuse conceptual confusion as the inevitable product of

the complexity, fluidity, and mobility of the global(ized) present, I wish to explore here the

hypothesis that the present is not one of hypermodern complexity, but rather that it reflects the

emergence – on the ruins of political modernity, understood as the quest for some rational

form of social order – of a new post-political rationality of what I call regulated chaos or

managed non-order. To make this argument, I shall examine the changed nature of war,

combatants, enemies, and victims to show how the blurring of boundaries between them

phenomenologically reflects the implosion of modern political rationality and its central trope,

the state. To do so, I draw on three social theorists/philosophers whose works, written at

different key moments of crisis and agony of the modern state, have problematized the

tensions inherent to the western project of modernity. At the heart of Max Weber’s

comparative historical sociology lies the ultimate irrationality of western modernity’s

rationalization of different life spheres, an irrationality clearly evident at the beginning of the

20th century in, for example, capitalism’s rational pursuit of profit as a senseless end in itself,

or in the modern state’s sacrifice of the normative goals that inspire political action to the

imperatives of bureaucratic rationalization and self-reproduction. Similarly, Michel

Foucault’s critical genealogies of knowledge and power, articulated during the crisis of the

liberal welfare state, radically debunk the modern teleological discourse of rational progress.

Even more explicitly, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the logical structure of exception at the

heart of the western metaphysical tradition reveals how and why modernity has today given

way to the impasse of contemporary politics’ permanent state of exception. Weber, Foucault,

and Agamben thus offer interpretative frameworks within which we can understand the

moments of slippage and convergence between modes of social action and existence within

the political (ir)rationality of the present. In the first section of this article, I draw on Max

Weber’s sociologies of action and of domination in order to understand the motivations, the

institutional and material resources, and the modes of legitimation particular to combatants in

the current historical configuration and thus to show how today’s military vocation has

become humanitarian in a particular sense. In the second section, I turn to the figure of the

enemy. In order to elucidate the historically changing discursive construction of the

distinction between friend and foe, I turn to Michel Foucault’s archaeology of western

epistemology and to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical elaborations of Carl Schmitt’s

concepts of sovereignty and the state of exception. I argue that enemies to be combated and

their victims to be saved have, in their contemporary construction, become slippery,

overlapping categories. Finally, in the third section, combining the insights of Weber,

Foucault, and Agamben, I sketch the contours of a new but still implicit mode of political

reason that has erased the ordered boundaries of friend and foe, of killing and saving, of war

and peace. In arguing that a fusion, and not just a confusion, of fundamental categories and of

social roles has occurred, I do not, of course, claim that organizations and actors as different

as state-based armed forces and international humanitarian NGOs undertake identical actions

or that killers, victims, and life savers have become empirically and morally indistinguishable.

Instead, I contend that the intrinsic logic of these distinct modes of action is identical and that

it heralds the emergence of a radically new nomos of the earth.

Killing and Being Killed as a Vocation

In 1915, at a moment when popular enthusiasm for the Great War remained strong

even in face of the horrors of the modern warfare of movement in the east and of position in

the west, Max Weber interrupted his encyclopedic survey of The Economic Ethic of World

Religions to write a theoretical excursus (his celebrated “Zwischenbetrachtung”) on

“Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.”3 Weber there sketches his

configurational understanding of social actors as suspended within the tensions between

different life spheres (kinship, economy, politics, esthetics, eroticism, reflexive knowledge,

and religion) and their intrinsic logics (Eigengesetzlichkeiten). Weber shows how the

rationalizations of each life sphere, which in the modern western world occurred concurrently,

albeit (and contrary to the Parsonian reinterpretation of Weber) with no teleogical necessity,

not only came into conflict with religious rationality but also revealed the substantive

irrationality of each life sphere’s inherent formal rationality. Within the agonistic sphere of

politics, for example, the intrinsic logic of competition for the monopolization of the means of

physical violence as the ultimate arbiter of value conflicts can, under certain historical

configurations such as that of modern western Europe, ultimately give rise to the institution of

the bureaucratic state and its legal-rational mode of legitimate authority. Just as capitalist

enterprise rationally organizes the means of production in endless and ultimately senseless

quest for their maximization, the bureaucratic state rationally organizes and maximizes the

fiscal, legal, and military-technical means of repression. From the logical standpoint of other

life spheres, but also from the standpoint of the value-rationality that inspires political

struggle in the first place, this political enterprise ending in the all-too-familiar absurdity of

bureaucratic hypertrophy is, of course, completely irrational.

Writing in the midst of the horrifically murderous conflagration that had arisen

unintentionally from the competitive logic of the international state system, Weber had to

confront the absurd irrationality at the heart of modern politics. The humanly unbearable

ultimate meaninglessness of the modern state required that “the polity resting on force”

consecrate death, that is, violent death for political ends as the highest possible human

achievement, even if those ends under the modern state were nothing more than the formally

rational means for aggrandizing state power. Thus, on the battlefield, politics supplanted

religion as the hero’s sacrifice of self gave great meaning to the otherwise absurd event of

death. At the service of the “cold monster” of the bureaucratic state, the soldier may well have

been just another depersonalized functionary, but he enjoyed the unique and glorious dignity

of being called upon to die for the fatherland.4 The modern soldier thus enjoyed, beyond a

legal-rational service ethic, the charisma of office as well as the camaraderie within the

charismatic community of his brothers-in-arms and recovered the honor of the traditional

warrior community. The figure of the modern soldier was nonetheless inseparable from the

institution of the modern state in its titanic struggle with other states whose soldiers were

consequently the soldier’s enemies or allies.

Weber’s ideal-typical construction of the particular dignity of the modern soldier still

resonates today, but the particularly modern discourse of military honor has become an

ideology increasingly difficult to sustain. Indeed, an examination of the social position of

contemporary military combatants from a Weberian perspective offers insight not only into

the combatant’s changing vocation but also into the transformed political institutional context

that defines both the soldier’s role and the enemies to be combated. Intuitively it is clear that

the social meaning of politically organized armed combat has changed since the end of the

Cold War and of the proxy hot wars that accompanied it. For example, a NATO soldier killed

by a landmine in Kandahar will still be proclaimed a hero, but a certain unease will surround

the event not simply because NATO’s mission in Afghanistan is, at best, ambiguous but,

more importantly, because western soldiers are no longer expected (normatively as well as

empirically) to die. The zero-casualty norm, however, raises a serious challenge to the dignity

and the vocation of the soldier. Indeed, the sky-rocketing suicide rate among US soldiers

since 2001, for example, may not stem, as common interpretation would have it, from the

horrors and hardships of their missions but rather from the lack of the horror of death.5 In the

absence of the ultimate sacrifice of the self as the norm for service, wherein does the specific

dignity of the military vocation reside now?

To answer this question, we must examine the particular historical configuration of

contemporary military service. The past, modern ideal-type of the citizen-civil servant-soldier

at the service of the legal-rational “polity resting on force” was of course a short-lived,

western historical contingency. Fighting people across time and space have found the

motivation and the legitimization for their actions and their obedience in a wide variety of

substantive and formal rationalities beyond the possibility of meaningful, heroic death for the

nation-state. The reasons to risk death in combat have included the social prestige of caste or

class, the lure of booty, the reproductive needs of family (think of the rape of the Sabine

women), the zeal of religious mission, and the payment of a wage. The latter – mercenary –

reason came, of course, uncomfortably close to the vocation of the modern soldier (and to that

of the post-modern combatant, albeit differently as we shall see). Socio-economically, both

forms of military service had at their origins the state’s monopolization of the means of

physical violence or the proletarianization of the fighting classes, be they noblemen, (petty)

bourgeois militia men, or peasant recruits. If, despite the former nobility’s and the

bourgeoisie’s monopolization of the higher officer ranks, the modern army practiced a

democratic leveling of class, or political proletarianization, before the sovereign state, the

question of class also shapes the contemporary military vocation.

As Weber’s historical sociology (of religion) posits, a not directly causal affinity

obtains between ideational motivations and class interests.6 What is more, the technical means

at the disposal of the social carriers of ideas shape both interests and ideas. Thus, at any given

historical moment, a particular configuration of ideas, interests (including material and

institutional resources) and available, objectively more or less effective military technologies

establish the combatant’s vocation. At different historical moments, whereas ideas of honor

have differed along with more or less elite or mass-based armed forces, military technology

has not only favored larger or smaller forces but also heightened or diminished the social

distinction between combatants and “civilians” as well as more or less isolated the battlefield

from other social arenas. It does not matter whether the French revolutionary ideal of the

“nation en armes” was cause or consequence of the democratization of the army, but the

technological, industrial means of arming and maintaining mass armies certainly helped give

rise to the idea of total war. The advent of aerial bombardment and, ultimately, weapons of

mass destruction made the totality of war a reality, a complete democratization of death,

which brought the bureaucratic state’s monopolization of the means of physical violence to its

logical fruition but also robbed modern soldiers of their specific vocational dignity. (Therein

lies the indecency of the atomic bomb from a purely sociological point of view.)

Under the shadow of mutual assured destruction, the proxy wars of the Cold War

concealed or delayed the reconfiguration of the military vocation, though in the United States,

for example, nostalgia for the “good war,” World War Two, signaled the strain on the modern

military discursive formation. With the collapse of the Soviet empire as military and

ideological enemy, western militaries underwent massive strategic, tactical, technical, and

discursive redeployment, with the norm of conscription or universal service giving way to

entirely professional and professionalized corps. To be sure “ordinary” combat troops still

engage in dirty fights, but the public malaise, if not embarrassment, that greets their deaths

points to the demise of the democratic, egalitarian, not to say proletarian military. Today’s

idealized fighters are clean, technical wizards sitting at computer screens and directing drones

with surgical precision not at enemy nations but at dangerous elements within them. They do

not die and they do not kill so as much as purge.7 They are not heroes, either; the only ones

celebrated as such are those who take part in the meta-operation of saving or recovering the

missing, the wounded, and the dead. As Leonard Wong writes in an article on the increasingly

enhanced norm within the American military to recover fallen “warriors,” “With much of the

killing relegated to technology, rescue and retrieval remains an intensely human endeavor.”8

In other words, the contemporary combatant’s highest vocation has become saving life or, at

least, the memory of a life lived.

This redeployment of the military as a corps of technical experts committed to the

saving of lives was not just a potentiality waiting to happen during the Cold War freeze on

modernity. It has a specific history, which we shall not rehearse here, in the crisis and conflict

zones of the 1990s from Somalia to Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, which gave rise to the

concepts of the rights and duties to intervene and to protect and of humanitarian war.9

September 11 and the launching of the wars on terror and in Afghanistan and Iraq renewed

the military’s securitarian mission but under an entirely new logic, best typified by the

elaboration and expansion of the concept of the “unlawful enemy combatant,” i.e. neither the

soldier nor the civilian of an enemy state, but an extra-legal, depoliticized agent of threat to

life. To be sure, states and state-based actors continue to play roles in the new securitarian (as

well as humanitarian) wars, but only within the new form of political reason under which the

discursively, socially, and technically reconfigured military operates. This reason is at work in

the contemporary securitarian-humanitarian redefinition of the enemy, to which we shall

shortly turn, but also evident in the definition of the new “legal combatant”.

Today’s fighters are neither soldiers, mercenaries, nor warriors, though their vocation

bears certain resemblance to these modern and traditional callings. Like soldiers, they remain

subordinated to the hierarchical, legal-rational, procedural command structure of the

bureaucratic state; like mercenaries, they are not only skilled, paid professionals but

effectively depoliticized as they engage either in aseptic killing or the saving of lives in the

anti-political humanitarian sense. Like warriors, they may believe in their noble calling,

though the recent propagation of the “warrior ethos,” in the US military, for example,

anachronistically revives the aristocracy’s myth of its charismatic or racial calling to

leadership and privilege as proven on the field of battle.10 The historical military figure whom

the current combatant may resemble most was, however, the field commander of the early

modern period: the technical, tactical genius who stood above a map in his comfortable tent at

a distance from the fray and studied the course of battle on a map upon which he moved

figurines, the forerunners of the remote-controlled drone. He embodied, of course, the

ambition and reason of panoptic theory.11 He was the philosophical knowing subject of the

classical episteme whose knowledge, and power, resided in his ability to represent reality. He

did not lead by example, as had been the case for the warrior chieftain, in keeping with the

political reason of the pre-modern episteme of resemblance. Nor did the classical field

commander draw on the empirical, historicized knowledge of populations and social

processes as did modern military leaders, notably in the heyday of social scientific policy

planning during and after World War Two. The contemporary ideal-typical fighter, namely

the drone controller, is distant and theoretical like the classical field commander, draws on

specialized empirical knowledge like the modern commander, but lacks the panoptical

ambition of both the former and the latter. This virtual combatant’s political reason belongs

neither to the transcendent subjectivity of the absolutist order nor to the megalomanic

objectivity of bureaucratic hierarchy, two political rationalities of and ambitions for order.

Instead, today’s virtual legal combatants, like the enemies they fight, participate in

another form of political reason beyond those, as I have already hinted, implicit in Foucault’s

typology of western epistemes since the renaissance.12 Despite the radical ruptures between

them, the epistemes of resemblance, of representation, and of the human sciences all

subscribed to a political rationality of order, be it divine, natural, or scientific. To be sure, the

episteme of representation entailed a vertical sovereign order derived from the natural law

accessible to the abstract universal subject whereas the episteme of human science yielded a

horizontal order of liberal governmentality. They both nonetheless retained the divine

principle of order. I shall argue that today’s political reason has abandoned order in favor of

the regulation of chaos, or the fragmented management of non-order, and that it is only in

light of this new reason that we can make sense of the vocations of virtual combatants and of

their logical doubles, humanitarian interveners, as well as of the similarly logically linked

status of the enemies they fight and the victims they save. To do so, let us turn to the figure of

the enemy today.

The Global Enemy “Live”

The enemy is the logical counterpart to the warrior, soldier, or combatant who defends

or imposes an order, whatever its underlying episteme. Defined negatively but imprecisely as

anyone or anything that defies, refuses, undermines, or attacks order, the enemy remains an

obscure figure, whose distinct places within the political rationalities of order and of non-

order we must now elucidate. As Gil Anidjar has observed, the figure of the enemy has been

the structuring absence of Western thought from its beginnings.13 That is, the enemy has

permeated western political and theological thought from the margins where it was relegated,

like the monsters that filled the uncharted portions of ancient nautical maps. The enemy has

also been a marginalized yet central figure on the scenes of military-humanitarian intervention

that my collaborator Mariella Pandolfi has visited in her ethnographic fieldwork since the mid

1990s in the postcommunist western Balkans in particular. Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania (the

latter albeit to a less obvious extent) have been theatres of unusual violence, both within local

society and between the local populations and the corps of interveners that have come to

rescue them. After briefly evoking the different modes of violence inflicted in the

postcommunist Balkans, I shall describe the emergent but confused figure of the enemy that

they suggest. Then, I shall draw on the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, whose

conceptions of sovereignty and the polity are haunted by the figure of the enemy. Finally,

drawing on Michel Foucault, I shall propose a genealogy of the contemporary figure whom

we dub the global enemy, or the enemy “live”, that is, the newly visible on-going series of

ephemeral monsters who in “real-time” haunt the collective, mass-mediated imaginary of

globalized disorder.

My research group’s work on the Balkans began in the wake of the Bosnian tragedy,

when Pandolfi arrived there to study post-conflict psychosocial trauma. When the Kosovo

crisis erupted into an international war and potential humanitarian catastrophe, she was

already on the ground in Albania, itself a site of massive international intervention. I cannot

here even begin to summarize the complexities of the Balkan conflicts, often reduced in

media representations to age-old ethno-religious antipathies or to instrumental economic or

political power struggles in the vacuum left by communism’s collapse. To be sure, the

propulsion of the Balkans onto the stage of political, economic, and cultural globalization

provoked the persecution of what Arjun Appadurai labels “inner enemies,” but the

superposition of an international presence claiming to represent transcendent universal values

prompted an even more complex spiral of violence.14 As a result of the massive militarized

humanitarian interventions that Pandolfi observed in Albania and Kosovo, the medicalization

and pharmaceutical treatment of social suffering (“saving the sick”) occurred in parallel with

redemptionist myths of political liberation (“saving the nation”) and the universal mission of

the international aid community (“saving the world”), binding previously disparate forms of

pathos in a thickening hegemony of compassion. Victimization, dependency, tutelage, and

uncertainty created a climate of individual and community inadequacy and of self-loathing

reflected in the articulation of hate as a communal expression of humiliation and rage. I have

labeled this self-directed violence “iatrogenic,” that is, a paradoxical reaction to a therapeutic

benevolence of what is in fact a monstrous, tentacular external force that threatens local

particularity with its claims to universal validity.15

Put more simply, the western Balkans became a theatre of violence implicating a

confusion of internal and external enemies. As early as the mid 1990s, the Italian philosopher

Giorgio Agamben described the Yugoslav civil wars, with their systematic rape and

gratuitous slaughter, as having surpassed totalitarian genocide as well as traditionally

modernist redrawing of ethnic and state boundaries. He saw subsequent “democratic”

intervention, understood and justified as temporary and restorative of political and social

order, to have prompted an indefinite state of exception. Under these circumstances,

Agamben announced, well before the scale and permanency of intervention became evident:

“…what is happening in ex-Yugoslavia and, more generally, what is happening in the

process of dissolution of traditional State organisms in Eastern Europe should be

viewed not as a reemergence of the natural state of struggle of all against all—which

functions as a prelude to new social contracts and new national and State

localizations—but rather as the coming to light of the state of exception as the

permanent structure of juridico-political de-localization and dis-location. Political

organization is not regressing toward outdated forms; rather, premonitory events are,

like bloody masses, announcing the new nomos of the earth, which (if its grounding

principle is not called into question) will soon extend itself over the entire planet.16

This prophetic citation is drawn from the first volume of Giorgio Agamben’s trilogy

Homo Sacer. Agamben does not explicitly theorize the figure of the enemy but points instead

to the role of the arcane figure of ancient Roman law, the homo sacer, a stranger to the

political community who could be killed without being legally murdered nor religiously

sacrificed. The homo sacer embodies bare life, that is, life without political or theological

significance, the same bare life that Aristotle banished from the political community in the

name of friendship and the “good life.” The homo sacer thus personifies the foundational,

exclusionary violence of law and politics, ethics and religion. He is not an out-law or an

enemy per se, whose killing would take on political-theological meaning, but rather occupies

the “zone of indistinguishability” between law and violence, friend and enemy. The homo

sacer represents the powerless counterpart to the sovereign, who also occupies a zone of

indistinguishability by virtue of his authority to proclaim the state of exception, the legal

suspension of the law. From Aristotle, who banished bare life from the polis, to Hobbes, who

excluded the sovereign from the social contract, to Carl Schmitt, who defined the sovereign as

he who can proclaim the state of exception and defined the political as the moment of

distinction between friend and foe, the Western political tradition reposes on what Agamben

calls the structure of ex-ception, or a logic of inclusive exclusion. Whereas the sovereign and

the homo sacer straddle the threshold of inclusion-exclusion, thereby offering a glimpse onto

the foundational violence of the politico-theological order, the enemy stands outside. His

absent presence, however, permeates the politico-theological order and thereby conceals its

arbitrary foundations. That was the situation at least until recent events brought “to light of

the state of exception as the permanent structure of juridico-political de-localization and dis-

location.”

Before further elucidating this new enemy, I should point out that Agamben’s indirect

definition of the enemy reproduces the Hobbesean logic of politics and, hence, of the enemy.

Hobbes’s conception of political power is vertical and repressive: the sovereign order is

hierarchical, patriarchal, and monotheistic; its enemies are necessarily exterior or foreign,

with sedition constituting an irrational self-exclusion from the commonweal. (Kafka offers no

doubt the best portrayal of this unfathomable enemy in “An Old Manuscript”.17) Although

this Hobbesean image of political power - namely the absolute sovereign – is a phantasm that

continues to haunt Western thought, we must remember that the Hobbesean moment, with its

claim to transcendence through natural law, arose from historical contingency. We must

therefore resituate and denaturalize his vertical conceptualization of power and its

concomitant exclusionary definition of the enemy – not because it has not enjoyed historical

efficacy, but because it still conceals other, horizontal modes of power and enmity that today

have converged with the vertical.

In his 1976 lecture course at the Collège de France, entitled “Society must be

defended,” Michel Foucault began to articulate explicitly a political theory of power as

horizontal and capillary with a historical re-contextualization of Hobbes’s theory of

sovereignty.18 Hobbes lived in a historical context of civil war prompted by aristocratic

resistance to monarchical absolutism. He wanted to put an end to the mythical war of all

against all by invoking the innate rationality of a universal subject. Consistent with the

episteme of representation of the classical age, the discourse of sovereignty obscured but did

not entirely suppress the aristocratic counter-discourse of politics as a continuation of internal

war by other means. Both in England and France, the feudal reaction to monarchical

absolutism drew on historical arguments about the rights of conquering and conquered races.

Foucault’s genealogy in “Society must be defended” exposes how this counter-discourse

resurfaced in the late 18th and 19th centuries not only in liberalism’s limitations on direct

vertical rule and in its introduction of horizontal “governmentality” but also in the theories of

class struggle, of social Darwinism, and of political racism. I cannot go into the detail of

Foucault’s political analysis, but with the epistemic rupture of the late 18th century, it is clear

that new conceptions of legitimate rule, of the political subject, and hence of the enemy arose

within the new episteme of the human sciences.

Indeed, following Foucault’s distinction – first presented in The Order of Things

(1966) – between the renaissance episteme of resemblance, the classical episteme of

representation, and the modern episteme of the human sciences, we can identify three figures

of the enemy, and add a fourth corresponding to the contemporary enemy “live”. Let us call

them schematically the enemies of virtue, of verity, of veridiction, and of verisimilitude:

- The first enemy is an immoral enemy of virtue, or even of God himself, for under the

episteme of resemblance legitimate authority derives from God; the king is good, to oppose or

to contest him is evil.

- The second enemy is an irrational enemy of verity, for under the episteme of representation,

legitimate authority derives from natural law accessible to the reason of the universal subject;

the king is just, his laws true; to oppose him is not so much evil as pure folly.

- The third enemy is a deficient enemy of veridiction. The distinction between verity and

veridiction might seem subtle, but it is crucial. After Kant and under the episteme of the

human sciences, contingency and relativity enter knowledge so that truth is not that of God or

of a transcendent rational subject. It can be spoken only within a framework of veridiction.

The human sciences establish a series of relative truths with reference to a multiplicity of

empirical objects, a multiplicity of multitudes that allow the identification of norms and

deviations. When jurisdiction gives way to veridiction, legitimate authority derives no longer

from rational laws but from scientific norms. Henceforth, the enemy is not evil or irrational

but abnormal; he is not the enemy of God or of the king but the enemy of the people, or rather

the enemy within the people: the insane, the unhealthy, the criminal, the pervert, the

unproductive, that is, all those against whom “society must be defended” through discipline,

normalisation or elimination.

The three figures of the enemy that Foucault’s genealogy suggests have today been

supplanted by a fourth figure. God’s enemy, the king’s enemy and the people’s enemy have

given way to the global enemy. We can also call him the enemy “live”, but first, following

our schema, let us describe him as the enemy of verisimilitude, or of what appears to be true.

Inasmuch as it is possible to speak of epistemic rupture in real-time, we can say that the

modern episteme of the human sciences, whose imminent demise Foucault announced already

45 years ago, has given way to a form of knowledge not based on resemblance,

representation, or empiricism, but on phantasmic projection. The contingent character of

veridical knowledge rested on its recognition of spatial, temporal, and cultural differentiations

and their resultant incommensurabilities. Today, on the stage of globalization, these

differences have collapsed into a singular, uniform, instantaneous space. Ideal-typically or

metonymically, we can understand this global scene by analogy to the global financial

market: detached from the productive economy, entirely self-referential, and prone to panics,

the global financial market flits from alleged solemn truth to truth, wreaking havoc as it goes.

The same can be said of the global media sphere that feeds on itself, spinning truths, or rather

verisimilitudes, in a compulsive quest for sensation, from breaking news to breaking news,

from crisis to crisis, in a self-important spiralling temporality of urgency. In so doing, it

provides an endless series of emergencies and enemies, fantastic monsters that simultaneously

horrify and entertain.

Phenomenologically, this global-scape strikes us with uncanny familiarity, but how

might we interpret it? Perhaps by returning to Agamben and Foucault. In the apocalyptic

political theology of the present, the dimensions of history, geography, and culture have

imploded onto a single point of origin. We can understand the repercussions of this implosion

through the political topography suggested, as we have already seen, by Giorgio Agamben. In

his vision, the sovereign and the homo sacer stood on the limits of the political order, beyond

which limits dwelled the enemy. Like echoes from the original big bang, they marked the

ends of the political universe, beyond and before which there was only unfathomable chaos.

Paradoxically, so-called globalization has not burst the frontiers of the political universe, but

rather collapsed them. In the process, the sovereign and bare life have moved from liminality

to centrality so that what Agamben calls the zone of indistinguishability no longer delimits,

but occupies the totality of political space. With this implosion, the figure of the enemy, who

previously haunted the political order from the exterior, now fills centre stage as well.

However, the resulting confusion of foundational violence, of primordial drives of bare life,

and of omnipresent enmity and danger is not a tabula rasa or return to the primitive

Hobbesean war of all against all; it is, to cite Agamben again: “the new nomos of the earth.”

With the help of Foucault, we can attempt to articulate the political rationality of this

new nomos. As we have seen, Foucault introduced a horizontal conception of power in the

modern age in contrast with Agamben’s vertical, Hobbesean or classical view. Indeed, his

concept of liberal governmentality revealed how certain technologies of government could

yield pervasive and invasive social control in the absence of – or rather alongside of –

repressive, hierarchical structures of sovereign command. According to Foucault, the

ingenious political rationality of liberalism was its ability to produce and to consume a series

of liberties so that liberal subjects could freely steer and coordinate their actions in the

direction suggested by the mechanism of self-interest. Neoliberalism refined this mechanism

– to be sure, always alongside certain vertical, regalian powers necessary for maintaining

capitalism’s inequalities – through the proliferation of technologies for perfecting the

entrepreneurial subject’s health, education, resilience, autonomy and the like.19 With the

implosion of the modern episteme and its concomitant liberal political order, the horizontal

technologies of governmentality did not disappear, just as vertical technologies of sovereign

command had never disappeared either. Instead, these technologies have recombined in a

symbiosis of vertical and horizontal powers under a political rationality that I call “regulated

chaos,” or the management of non-order.

Whereas liberalism produced and consumed freedoms, regulated chaos produces and

consumes disorder. That is, a permanent state of emergency produces and reproduces itself by

identifying an endless series of enemies, real, potential or imagined. Within the new political

rationality of regulated chaos, different forms of knowledge-power and technical expertise

simultaneously and autonomously carve out and tactically manage encapsulated zones of life

and of social relations without regard for any overarching principle of hierarchy or coherence.

With a virtually limitless repertoire of criteria, they isolate “vulnerable” individuals and

populations who require warnings about and protection from predators, catastrophes, or

themselves: the weak, the strong, the young, the old, the rich, the poor, the native, the

stranger, the hopelessly average, all become victims, potential or real. They all become bare

life at the mercy of as many discrete forms of knowledge-power as can define them. At the

same time, in the global politics of survival, they all can morph into each other’s enemy. The

confusion of genres becomes fluid and total.

This confusion has attained its highest expression today in the concept of humanitarian

war. Humanitarianism, the elevation of the protection of bare life to the highest possible

principle of social action, provided post Cold War globalization with a foundational myth.

The claim today that war, too, is a mode of humanitarian action, nay, even that humanitarian

action requires war, not only reveals the inherent violence of any foundational myth. It

exposes a world where life itself becomes its own worst enemy. In such a world, in the name

of saving individual lives and species life, an endless array of discriminating discourses and

technologies fragments human society into countless and shifting categories of life more or

less worthy of being lived. The shift from the category of “deserving poor” or “legitimate

asylum seeker” to that of “social parasite” or “illegal immigrant” can be as quick as it is

imperceptible. Just think of the speed with which heroic Tunisian revolutionaries can be left

to drown within sight of the shores of Lampedusa. Worthy lives, wasted lives come and go in

a spiral of increasingly arbitrary social triage within which the enemy “live” frightens,

titillates and entertains us until we too enter the zone of indistinguishability and we wage war

against ourselves in the name of humanity.20

Beyond Order and Chaos

In describing the verisimilitudinous political reason of the present, I too have slipped

into the denunciatory normative, dichotomous, apocalyptic language of the western

philosophical tradition with its all-too-neat distinctions between friend and foe, victim and

perpetrator, good and evil, order and chaos. Nietzsche, of course, already long ago announced

the exhaustion of the western logos; politically and practically its aporias have been evident

since at least World War I. A generation ago, Foucault called for the decapitation of the king

who continued to haunt political thought as the inevitable fountainhead of law and order. My

concept of regulated chaos, however, suggests, through its oxymoronic formulation, the

difficulty of such mental regicide. Indeed, if we wish to argue that military and humanitarian

action follow the same logic or that enemies and friends (or at least those whom we would

save) are indistinguishable, then we must find a new vocabulary that goes beyond such

apparently mutually exclusive but logically interdependent concepts such as order and chaos.

Agamben, when he announces a new nomos of the earth that is replacing the structure

of exception of sovereign rule, remains allusive and elusive. He argues, as we have seen, that

the generalization of humanitarian and securitarian states of exception has reduced

contemporary politics to the management of “bare life.” Agamben’s reflections on the state of

exception and bare life have thus inspired philosophical and practical critiques of

humanitarian intervention, of the securitarization of politics (in particular since 9/11), and of

the growing confusion of the humanitarian and securitarian agendas not only in such concepts

as “human security” but in military-humanitarian interventions in places such as Kosovo and

Afghanistan.21 Although Agamben’s insights have proven timely and apposite, I suspect that

they still apply to the old nomos of politics-as-order precisely because Agamben sees the

contemporary generalization of states of exception as the logical paroxysm of the

foundational violence of the sovereign state; he remains sibylline about what lies beyond

sovereignty’s state-of-exception threshold.

In contrast to Agamben’s nomological conceptualization of bare life, Michel

Foucault’s original articulation of biopolitics was quite literally biological, meaning the

political management of species-life in accordance with the positive findings of the empirical

life sciences and naturalistic social sciences. While Foucault’s concept of biopolitics has also

given much traction to contemporary critiques of humanitarian intervention (and of neoliberal

social policy as well), he originally developed it within the framework of his analysis of the

“governmentality” of classical liberalism. Biopolitics and the naturalistic theory of market

economy provided the technical means for liberalism to govern more effectively by governing

less. Unlike reason of state’s attempt to control (all) things, liberal governmentality, as I have

already summarized, indirectly steered social action through the harnessing and manipulation

of interest. According to Foucault, liberal government not only “produces and consumes

freedoms” for subjects to pursue interests, notably on the free market as a place of veridiction,

but must also protect interests by providing security, notably for private property, and by

cultivating “a culture of danger” from violence, crime, and degeneration.22 Thus, liberalism

weds economic freedom with social technologies for disciplining bodies and normalizing

populations. At its logical, anarchical extreme, the (neo)liberal mode of scientifically-

informed indirect government devolves the management of risk upon endangered individuals

and groups, “empowering” the variously “vulnerable” to take biopolitical charge of their lives

so that the residual sovereign state might assume only its regal functions if not ultimately

whither away.

Indeed, Foucauldean scholars today stress the fragmentation and extreme decentering

of (neo)liberal subjectivity and capillary power relations concomitant to the explosion,

notably genetic and digital, of new security technologies.23 This utopian/dystopian

Foucauldean reading of (neo)liberalism at least ideal-typically corresponds to the

governmentality, or what the interveners themselves call “good governance” programs, being

experimented with on sites of humanitarian intervention, where the attempts to restore

deficient sovereign state authority has been more nominal than effective. Foucault thus offers

a potential avenue for understanding politics outside the ordered framework of the state, or as

the uncoordinated regulation of social non-order. As McFalls has argued, however, Foucault’s

critique of (neo)liberal governmentality remains largely ideational or disembodied and

requires sociological grounding if it is to move from description to explanation of

contemporary biopolitics.24

Read in conjunction with Foucault, as he is increasingly today, Max Weber, a thinker

who put order (Ordnung) at the centre of his political sociology, may paradoxically provide

the best avenue for conceiving of and explaining a politics beyond order.25 Weber defined

order as a social relationship in which action is oriented by identifiable, stable normative

maxims, i.e. an order’s claims to legitimacy.26 Despite prominent idealist interpretations of his

theory of social action (Parsons, Habermas), Weber, as we saw in the first part of this paper,

was not so much interested in the normative underpinnings of social order as in their formal

logic’s socio-structural consequences, including in modern times the state. Thus, Weber’s

sociology of domination establishes three ideal-types of legitimate social order—the

traditional, the legal-rational, and the charismatic—according to the form a ruler’s claims to

obedience take—respectively personal and ordinary, impersonal and ordinary, or personal and

extraordinary. Of these three forms, the charismatic is logically and empirically the least

stable, the extraordinary nature of the charismatic leader’s claims being necessarily

contradictory to order, which can re-emerge only through traditional or legal-rational

routinization. I have previously pointed out that Weber’s typology of legitimate domination

implied a fourth, as yet unnamed impersonal and extraordinary form that I dubbed and

theoretically elaborated as “therapeutic domination.”27 Indeed, I contended that a legitimate

order of therapeutic domination, complete with its own most typical institutional form, the

non-governmental organization (NGO), was not only theoretically possible but also

empirically observable on contemporary sites of humanitarian intervention. However, I also

noted the paradox of an order that, like charismatic rule, was extraordinary in form. The

paradox disappears—and not merely through sophistry—if we treat therapeutic rule not as

order, nor as disorder, but – for want of a better term – as non-order.

Problematizing politics in terms of non-order does not, however, mean that we cannot

submit it to reasoned analysis; it simply requires a different framework of intelligibility.

Weber, for example, describes feudal patrimonialism as a “chaos of concretely determined

subjective rights and duties of rulers, ruled, and administrative personnel, that cross and limit

one another and whose joint effect produces communal action that cannot be reconstructed in

modern publicistic categories, let alone in terms of the ‘state’.”28 Weber’s sociology of

charisma as an extra-order offers another avenue for understanding political non-order, for,

like any other social relationship, charisma has its particular rationality (daemonic/prophetic

value rationality, as opposed to legal-rational instrumentalism), social carriers (pariahs,

aristocrats), institutional forms (amorphous communism) and technical means (the spoken, as

opposed to written, word). Weber’s configurational sociology thus suggest that by examining

humanitarian discourses as well as the technical means and the resources (material, ideal,

institutional) of their social carriers, we can empirically uncover the framework of

intelligibility for the contemporary politics of managing non-order or regulating chaos.

Indeed, my team’s previous work on the transnational humanitarian aid community has

shown the existence of diverse corps of experts dedicated to the combat of different natural or

social ills and enjoying relative material and institutional autonomy from hierarchical, state-

based structures of command. The technical preconditions for their autonomy and efficacy

have lain not only in these corps’ particular forms of expertise and in their geographic, social,

and institutional mobility but also in the new, instantaneous communication forms that have

given their knowledge/power universal validity by virtue of its verisimilitude. Similarly, as I

theoretically suggested in the first part of this article, military actors, while still subordinated

to state authority, have also become technical experts dedicated to the expunging of social ills

or to the saving of individual lives. These changes have been possible only in a discursive

context where, as we saw in the second part, categories as fundamental as friend and foe or as

the preservation of bare life and the pursuit of the good life have become (con)fused.

Finally, as I have tried to suggest in this third part, perhaps we can make sense of the

present confusion only through a clear articulation of the emergent political reason – whether

we call it “regulated chaos,” “post-liberal,” “post-humanitarian,” or “biohumanist” – behind

the fragmentary, encapsulating technical management of various, shifting verisimilitudinously

defined specimens of species-life and of life-threats. To be sure, we can still try to understand

our contemporaneity with the neatly dichotomous language of modern liberalism – war/peace,

state/society, friend/foe, etc. – yet all too quickly we have to turn to such oxymoronic, if not

patently absurd formulations as “humanitarian war.” We may also still be able to make

empirical distinctions between soldiers at the service of nation-states, humanitarian experts

moving between the public, private, nongovernmental and non-profit sectors, militia men,

murderers, and innocent women and children. And yet: on the ground on sites of militarized

humanitarian/humanitarianized military interventions, in media representations of

protagonists and antagonists on sites of international intervention or of any real or potential

social crisis, and in scholarly analyses of the logic of action in a world of proliferating

(discourses of) risk, the lines are far from clear. As I have argued with the help of Weber’s,

Foucault’s, and Agamben’s analyses of the tensions and aporias of western modernity and of

its rationalist teleology, the long crisis of western rationalism over the course of the short

twentieth century, from the outbreak of World War One to the aftermath of the Cold War, is

giving way to a fog impenetrable with the categories of our past political reasons.

                                                                                                               1 This paper is a revised version of manuscript that I am preparing for publication with my

colleague Mariella Pandolfi.

2 Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York : Oxford University Press,

1946), 335.

3 Originally published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1915, Weber’s

essay was translated by Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 323-362, out of its original

context of Weber’s comparative sociology of the great world religions.

4 To be sure, the ordinary bureaucrat also enjoyed this dignity, but to a significantly lesser

degree since the expected self-effacement in devotion to his or her vocation did not include

death, except of course for honor-suicide.

                                                                                                               5 See Michael Thompson, “Is the US Army Losing its War on Suicide?” Time (13 April

2010), http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1981284,00.html (last accessed

September 5, 2011).

6 Cf. Weber’s oft-cited sentences from the “Introduction” to his Sociology of Religion: “Not

ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conducts. Yet very frequently the

‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks

along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” Gerth and Mills From Max

Weber, 280.

7 As Alessandro Dal Lago, “Presentazione, Metamorfosi del guerriero,” Conflitti globali 3

(2006), has argued, this aseptic, civilized face of the military in its external missions shows

another face internally towards its society of origin. Since September 11, notably, the

ubiquitous presence of uniformed public and private security agents and their expanding,

invasive security measures has led to the militarization of civil society with increasingly

overt, brutal repression of internal dissent (for example at international summits in Seattle or

Genoa). This “civilization” of the military and militarization of civil society is yet another

facet of the contemporary (con)fusion of genres. See also Didier Bigo, “Global (In)security :

the Field of the Professionals of Unease Management and the Ban-opticon” in Traces: a

Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory, no. 4 (2005), 109-157; also Barbara Ehrenreich, “The

Fog of (Robot) War,” TomDispatch.com, 10 July 2011:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175415/ (last accessed 1 September 2011).

8 Leonard Wong, “Leave No Man Behind: Recovering America's Fallen Warriors,” Armed

Forces & Society 31 (2005), 599-622.

9 Philippe Moreau Defarges, Droits d’ingérence dans le monde post-2001 (Paris: Science Po

Les Presses, 2006); Jean Bricmont, L’impérialisme humanitaire; droit humanitaire, droit

d’ingérence, droit du plus fort? (Montréal: Lux Editeur, Montréal, 2006); Fabrice Weissman,

                                                                                                               ed., A l'ombre des guerres justes: L'Ordre international cannibale et l'action humanitaire

(Paris : Flammarion, 2003); David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and

International Intervention (London : Pluto Press, 2002); Jacques R. Pauwels, The myth of

Good War (Toronto: James Lorimier and Co, 2002).

10 Wong, “No Man Left,” 613.

11 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris : Gallimard, 1975); Michel Foucault, Les mots et

les choses (Paris : Gallimard, 1966).

12 Foucault, Les mots.

13 Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab : A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA : Stanford

University Press, 2003).

14 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham :

Duke University Press, 2006).

15 Laurence McFalls, “Benevolent Dictatorship: The Formal Logic of Humanitarian

Government,” in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, eds, Contemporary States of

Emergency, 317-333

16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1998), 38.

17Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996

[1919]).

18 Michel Foucault, «Il faut defendre la société» (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

19 We have briefly summarized here the historical deconstruction of (neo)liberalism by

Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).

20 My use of the term “worthy lives” evokes Nazi genocidal propaganda and with it

Agamben’s powerful claim in Homo Sacer that the Nazi death camp is paradigmatic of

                                                                                                               modern politics. The expression “wasted lives” refers, of course, to Zygmunt Bauman,

Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

21 In addition to Agamben, Homo Sacer, see especially Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

22 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 65-68.

23 See Michael Dillon and Luis Lobos Guerrero, “Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century:

An Introduction,” Review of International Studies 34, no. 2 (2008); Michael Dillon and

Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009).

24 Laurence McFalls, “Les fondements rationnels et sociaux des passions politiques : vers une

sociologie de la violence contemporaine avec Weber et Foucault,” Anthropologie et Sociétés

32, no. 3 (2008), 155-172.

25 On the rapprochements between Weber and Foucault, see Catherine Colliot Thélène, “Les

rationalités modernes du politique : de Foucault à Weber,” in H. Bruhns and P. Duran, eds,

Max Weber et le politique (Paris: L.G.D.J., collection Droit et Société, 2009), 181-197.

26 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988 [1922]), 16.

27 Cf. McFalls, “Fondements rationnels” and McFalls, “Benevolent Dictatorship.” A similar

concept, though not articulated from a Weberian perspective as a formal mode of domination

is “therapeutic governance” as elaborated by Vanessa Pupavac, “Human Security and the

Rise of Global Therapeutic Governance,” Conflict, Development and Security 5, no. 2 (2005),

161-182.

28 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 735, my translation.