Book contents
- Discounting Life
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Discounting Life
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Necropolitical Law
- Chapter Two Necropolitical Law’s Planetary Jurisdiction
- Chapter Three Necropolitical Law Remakes Justice
- Chapter Four The Killing of al-Baghdadi
- Chapter Five Necropolitical Law, Necropolitical Culture
- Chapter Six The Mother of All Bombs
- Chapter Seven Necropolitical Law and Endless War
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
Chapter Three - Necropolitical Law Remakes Justice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2022
- Discounting Life
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Discounting Life
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Necropolitical Law
- Chapter Two Necropolitical Law’s Planetary Jurisdiction
- Chapter Three Necropolitical Law Remakes Justice
- Chapter Four The Killing of al-Baghdadi
- Chapter Five Necropolitical Law, Necropolitical Culture
- Chapter Six The Mother of All Bombs
- Chapter Seven Necropolitical Law and Endless War
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
Summary
Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.
Keywords
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- Information
- Discounting LifeNecropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror, pp. 93 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022