Table Of ContentBIOPOLITICS OF SECURITY
Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the
analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory.
Explaining how both politics and security are diff erently problematised by
changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the
seventeenth century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly
enframed by a novel account of time and human fi nitude, which it calls ‘factical
fi nitude’. The correlate of fi nitude is the infi nite, and the book explains how the
problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infi nite
government of fi nite things. It then explains how concrete political form was
given to factical fi nitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern
sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays
explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together,
and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how
biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation
of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions
of twenty-fi rst century security politics.
This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory,
critical security studies and International Relations.
Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster
University. He has written extensively on international political theory, continental
philosophy, security and war, and cultural research.
PRIO New Security Studies
Series Editor: J. Peter Burgess, PRIO, Oslo
The aim of this book series is to gather state-of-the-art theoretical refl exion
and empirical research into a core set of volumes that respond vigorously
and dynamically to the new challenges to security scholarship.
The Geopolitics of American Securitization Theory
Insecurity How security problems emerge and
Terror, power and foreign policy dissolve
Edited by Fran ç ois Debrix and Mark Edited by Thierry Balzacq
J. Lacy
Feminist Security Studies
Security, Risk and the A narrative approach
Biometric State Annick T. R. Wibben
Governing borders and bodies
Benjamin J. Muller The Ethical Subject of Security
Geopolitical reason and the threat
Security and Global against Europe
Governmentality J. Peter Burgess
Globalization, governance and the state
Edited by Miguel de Larrinaga and Marc Politics of Catastrophe
G. Doucet Genealogies of the unknown
Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster
Critical Perspectives on
Human Security Security, the Environment and
Rethinking emancipation and power Emancipation
in international relations Contestation over environmental
Edited by David Chandler and change
Nik Hynek Matt McDonald
Securitization, Accountability and Security, Technology and Global
Risk Management Politics
Transforming the public security Thinking with Virilio
domain Mark Lacy
Edited by Karin Svedberg Helgesson and
Ulrika M ö rth Critical Security and Chinese
Politics
Commercialising Security The Anti-Falungong Campaign
Political consequences for European Juha A. Vuori
military operations
Edited by Anna Leander Governing Borders and Security
The politics of connectivity and
Transnational Companies and dispersal
Security Governance Edited by Catarina Kinnvall and Ted
Hybrid practices in a postcolonial Svensson
world
Jana H ö nke Contesting Security
Strategies and logics
Citizenship and Security Edited by Thierry Balzacq
The constitution of political being
Edited by Xavier Guillaume and Jef Confl ict Resolution and
Huysmans Ontological Security
Peace anxieties
Security, Emancipation and the Edited by Bahar Rumelili
Politics of Health
A new theoretical perspective Biopolitics of Security
Jo ã o Nunes A political analytic of fi nitude
Michael Dillon
No one writing about security issues is as philosophically astute, conceptually
innovative, politically attuned, and eloquent as Michael Dillon. Everyone
in academic, journalism, and policy communities concerned with security
thinking should read Biopolitics of Security .
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i, Manoa
BIOPOLITICS OF
SECURITY
A political analytic of finitude
Michael Dillon
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Michael Dillon
The right of Michael Dillon to be identifi ed as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-48432-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-48433-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72501-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
For Laurence Montagu
By the time that we have discovered that things are at a given juncture, they
have already changed several times. Hence we always perceive events too late,
and politics must always foresee, as it were, the present.
(Turgot)
For all their boasting, practical men do not know either men or the world;
they do not even know the reality of their own works. [If they could return
to life], the geniuses of pure politics, the f atalia monstra recorded in histories,
would be astounded to learn what they have done without being aware of it,
and they would read their own past deeds as in a hieroglyph to which they
had been off ered the keys.
(Benedetto Croce)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 A political analytic of fi nitude: the infi nity of fi nite
government and rule 1 7
2 B iopolitics of security in the twenty-fi rst century 4 5
3 G overnment, economy and biopolitics 7 6
4 U nderwriting security 9 9
5 P olitics of truth and pious economies 1 23
6 B iopolitics of security, race and war 1 49
7 G overning terror: the state of emergency of biopolitical
emergence 1 81
Conclusion: a cceleration of the baroque katechon 209
Index 219
