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Chapter Three - Necropolitical Law Remakes Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Jothie Rajah
Affiliation:
American Bar Foundation
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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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Discounting Life
Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror
, pp. 93 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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