Theory & Event

Almost ten years after the 9/11 events and the onset of the War on Terror, the national political landscape has significantly shifted. It is now, in many respects, a terror firma. Terror firma is a domain reconfigured by the effects, policies, tactics and countertactics of terror; is no longer a new territory but a familiar landscape, however unsettled and unsettling, which grounds American political life. Its survey features include state and nonstate forms of war, torture and surveillance; rhetorics of panic; affective experiences of apprehension and fear; realignments of juridical power and national identity based on patriotism, Islamophobia, and perceived new threats to the nation; and the organizing influences of disaster, conspiracy, and detective genres, among other features. There is much current scholarship that traces the evolving contours of terror firma, but the two books under review are exemplary for their rigorous and innovative interrogations of how it has reorganized political culture. Together, they map the topography of terror in a way that provides new insight into what it means to live in and be destabilized by its shifting terrains.

Robin Truth Goodman's Policing Narratives and the State of Terror argues that narratives of policing inform how we discuss, practice and delineate the war on terror. For all the claims in current public discourse to "hunt down terror," for all the ways in which state practices of surveillance and regulation are presented as the heroic work of a fearless agent aiming to discover the true identity of terrorists, Goodman sees narratives of police and detective work at play. These narratives are integral to the study of state power because they reconceive the boundaries of nation-states, national identity, and the public sphere. In part, this is due to the privileged status accorded to police detectives: detectives represent the legal violence of the state and also the role of private citizens in sustaining the law. They can infiltrate both domestic and foreign spheres, public and private life, citizens and criminals. As she writes, "the basic ambiguities over the social meaning of the police point toward the historical tension between the liberal welfare state's promise of equality, on the one hand, and on the other, its mechanisms for social control through the containment, maintenance, and constant reinstitutionalization of inequalities"(118). Analyzing their discursive manifestations reveals porous and shifting boundaries between the sovereign state and its other, between collective and individual politics, between the law and its exceptions in liberal politics. For Goodman, terror firma is in a constant state of flux, a terror nonfirma continually redrawn by different imperatives of state power and narrative tropes.

Goodman uses the study of police narratives to argue—against much current work in the humanities—that state power continues to be a central point in political life, and this is one of the book's key interventions. The privatization of the war on terror, for instance, does not limit state power but signals the emergence of new modes of power over spaces previously deemed "private." Yet rather than merely condemn maligned concepts of privacy, sovereignty, and autonomy for the unstable boundaries they produce, or for the ways they work to further the expansions of state power they are ostensibly arrayed against, Goodman has other aims. She wants to rehabilitate these terms, in their ambivalences, by showing how they are still crucial for critiquing state violence and for advancing freedom and equality. The concept of autonomy, for instance, provides a language to contest the cruelties of state terror and formulate challenges to the ravages of contemporary capitalism. For Goodman, the state of exception—the space and power exempt from the law—is not always a wholly negative state; it can be put to use for a variety of radical political projects. As she carefully reminds us, challenges to the rule...