Grégoire Chamayou

Une généalogie du libéralisme autoritaire

La société ingouvernable

Drone Theory is Gregoire Chamayou's poignant and sharply argued polemic against US drone warfare. In 2011 alone, the US deployed one drone strike every four days in Pakistan. Drone Theory is a rigorous polemic against the increasing use of robot warfare around the world. Drawing on philosophical debate, moral lessons from Greek mythology and transcripts of conversations between drone operators, Drone Theory re-evaluates the socio-political impact of drone warfare on the world - and its people. Chamayou takes us through Nevada, Pakistan and arresting philosophical terrain to reveal how drones are changing the landscape of war theory and to highlight the profound moral implications of our own silence in the face of drone warfare. Born in 1976, Grégoire Chamayou is a philosopher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and the author of Les corps vils and Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Chamayou also lectures at Université de Paris Ouest, and has written for Le Monde Diplomatique among other publications. Janet Lloyd has translated over seventy books from French to English and has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize.

Drone Theory

a philosophical history

Manhunts

Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched – the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable in the eyes of ruling elites. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live. To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that thus began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple ‘state phobia’ and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went hand-in-hand with new forms of power imposed from above: a ‘strong state’ for a ‘free economy’ became the new magic formula of our capitalist societies. Grégoire Chamayou analyses this crisis as it was perceived and theorized in the 1970s by those who strove to defend the interests of business – that is, the ruling elites, especially in the United States, from which a far-reaching intellectual and political movement spread. The new arts of government they devised are still with us today and we can understand their nature and lasting influence only by re-examining the history of the conflicts that brought them into being.

A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism

The Ungovernable Society

A comprehensive history of manhunting in the West, from ancient times to the present Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants. Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, Grégoire Chamayou examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous simply for existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable. Chamayou begins in ancient Greece, where young Spartans hunted and killed Helots (Sparta's serfs) as an initiation rite, and where Aristotle and other philosophers helped to justify raids to capture and enslave foreigners by creating the concept of natural slaves. He discusses the hunt for heretics in the Middle Ages; New World natives in the early modern period; vagrants, Jews, criminals, and runaway slaves in other eras; and illegal immigrants today. Exploring evolving ideas about the human and the subhuman, what we owe to enemies and people on the margins of society, and the supposed legitimacy of domination, Chamayou shows that the hunting of humans should not be treated ahistorically, and that manhunting has varied as widely in its justifications and aims as in its practices. He investigates the psychology of manhunting, noting that many people, from bounty hunters to Balzac, have written about the thrill of hunting when the prey is equally intelligent and cunning. An unconventional history on an unconventional subject, Manhunts is an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.

A Philosophical History

L'histoire de l'expérimentation sur les hommes en médecine. L'auteur insiste sur le développement parallèle de la rationalité scientifique et des rationalités qu'il qualifie d'abominables et qui consistent à sacrifier les plus vulnérables comme matériau expérimental (les paralytiques, les orphelins, les bagnards, les prostituées, les détenus, les internés ...)--[Memento].

expérimenter sur les êtres humains aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles

Les corps vils

D’étranges oiseaux de métal sillonnent le ciel. Ils sont armés de missiles et tuent. Ceux qui les commandent ne sont pas à leur bord. Confortablement assis dans des salles climatisées à l’autre bout du monde, ils les pilotent par joysticks et écrans d’ordinateurs interposés. Ceci n’est plus de la science-fiction. Les drones, avions fantômes télécommandés, caméras létales volantes, sont devenus le fer de lance d’une nouvelle forme de pouvoir militaire hypertechnologisé. Aux États-Unis, où l’on forme aujourd’hui davantage d’opérateurs de drones que de pilotes classiques, les plans officiels prévoient de convertir, demain, la majeure partie des forces aériennes et, après-demain, des forces terrestres elles-mêmes, en engins robotisés. Le drone est l’instrument d’une violence à distance, où l’on peut voir sans être vu, toucher sans être touché, ôter des vies sans jamais risquer la sienne. C’est l’arme de combattants invisibles et invulnérables, seulement présents sur le champ de bataille par le spectacle de la dévastation qu’ils y impulsent, mais à jamais absents par leurs corps. C’est le bras armé de guerres asymétriques devenues opérations unilatérales, où la mort devient le privilège exclusif de l’ennemi. Au plan politique, c’est la solution trouvée aux contradictions de puissances impérialistes qui voyaient leur volonté d’intervention bornée par "l’aversion pour les pertes", réelle ou supposée, de leurs "opinions publiques".

Théorie du drone

Die 1970er Jahre wurden von einer gigantischen »Regierbarkeitskrise« erschüttert: Die Wirtschaftswelt hatte mit massiver Disziplinlosigkeit der Arbeiter zu kämpfen, aber auch mit der so genannten »Managerrevolution«, mit bisher beispiellosen ökologischen Massenbewegungen und neuen Sozial- und Umweltvorschriften. Politisch geäußerte Ansprüche immer zahlreicher werdender sozialer Gruppen drohten in den Augen der herrschenden Eliten aus Wirtschaft und Politik die Gesellschaft unregierbar zu machen. Der französische Philosoph Grégoire Chamayou porträtiert in seinem faszinierenden Buch dieses Krisenjahrzehnt als den Geburtsort unserer Gegenwart – als Brutstätte eines autoritären Liberalismus. Zur Abwehr der Bedrohung wurden in wirtschaftsnahen Kreisen neue Regierungskünste ersonnen, die beispielsweise einen Krieg gegen die Gewerkschaften, den Primat des Shareholder Value sowie eine Entthronung der Politik vorsahen. Der damit seinen Siegeszug antretende Neoliberalismus war jedoch nicht durch eine einfache »Staatsphobie« bestimmt. Die Strategie zur Überwindung der Regierbarkeitskrise bestand vielmehr in einem autoritären Liberalismus, bei dem die Liberalisierung der Gesellschaft eine Vertikalisierung der Macht impliziert: Ein »starker Staat« für eine »freie Wirtschaft« wird zur neuen Zauberformel unserer kapitalistischen Gesellschaften.

Grégoire Chamayou

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