International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398–413

Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality

and the Biopolitical Production of Terror1
François Debrix
Florida International University

AND

Alexander D. Barder
Johns Hopkins University

Moving beyond the political framework of both Hobbes and Schmitt

that privileges a centralization of power as a way of dealing with the fear
of violent death, this article turns to Foucault’s discourses of war, power
over life, and governmentality to illuminate the contemporary reproduc-
tive potential of fear in exercises of preservation of life in society. The
decentralization of fear and power in governmentalized modernity
encourages various public agents ⁄ agencies to mobilize the specter of
danger, threat, insecurity, or enmity to normalize populations. This arti-
cle reflects on the effects of this (re)productive mobilization of fear and
emphasizes the proliferation of dispositifs of terror that engender a fear
of not being able to live one’s normal life.

Whereas late-modern societies thought they had conjured away the specter of a
state-of-nature-like violence, recent events have reminded people in developed,
rich and supposedly danger-free (often Western) nations that physical harm and
material destruction can hit anyone, anywhere, at any moment. Since the attacks
of 9 ⁄ 11 (New York and Washington, DC), 3 ⁄ 11 (Madrid), and 7 ⁄ 7 (London),
people in the West have realized that they are living ‘‘the terrifying experience
of heteronomous, vulnerable populations overwhelmed by forces they neither
control nor truly understand, horrified by their undefendability and obsessed
with the security of their borders’’ (Bauman 2006:96). An important part of this
apparent accentuation of fear has been the perception that today’s enemy, envi-
sioned as an amalgamation of forces often referred to as terrorism and poten-
tially present everywhere (Cavarero 2009), is an enemy like no other in history.
The acts of 9 ⁄ 11, 3 ⁄ 11, and 7 ⁄ 7, among others, have radicalized the idea that the
enemy is beyond any form of restraint, located in a domain where it no longer
obeys any political rationality. In 2005, George W. Bush sought to capture the
‘‘novelty’’ of this danger by claiming that this terrorizing enemy is ‘‘as brutal an
enemy as we’ve ever faced. They’re unconstrained by any notion of our common
humanity, or by the rules of warfare’’ (Bush 2005).
If one of the main arguments for the justification of the modern state (since
Hobbes in particular) has been the ability of the sovereign state to defend the

1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2008 BISA annual meeting in Exeter. We would like to
thank the editors of IPS and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

 2009 International Studies Association

 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 399

property and basic rights of individuals (starting with their right to be free from
harm), a crucial question, possibly rendered more urgent by events of the past
decade, must be asked: what happens to practices of sovereignty and state power
when the fear of the enemy borders on the absolute? The Hobbesian solution to
create a sovereign power with a primary capacity to offer protection from violence
necessitates a concentration or centralization of fear. This fear resides in the very
persona of the sovereign. Yet, as Hobbes’ state of nature was supposed to demon-
strate, when fear escapes the sovereign domain and instead is disseminated
throughout the members of the social compact, absolute terror and the specter
of total annihilation easily can return. Such a fear of catastrophic terror is not
only a fear of potential physical harm or possible violent death. This fear is also
crucial to the maintenance or replacement of political institutions as it allows
those who mobilize its specter periodically to call into question practices that have
accompanied the development of the modern state, possibly since its inception.
For example, over the past two decades, the eliding of traditional political geo-
graphical boundaries, deterritorializing flows associated with nomadic groups
(sometimes bands of warriors or so-called terror networks) no longer under the
control of state apparatuses, or the observation of a growing global disorder more
akin to generalized civil war conditions may have reinforced the sentiment among
modern Western political leaders (and sometimes their subjects too) that a trans-
fer of responsibility and power from the sovereign to some of its order-enforcing
or risk-managing agents (police forces, the military, immigration officers, and so
on) is required. Although these phenomena are not very new, the recent resur-
gence of a discourse of totalizing fear in the wake of 9 ⁄ 11 and the Global War on
Terror has led critical political theorists to notice the multiplication of all sorts of
executive and decisionistic measures and policies. Still, many of these measures
and policies have not always been the result of a sovereign decision on the excep-
tion (as Carl Schmitt would have argued), but rather of techniques and tactics
deployed by various public agents ⁄ agencies and designed to recapture security,
order, and the law (Butler 2004; Brown 2006; Paye 2007).
Thomas Hobbes’ famous solution to what he perceived to be the danger of
civil disorder was to create a power that could centralize all individual fears and
all the methods devised by individuals to react to such fears. The arbitrary, exec-
utive, and policing force of the one and undisputed sovereign (in which all indi-
vidual subjects would finally recognize security and well-being) could become the
guarantee that the natural danger of violent death would be done away with,
even if that meant that organized violence against other sovereigns and their
populations had to be undertaken to preserve the domestic compact. This com-
pact for Hobbes was nonetheless predicated on the very condition of possibility
of a latent state of nature whose re-actualization would be taken to be what
can restructure political order. Hobbes thus became a paradigmatic figure for
subsequent theories and models of centralization of state power based upon the
premise of an always possible virtual fear or danger.
In the twentieth century, Hobbes’ model of centralized power would be revis-
ited by Schmitt’s own founding of the state on the sovereign’s prerogative to
mobilize a condition of exception. For Schmitt, the legal and constitutional order
of the modern state must have the capacity to cast itself out through an act or
decision of the executive, but also potentially through the actions of policing or
soldiering agents, during a period necessary to defeat a deadly enemy. At first
glance, Schmitt’s sovereign decision on the exception appears to be the logical
continuation of Hobbes’ desire to preserve the domestic compact and to allow
society to thrive through mechanisms that can ensure control over fear ⁄ danger.
The first part of this essay briefly reviews how Hobbes and Schmitt organized
their thoughts with a view toward perpetuating techniques of centralization of
fear in modern politics. Today, the Hobbesian mechanism of fear concentration
400 Nothing to Fear but Fear

and the Schmittian condition of sovereign exception often look like they have
been generalized to global politics. Instances of war against and destruction of
enemies proliferate across the globe in the hope that such antagonistic and sup-
posedly exceptional operations will make ‘‘us’’ free from fear (Hardt and Negri
2004). Of course, one must recognize that the Global War on Terror has been a
convenient excuse for Western states, as it has allowed them to execute openly
the kind of boundless violence in the name of an eradication of danger that, for
centuries, they practiced with proficiency against the non-West. In the West,
a typical response to the threat of so-called dangerous enemies has consisted in
re-injecting in the sovereign state a capacity to institutionalize fear at any moment
by having recourse to war and warriors (Debrix 2008; Barder and Debrix 2009).
But in this article, we also wish to move past Hobbes’ and Schmitt’s solutions
to the ‘‘fear production’’ dilemma by introducing some of Michel Foucault’s
analyses, particularly those on governmentality (Foucault 1990, 2003, 2007). Fou-
cault allows us to identify an additional dimension in the relationship between
fear and modern power. To be sure, Foucault’s concept of power is radically
different from that introduced by Hobbes and expanded upon by Schmitt. As is
now well-known, Foucault stresses a non-essentialist and relational concept of
power that further allows him to map out a non-sovereign centered potential for
disciplinization and normalization. At the same time, a less debated aspect of
Foucault’s concept of power is its connection to practices and discourses of war.
Foucault’s micro-histories of Western discourses of war, battles, and racialized
antagonistic violence suggest that fear (and the power relations that flow from
its production) is actually not something that the modern state and its agents
ever want to do away with or be free from. Rather, fear is what must be produced
and reproduced by governmental agents in order to establish the control, super-
vision, or enhancement of the social body through multiple mechanisms of mea-
surement, calculation, improvement, and preservation of life. Thus, Foucault
intimates, fear must be made productive and reproductive of society, not only to
allow the sovereign state to mobilize death, terror, or endless destruction
through a recourse to war and warriors, but also to enable life—or a certain con-
ception of what it means to have live bodies in society—to thrive.
It is indeed through a series of governmentalized techniques or procedures of
maintenance of life that, in the modern age, fear has been made ‘‘beneficial’’ to
society by, first, operating at the level of individual docile bodies (through disci-
plinary mechanisms) and later, around the turn of the nineteenth century, work-
ing on the population in its entirety (through methods of rational regulation).
Thus, one could argue that by the time Schmitt (in the twentieth century) seeks
to revisit Hobbes’ model of sovereignty (as a system of power premised upon a
concentration of fear), a generalized biopolitics of fear has already been put to
good, efficient, and ‘‘positive’’ uses in the modern state, through the disciplining
and normalizing efforts of various governmental agents that may or may not
directly serve the interests of the central sovereign ⁄ executive power.
As agencies, arrangements, or assemblages of surveillance and regulation of
bodies and the population disseminate their effects throughout the body politic,
governmentality displaces authority and power away from the centralized sover-
eign (Butler 2004:65; Neal 2008). More than a politics of sovereign exceptional-
ity, it is a biopolitics of fear enacted by way of governmentality that is operative and
that, in a way, disables the state’s central monopoly on power. This pluralization
of fear and power in governmentalized modernity further encourages all sorts of
public agents ⁄ agencies to mobilize the specter of danger, threat, insecurity, and
enmity. Far from mastering the conditions of production and reproduction of
fear (as Hobbes, Schmitt, or even some contemporary proponents of a return to
sovereign exceptionalism would have it), the sovereign is actually made to
depend upon a wide array of decentralized ‘‘executive,’’ sometimes public, and
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 401

generally administrative procedures and mechanisms (or dispositifs, as Foucault

would call them) that bear the mantle of social order and security. A Foucault-
inspired analysis of the way fear is rendered productive in modernity (or a
biopolitics of fear) performs a break in contemporary critical analyses that have
suggested that Schmittian theories of sovereignty are best suited to explain the
return to a politics of fear today. Indeed, contemporary discourses on fear and
terror (and on the wars that bear terror’s name) make sense precisely because
they reflect a political and discursive context in which multiple governmentalized
agencies proliferate power-effects, control-effects, security-effects and, ultimately,
terror-effects throughout society.
When biopolitical agents ⁄ agencies of fear production—police forces, the mili-
tary, immigration and customs officers, airport security services, but also some
educators, some doctors and scientists, some legal and constitutional experts, or
some administrators of public bureaucracies—become the loci of enunciation of
techniques of governmentalized power, the likelihood of unlimited violence and
the prospect of a generalized condition of terror are no longer what must be
cast away. Rather, a shift is taking place whereby these deplorable conditions are
now what must be expected, accepted, and anticipated by populations whose
lives are said to be constantly threatened and, as such, must become the objects
of sustained normalization or heightened regulation. In the last section of this
essay, we discuss this reversal in the productive mobilization of fear (from a fear
of violent death to a fear of letting the ‘‘wrong’’ people live and, consequently,
of not being able to allow the safe and regulated populations to enjoy ‘‘normal’’
lives), and we examine some possible meanings and consequences of this
expanded governmentalizing yet terrorizing condition for life itself.

Hobbes, Schmitt, and the Centralization of Fear

In the Hobbesian model of power, fear is presented as an inescapable condition
of physical violence (and moral ⁄ mental angst too) (Robin 2004:31), and it
imposes a singular obligation on the sovereign: to protect the members of the
social compact. To some, this obligation to protect rights-bearing individual sub-
jects marks Hobbes as the first modern political thinker (Strauss 1984). From
this perspective, the (Hobbesian) state of nature is a crucial starting point for
any modern political thought that seeks to empower a distinctly ‘‘artificial’’
unity, or what for Hobbes becomes the modern sovereign. In Human Nature,
Hobbes offers an elaborate and systematic overview of what human nature
is. Hobbes writes: ‘‘Man’s nature is the sum of his natural faculties and powers,
as the faculties of nutrition, motion, generation, sense, reason, etc. For these
powers we do unanimously call natural, and are contained in the definition of
man, under these words, animal and rational’’ (Hobbes 1999:22). Hobbes seeks
to show that the first impulse toward human action in nature is rooted in a
‘‘conception of external objects,’’ one that ‘‘causes appetite’’ and by extension
‘‘fear’’ (Hobbes 1999:70). Thus, when Hobbes examines the implication of a will
rooted in desire, appetite, and the concept of fear, what emerges is a fundamen-
tal ‘‘right of nature: that every man may preserve his own life and limbs, with all
the power he hath’’ (Hobbes 1999:78–79).
Hobbes attempts to rationalize society on the basis of a new capacity to miti-
gate the worst form of fear that inevitably (he believes) occurs between men and
of a likelihood of great physical harm resulting from human vainglory, competi-
tion, and diffidence. The state of nature as a state of war is one where ‘‘there is
in all men a will to do harm which derives from vainglory [inanis gloria] and
over-valuation of his own strength’’ (Hobbes 1998:26). This state of nature ⁄ war,
famously characterized by Hobbes as ‘‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’’
(Hobbes 1985:186), becomes the necessary platform for the legitimization of the
402 Nothing to Fear but Fear

overarching power of the ‘‘mortal god,’’ or Leviathan, that appropriates the

mutual fears among individuals and concentrates them to produce order and
security. Hobbes further justifies this concentration of power ⁄ fear by arguing that
the defense of the political realm against hostile outsiders necessitates ‘‘one
Assembly or one man who has the right to arm, muster and unite, on each occa-
sion of danger or opportunity, as many citizens as the common defence shall
require… as well as the right to make peace with the enemy when advantageous’’
(Hobbes 1998:78–79). Of note here is the fact that fear—the fear of violent
death in particular—always remains the currency of the political legitimacy and
constituted rule of the sovereign, even after the social compact is created and
allegedly stabilized. When Hobbes writes that ‘‘the nature of war consisteth not
in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto’’ (Hobbes 1985:186), he artic-
ulates the belief that fear must remain the propelling force of any political sys-
tem, perhaps at any stage of this system’s life. But the fear Hobbes capitalizes on
to legitimize Leviathan must also remain rooted in the virtuality of future threats
against the polity. What can be called a virtual condition of fear (fear can return
at any time because disorder remains virtually present) plays a key structuring
role in the Hobbesian state. Hobbes emphasizes ‘‘a tract of time, wherein the
will to contend by Battell is sufficiently know: and therefore the notion of Time,
is to be considered in the nature of Warre…’’ (Hobbes 1985:186). What gives
rise to the ‘‘known disposition thereto’’ reflects a concern not only with actual possi-
bilities of violence, but also with the virtual intent of those who may pose a
threat. Thus, Jef Huysmans has suggested that Hobbes relies upon an ‘‘epistemo-
logical fear.’’ Accordingly, ‘‘insecurity does not follow from one’s vulnerability as
such. Rather, it follows from an uncertainty about which human relations are
benign and which are dangerous’’ (Huysmans 2006:53). As a result, the central-
ization of fear in the institution of the state is a necessary step for Hobbes
because it serves as a prophylactic device against the overwhelming fear of virtu-
ally presented threats.
Despite the apparently durable constitution of this centralized system of
power, the status ascribed by Hobbes to the state of war is never certain. Does
Hobbes imagine the state of nature ⁄ war (and the threat of its recurrence, even
after the institution of Leviathan) as a real possibility, as an ongoing danger to
political life? Or is it mainly, as some have argued, a heuristic device (Williams
2005), contaminated by assumptions about human nature developed within an
already present society, and thus designed to justify the sovereign’s authority and
its monopoly on violence? In other words, is the ‘‘terror’’ of the state of nature
a concrete condition, one that any society can encounter or fall back into? Or
are we to interpret Hobbes’ political philosophy as a prime example of the type
of fear production often mobilized by states and their leaders to maintain or
reinforce sovereignty (a sort of always already anticipated, virtual, yet discursively
present, state of exception)? These questions become more pertinent when we
summon Schmitt’s political theory and Schmitt’s apparent desire to accentuate
the terror supposedly found in the state of nature. For without a persistent sense
of fear present in the minds and bodies of individual subjects, the awe-inspiring
power of the state ⁄ sovereign may lose much of its apparent legitimacy. And the
ultimate ability to make crucial executive decisions to safeguard the citizenry
may no longer appear so justified.
By the time we get to Schmitt’s revival of Hobbes’ thought on the centraliza-
tion of fear ⁄ power in the hands of the sovereign, the emphasis is clearly on sov-
ereignty as the pinnacle of political order. Schmitt has been described as a
paradigmatic figure in the twentieth century revival and perhaps radicalization of
Hobbes’ model of power (Strauss 1996:89–92; Strong 2005:xx). In part because
of his perception of the political chaos that reigned during Germany’s Weimar
Republic in the 1920s, but also due to what he considers to be the negative
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 403

effects of liberalism (with, among other problems, liberalism’s neutralization of

political life) (Dyzenhaus 1999), Schmitt seeks to revive the terrifying specter of
a return to the state of nature. He presents this fatal reversion as a situation that
could only result in the demise of the state (Schmitt 2007). Schmitt’s two main
works at the time, Political Theology (2005) and The Concept of the Political (2007),
attempt to reset the terms of the debate over the role of fear in power configura-
tions by postulating two important principles: (i) sovereignty is the capacity to
determine when an exceptional situation arises (Schmitt 2005:5); and (ii) the
basis of the political lies in the ability of the sovereign to make a decision as to
who the public friend and the public enemy are (Schmitt 2007:26–27). For
Schmitt, any inquiry into the state must first reckon with the concept of the
political and these two principles (Schmitt 2007:19–20). Moreover, like Hobbes,
Schmitt insists on the fact that ‘‘to the state as an essentially political entity
belongs the jus belli, that is, the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation
upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the
entity’’ (Schmitt 2007:45). But only when the sovereign state retains a central
capacity to marshal authority, resources, and legitimacy does it have the ability
to make such an essential decision. And only when the population retains a
capacity to fear the consequences of a return to the state of war can the state truly
be political.
Schmitt is interested in making use of Hobbes’ fear (and his state of nature ⁄
war specter) to normalize a continuous mode of sovereign decisionism, a founda-
tional decision on the exception that, in fact, necessitates a constant production
of fear of physical harm and death within the state. Without such an unremitting
anxiety, the rationale for abstracting any normative content out of the juridico-
political order would disappear, and what Schmitt perceives as a form of parti-
sanship (with respect to the determination of the legal substance of the political
order) would take over the state and deprive it of its vitality. This is perhaps why
there is always a need for Schmitt to think in terms of extreme cases, or to mobi-
lize the figure of an absolute threat, or even to imagine what is in excess of the
political (Derrida 1997:112–137). Such a way of thinking also seems to justify the
deployment of political and juridical concepts that revolve around the idea of a
decisionistic unity. What Schmitt dreads most is the impotence of the state.
While Schmitt also realizes that there remains a dramatic possibility that the sov-
ereign may end up exchanging the terror of the state of nature for a terror
brought by war-mongering agents (Barder and Debrix 2009), his decisionistic
model is in fact what is likely to lead to a state of affairs where a monstrous exec-
utive power, representing an unbounded will, takes over political life. This is the
kind of scenario that, Slavoj Žižek argues, normalizes an ‘‘abyssal act of violence’’
(Žižek 1999:18), that is to say, a political action that is no longer restrained by
any form of obligation to secure the individual subject and whose consequences
for the state itself are no longer controllable (Weiler 1994:98–99). Schmitt’s
objective is to neutralize anything that could compete with the state’s monopoly,
not simply on violence, but also on the production of fear, terror, and ultimately
death. In this fashion, Schmitt ends up conflating the sovereign decision to go
to war and the always possible return to the state of war in the image of a
Leviathan-turned-Monster of War for whom chaos or destructive violence and
order ⁄ preservation of the state can become one and the same.
As some political chroniclers have argued, the image of this sovereign monster
has had a tendency to return in concrete political circumstances of late (Hardt
and Negri 2004). A normalization of terror, violence, and fearful life is often the
outcome of many of this sovereign’s actions and decisions. And contemporary
critical studies have been tempted by this analysis, particularly in the context of
the US-led war on terror (Smith 2004; Coker 2007; Münkler 2007). By contrast,
Foucault’s writings suggest that a careful understanding of the way mechanisms
404 Nothing to Fear but Fear

of normalization operate requires one to de-emphasize the central role given to

the sovereign in political designs. It is toward these Foucaultian considerations
and their implications for a governmental approach to fear production that we
now turn.

Foucault and the Biopolitical Production of Fear

Despite Schmitt’s radicalization of Hobbes’ thought, Hobbes and Schmitt share
an important perspective. For both Hobbes and Schmitt, sovereign power is
rooted in the constant possibility that the state will decide to take away life. This
ability to take away life or to put to death is presented as a functional mechanism
that establishes a clear distinction between the state ⁄ sovereign on the one hand
and society ⁄ the citizenry on the other. This juridico-political framework is con-
structed as a continuous system of monopoly of force that enables the singularity
of the sovereign decision to be ready for operationalization and, in some cases,
for the deployment of centralized violence and terror (even when the sovereign
claims to use force to protect the rights of the citizens). The always present possi-
bility of violence is what defines modern sovereignty’s legitimacy. This powerful
configuration also makes fear the currency of the modern juridico-political
order.
But within this modality of power lies another potentiality too, one that cannot
be reduced to a juridical rule or to the preservation of the legal order (even by
way of a decision on the exception). Foucault’s early work on disciplinary power
(1979) points to the way disciplines invest political, social, and economic institu-
tions and procedures beyond the immediate gaze of the sovereign. The disci-
plines’ modalities of micro-power and meticulous control of bodies, tied to a
series of knowledges (medical, penal, pedagogical, and so on), appear to present
a rupture from the Hobbesian ⁄ Schmittian attempt at placing the will and force
of the sovereign (and, often, the fear of such a will or force) at the heart of
mechanisms of political order. Foucault distances himself from the Hobbesian
view on power (and presents instead a relational perspective, as we suggested
above) when he argues that ‘‘[p]ower must… be analyzed as something that cir-
culates… [since it] is never localized here or there.’’ Foucault adds: ‘‘Power
passes through individuals. It is not applied to them’’ (Foucault 2003:29). Thus,
whereas Hobbes stresses the virtuality or, at least, the future-oriented potential of
war as a central factor in the legitimization of the state, Foucault’s genealogies of
(bio)power navigate through actual historical wars and war accounts that gave
rise to (as he puts it) ‘‘historico-political discourses’’ of racial struggles (Foucault
2003:207–208). This contrast with Hobbes found in Foucault’s genealogies of
sovereign power is important because of Foucault’s emphasis on revealing the
‘‘historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences
or formal systematizations’’ (2009:7). In other words, as Foucault clarifies at the
beginning of ‘‘Society Must Be Defended,’’ genealogies are meant to be ‘‘an insur-
rection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institu-
tionalization and workings of any scientific discourse’’ (Foucault 2003:9). As a
result, Foucault brings to light what Hobbes’ model of centralized power ⁄ fear
suppressed: the real life battles that gave rise to the law, states and nations, and
the vast array of modern apparatuses of government. For Hobbes, the emergence
of Leviathan is tied to ‘‘the political use that was being made in political strug-
gles of a certain historical knowledge pertaining to wars, invasions, pillage,
dispossessions, confiscations, robbery, exaction, and the effects of all these feats
of battle’’ (Foucault 2003:98).
Thus, when Foucault addresses sovereignty and the formation of modern state
apparatuses, he breaks from the Hobbesian conception of sovereign power and
introduces the notion of biopower instead (Foucault 1990). With biopower, the
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 405

point of reference is no longer the forceful, centralized, or awe-inspiring rule of

the sovereign. It is also not just the patchwork of bounded sites (the asylum, the
hospital, the prison, the school, the factory, etc.) that characterize disciplinary
power, as Foucault first understood it (Foucault 1965, 1979). Rather, the object
of biopower is the population of a given territory in its entirety, and the main
preoccupation of this power is the population’s proper governance. This shift
from a centralized sovereign model of hierarchical power to one that conceptual-
izes relational techniques of governmentalized biopower has been described by
Foucault as a transition from a power that defined itself by way of ‘‘the right to
take life or let live’’ to one that seeks ‘‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of
death’’ (Foucault 1990:136–138). The emergence of biopower as a primary gov-
erning logic (around the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) is also
intended to give rise to a new form of knowledge about the social body. Rather
than being overtly concerned with contingent events such as reacting to an epi-
demic, targeting particular ‘‘natural’’ abnormalities, or fending off local disor-
ders, biopower focuses on ‘‘what might be broadly called endemics, or in other
words, the form, nature, extension, duration, and intensity of the illness of the
population’’ (Foucault 2003:243). These ‘‘endemics’’ are more or less durable
features of a population, a species, or even a race. They are said to be responsi-
ble for a series of social factors that can impact negatively the vitality or health
of an entire population.
This passage from a fear of immediate death at the moment of the always pos-
sible catastrophic event or of the sovereign’s reaction to it to a concern with
maximizing conditions that can foster life in society reveals a transformation in
the political utility of death in modern power designs. With biopower, death
becomes ‘‘something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually
gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it’’ (Foucault 2003:244). While the termi-
nation of individual lives is an inevitable feature of natural life, in both biological
and political discourses death now becomes a matter of mortality, something that
counts at the level of the entire population (Foucault 2003:248). With the notion
of mortality (and its social, economic, political, but also biological connections
to the overall vitality of the social body), regulatory norms emerge. Their pur-
pose is to ensure that a social equilibrium can be maintained or can compensate
for fluctuations that are still bound to arise from time to time.
What Foucault (2003:246) calls ‘‘security mechanisms’’ can be understood in
the context of this biopolitical organization, normalization, and maximization of
the conditions of proper governance of life in society. The implementation of
security mechanisms or safety procedures throughout the social (and the multi-
plication of agencies in charge of operating them) revolves around the idea of
not only investing individual bodies (as the disciplines did), but also of optimiz-
ing the health or labor of a population (Foucault 2003:248). In this sense, the
rise of biopower for Foucault also points to the growing difficulty for the central-
ized sovereign to master all the novel political configurations, economic situa-
tions, and sociophysiological contingencies of life that emerge in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution and as a result of the population growths of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe (or what regimes of biopower will
redefine as matters of ‘‘demographics’’) (Foucault 2003:249).
In the last chapter of Society Must Be Defended, Foucault tries to introduce some
implications of this turn toward biopolitics and security mechanisms. One impor-
tant implication is that the function of state power appears to change from one
that is in charge of establishing a legal order over a particular political territory
to one that consists in delineating a succession of governmental procedures,
techniques, and strategies that can actively regulate a population. But if state
power as centralized violent force or coercion is indeed re-imagined, redesigned,
or redistributed throughout biopolitical arrangements, (bio)power’s relation to
406 Nothing to Fear but Fear

fear may need to be revisited too. If and (if so) how such a power over life
relates to the modern production of fear, and whether, by seeking to optimize
the living conditions of a population, biopolitics can or even is meant to remove
fear once and for all now emerge as crucial questions. Or, to present the
dilemma of biopower somewhat differently, how a biopolitics of fear may still be
needed for the production of a new modality of power becomes a key problem-
atic.
Although never directly asked by Foucault, these questions are nevertheless
prompted by his reflections. If fear plays a part in biopolitical designs (some-
thing Foucault implies), it can no longer be to prevent a transgression of the
juridico-political order maintained by a central sovereign. Rather, it would have
to be to preserve or enhance the life-efficiency of a given population. Thus, a
new productivity of fear ⁄ terror seems to accompany the deployment of regimes
of biopolitical governance (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in partic-
ular, and possibly up until today). This productivity of fear and its connection to
biopolitics make sense, Foucault suggests, if we take into account the way race
comes into play in practices and discourses of power in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Foucault argues that, around that time, Western European
discourses of racial antagonism—found not just in biological studies but also in
war declarations, political treatises, or nationalist pamphlets—start to introduce a
knowledge that seeks to provide criteria regarding who can live and who, on the
contrary, can die. This biopolitical discourse of race and racial enmity (a precur-
sor to the idea of representing the enemy as a racial other) hopes to dismantle
any understanding of the human species as a biological continuum, and it strives
to impose hierarchical divisions based on categorical racial differences. Geopoliti-
cally, this discourse and subsequent practice of biopolitical racism attempt to
re-territorialize the globe along the lines of such racial profiles and differences, a
process that helps to ‘‘naturalize’’ the Western colonization projects of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault concludes that this biopolitical racism
changes the ‘‘relationship between my life and the death of the other [in] that
it is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type
relationship’’ (Foucault 2003:255).
The normalized but supposedly ‘‘secure’’ society (‘‘secure’’ from the racial
other, and with normal living conditions that are not those of the other) that is
created by what Mitchell Dean has called an ‘‘enwrapping of the modern state’’
by biopower (Dean 1996:211) relies a great deal on representations and opera-
tions of biological racism. In many ways, this generalized yet intricate racial dis-
course of normalization (of the inside) and of antagonism (of the outside) does
not just work through a differentiation between races, but also through all sorts
of marginal forms of conduct, such as criminality, madness, underclass habits,
and so on (Foucault 2003:257). Thus, the normalization of the inside (the popu-
lation, society) and the antagonism of the outside (the racial other, the enemy)
increasingly become blurred. The ways the state and its agents start to conceive
of relations with ‘‘other races’’ or with various forms of ‘‘counter-conducts’’
become similar and undistinguishable. In all cases, it is a relation of permanent
hostility (or, perhaps, ‘‘endemic enmity’’) that is being implemented and that
demands a productive disposition on the part of the population vis-à-vis antago-
nism, enemy-construction, and moral and physical confrontation (Foucault
2007:191–226). As Foucault puts it, ‘‘[f]rom this point onward, war… is not sim-
ply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race,
of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there repre-
sent to our race’’ (Foucault 2003:257).
The nexus biopolitics-race-war highlighted by Foucault allows us to re-concep-
tualize the relationship between power and fear in modernity (particularly
from the nineteenth century onwards). Instead of asking how the sovereign can
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 407

manage to keep dangers and fears in check, a more pressing question is to iden-
tify the extent to which biopolitical techniques and mechanisms of government
are indicative of a productive fear of not being able to live one’s normal, regu-
lated, or optimized life as a member of the public, population, or society. What
the perspective on biopower and the desire to preserve or even regenerate one’s
own race also suggest is the possibility that various decentralized agents ⁄ agencies
of government will need to make efficient use of fear (once again, a fear of not
being able to live one’s normal life as part of a given population). These govern-
mentalized agents and agencies can have recourse to violent techniques or brutal
force to protect a certain society. But, more often than not, they will only need
to rely on ‘‘benign’’ calculated, rationalized, and calibrated safety measures or
security mechanisms that supposedly leave no physical marks on individual
bodies since they operate at the more abstract level of the organization, normali-
zation, and optimization of the body politic.
With the emergence of those agents ⁄ agencies of government and their con-
stant efforts to regenerate the population through a generalized sense of fear of
not being able to live one’s own life in an era when racial others or unproduc-
tive counter-conducts abound, we enter the realm of what Foucault refers to as
governmentality. For Foucault, governmentality represents the moment in config-
urations of power when methods of scientific, disciplinary, and knowledge-based
rationality and procedures of government come together to organize social life,
often ‘‘through a range of formally nonpolitical knowledges and institutions’’
(Brown 2006:79). The ‘‘governmentalization of the state’’ (Brown 2006:80)
implies that this government by institutions and knowledges can pluralize the
supposedly centralized sites of sovereign ⁄ state power. With governmentality, the
origin of the law is less relevant to social and political designs (and to power’s
applications) since this particular modality of government is ‘‘not a matter of
imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ
tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use laws themselves as tactics’’ (Fou-
cault 1991:95). It is indeed through techniques and tactics of management and
by way of organizational and procedural dispositifs that governmentality takes
charge of a population, fosters its vital conditions (by trying to control endemic
social ‘‘illnesses’’), and ‘‘orchestrates the conduct of the body individual, the
body social, and the body politic’’ (Brown 2006:81). The ‘‘conduct of conduct’’
within the realm of biopolitics is the main objective of governmentality’s social,
economic, and political, but also cultural, religious, and educational agents and
agencies. In a context of governmentalized power, the biopolitical production of
fear is the result of a series of scare tactics or terror dispositifs put to ‘‘good’’
social effects by agents ⁄ agencies of government.
The Foucaultian concept of dispositif (often translated as ‘‘apparatus’’ in
English) is particularly useful to this analysis of biopolitics and fear. Dispositifs,
Nikolas Rose explains, are ‘‘machines for government’’ (Rose 1996:38). They are
complex apparatuses made up of various economic components, political unities,
discursive elements, and bits of sociocultural information that come together for
strategic reasons (Agamben 2009:3), not to create normative structures or to
maintain legal orders, but to produce power as governance effects. As Giorgio
Agamben has noted, dispositifs demonstrate a ‘‘capacity to capture, orient, deter-
mine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or
discourses of living beings,’’ often with a view toward achieving some level of
subjectification (Agamben 2009:14). Moreover, the strategic or tactical work of
dispositifs is more likely to be justified (by agents of government) when public
discourses about ‘‘urgent needs’’ proliferate since dispositifs or apparatuses can
‘‘obtain an effect that is more or less immediate’’ (Agamben 2009:8). Thus, the
power of dispositifs has to do with the operational and regulating strengths they
inject into governmentality. Dispositifs can also be thought of as ‘‘lines of forces’’
408 Nothing to Fear but Fear

that seek to relate various points in society without any necessary preexisting
commonality, connectivity, or associative logic (Deleuze 2006:340). To the extent
that it makes sense to use the phrase ‘‘agents or agencies of governmentality’’
(as we do in this article), those agents ⁄ agencies and their tactics of regulation,
normalization, and optimization of life can be seen as layers, collections, or
assemblages of various dispositifs. Dispositifs are indeed machines for government
(but not of government) whose regularities of conduct nonetheless owe very little
to the possible existence of a centralized power or to the traditional model of
sovereignty.
If fear is one of these regularities generated by dispositifs of or for government
(if fear becomes a terror dispositif), fear cannot be the outcome anymore of what
the sovereign wishes to contain, control, or localize in some place (in the state
of nature, in the executive decision of the sovereign, in the persona of the king,
in the constitution). Rather, a biopolitical production of fear implies that a mul-
titude of agents for government are in the business of deploying a range of tech-
niques, procedures, and tactics that strive to realize control over or regulation of
the population’s everyday conduct from all sorts of points, positions, or perspec-
tives and through various relations ⁄ lines of force. It is everywhere throughout
society that we find security mechanisms or safety arrangements that are con-
stantly at work mobilizing fear ⁄ terror. In the last section of this article, we reflect
on some of the meanings of this analytical approach to the governmentality of
fear in contemporary settings of social terror.

Scare Tactics, Terror Dispositifs, and the Emergence of Life

In a recent essay, Didier Bigo turns to Foucault’s notion of dispositif to situate
post-9 ⁄ 11 (in)security practices within the general field of governmentalized
power. For populations, the production of (in)security generally amounts to
making use of situations, events, or contingencies that can result in individual
bodies being made incapable of or in fact prevented from enjoying their normal
life or expected living conditions. What Bigo (2006:123) calls the ‘‘management
of unease’’ is one form the biopolitical production of fear takes in contemporary
society (after 9 ⁄ 11, above all), both within and across nation-state borders
(Huysmans 2006; Minca 2006; Bigo 2007; Vaughan-Williams 2008). This produc-
tion of unease or, to put it differently, the governmentalization of insecurity in
contemporary society, highlights the omnipresence of decentralized political
operations through terror dispositifs or scare tactics.
To make sense of contemporary dispositifs of fear ⁄ unease within a generalized
condition of governmentalized insecurity, Bigo revisits Jeremy Bentham’s famous
panoptic regime of surveillance (discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish)
(Foucault 1979:195–228) and comes up with a new concept, the ‘‘Banopticon.’’
This ‘‘Banopticon’’ operates not just by means of disciplinary omnivoyance over
coerced bodies, but also by way of normalized exclusion (or ban) of targeted
individuals and groups. Some of these targets are marked as racially other or as
representing exemplary counter-conducts and, as such, become dangerous ene-
mies for the population. But many banned individuals and groups are not char-
acterized a priori as abnormal, criminal, delinquent, inimical, or even terrorist.
Under a ‘‘banoptic’’ regime, anybody can become the object of banning micro-
gazes or micro-surveillance tactics mobilized by all sorts of apparatuses involved
in the population’s security or well-being. For Bigo, the ‘‘Banopticon’’ intervenes
at the juncture of governmental rationality and power’s capacity to remove the
rule of law in times of emergency. This dispositif of terror and management of
unease is also supposed to anticipate the ‘‘future potential behavior’’ of individu-
als and groups and to normalize ‘‘the non-excluded through [a] production of
normative imperatives’’ (Bigo 2006:134).
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 409

Bigo’s (2002, 2006) analyses of unease are intriguing, although one may sus-
pect that they still privilege a unidirectional perspective on governmentality and
fear. Fear here is managed at the governmental level (through terror dispositifs),
and it then seeps into the public sphere through a relentless process of normali-
zation. But, unwittingly perhaps, a vertical structure of power is reproduced by
this ‘‘banoptic’’ system of governance and exception. As suggested above, any
‘‘banoptic’’ exercise implies that a condition of exception or a state of emer-
gency has been deployed. More crucially, what is absent from Bigo’s interesting
reflections on governmentality and unease is an elaboration of how the live but
banned bodies of the population, under ‘‘banoptic’’ conditions, internalize or,
rather, are encouraged to make their own a fear of not being able to live accord-
ing to normal or expected conditions. A critical concern about contemporary
regimes of governmentality is not just why individuals and groups in society fear
not being able to live their normal life. It is also how the myriad apparatuses
through which rationalities of government are rendered visible and effective
manage to make fear ⁄ terror the population’s own problem, that is to say, how
they produce fear ⁄ terror as an everyday social reality that populations must own
and become responsible for.
Asking how the productivity of fear by way of agents ⁄ agencies of governmental-
ized terror is realized means questioning the ways in which a biopolitics of fear,
unease, or insecurity takes place and reproduces itself across space and over
time. It means wondering how the governmentality of fear develops today the
conditions of production of its eventual reproduction. Whether we think about
this management of unease or fear—and the methods through which it is kept
active—in terms of special sites or exceptional events (Guantanamo’s Camp
Delta after 9 ⁄ 11), or as a matter of everyday occurrence in public places or
through mundane activities (commuting to work via the London Underground
transit system in the aftermath of the July 7, 2005 attacks),2 exploring how
bodies are mobilized to provide their own responses to the governmental man-
agement of fear ⁄ terror in the particular time-scapes of (bio)power is crucial to
assessing the resilience of contemporary regimes of power, force, and violence.
Here, Dean’s analysis can be useful. Dean writes that ‘‘[o]ur present is one in
which we are enjoined to take care and responsibility for our own lives, health, hap-
piness, sexuality, and financial security’’ (Dean 1996:211; emphasis added). The gov-
ernmentality of fear, unease, or insecurity demands that subjects ⁄ bodies act
upon themselves first and foremost. To borrow Dean’s language, it is one’s own
‘‘enfolding’’ of governmental authority, the application of dispositifs of fear and
security by oneself and onto oneself, that becomes the best guarantee that
regimes of governmentalized terror will remain effective. This individualization,
embodiment, or perhaps incarnation of ‘‘banoptic’’ techniques is a preferred
disposition of contemporary fear (re)production today (Paye 2007:245). It is by
means of such a capillarized, localized, and disseminated, but also maximizing,
totalizing, and regimenting, operation that the quotidian biopolitics of terror is
best maintained.
If insecurity or unease is the problem, and if fear ⁄ terror dispositifs are the
answer, governmental agents ⁄ agencies must ensure that the conduct responsible
for the alleged irregularity or abnormality is done away with (before it turns into
an endemic). But, more importantly, these terror dispositifs upon which govern-
mental agents rely must also make certain that bodies are actively recruited in
the maintenance of these regimes of governance. Thus, individuals and collectivi-
ties must self-rationalize, self-normalize, self-securitize, and indeed self-terrorize.

2
We are referring to the killing by the British police of Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the Lon-
don Underground in July 2005 while on his way to work. For an excellent study of this shooting and its connection
to biopower, see Vaughan-Williams (2007).
410 Nothing to Fear but Fear

They must be mobilized and they must mobilize themselves against the possibil-
ity that their own conduct (perhaps their thought too) will be what leads to soci-
ety’s overall sense of insecurity, and consequently will be responsible for the
entire population’s ‘‘ill health.’’
A telling example of this self-mobilization and self-anticipation against one’s
own conduct can be found in the way Western states (or, rather, their govern-
mental agencies) along with some transnational organizations (the World Health
Organization, the United Nations) have asked populations to preemptively take
care of their health, hygiene, and everyday routines in the context of the ongo-
ing A ⁄ H1N1 or ‘‘swine flu’’ pandemic. In this recent case of popular health
scare, as with many other instances of spreading epidemics over the past decade
(SARS, the H5N1 ‘‘bird flu,’’ but also AIDS before), individuals and groups are
asked to be the first layers of securitization by turning their bodies (or those of
family members, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) into primordial sites of analysis and
scrutiny from where not only the disease but, just as importantly, the fear about
what might happen with the disease will be monitored. With the ‘‘swine flu,’’ a
constant questioning of one’s body movements and symptomatic features, but
also of one’s daily habits, becomes an automatic (and autoimmune) measure
against the endemic fear. Individual and collective bodies become the most vital
dispositifs of containment of the pandemic and of the terror that inevitably will
spread. This management or governance of the ‘‘swine flu’’ and its scare (the
disease and its terror are inseparable from the moment a pandemic discourse is
launched) is said to require constant self-checking (Do I have a fever? Is my
cough a sign that I have been infected? Did I remember to wash my hands after
riding the bus or the subway?). But it also demands what can be called self-
carceralization measures (we must stay home for several days if we feel sick; we
must wear protective masks if we venture outside and have a runny nose; we
must close entire schools for as long as necessary if we suspect that children
in the community have the flu). In the end, it is a full-blown biopolitics of self-
terror that sets in whereby people must allow themselves to be quarantined, must
accept being placed in hospital isolation, and must even be willing not to be
treated if pharmaceutical companies fail to produce enough vaccines for every-
one. As the A ⁄ H1N1 pandemic preemption regime reveals, individual and collec-
tive bodies must always be prepared to immerse themselves into disciplinary and
regulatory procedures, into security mechanisms, and into governmental tactics.
In fact, they must act as dispositifs of fear governance themselves. This means that
bodies become the required lines of forces that connect the possible localized
symptoms to the global pandemic and its terror.
From this perspective on how bodies in societies of unease enable regimes
of biopolitical terror and are themselves the product of operations of govern-
mentalized fear, no return to a centralized model of power is necessary to
make sense of the terror embedded in contemporary regimes of government.
Rather, as the ‘‘swine flu’’ case shows, it is the horizontality, the capillarity,
and the propagation of carceral effects across space and through time that
authenticates this (self) imposition of governmental power and force. But what
this system of reproduction of self-governmentalized scare tactics and biopoliti-
cal (in)security calls for, however, is the beginning of a different understand-
ing of life, or of what life means. Indeed, it is not enough anymore to think
of life as docile or regulated. It may also not be sufficient to think of today’s
living bodies as abandoned beings (Agamben 1998) caught in a state of sover-
eign exception. Rather, the self-rationalizing, self-securitizing, and self-terroriz-
ing bodies that act, react, and interact in coordination with agents ⁄ agencies of
government and are found at the heart of societies of fear production are
more likely to represent what Mick Dillon has called ‘‘emergent life’’ (Dillon
2007).
 François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder 411

For Dillon, emergent life is found in societies ‘‘governed by terror [and] in

the process of trying to bring terror within the orbit of their political rationalities
and governmental technologies’’ (Dillon 2007:8). Emergent life can be under-
stood as a constant potential for adaptation in biopolitical terror apparatuses. As
Dillon clarifies, ‘‘[e]mergent means that they [living things] are capable of mov-
ing out of phase with themselves and becoming other than what they were’’
(Dillon 2007:14). The ‘‘living things’’ (as Dillon puts it) that populate emergent
life have no choice but to rely on pure contingency. This means that they can
and, in fact, have to redefine themselves incessantly inside the machineries of
government. Yet, because terror dispositifs and security mechanisms are condi-
tions that allow it to thrive, emergent life moves about but always remains on the
qui vive, on the look-out. As we saw above, it is a life that endlessly needs to
watch itself and monitor its own movements so that it can anticipate dangers or,
at least, so that it can fear today what is sure to be tomorrow’s terror.
Dillon intimates that it is through the production, maintenance, and care of
emergent living things that terror, unease, or insecurity is governed, that is to
say, placed within the domain of the biopolitical promotion of life. Indeed, what
emergent bodies enable through their constant ‘‘terror watch’’ is the perpetua-
tion of regimes of governmental fear and terror. As Dillon puts it, ‘‘the more
effort that is put into governing terror, the more terror comes to govern the
governors’’ (Dillon 2007:8). Emergent life in states, societies, populations, or
races steered by security mechanisms, fear tactics, or ‘‘banoptic’’ regimes ensures
that contemporary terror (no matter what form it takes—terrorism, total warfare,
pandemics, natural catastrophes—and no matter which enemy or danger is tar-
geted) will not be removed from the social compact but, instead, will remain as
the main political modality of government.
Among other things, what Dillon’s thought on emergent living reveals is that
it may be time to push Foucault’s thought on the biopolitical production of fear
further, perhaps beyond its own biopolitical limits. For when we speak in terms
of a biopolitical productivity of fear today (as we did above), what we are really
describing is the production of a fear of fear itself, or of a fear of being fearful.
Docile and normalized bodies of biopower and governmentality are not only
afraid of not being able to live their normal life, as we intimated above. They are
also emergent living things that fear being afraid of living a life that has fear ⁄
terror as its main vital impulse. As we saw with the ‘‘swine flu,’’ emergent lives
fear being afraid not so much of the spreading disease and its social and physio-
logical effects. Rather, they fear the terror that, for them, the disease comes to
represent. By treating the pandemic (or the weather catastrophe, or the terrorist
attack) no longer as a possible natural or man-made disaster, but as terror itself
(i.e., to say, as that which envelops one in fear) (Cavarero 2009:5), emergent liv-
ing things deprive themselves of any possible solution or actual preventive mea-
sure that might tackle the problem (Whitehall 2009). Instead, the main way for
emergent living things of dealing with the impending source of doom is simply
to fear more and more or, as we argued above, to proliferate self-monitoring
and self-carceralizing techniques that can only confirm that they have good
reasons to remain fearful.
For emergent lives today, there is indeed nothing to fear but fear. But, ironi-
cally, such a fear of fear is also what energizes emergent living bodies into
expecting and eventually accepting the terror and the insecurities that govern
their daily conducts. This redoubled fear prompts emergent living things to be
mobile ⁄ mobilized in an effort not so much to be prepared for the next disaster,
but rather to be ready to fear the next catastrophic terror. Thus, unlike Fou-
cault’s disciplined or normalized bodies who passively fall prey to governmental
techniques, emergent living things today actively and energetically partake of
the reproduction of (their) scare tactics and (their) terror dispositifs. While this
412 Nothing to Fear but Fear

argument is not to be interpreted to suggest that they give their full consent to
the power of biopolitical regimes of fear production (indeed, consent, free-will,
or individual choice—actual or coerced—plays no part in this system of gover-
nance, and this is one of its main differences from the Hobbesian model), its
implication is nonetheless that emergent lives are not excluded from what terror-
izes them. This point also suggests that, as Dillon implies, emergent life is inca-
pable of thinking of itself as separate from mechanisms and dispositifs of fear
management.
In a Foucaultian fashion, we could conclude that, under emergent living con-
ditions, mobility, adaptability, and contingency are the traps of the contemporary
biopolitical order that emergent bodies fall into. But we also have to recognize
that they fall into those traps because they never cease to set them up for them-
selves. In today’s governmentalized configurations of ongoing (in)security, life
gets fused and confused with fear. Together, as one, they form the prime objects
of government and biopower. Terrifyingly, as this condition of governmentality
of fear takes charge of (emergent) life, the terror of terror, the fear of fear, or
the insecurity of insecurity become ‘‘our’’ best guarantees that human
bodies—adaptative, uncertain, vulnerable, yet also active and mobilized—will
retain a semblance of social meaning and purpose.

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