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Zones of Indistinction

Security, Terror, and Bare Life

Lancaster University

Carsten Bagge Laustsen

University of Copenhagen

Since the late 1970s, the focus on the "urban question" has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to "postpolitical" risk management. In this context, the city is increasingly transformed into a "network city": fragmented space held together by technologies of mobility and flexible forms of power. The transition from "disciplinary society" to "societies of control" is decisive. It is increasingly evident that post-politics, based on technologies of control, is not a peaceful social order and brings with it new forms of violence: terror. The article elaborates on the relationship between these three successive forms of power (discipline, control, and terror) by focusing on their common denominator, that is, the creation of spaces of "indistinction." With Agamben, it is argued that the "camp," the logic that combines discipline, control, and terror, is becoming the biopolitical paradigm of today's societies.

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