Michael Dutton most recently taught at Beijing Capital Normal University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of
Focusing on a strange coincidence surrounding the number 911, this chapter compares two “states of exception.” One is caused by the ongoing war on terror, while the other became a war against nature after the contagions of the first SARS outbreak. These two states of exception are unpacked in such a way as to enable a forensic analysis of two forms of the political. If the war on terror circles around degrees of political intensity, the war on nature largely takes place as an action at a distance abstracted from daily Western life concerns and employing specialist knowledge regimes that cut across affective energy flows and redistribute that energy along lines dictated by the market.
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