Andrew Culp
(California Institute of the Arts)
Abstract:
Liberal juridical and institutionalist theories of government often present statecraft as a pathway to peace—perhaps even Kant’s elusive “perpetual peace.” However, these accounts tend to overlook the dark underbelly of modern governance: cruel forms of governmentality. How, then, do we account for the political manhunts chronicled by Grégoire Chamayou, including the literal hunting of foreigners, the poor, and police hunts? These practices have not disappeared with the rise of modern liberal jurisprudence; rather, they have been regulated, formalized, and institutionalized. The professionalization of war, for instance, did not eliminate war crimes but instead enabled them on a global scale. Yet symbolic and physical violence continues to be depicted as a disruption in an otherwise peaceful world of law and order. As such, they are viewed as isolated events, allowing persistent cruelty to be dismissed as lone outbursts of defective personalities. In contrast, I argue that this cruelty is not a contingent aberration but a structural feature of governance. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explore the underlying desire for brutality that fuels such actions. By refusing to separate the leader’s cruel glee from the structural features of government, I will examine the history of seizing war captives, the domestication of gender, the terror of bureaucracy, and the brutality of capitalism’s silent compulsions.
Bio:
Andrew Culp, Professor, serves as the Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts, where he teaches Media History and Theory in the School of Critical Studies. He is the author of two major books, Dark Deleuze (2016, University of Minnesota Press) and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (2022, University of Minnesota Press). As a member of the Destructionist International, he is the co-writer and co-director of Machines in Flames (2022, 50min) and Breached: A Chronicle of Cargo Theft (2024, 15min). His writing has appeared in various journals including Stasis, symploke, and Angelaki. He is currently finishing a book, The Anarcheology of Power, a comparative philosophy of government.
