Bad cops and true detectives: The horror of police and the unthinkable world

Abstract

The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world and the subject’s relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation, the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological position—a world-without-police—as it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside the subject.

A snake who eats the devil’s tail: The recursivity of good and evil in the security state

“…the French Revolution), or in science fiction. Security states lock down the violent power of counter neoliberalism to the point now where it is ‘impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2, as quoted in Linnemann, 2017a: 8). Further disturbing is the idea that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.…”

“…Within this moral frame, normally immoral actions within the principles of democracy become permissible as a way to both extend and protect the ‘homeland’. Or, ‘here, beyond good and evil the bigger monster wins’ (Linnemann, 2017a: 7; see also Anker, 2014). This point suggests something sinister about the institutions of security, and those that extend to foreign lands by extension (e.g.…”

“…The evolution and continuation of modern national security states are built on this very thing. Indeed, Neocleous (2016: 85) as both paraphrased and quoted by Linnemann (2017a: 10) argues:‘The theology of evil and particularly Christian notions of the Devil have long been integral to Western political power. In the realm of security, the leaders of the earliest state formations in Europe quickly learned that their legitimacy was dramatically enhanced by claims ‘coordinating the war on the Devil as the Enemy of All Mankind as well as the Enemy of God’’.…”

“…Speculative fiction represents an exaggeration of hyper-security states and tends towards an apocalyptic present. It often highlights the plight of neoliberal subjects as they operate within a capitalist-driven world (Linnemann, 2017a). The predominant narratives of speculative fiction explore the consequences of institutional and market-based authoritarian aggression in efforts to control a respective populace.…”

“…In many ways, the worlds represented here are similar to current socio–political–economic conditions seen today in the US. This is not shocking given that speculative fiction tends to represent ‘an extrapolation or exacerbation of our present’ (Linnemann, 2017a: 8; also see Fisher, 2009). The apocalypse-driven body of dystopic-utopias serves as a means of ‘banishing, symbolically obliterating, whatever the apocalyptic writer deems unacceptable, evil, or alien’ (Berger, 1999: xv).…”