Forgetting ISIS: enmity, drive and repetition in security discourse

Abstract

This paper explores the reconstitution and repetition of threat imaginaries in security discourse, with particular focus on the War on Terror era. Upon vanquishing the enemy (whether an individual militant or militant group) no tangible increase in 'security' is claimed by securitising actors. Instead, the security apparatus turns away and reconstructs the figuration of insecurity elsewhere. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS replace each other as signifiers for the most profound threat to international order. The article positions this compulsive refiguration of enemies within an aversion to attaining a state of 'security'. The paper uses psychoanalytic concepts of drive and jouissance to argue that security imaginaries play out fantasies of insecurity to suture the symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and power. If enmity was permanently ended or victory attained, society would need to confront the continued experience of 'lack' (ontological insecurity) -something promised to disappear upon the resolution of hostilities. The fantasy of interpellation would collapse at this point. The article contributes to Critical Security Studies by explicitly addressing the repetitive constitution of terrorist threats. It goes beyond constructivist understandings of othering to explain why the resolution of insecurity is disavowed and why enmity is continually restaged.

Dā'ish vs Tanẓīm Al-Dawlah: BREAK Analysis of The Names of ISIS in Arab Mass Media

“…In ISIS's view, their Islamic doctrine is the most correct. Based on this doctrine, hostility should be directed at non-Muslims and all Muslims who belong to different sects (Abdulrazaq & Stansfield, 2016;Heath-Kelly, 2018). On that basis, the meaning of 'who spreads enmity' in the relevant word dāḥis is associated as the second meaning of primary discourse.…”

Security symptoms

“…As Charlotte Heath-Kelly has noted in the context of global geopolitics, 'security never seems to make any progress'. 6 By turning as Heath-Kelly does to psychoanalytic theory, we can better understand how the (re)production of a social -and, I will add, spatial -order rooted in dispossession requires a politics of (in)security without end.…”