Law in Crisis The Ecstatic Subject of Natural Disaster The Cultural Lives of Law

Introduction Ths book s n part a plea to revve ecstasy as a pont of departure n the study of law.1 Ecstatc subjects—shattered, dspossessed, dsplaced, and besde themselves—have never dsa

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Lbrary of Congress Catalogng-n-Publcaton Data

Mller, Ruth Austn

Law n crss : the ecstatc subject of natural dsaster / Ruth A Mller.

p cm.—(The cultural lves of law)

Includes bblographcal references and ndex.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6256-4 (cloth : alk paper)

1 Law—Phlosophy 2 Subjectvty 3 Natural dsasters—Law and legslaton 4 Law—Poltcal aspects I Ttle II Seres: Cultural lves of law

K240.M55 2009

340.1—dc22

2008055820 Typeset by Thompson Type n 10/14.5 Mnon

1 Introducton 1

2 Wrtng About Dsaster: Metaphors n Crss 33

3 The Gft of Lfe: Blood, Organs, and Vruses 52

4 Respect n Death: Ghouls and Corpses 85

5 Sesmc Space: Camps, Cemeteres, Squares, and Monuments 120

Introduction

Ths book s n part a plea to revve ecstasy as a pont of departure n the study of law.1 Ecstatc subjects—shattered, dspossessed, dsplaced, and besde themselves—have never dsappeared completely from legal or poltcal analyss.2Snce the 1970s and 1980s, the subject n ecstasy has been nvoked n a number

of books and artcles, especally n the fields of relgon, metaphyscs, and ture.3 The dea, however, that ecstasy s, or should be, central to legal structures

ltera-or legal study s one that has not found proponents fltera-or a number of centures.4

I make the case n ths book that legal ecstasy s stll very much wth us, that t remans an effectve framework for poltcs, and that ecstatc subjects—or ther off-center, eccentrc counterparts—have been key players n the artculaton

of modern and contemporary poltcal norms I do so by focusng on what has

ncreasngly been called “dsaster law”5—defined broadly here as the legal and poltcal structures that appear n the aftermath of crses such as earthquakes, floods, or fires What I suggest throughout ths book s that the dual purposes

of dsaster law are, first, to make the dsaster ntellgble by, second, assgnng a poltcally normatve functon to the subject n ecstasy

I admt that the subject n ecstasy s a strange place to start a book that s not beng wrtten thrty years ago, when dscussons of subjectvty were more wdespread.6 What I propose over the followng chapters, however, s that at that moment thrty years ago, there was a potental connecton, a possble lnkage,

among ecstasy, eccentrcty, and the law that could have been made but that was not—an assocaton that was momentarly formulated, but that then unraveled

My startng pont n ths book, therefore, s that ths bref, potental, or possble lnkage needs to be reartculated—especally now that crss and dsaster have become common tropes n contemporary poltcal and legal rhetorc Over the followng pages, I argue that durng a dsaster or crss, the law assumes not bounded, dstnct, definable subjects, but rather eccentrc subjects or subjects besde themselves—subjects n ecstasy Furthermore, ths assumpton of legal ecstasy or eccentrcty produces not just bodes besde themselves, but also ds-placed spaces and shattered narratves—the realty assocated wth what can be represented gvng way to a realty assocated wth what cannot

That law mght deal n ecstatc rather than n bounded subjects—n what not be represented rather than n what can—may at first appear paradoxcal One

can-of the most common assumptons n legal studes today s that legal systems, regardless of ther deologcal bases, both demand and define dscrete, untary, and above all bounded subjects The rghts-bearng ndvdual, for example, s assumed to enter the lberal socal contract only after takng on the ratonal, untary subjectvty that s ctzenshp The state becomes soveregn and thus a state—capable of engagng n nternatonal law systems—only when t s recog-nzed to possess dstnct boundares enclosng a definable space.7 Even the racal-

zed body that s regulated by shftng, decree-drven totaltaran law s a body capable of beng represented and made (sometmes hyperbolcally) dstnct.8Although a number of scholars have crtczed ths emphass on the bounded subject—tryng, for example, to preserve the noton of rghts whle dong away wth the categorzaton and dependency demanded by the socal contract,9 or hghlghtng the racsm that underles the valorzaton of the nvolate natonal boundary10—few have questoned the more fundamental assumpton that law demands a untary subject.11 I focus on the law of dsaster n ths book n order

noted n other contexts, that s, I argue n ths book that the crss has become the norm.13 My final pont, therefore, s perhaps a counterntutve one, espe-cally n a book purportng to address dsaster law: rather than amng at some (legal) resoluton to crss or dsaster stuatons, rather than attemptng to solve the problem that s the crss or dsaster, I suggest that we should nstead develop

a legal vocabulary that recognzes dsaster as the endpont of law

The rest of ths ntroductory chapter s devoted to buldng a framework for addressng these ponts Frst, I outlne the major themes that appear throughout the book, and second, I ntroduce some of the theoretcal work wth whch I en-gage In the three sectons that follow, for example, I address a number of broad trends n the lterature on ecstasy, subjectvty, and truth I descrbe ecstatc sub-jects of law as they appear n late twenteth-century work, and explan how my own nterpretaton of ecstatc subjectvty both draws on these descrptons and departs from them

The sectons “Ecstasy,” “Ecstasy and Subjectvty,” and “Ecstasy, Subjectvty, and Truth” explore the law of dsaster—addressng recent theores of poltcal exceptonalsm, comparng these theores to emergency measures taken durng crss stuatons, and descrbng the ways n whch these dsasters and crses are made meanngful My purpose n these sectons s to stuate my analyss of the

crss or the dsaster—and more specfically the subject of the crss or the

dsas-ter—wthn these broader theores of the state of excepton Agan, n the secton

“States of Excepton,” I suggest that although the subjects of dsaster law are very much related to the subjects of the poltcal excepton, they are also dstnct n sgnficant ways

The sectons “Natural Dsasters and Metaphyscal Dsasters” and “Dsaster Law and Femnst Theory” set the groundwork for the chapters that follow by brngng together my workng defintons of the subject n ecstasy and my work-

ng defintons of the subject of dsaster law The lterature on subjectvty and the lterature on dsaster have both reled heavly on a rhetorc of crss In the first of these sectons, I suggest that these natural dsasters and metaphyscal d-sasters are n many ways the same thng Then n the second secton, I define “d-saster law” for the purposes of my argument, I descrbe how ts consttuent parts

nteract to produce the ecstatc subject, and I dscuss broadly the mportance of femnst theory to these relatonshps

It s dfficult to dssocate ecstasy from subjectvty As the next secton shows, each has been repeatedly defined n relaton to the other, and each lends tself easly to a relatonal definton Before I get to ths relatonal definton, how-ever, I want to sketch a few characterstcs of the former detached from, dvorced from, or even pror to the latter.14 Lterally, therefore, ecstasy—ek-stasis—means

a “beng put out of place” or a “standng outsde of.” It s a term that descrbes a process—and a process alone Who or what the subject or object of ths process mght be—what s put out of place, or what stands outsde of what—s a queston that s for the most part left unanswered It s n fact only n the secondary defin-ton of the term n Greek, a “beng dsorented,” that the exstence of a subject s

tculaton, that s, does not requre a self Contemporary dscussons of the state

of ecstasy do What I would lke to do n ths secton and the next, therefore, s begn wth ths ntal artculaton of ecstasy as a process, and then move on to ecstasy as an aspect of subjectvty—to the qute reasonable tendency to under-stand ecstasy prmarly, or even only, n relaton to the self

What, then, does t mean to “be put out of place” or to “stand outsde of?” Frst

of all, each mples a process of decontextualzaton Beng put out of place means beng deprved of a context, of reference ponts, of a meanngful framework Be-

ng put out of place means beng offstage; t means, more broadly, beng ble of representaton Beng put out of place—lke beng eccentrc (off center)—s thus to be constantly shftng, dsntegratng, and rentegratng elsewhere Ths

ncapa-s not a state of transcendence, not a process of otherng or beng othered.17 There

s no movement from one defined or finte state to another Rather, ths s a state

of constant and smultaneous solaton, dsntegraton, and rentegraton.What I suggest n ths book s that the law of dsaster seeks to produce pre-csely ths state of ecstasy Instead of understandng law—or law’s volence—as somethng that defines, represents, ratonalzes, and forces nto a meanngful frame, that s, I understand law as somethng that nssts upon a process of de-contextualzaton, a gradual move toward the ndefinte If there s a coercve

character to dsaster law, therefore, I suggest that t manfests tself by shftng what can be represented nto the realm of what cannot—not by forcng com-plex subjects to conform to smple, ratonal, or recognzable legal and poltcal norms.

Ths does not mean, however, that subjects and subjectvty are rrelevant to legal ecstasy “Beng put out of place” and “standng outsde of” each mply, at least, some object, subject, space, or narratve that s undergong ths process

of decontextualzaton—each almost demands a thng that mght be fractured, shattered, or placed besde tself And to the extent that ths thng s the body

or mnd, the subject does gradually begn to enter the pcture If ecstasy means standng outsde of the body, standng outsde of the mnd, or standng outsde

of the self, n other words, t s n many ways an aspect of subjectvty

Although I take as my startng pont ecstasy as a process, my fundamental workng definton of the term s “a decontextualzng,” or “a renderng nca-pable of representaton.” In many nstances, t s the subject who becomes de-contextualzed or unrepresentable In some nstances, however, t s not None-

theless, what I want to do now s turn to the work that has addressed ecstasy

prmarly n relaton to subjectvty—to the work that has descrbed the varous ways n whch ecstasy has ndeed become a means of descrbng or even definng the subject

Ecstasy and Subjectivity

Much of the late twenteth-century work on subjectvty took as ts startng pont the so-called Cartesan subject—seekng varously to challenge, crtque, defend, or re-create the bounded, ratonal self that was nvented, t was con-tended, by René Descartes.18 As Matthew L Jones has argued, the story of Des-cartes’ nventon of the modern subject became “a comfortng fable” n many scholarly fields—a narratve n whch “knowledge and truth” were assumed to

“rest upon the ndvdual subject and that subject’s knowledge of hs or her own capactes.”19 Jones’s purpose n ths analyss of Descartes s to emphasze the complexty of what has often been descrbed as almost a carcature of the ra-tonal, modern, self—to rescue Descartes, at least n part, from the crtques of modernty n whch he has been entangled.20 By focusng on the mathematcal exercses that “Descartes hghlghted as propaedeutc to a better lfe and bet-ter knowledge,”21 for example, Jones states that Descartes’ phlosophy valorzed

“the wll to recognze and to accept freely the nsghts of reason not just followng the passons or memorzed patterns of actons It meant essentally

recognzng the limits of reason and wllng not to make judgments about thngs

beyond reason’s scope.”22

My purpose n ths secton s not to argue n favor of, or aganst, the

complex-ty of Cartesan subjectvcomplex-ty, or the valdcomplex-ty of holdng up the “Cartesan subject”

as an actual product of Descartes’ phlosophy and mathematcs Nor do I tempt n ths secton an extensve revew of the late twenteth-century lterature that addresses subjectvty n general Gven the hundreds of books and artcles

at-on the modern subject, ts crss, ts death, and ts revval that were publshed throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and that contnue to appear, although wth less frequency, today—such a comprehensve revew would n any case be excessve Rather, what I try to do n ths secton s pant n broad strokes some

of the major themes that helped to shape ths ntellectual moment—and explan why I am seekng to return to t now In partcular, I emphasze the persstence

of what has been called Cartesan reason, related or not to the phlosophy of Descartes, as a trope n dscussons of subjectvty—even, or especally, n those dscussons that announce the death or crss of the ratonal subject I address, that s, the endurng assumpton that truth and knowledge must be stuated n bounded, self-conscous, ratonalty—even when ths ratonalty s crtqued, challenged, or set asde

At the same tme, I should note that my pont n ths secton s not that the crtcal wrtng on subjectvty s nconsstent or contradctory n ts smulta-neous dsmssal of, and nsstence on, Descartes’ ratonalty It s true that even whle grapplng wth the Cartesan subject, even whle announcng the death, dsntegraton, rrelevance, or revval of ths subject, much of the work on sub-jectvty seems to have treated ths apparently dead, dspersed, or rrelevant sub-ject as the norm It s lkewse true that although the modern, ratonal subject has been descrbed as a subject n crss for many decades or even centures, t remans an often overwhelmng presence n academc work today I thnk that ths s so, however, less because of the often paradoxcal nature of scholarly wrt-

ng, and more because there has been a msreadng of the nature and ment of modern law and poltcs As I argue n the followng chapters, the key figures n the development of poltcal and legal structures over the past three centures have not been the bounded, ratonal, self-conscous subjects of precr-ss Cartesan ratonalty, but rather precsely the postcrss subjects—the subjects

develop-n ecstasy, besde themselves, unrepresentable, and at the margdevelop-ns—descrbed by these crtcal works.

Wth that n mnd, I am not gong to start ths dscusson of ecstasy and jectvty n the 1980s, but rather n the first couple of centures ce, wth the trea-

sub-tse of the lterary crtc, Longnus, On the Sublime Longnus’s purpose n ths

treatse s to analyze dfferent types of rhetorc and to evaluate ther efficacy n movng a publc audence Indeed, although he addresses a varety of styles of speech—poetc as well as poltcal—he makes a pont of askng early on (and repeatedly afterward) “whether we shall have theorzed on somethng useful for men n poltcal lfe.”23 Throughout the text, Longnus remans nterested above all n poltcally useful speech—and n the type of speech that forms a poltcally useful subject Moreover, accordng to Longnus, at the heart of ths queston of poltcal speech rests the relatonshp between the ratonal subject who can be persuaded by logcal dscusson and the subject n ecstasy who s rrelevant to such dscusson “What s beyond nature,” Longnus argues,

drves the audence not to persuason, but to ecstasy What s wonderful, wth ts rng power, prevals everywhere over that whch ams merely at persuason and at gracefulness The ablty to be persuaded les n us, but what s wonderful has a capa- blty and force whch, unable to be fought, takes a poston hgh over every member

str-of the audence 24

A number of pages later, he contnues that the “final end of poetry s the

astound-ng of those who hear t,” and that both poltcal speech and poetcal speech

“are seekng the sublme and the state of sympathetc exctement.” Fnally, n a concludng secton, he repeats, “you see—as I never stop sayng—the works and emotons whch come near to ecstasy are a release and a cure-all for every auda-cousness n spoken and wrtten style.”25

Accordng to Longnus, n other words, there s a clear and dstnct dvson between untary, ratonal subjects—subjects capable of beng persuaded—and ecstatc subjects besde themselves, astounded, and n an altered state As the ed-

tors of the text argue n ther notes, the dfference between beng persuaded and beng moved to ecstasy s that ecstasy s a “hypernatural” state that s “almost

mystcally beyond logos,” whereas beng persuaded “ndcates voluntary cence as a result of logos.”26 Beng astounded—“a synonym of ‘ecstasy’”—“knocks you out” and results from a “drect sensaton” or “mages of such sensatons,” and “s one of the prncple jobs of the publc speaker.”27 I want to emphasze ths

acques-pont: n Longnus’s unverse, there s the same dchotomy between the untary subject and the ecstatc subject that we see n current work on subjectvty Un-lke the lterary crtcs wrtng n the 1980s, however, Longnus assumes almost

automatcally that the normative subject—the subject produced by both poltcal

dscourse and poltcal structures—s the latter of these, the subject n ecstasy Truth, power, poltcs, and lfe are a functon of beng besde oneself.28

Two thousand years later, Mchel Foucault addressed smlar aspects of ths trend n the work of classcal ethcsts and phlosophers In a seres of lectures

gven n 1981 and 1982 on The Hermeneutics of the Subject and n 1983 on

Fear-less Speech, he goes nto detal about the relatonshp among classcal Greek and

Roman subjectvty, exstng outsde of oneself or n an altered state, and havng access to the truth.29 Startng wth the Socratc admonton to “know oneself” and “care for oneself,” Foucault makes the case that sprtualty (as dstnct from theology),30 subjectvty, and truth were nterconnected ssues n the world of antquty Sprtualty, he argues, “postulates that for the subject to have rght of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shfted, and become other than hmself.”31 He contnues that the nsstence on “care of the self” n Socratc phlosophy “desgnates precsely the set of condtons of sprtualty, the set of transformatons of the self, that are necessary condtons for havng access

to the truth.”32 As a result, he concludes, “the phlosophcal theme (how to have access to the truth?) and the queston of sprtualty (what transformatons n the beng of the subject are necessary for access to the truth?) were never sepa-rate.”33 Lke Longnus, Foucault recognzes that persuason through logos was

nether nvested wth an obvously postve moral value nor partcularly closely assocated wth truth or realty n the classcal world He argues that n Greek

thought, for example, “you metanoei (you change opnon) when you have been

persuaded by someone,” and ths process “always has a negatve connotaton, a negatve value.”34

Foucault contnues by comparng ths classcal relatonshp among

subjectv-ty, sprtual transformaton, and truth to modern varatons on the same theme

In the process, he develops two further ponts Frst of all, he argues that the

“Cartesan moment”—a term he uses as shorthand for a general modern shft toward untary ratonalty n ethcs and phlosophy—marked the pont at whch

“know yourself” was “requalfied,” and “care of the self” was “dscredted.”35Rather than lnkng truth to an altered or transformed state, Foucault suggests,

modern phlosophers nstead nssted that “the condton for the subject’s cess to the truth [was] knowledge, and knowledge alone.”36 In Fearless Speech, he

ac-elaborates on ths noton, statng that,

before Descartes obtans ndubtably clear and dstnct evdence, he s not certan

that what he beleves s, n fact, true In the Greek concepton of parrhesia

[speak-ng freely], however, there does not seem to be a problem about the acquston of the truth snce such truth-havng s guaranteed by the possesson of certan moral qual-

tes: when someone has certan moral qualtes, then that s the proof he has access to the truth—and vce versa 37

Accordng to Foucault, n other words, there s a dstncton between the ern assumpton that truth exsts outsde of the subject—and thus requres a self- conscous, knowng subject capable of graspng t—and the classcal assumpton that truth and (altered) subjectvty are the same thng In the classcal perod, he argues, somethng could be true only va recourse to the transformed, unquely vrtuous, or ecstatc subject In the modern perod, contrarly, somethng could

mod-be true only va recourse to knowng, ratonal, untary subjects—subjects who

were, by definton, not besde themselves.

The second and related pont that Foucault draws from both hs analyss of classcal subjectvty and the dstncton he posts between classcal truth and

modern truth s that the ecstatic subject of Greek and Roman texts had no tonshp to law or poltcs For example, ascesis (or askesis—exercse or the prac-

rela-tce of carng for oneself) s not, for Foucault, “a way of subjectng the subject to the law; t s a way of bndng hm to the truth.”38 More emphatcally, he argues that “n the culture of the self of Greek, Hellenstc, and Roman cvlzaton, the problem of the subject n hs relaton to practce leads to somethng qute df-ferent from the queston of the law.”39 Indeed,

however pressng the cty-state may be, however mportant the dea of nomos may

be, and however wdespread relgon may be n Greek thought, t s never the polt- cal structure, the form of law or relgous mperatves that can say what a Greek or Roman must do concretely throughout hs lfe In Greek classcal culture, the art of lfe s, I beleve, nserted n the gaps left equally by the cty-state, the law, and relgon regardng ths organzaton of lfe 40

In addton to postng the Cartesan moment as the end of the normatve statc subject, n other words, Foucault s lkewse argung that, even n antquty,

ec-subjects besde themselves had lttle to do wth law or poltcs The care of the self, the truth that was accessed by the transformed subject, had nothng to do wth the world of the cty-state and the legal structures that defined t

These two ponts—the shft marked by the Cartesan moment and the evance of any but the Cartesan subject to law and poltcs—have been extraord-narly nfluental n wrtng on subjectvty Judth Butler, for example, operates

rrel-n an analytcal framework rrel-n many ways smlar to Foucault’s and, lke hm, understands the ecstatc subject as a margnal figure n law and poltcs It s true that rather than postng a chronologcal break—the Cartesan moment—as the thng that dfferentates the ecstatc subject from the bounded subject, Butler

nstead posts a narratve or dscursve break But the dchotomy s nonetheless

clear On the one hand, for example, she argues that terms such as “my

sexual-ty” or “my gender” ndcate not so much possesson but “modes of being

dispos-sessed, ways of beng for another or, ndeed, by vrtue of another.”41 On the other hand—and n opposton to ths fractured subjectvty—she states that n the context of law, poltcs, and rghts,

we have to present ourselves as bounded bengs, dstnct, recognzable, delneated, subjects before the law, a communty defined by sameness Indeed, we had better be able to use that language to secure legal protectons and enttlements But perhaps

we make a mstake f we take the defintons of who we are, legally, to be adequate descrptons of what we are about Although ths language mght well establsh our legtmacy wthn a legal framework ensconced n lberal versons of human ontology,

t fals to do justce to passon and gref and rage, all of whch tear us from ourselves, bnd us to others, transport us, undo us, and mplcate us n lves that are not our own, sometmes fatally, rreversbly 42

On the one hand, she contnues, “to assert sexual rghts” means “strugglng to

be conceived as person [and] ntervenng nto the socal and poltcal process

by whch the human s artculated.”43 On the other, falng to engage effectvely wth poltcal, legal, and socal structures renders certan people less than real—renders “ther loves and losses less than ‘true’ loves and ‘true’ losses.”44

Lke Foucault, that s, Butler also draws a number of dstnctons between the untary, knowng subject and the dspossessed subject n ecstasy Frst of all,

t s the untary subject who s the subject of legal and poltcal structures statc subjects—even f they are “what we are about”—reman rrelevant to the

Ec-language of law and rghts, remnscent of Foucault’s subjects of askesis Second,

somethng can become (poltcally or legally) true or real n ths context only va

recourse to the untary subject The subject n ecstasy—eccentrc to these tures—can never produce effectve (poltcal or legal) truth.45 In the work of But-ler, t s precsely a “Cartesan” type of law or poltcs that renders the loves and losses of those besde themselves less real and less true than the loves and losses

struc-of those who are self-contaned Although she does spend tme n her work

try-ng to redefine rghts and law such that they mght be relevant to fractured jects, therefore, I want to emphasze that Butler’s startng pont and assumptons

sub-are not far removed from Foucault’s: law as t exsts now assumes a bounded,

untary subject Access to (recognzed poltcal) truth has nothng to do wth the subject n ecstasy

Ros Bradott, who has also wrtten extensvely on subjectvty, draws clusons that are n many ways dfferent from Butler’s but, agan, seem founded

con-on the same assumptcon-ons about bounded and ecstatc subjects In her Nomadic

Subjects, for example, Bradott asks “how can we affirm the postvty of female

subjectvty at a tme n hstory when our acqured perceptons of ‘the subject’ are beng radcally questoned?”46 She asks furthermore whether t s possble “to avod hegemonc recodficaton of the female subject to keep an open-ended vew of subjectvty, whle assertng the poltcal and theoretcal presence of an-other vew of subjectvty.”47

Throughout much of her wrtng, Bradott proposes a number of possble swers to these questons Drawng on the work of Luce Irgaray, for example, she argues that the crss of the Cartesan subject should be recognzed as “only the death of the unversal subject—the one that dsgused ts sngularty behnd the mask of logocentrcsm.”48 Drawng on the work of Deleuze, she argues that the subject s a “process,” and “can no longer be seen to concde wth hs/her conscousness but must be thought of as a complex and multple dentty, as the ste of a dynamc nteracton of desre wth the wll.”49 Accordng to Bradott,

an-n other words, the way out of the crss of the Cartesan subject s to recognze that ts definng (volent) characterstc was ts “logocentrc” clam to unversal-

ty Smlarly, the partcular danger that faced femnsts and crtcal theorsts—a danger aganst whch Bradott convncngly warns—was that ther work would smply recodfy ths untary, unversal subject under dfferent terms

Where, though, does ths place law? In a relatvely famlar move at ths pont, Bradott assocates law—n some ways conflated wth logocentrsm n her work and n other ways not—wth the dead Cartesan subject Law becomes rrele-vant, that s, when the untary, ratonal subject has dsappeared Indeed, n her

1994 dscusson of bopoltcs as an (undesrable) manfestaton of ths postcrss thnkng, Bradott argues that,

the bopower world s marked not by the soveregnty of the law but by prohbtons, rules, and regulatons that bypass, overflow, and dsregard what used to be the law The bodly matter s drectly and mmedately caught n a field of power effects and mechansms for whom legslaton, when not archac, s smply redundant 50

A year later, Gorgo Agamben would make the case that soveregnty and poltcs are much more closely—or at least ambguously—related to one another than ths.51 Rather than gong nto more detal about hs argument now, though,

bo-I smply want to hghlght, agan, the assumptons under whch Bradott pears to be operatng Unlke Butler, who remans convnced that—despte the metaphyscal crss—both the untary subject and the language of law are deas worth engagng, Bradott argues that the crss has effectvely klled both Butler advocates some sort of workng relatonshp between the subject besde tself and the legal rhetorc that apparently gnores ths subject Bradott—lke Foucault

ap-n hs analyss of classcal theores of the self—dsregards law and ts untary subject altogether At the same tme, however, all three nonetheless see the same, and I thnk famlar, relatonshp between law and subjectvty: law produces a bounded, ratonal subject; law thus has nothng to do wth the ecstatc subject; law s therefore (a) rrelevant, or (b) n need of redefinton

The ecstatc subject, n other words, ded wth Descartes, and the Cartesan subject ded soon after, durng the repeated crtques of modernty throughout the late nneteenth and twenteth centures And now we are left wth—some-thng else What I want to argue n ths book, however, s that ths somethng else s none other than our orgnal ecstatc subjects—and that t s these ecstatc subjects, far more than ther ephemeral Cartesan counterparts, that have been the normatve subjects of modern, f not necessarly classcal, law and poltcs

In partcular, t s the ecstatc subject who has been the focus of dsaster law and poltcs And, to the extent that dsasters have n many ways become the day-to-day norm, the subjects that they have produced have lkewse become far more—paradoxcally—central than they mght ntally appear

Agan, my purpose n ths secton has not been to attempt a lterature vew—or even an extended definton—of “the subject” as a theme n phlosophy and ethcs Rather, I have tred to pnpont some common trends that appear and reappear n wrtng on subjectvty, ecstasy, and truth In general, regard-

re-less of perspectve or prescrpton, much of the work on these ssues seems to be founded on the same assumptons Frst of all, whether the break s chronolog-cal as t s n Foucault, or dscursve as t s n Butler, there appears to be a dstnct dchotomy set up between the untary subject and the subject n ecstasy Second, there s lkewse an assumpton that whereas n the premodern perod ecstatc subjects could be the poltcal norm—truth accessed and produced by subjects besde themselves—n the post-Cartesan world, untary, ratonal subjects be-came the norm, and (poltcal and legal) truth was derved from what could be verfied ratonally and externally In general, that s, despte the fact that the Car-tesan subject has ded repeatedly over the past century and a half, t stll appears

n work on subjectvty wth a perplexng frequency

I argue that ths s the case, however—that Descartes’ subject wll not de—not because of some ntellectual paradox, not because of some lag between metaphys-

cal crses and poltcal ones, but rather because of a msreadng of poltcs, law, and truth n the post-Cartesan world It s not, I suggest, the untary subject that has been the bass for poltcal and legal structures over the past three centures Rather, the poltcal and legal norm has been the subject n ecstasy—that subject theorzed so many centures ago by Longnus and hs contemporares, and that subject who has survved so many floods, fires, earthquakes, and dsasters

Ecstasy, Subjectivity, and Truth

Although I began to descrbe the relatonshp between ecstatc subjectvty and access to the truth n the prevous secton, I pause here to explan n more detal how ths relatonshp wll play out n ths book As Foucault, Butler, Bradott, and others have argued, the truth accessed by ecstatc subjects and the truth or realty accessed by ratonal, bounded subjects seem completely dstnct from one another Ecstatc subjects alter themselves, nternally or sprtually, as a means of apprehendng truth n ts totalty Accordng to Foucault, for nstance, “durng the Hellenstc and Roman perod there s the ncreasngly marked absorpton of phlosophy (as thought concernng truth) nto sprtualty (as the subject’s own transformaton of hs mode of beng) Wth ths there s, of course, an expanson

of the cathartc theme [H]ow must I transform my own self so as to be able

to have access to the truth?”52 Sprtual, cathartc transformaton, that s, poses subjects to engagng wth truth

preds-Ratonal subjects, contrarly, alter the external world such that they can ually gather knowledge, whch wll then, pecemeal, lead to a dfferent sort of truth Ths does not mean, however, that ratonal subjects are not concerned wth ther nternal state As Jones argues wth respect to Descartes’ work, for exam-

grad-ple, “Descartes’ geometry was a sprtual exercse [askesis], meant to

coun-ter nstablty, to produce and secure oneself despte outsde confuson, through the producton of real mathematcs Descartes’ famous quest to find a superor phlosophy took place wthn ths therapeutc model.”53 The dfference between these two approaches to truth and subjectvty, therefore, s less that one gnores the self whereas the other takes the self as a startng pont More, t s that n the latter, truth follows from anchorng the self, whereas n the former, truth follows from shftng or transformng the self Whereas the ecstatc subject changes, or even loses, the self n order to nternalze truth, suddenly, n ts totalty, the ra-tonal subject secures, or even asserts, the self n order to comprehend truth, progressvely, through the gradual accumulaton of evdence

What I suggest n ths book s that the law of dsaster operates at the ton of these two approaches to subjectvty It does seek securty of the sort de-manded by Descartes, but what t secures s the subject n, and state of, ecstasy It

ntersec-secures each of these n a rational way—definng, representng, and

contextualz-ng them But t defines them as ndefinable, represents them as unrepresentable, and contextualzes them outsde of context As a result, the subjects of dsaster

law access a truth that s both total or mmedate and dependent on gradual,

ratonal alteratons to the external world The ecstatc subjects sought, descrbed, and produced by dsaster law, that s, have unque access to a truth that s smul-taneously sprtual and ratonal In turn, the legal narratve of dsaster that these subjects produce s a narratve that s more than total—that descrbes not just publc and prvate, but nternal and external, sprtual and ratonal, ecstatc and bounded

When I say that the state of ecstasy—or more narrowly, the subject n stasy—endows the dsaster wth meanng, therefore, I am makng a very dstnct and narrow clam I am argung that as the law of dsaster s elaborated, what may or may not have happened n the dsaster area s less meanngful than the shattered, decontextualzed condton of the subjects of dsaster law What broke, what ded, what burned down, what was destroyed becomes n some ways rrel-evant as dsaster law s artculated Instead, what becomes key to determnng the exstence of the dsaster s the state of the subject, the partner, the slghtly less

ec-than real other actor, who may or may not have even exsted when the dsaster

struck.54 Moreover, t has been prmarly va reference to these shattered subjects that legal narratves of dsaster—and that the legal meanngs of dsaster—have been formulated, reformulated, and put nto play

States of Exception

I turn now to nteractons between theores of subjectvty and theores of exceptonalsm n wrtng on dsaster Many recent analyses of law and dsaster have taken the state of excepton as a startng pont, drawng n partcular on the work of Carl Schmtt and Gorgo Agamben These dscussons have addressed both the concrete relatonshp between natural dsasters and states of excep-ton—the extent to whch catastrophes blur the lne between law and poltcs and provoke emergency measures—as well as the more theoretcal relatonshp be-tween dsaster as a concept and the poltcal phlosophy of the excepton What I

do n ths secton, therefore, s talk brefly about Schmtt’s and Agamben’s res of the excepton and then explan n more detal how my subjects n ecstasy

theo-reflect Agamben’s homo sacer, and also the ways n whch they do not.

At the begnnng of hs Political Theology, Schmtt argues that a soveregn s

“he who decdes on the excepton.”55 Accordng to Schmtt, soveregn exstence

s n fact predcated on the state of excepton—the relatonshp between egn power and the excepton dentcal to the relatonshp between dvne power and the mracle “The excepton n jursprudence,” he argues, “s analogous to the mracle n theology,” and just as the dvne suspenson of the laws of nature proves the exstence of God, so too the soveregn suspenson of the soveregn’s law proves the exstence of the soveregn.56 Each s stuated n precsely the de-structon of a system of objectve legal norms

sover-In hs crtque of Schmtt’s arguments, Agamben reevaluates ths dscusson

of soveregn power and develops a useful and pecularly spatial theory of the

ex-cepton The state of excepton, he argues, “represents the ncluson and capture

of a space that s nether outsde nor nsde” the jurdcal order that consttutes the norm.57 The excepton nstead has a unque relatonshp wth the norm, n whch,

n order to apply a norm t s ultmately necessary to suspend ts applcaton, to duce an excepton In every case, the state of excepton marks a threshold at whch

pro-logc and praxs blur wth each other and a pure volence wthout logos clams to

real-ze an enuncaton wthout any real reference 58

A number of pages later, Agamben turns to a concrete example of ths process—

“perodc anomc feasts” such as the Roman Saturnala59—whch “dramatze ths

rreducble ambguty of jurdcal systems” and “celebrate and parodcally cate the anome through whch the law apples tself to chaos and to lfe only on the condton of makng tself, n the state of excepton, lfe and lvng chaos.”60The state of excepton s, n other words, a dsaster Moreover, as Ellen Ken-nedy has argued, ths theoretcal lnk between the poltcal excepton and the natural dsaster became gradually more concrete over the nneteenth and twen-teth centures, as the “definton of poltcal power became more closely asso-cated wth power n exceptonal crcumstances.”61 Accordng to the 1807 U.S

repl-“Insurrecton Act,” for example, the presdent can use mltary force to restore order n response to “a natural dsaster, epdemc, or terrorst attack,” as well

as an actual nsurrecton.62 By the early twenteth century, the Amercan Red Cross reports were conflatng rots and rebellons wth famnes and floods.63 In natons lke Italy, the “law specfically recognzed ‘rots and plagues’ as nstances where governmental (poltcal) power was requred and mmnently justfied.”64

In both ther theoretcal and practcal applcaton, that s, the poltcs of dsaster and the state of excepton seem n many ways nterchangeable

More fundamental to my own argument, however, s the subject assumed

by these theores of poltcs and dsaster Although nether my bref analyss of Schmtt nor my bref analyss of Agamben refers drectly to the subject produced

by the state of excepton, a certan type of subjectvty s nonetheless mpled

n the work of both In the work of Schmtt, for example, the subject s tonal, nonverbal, nonobjectve—at home n a unverse of sudden mracles and (qute classcal) alteratons of state and self Accordng to Agamben, subjects of the excepton are both outsde and nsde the sphere of poltcs, smultaneously temporary and permanent—they are subjects that manfest themselves most concretely when law, governng chaos, embodes chaos Put another way, sub-jects of the state of excepton appear at first very much to be subjects n ecstasy They are eccentrc subjects, offstage They are explctly ndefinable, occupyng a lmt space, straddlng multple contradctory postons, and besde themselves They are the seemng opposte of the bounded, definable, untary subject of the Cartesan moment

nonra-So the state of excepton produces somethng that looks lke subject n stasy—and t would seem, therefore, that we have an excellent frame of reference for thnkng about the law and poltcs of dsaster I want to pause here, however,

ec-and make clear that, n my analyss, the law ec-and poltcs of dsaster are not n fact

dentcal to the state of excepton Agan, as I argue throughout ths book, the subject n ecstasy, the subject of the dsaster, has unque access to a partcular knd of truth, s n a unque poston to endow the dsaster wth meanng The

subject n ecstasy defines the dsaster, provdes a lnk between the world of

d-saster and the world of law The relatonshp, therefore, between the subject and

the dsaster s, f anythng, an inverted verson of the relatonshp between the

subject and the excepton Just now we saw that the state of excepton demands what looks lke a subject n ecstasy Over the followng pages, however, I argue that subjects n ecstasy are far more actve than ther exceptonal counterparts— central to the producton of legal and poltcal truth

As a result, although related to Agamben’s homo sacer,65 the ecstatc subject

s n many ways qute dfferent—beng, f nothng else, a more optmstc figure

Homo sacer, for example, represents both the startng pont and the end pont

of the nscrpton of bare, bologcal lfe nto poltcal structures.66 Homo sacer

s manfested concretely n the hyperbolcally passve “neomort,” refugee, or

Muselmann of the Naz death camp The death of homo sacer s a nonevent, s

r-relevant, because homo sacer s defined first by a poltcs n whch all that matters

s the regulaton of bare lfe, and second by a bare lfe that has been strpped of

poltcal meanng And so the lfe, also, of homo sacer s rrelevant, sprtually67meanngless, reduced to bare bologcal markers

When I argue that ecstatc subjects endow the crss or dsaster wth

mean-ng, therefore, I am understandng these subjects to be somethng qute dfferent

from homo sacer I thus approach Agamben’s work n a manner smlar to

Brad-ott, who crtczes

the extent to whch zoe68 gets coded n negatve terms, for nstance n the post- Hedeggeran work of Agamben, as a lmnal state of extreme vulnerablty of beng human: a becomng-corpse [T]he potency of zoe as the definng trat of the sub-

ject dsplaces the untary vson of conscousness and the soveregnty of the “I” Both lberal ndvdualsm and classcal humansm are accordngly dsrupted at ther very foundatons Far from beng merely a “crss” of values, I thnk ths stuaton con- fronts us wth a formdable set of new opportuntes 69

I therefore argue that ecstatc subjects are hyperbolcally actve Ther death,70

unlke the death of homo sacer, s n every way a catastrophe—of the utmost

mportance Indeed, wth the death of the ecstatc subject, all truth, all

mean-ng, any lnk between law and dsaster dsappears If ecstatc subjects produce poltcs, ther nonexstence s unthnkable Unlke the lfe of homo sacer, the lfe

of the ecstatc subject s f anythng overdetermned, sprtually crtcal, stuated

n, but also far beyond bology It s a lfe that must have actve, poltcal, tve meanng n order for poltcal and legal structures to functon Although I address n ths book the volence, racsm, sexsm, and straghtforward butchery that dog both legal ecstasy and the poltcs of dsaster, therefore—just as they dog the poltcs of the excepton and “day-to-day” poltcs—I also nsst that there are less omnous qualtes that can and do attach themselves to eccentrc subjects n ecstasy

narra-Natural Disasters and Metaphysical Disasters

It wll have become clear by now that although the focus of ths book, narrowly defined, s natural dsasters or crses—fires, floods, earthquakes, and the lke—I

am also definng both “dsaster” and “crss” as broadly as I can I am dong so prmarly because when we move away from the bounded subject of day-to-day law and start to address the ecstatc subject of the law of dsaster, we are faced wth the problematc, fractured, and ndefinable character of dsaster tself The day-to-day has recently been restuated as a ste and state of constant volence (f also occasonal transcendence), ncapable n many ways of representaton.71

In the process, however, the dsaster or the crss—what the day-to-day has now become—has to some extent been empted of even ts earler dosyncratc mean-

ng What I do now, therefore, s look brefly at what has hstorcally been defined

as a dsaster or crss, and what, hstorcally, has not In dong so, I start wth the nneteenth- and twenteth-century rhetorc of the natural dsaster, and then move on to what has been called more generally the metaphyscal crss of the ratonal subject I suggest n the followng secton that the relatonshp between the natural dsaster and the metaphyscal dsaster s much closer than t mght

at first appear—that both produce systems of law and poltcs arrayed around decentered, eccentrc subjects, subjects n ecstasy and besde themselves Wth that n mnd, I begn by addressng two early twenteth-century texts that unambguously seek to define “dsaster.” The first s a 1909 artcle wrtten for

the Amercan Geographcal Socety dscussng an earthquake n Messna, Italy

It begns:

On May 3rd 1887, an earthquake mght have been felt n many places scattered throughout about one-half Old Mexco as well as over two-thrds of Arzona and New Mexco Ths shock was not chroncled n the world’s centers of culture, and even up

to the present t has been vouchsafed but lttle attenton; yet t was undoubtedly a far heaver shock than that whch has just strred the emotons and aroused the sympa- thes of the entre cvlzed world The area of the destructve shocks of the earler ds- turbance exhbts an alternaton of mountan and ard plan, much of t nhabted only

by Indan trbes wth a few scattered ranches and mnng camps Had t been much more thckly settled than t was, t s probable that the loss would have been small If

an army n tents had encamped upon the ste of Messna on the mornng of the 28th of December last, the loss of lfe and property would have been nsgnficant 72

The second text s from an Amercan Red Cross report summarzng Red Cross actvtes between June 1917 and June 1918 In ths report, “mltary relef” s carefully dfferentated from “cvlan relef,” wth “great dsasters” or “calam-tes” appearng as subsectons of the latter Among the acts of mltary volence releved n 1917 and 1918 were battles and famnes n France, Romana, Russa, Serba, Belgum, Italy, Syra, and Palestne Among the calamtes and dsasters releved over the same perod were “sx large fires, four floods, four tornadoes, two earthquakes, one shpwreck, one storm, one race rot, one exploson n a muntons plant, one shp sunk by submarne, and one exploson of a muntons shp n harbor.”73

Each of these passages contans a straghtforward definton of dsaster, lamty, or crss—followed mmedately, however, by what s arguably an under-mnng or shatterng of ths definton Each assumes that the lne between d-saster and not-dsaster s clearly dstngushable, but each n turn seems to blur ths lne nto effectve nonexstence In the first passage, the dsaster s appar-ently dfferentated from the not-dsaster by the exstence of a settled populaton

ca-n the dsaster area What seems to be mportant ca-n understandca-ng dsaster, ca-n other words, s not only that a shock occurred, but that there were recognzable people around to feel t.74 The passage brngs the dsaster’s destructon to lfe not only va reference to what happened, but also—and perhaps more so—va

reference to what ths destructon, what ths dsaster, what ths crss, was not

Accordng to the artcle, the Messna earthquake dd not occur n the mplctly empty space of the Amercan Southwest, t dd not occur beneath a tent cty, and

t was not at the margns of the cvlzed world Agan, I want to make ths ence pont clear: what makes the Messna earthquake understandable s not just that t occurred at a center of cvlzaton—where people could feel t—and that

refer-t therefore produced x, y, or z meanng; more so, what makes refer-t understandable

s that there may or may not have been another earthquake that occurred beyond

the bounds of cvlzaton, where no one would have notced the shocks

Ths may seem lke an nsgnficant shft n perspectve, but I suggest that t

s fundamental to both the law of dsaster and to ts ecstatc subject Frst of all, realzng that what makes a crss real s not ts proxmty to centers of cvlza-

ton, but rather an alternatve, margnal, other dsaster’s lack of proxmty to

cen-ters of cvlzaton moves us beyond the usual dscussons of natonal or mperal subject formaton that appear n so many analyses of both poltcal and natural volence.75 The pont here s less that certan spaces or bodes occupy certan rungs on racst or colonal cvlzatonal herarches, and that, dependng on ths placement, the sufferng or volence that occurs n these spaces or to these bod-

es becomes more or less real or meanngful.76 The pont s less that crses that occur at what has been defined as the center of cvlzaton demand more atten-ton, produce more emotonal arousal, and attract more sympathy among the comfortable, secure, mperal subjects who develop these herarches n the first place Rather, lke premodern dream manuals, these narratves lnk the realty of

a dsaster to the eccentrc subject offstage or to the ecstatc subject n flux What s mportant n decdng on the realty of a dsaster or crss, n other words, s not just that t happened—emprcally—or that t caused destructon—measurably—at some mperal or neomperal center What s mportant s that another crss may have been glmpsed brefly, out of focus, outsde the frame, at

the same tme The 1887 earthquake might have been felt by hypothetical Indans,

ranchers, and mners The unknowable space of the Amercan wlderness, or the

ephemeral and never bult tent cty, could possibly have been wracked by dsaster And therefore the Messna earthquake occurred The crss here s above all a cr-

ss of what cannot and could not be represented, defined, or understood

If we turn to the conclusons reached by the Amercan Red Cross, they seem

f anythng more clearly addressed to the poltcal subject n ecstasy Once agan, among the mplctly apoltcal calamtes and dsasters releved by the organza-ton were not just fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, storms, shpwrecks, and explosons, but also “race rots” n the Amercan Mdwest and submarne attacks

n the Atlantc Ocean To reterate: accordng to the Amercan Red Cross, a race

rot or a submarne attack resembles a flood or a tornado more than t does a battle or a revoluton Why should ths be? One smple explanaton s that the organzaton s sendng a message about what can and cannot be endowed wth poltcal meanng Unlke the meanngful, f unfortunate, devastaton caused by

a battle or a revoluton, the volence assocated wth the race rot or submarne attack s wthout meanng Lke an earthquake or a storm, a race rot or a sub-marne attack s chaotc, uncontrolled, and wthout purpose There s no cause

or effect, no ratonalty or reason, assocated wth these dsasters They are

noth-ng more than pontless, formless destructon—asknoth-ng for poltcal whys and wherefores s as absurd as askng why, poltcally, a flood affects one cty but not another

Although ths nterpretaton of the Amercan Red Cross reports s n many ways a convncng one, I thnk there s also more gong on n the organzaton’s counterntutve process of categorzaton If we thnk about what sort of subjects are nvolved n both the race rot and the submarne attack, we can see that the report s conformng qute clearly to the paradgm establshed by the Amercan Geographcal Socety By the end of the Frst World War, the submarne attack had become assocated almost exclusvely wth what was termed “llegal” Ger-man mltary actvty—so much so that many analysts were desgnatng subma-rnes as prate shps and hence the “enemes of all manknd.”77 Detached from any sort of definable poltcal dentty, placed on the boundless open seas, nca-

pable of representaton, the submarne-as-prate had, by 1917, already become

a fractured subject On the one hand, t was part of the rapdly dsntegratng soveregn state that was Germany On the other, t was outsde any soveregn system—solated and n flux

The Amercan “race rot” was even more closely assocated wth the qute-soveregn eccentrc or ecstatc subject Incorporated nto poltcal systems

not-n much the same way that prates were, the dssatsfied “race” was smulta- neously outsde and nsde, shattered, multple by definton Although the Amer-can Red Cross’s process of categorzaton s wthout queston a means of dele-gtmzng what n other crcumstances would look lke qute legtmate poltcal volence, therefore, t s also more than that In the very process of emptyng the race rot and submarne attack of poltcal meanng, the report s revealng the ecstatc state of the subjects assocated wth them More mportant, the report

s then nvokng these shattered subjects as a means of determnng what is a

“dsaster” and what is a “calamty.” In the same way that the Messna earthquake

became real at the same tme as—and because—magned Indans became real,

the floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes releved by the Amercan Red Cross came real only alongsde the prate submarne n ts dsastrous destructon, and

be-the race rot n ts calamtous fury These dsasters could only occur once be-the

ecstatc subject had been stuated as the norm

These two passages are anecdotal ones, ndcatve of broader trends n the poltcs of dsaster or crss that I dscuss later on For now, I just want to empha-sze, agan, that the process of definng a certan event as a dsaster, a calamty,

or a crss s more complcated than t mght at first appear Most fundamentally,

an earthquake, flood, fire—or for that matter submarne attack—becomes a saster not only, as has been theorzed before, because certan spaces, bodes, or narratves occupy certan places on an mperal cvlzatonal contnuum, and are thus endowed wth greater or lesser value or meanng Rather, an earthquake becomes a dsaster precsely because shattered subjects besde themselves are brefly more real, more valued, more meanngful than ther bounded, ratonal counterparts The rhetorc of dsaster s amed at the ecstatc, eccentrc subject, not at the untary, self-conscous one Indeed, the crss so relentlessly decenters these ratonal, bounded subjects, that n many ways they dsappear altogether One talks about the Messna earthquake by nvokng hypothetcal Indans, mn-ers, and ranchers One releves a flood by turnng to submarne/prates and ra-cal storms The dsaster becomes a dsaster only n the presence of the subject

d-ncapable of representaton

If we turn from the natural crss or dsaster to the metaphyscal crss or saster, we can see almost dentcal themes playng out Indeed, the crss of the ratonal subject has been one of the fundamental ponts of reference n the past two hundred years of poltcal phlosophy—often used to sgnfy a renterpreta-ton of truth or realty In order to address ths crss, I hghlght one analyss of

d-t—Bradott’s—and then re-stuate my study of natural dsaster wthn t In her

1991 book, Patterns of Dissonance, Bradott seeks, first, to address what she calls

modernty’s metaphyscal crss—the “crss of the ratonal subject”—second, to analyze the rhetorc of the “femnne” n the poltcal phlosophy that has re-sponded to ths crss, and finally, to ask why t s that despte ths emphass on the femnne, femnst theory and dscussons of actual women have remaned so margnal n the work of contemporary phlosophers

In addressng these ssues, Bradott nvokes the work of a number of poltcal theorsts, but her startng pont s, agan, Descartes, and partcularly the Carte-

san nterpretaton of (and attack on) the body Accordng to Descartes, Bradott argues, the body conforms “to a very precse geometry: t has a volume that oc-cupes a certan amount of space so as to exclude from t all other bodes.”78 Ths body, the ste of “pre-ratonal susceptblty” and “multple other perturbatons,”

s held up n opposton to “thought,” whch s “defined as the prncpal of lecton” and “s the drvng force of the wll thanks to whch man can domnate the powerful sensory perceptons whch nvade hm.”79 As a result, the body be-comes “the favorte target of Cartesan method, and thus forms the battleground for the combat between reason and ts other.”80

ntel-From ths pont, Bradott traces the varous ways n whch modern poltcal phlosophy has crtqued, undermned, or smply moved away from Descartes’ ratonal subject, wth ts antagonstc ntellect/body paradgm, and toward a re-evaluaton of subjectvty Accordng to her analyss of Foucault, for example, the subject s “eccentrc n relaton to hm/herself stuated n the vod opened up

by the dscourse on hm/her,” and “n ths space, whch nudges nhlsm whlst at the same tme resstng t t becomes possble to thnk anew about the mod-ern subject.”81 Addressng Deleuze, who plays a sgnficant role n her analyss, Bradott lkewse dscusses the transton from “thnkng” n “Western meta-physcs,” whch “always means thnkng about somethng” to “the new ntrans-tve status [of thnkng] reached by contemporary theores of subjectvty.”82 The fundamental stran that runs through all of her argument, however, s agan that first, these new theores of subjectvty represent a crss and, second, that ths crss s nextrcably lnked to gender studes83 and femnst theory.84 As a result, she emphaszes, alongsde “the rejecton of the alleged unversalty of the know-

ng subject, and the crtque of the complcty of masculnty and ratonalty,” there must be “a renewal of ntent n the sex-specfic nature of the subject,” that begns “wth the dea of embodment.”85

What, though, does ths metaphyscal crss have to do wth earthquakes that afflct hypothetcal Indans n the magned Amercan Southwest, or wth submarnes and race rots that code as fires and floods? Most obvously, both the crss that s the natural dsaster and the crss of the ratonal subject are concerned wth addressng the meanng of destructon—and n partcular the relatonshp among destructon, realty, and subject formaton The Amercan Geographcal Socety wants to descrbe and define the Messna earthquake and wants to know what Messna and ts nhabtants are, now that they have been destroyed The Amercan Red Cross wants to do the same wth ts myrad floods,

fires, tornadoes, and explosons Smlarly, Foucault and Deleuze want to know what Descartes’ ratonal subject s, now that t has been demolshed Bradott wants to address the dsntegraton of hs mnd/body dualsm

More to the pont, however, both the natural dsaster and the metaphyscal crss produce dentcal responses—responses addressed first and foremost to what cannot be represented Foucault’s subjects are eccentrc to themselves and stuated n a dscursve vod Hs subjects, n other words, are n many ways a col-lecton of fantasy Indans, ranchers, and mners who exst offstage n the dscur-sve emptness that s the magned Amercan Southwest Deleuze’s thought s

ntranstve above all—there s no cause or effect, no ratonal progress narratve that mparts depth to hs thnkng subject Hs thnkng subject s thus lkewse

n many ways a submarne attack or a race rot—empted of meanng, but sentatve of a new emboded subjectvty precsely n ts shallowness

repre-Bradott’s dscusson of the “femnne” as representatve of the lmtatons, gaps, and deficences n an apparently precrss rhetorc of the ratonal subject n ths way becomes qute sgnficant n my analyss of dsaster I do not thnk that these smlartes n definng, dscussng, and respondng to the metaphyscal dsaster and definng, dscussng, and respondng to the natural dsaster are ar-btrary Each type of crss demands a new subject, and each type of crss brngs ecstasy wthn reach Moreover, to the extent that the crss of the ratonal subject has destablzed two centures of jurdcal truth—even whle most contemporary legal rhetorc remans resolutely blnd to ts destructve potental—the law of d-saster must be operatng on multple levels I therefore suggest n ths book that metaphyscal and natural dsasters do not just explan one another, but that they produce one another—and that as much as legal responses to them cry out for a ratonal subject, t s the subject n ecstasy that s eventually revealed

I conclude ths secton by sayng that although I started wth a plea to revve ecstasy as a category of legal and poltcal analyss, n many ways I end wth

a plea to shft gender studes and femnst theory to the center of the study of law and poltcs If ecstatc or eccentrc subjects are as foundatonal as I suggest they are, then the methodologes developed by scholars of gender wll be nds-pensable n addressng them.86 Lkewse, if there s a field n whch the ecstatc

or eccentrc subject—the dsplaced, decentered, shattered, perpatetc object of law and poltcs—has been effectvely theorzed, that field s gender studes or femnst theory.87 In the same way, therefore, that I am callng for a return to the emphass on ecstasy that occurred n the 1970s and 1980s, I am lkewse callng

for a rereadng of the theores of gendered subjectvty that appeared alongsde t

n the 1980s and early 1990s Returnng to these dscussons wll be essental to

an effectve readng of the poltcs of dsaster and the types of subjects that these poltcs descrbe

Disaster Law and Feminist Theory

I define “dsaster law” broadly n ths book Although the cases, statutes, codes, and regulatons that compose the legal doctrne of dsaster play a sgnfi-cant part n my argument, I pay equal attenton to the lterary and cultural ds-course of dsaster law—and delberately gnore the boundares that are thought

to exst between legal texts wth legal meanng and cultural texts wth cultural meanng When I nvoke dsaster law, therefore, I nvoke not only, for example, the trals of crmnally neglgent buldng contractors, but the popular response

to these trals, and the poltcal management of ths popular response—wthout prvlegng any one set of texts over the others as more truly legal I descrbe not just the regulatons that have ordered postdsaster refugee camps, but also the spatal manfestatons of these regulatons, and the autobography or poetry produced wthn these spaces My contenton s that t s precsely as these legal, cultural, poltcal, and lterary texts ntersect that dsaster law s elaborated My workng definton of dsaster law s the smultaneously legal, cultural, poltcal, and lterary producton of the subject n crss

At the same tme, I am well aware that such a broad definton of dsaster law runs the rsk of becomng not only broad, but also dffuse I therefore devote ths secton to explanng my understandng of dsaster law n more detal, anchor-

ng t wthn the dscussons of ecstasy, truth, exceptonalsm, and metaphyscal crses that came before More specfically, I answer two questons: first, how s t

that a poem or a pamphlet can be as effectvely legal—as much “law”—as a case

or a statute, and second, how s t that the subject n ecstasy can operate wthn ths broadly defined legal sphere? Underlyng both questons s a more funda-mental one that I also address n ths secton—namely, why gender studes or femnst theory methodologes are the most effectve means of descrbng both dsaster law and ts poltcal subjects

The three major chapters of ths book all follow a smlar plan In each, I gn wth a specfic case, code, or narratve that s not obvously relevant to the legal doctrne of dsaster—a case, for nstance, that s ordnarly studed for ts

bearng on medcal ethcs, a code that has meanng prmarly as a foundaton for

nterwar soveregnty, or a narratve that ntally operated only n the unverse

of nneteenth-century mperal geography Each of these examples serves as an

ntroducton to a more targeted dscusson of the law and legal dscourse of a specfic dsaster All three chapters then end wth a return to the realm of what s ordnarly assumed to be normal or everyday law

I have arranged the chapters of the book n ths way n order to emphasze the contnuty between everyday law and law n crss—to demonstrate the extent to whch one seems always to serve as the endpont to the other There s a second sort

of contnuty that ths arrangement suggests, however—and that s the contnuty among legal, cultural, poltcal, and lterary texts As each of these texts gves way

to the other, the boundares among them become dfficult to dscern Moreover, the reason for ths mprecson, I argue, s that each serves the same fundamentally

legal purpose Whether we are talkng about the lberal ctzen-subject of socal

contract theory, or the subjected self of crtcal theory, a (and perhaps the)

funda-mental purpose of law s the producton of a poltcal beng88—and t s toward the producton of ths poltcal beng that these texts all tend When I say, therefore, that cultural or lterary texts are as much a part of law as legal doctrne s, ths

s not just because law operates wthn a cultural context, or because somethng called “law” s “entwned” wth somethng called “culture.”89 More so, t s that each—the poem, the pamphlet, the code, and the statute—does the same, and the same qute specfic, work n determnng poltcal subjectvty

To that extent, t s not only reasonable to suggest that “dsaster law” conssts

of both legal doctrne and cultural or lterary texts, but t s perhaps rresponsble

not to do so It s after all only by followng the crss from ts appearance n the

trals of contractors or looters, to ts appearance n newspaper accounts of these trals, to ts appearance n the shattered responses of the populatons who follow these meda accounts that the multple meanngs and effects of dsaster law be-come clear It s only by lookng smultaneously at the mltary or camp regula-tons legslated n the aftermath of dsaster, at the buldng and rebuldng plans that draw on these regulatons, and at the demographc studes that populate and repopulate these plans, that the strange contnuty of what s supposed to be a unque, ad hoc legal response to crss begns to make sense Ths, then, s why I understand the poem or the pamphlet to be as effectvely legal as the case or the statute—because all of these texts are part of the same poltcal process, equally fundamental to the producton of the poltcal subject

The problem, however, s that ths poltcal process s by no means a forward one—especally when the subjects of dsaster law are, as I suggest, ec-statc, shattered, and far removed from the bounded, autonomous ctzens of lb-eral theory Indeed, there s a crcularty n the relatonshp between the subject

straght-n ecstasy and the elaboraton of dsaster law that wll become straght-ncreasstraght-ngly parent as my argument progresses I do not try to dspel that crcularty here or elsewhere n ths book I do, though, address t brefly and explan n more detal how t helps to formulate both ecstatc subjectvty and the poltcs of dsaster

ap-My contenton that the law of dsaster both assumes and produces a subject

n ecstasy s a problematc one If law assumes a subject, then that subject must already exst; f law produces a subject, then that subject cannot have already exsted The contradcton s obvous and becomes only more so when we add that the ecstatc subject s lkewse both defined by the dsaster and makes the d-saster poltcally ntellgble Ths crcularty—or contradcton—however, s by

no means unque to my own take on law and subjectvty It s rather a queston that has motvated a great deal of recent poltcal theory and that has nspred a number of responses, especally snce the 1980s

Snce my nterest here s not to take on or to resolve ths contradcton, but rather to explan how t affects my own argument, I address only one of these responses here Regardless of ther methodologcal approaches, many twenteth-century poltcal phlosophers started wth the noton that nether the assump-ton nor the producton of the poltcal subject was a sngle, dscrete act Rather, they argued, the relatonshp between law and the poltcal subject was an tera-tve one, each constantly producng and assumng the other In lberal theory, ths process was artculated va varous theores of consent—the unque act of hypothetcal consent to the socal contract gvng way by the end of the nne-teenth century to the repeated, tact acts of actual consent that represent daly lfe n a lberal state.90 Psychoanalytcal theorsts—recognzng the volence m-plct n ths repetton—reformulated the relatonshp between law and subjec-tvty as a traumatc one, the poltcal subject’s compulsve dependence on law for symbolc exstence descrbed as hystercal and sometmes even pornographc.91Crtcal theorsts developed ncreasngly sophstcated theores of nterpellaton, notng n partcular the gult that must underle such repeated, consensual acts

of subject formaton.92 In general, that s, the relatonshp between law and the poltcal subject was necessarly crcular, necessarly contradctory, and neces-sarly ongong

In ths sense, therefore, the crcularty nvolved n the producton and

as-sumpton of the ecstatic subject of dsaster law s by no means unque—and I

stuate my analyss of these processes wthn a well establshed, preexstng field

of lterature At the same tme, however, the fact that I focus n partcular on dsaster law and n partcular on the ecstatc subject does rase some addtonal

ssues Frst of all, dsaster law s by definton somethng unque, dscrete, and even accdental, whereas the law descrbed by the theores above s supposed to

be contnuous, repettve, and delberate.93 Second, accordng to my analyss, saster law produces and assumes the subject n ecstasy precsely n order to make the dsaster ntellgble Ths supplementary functon of the poltcal subject re-qures some explanaton

d-Wth that n mnd, I return now to my pont that gender studes or femnst theory methodologes are the most effectve means of descrbng dsaster law The contnuty between ordnary law and law n crss s not new to femnst theory As Bradott argues, many crtcal theorsts have sought n the supposed femnne ther desre for a crss of metaphyscal, poltcal, and legal structures.94

As Carole Pateman argued some years earler, many lberal theorsts lkewse

feared n the supposed femnne the threat to metaphyscal, poltcal, and legal

structures.95 It can ndeed be argued that as ordnary law has ncreasngly come

to be vewed as law n crss, women have n actualty become the neutral or matve figures of ths metaphyscal, poltcal, and legal crss.96 It s ths gradual materalzaton of what was once thought to be a metaphorcal dsaster, then, that gender studes methodologes can help to descrbe—ths gradual move-ment from the ongong subject formaton of the everyday to the ongong subject formaton of the crss In the chapters that follow, t wll become clear that far more often than not, the concrete realzaton of the subject n ecstasy—the actual ctzen nvolved n the repettve and crcular process of ecstatc subject forma-ton—s first and foremost a gendered subject

nor-That beng the case, the nteracton between ecstatc subjects and ntellgble dsasters s an nteracton very much also embedded n femnst theory Just as gender studes methodologes have been ndspensable to descrbng the theoret-cal relatonshp between the field of the ntellgble and the nonfield of the unntel-lgble,97 they wll be equally ndspensable to descrbng the concrete relatonshp between the ntellgble dsaster and the unntellgble subject n ecstasy When I say, therefore, that dsaster law—defined, agan, as smultaneously legal, cultural, poltcal, and lterary—assumes the subject n ecstasy n order to endow the d-

saster wth meanng, I am makng a dstnct, specfic clam, stuated n femnst methodology I am argung that the dsaster becomes a poltcally vable event at

precsely the moment that all subjects become not just gendered, but unthinkably

gendered The assumpton and producton of the ecstatc subject of dsaster law, that s, nvolves precsely the negaton and the unravelng of ths subject

It s for ths reason that I have brought together n ths secton three seemngly dsconnected ssues—my workng definton of “dsaster law,” my bref analyss

of subjecton and subjectvaton, and my clam that femnst theory ges are essental to any analyss of dsaster law Although not mmedately rel-evant to one another, each gets at a key aspect of the assumpton, producton, negaton, and unravelng of the ecstatc subject By definng dsaster law broadly,

methodolo-as the product not just of legal doctrne but of lterary and cultural texts, I ognze that the poltcal field of the ntellgble can only be defined through the

rec-nteracton of multiple dscourses By acknowledgng the crcularty of the legal

and poltcal relatonshp, I stuate dsaster law and ts ecstatc subjects wthn

a well establshed, exstng lterature And finally, by descrbng the subject of dsaster law as a subject specfically relevant to femnst theory, I shft my study

nto the methodologcal realm wth arguably the most potental for radcally thnkng these nteractons and relatonshps

re-Historical Context and Chapter Outlines

Throughout ths ntroductory chapter I have drawn n an mpressonstc way

on descrptons of a number of dfferent dsasters I have also cobbled together a varety of theoretcal dscussons of crses, exceptons, and subjects besde them-selves Over the remander of the book, I ground these theoretcal analyses wthn

a more detaled hstory of four major case studes: the 1894 Istanbul earthquake, the 1906 San Francsco earthquake, the 1923 Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake, and the 1999 Istanbul/Marmara earthquake Readers may be taken aback by the case studes I have chosen, and partcularly by my prvlegng of the (repeated) de-structon of Istanbul Rather than wrtng a further secton n whch I explan

or defend my choce of case studes, however, I nstead relate a paragraph from a work that deals wth smlar poltcal ssues

I have not respected the academc dvson of labor between area studes and the cplnes I offer no modest apologes for ths Europeansts unversalze European

mleus and experences all the tme Instead of provncalzng Europe, I have tempted a necessarly provsonal unversalzng of one corner of postcolonal Asa Humanty (and theorzng about t) s, after all, an ntermnable work of collaboraton and comparson 98

at-Needless to say, I wrte under the same assumptons

At the same tme, I note that these dsasters and the narratves surroundng them are all unque and specfic to ther chronologcal and geographcal con-texts They also, however, share key smlartes, especally wth regard to the le-gal and poltcal responses that followed them and the legal and poltcal subjects demanded by these responses Each, I suggest, produced a poltcal context n whch the ecstatc or eccentrc subject became the norm And each nvoked the subject n ecstasy as a means of endowng the dsaster wth meanng

As for the usual facts and figures that accompany hstores of destructve earthquakes, the first Istanbul quake occurred at 12:24 on Tuesday afternoon, July 10, 1894 It conssted of three major shocks, lastng thrteen seconds, and would have measured around 7 on the Rchter scale The epcenter was n the Sea

of Marmara, eght klometers from the shore of the European sde of the cty cordng to offical figures, 138 people were klled, but lkely many more than that lost ther lves, and hundreds of houses and publc buldngs were destroyed.99The San Francsco earthquake occurred at 5:12 on Wednesday mornng, Aprl

Ac-18, 1906 It conssted of a number of shocks lastng forty-five to sxty seconds, and would have measured between 7 and 8 on the Rchter scale The epcen-ter was about three klometers offshore Accordng to offical figures, 375 to 478 people were klled, but, agan, the estmates as to the actual death toll are much hgher Tens of thousands of homes and publc buldngs were destroyed n the quake and n the fire that followed t

The Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake occurred at noon on September 1, 1923 The shocks measured 8.3 on the Rchter scale The epcenter was n Sagam Bay, southwest of Tokyo Bay At the tme, an estmated 100,000 to 140,000 people were klled n the quake and n the fires that followed The cty of Yokohama was completely burned, and n all over a bllon dollars worth of property was de-stroyed Fnally, the second Istanbul earthquake (the Marmara quake) occurred

at 3:02 n the mornng on August 17, 1999 The first two shocks lasted seven seconds, and the largest measured 7.4 on the Rchter scale The epcen-ter was seventy klometers south of Istanbul n the gulf of ˙Izmt An estmated 15,000 people ded, and 600,000 were left homeless n the months that followed

thrty-I provde these figures less because they wll be mportant to my later analyss than because ths s the sort of nformaton that s expected n dscussons of dsasters of ths knd Agan, though, my partcular nterest n ths book s not so much what happens durng or after a dsaster as what defines the dsaster n first place—and what sort of subject s at the heart of ths process of definton As a result, the book s dvded nto four major chapters, each of whch addresses one aspect of subject formaton durng moments of crss Chapter Two conssts of a lterature revew of both hstorcal and contemporary wrtng on dsaster In t,

I address, first of all, the meanng of earthquake metaphors n poltcal speech—what happens to the dsaster, that s, when revolutons, rebellons, and economc crses are explaned va recourse to the “convulsons of the earth.” I then turn to hstorcal dscussons of actual earthquakes and how these have drawn on ths poltcal rhetorc Fnally, I dscuss the concerns of contemporary scholars of ca-tastrophe studes—and the varous tropes and events that they nvoke n order to make dsasters understandable

Chapters Three and Four engage wth ecstatc lfe and ecstatc death as they have been defined by the law and poltcs of dsaster In Chapter Three, I compl-cate the story of postdsaster blood transfusons, organ transplants, and dsease preventon measures by argung that each s as much a means of artculatng the subject n ecstasy as t s a means of provdng santaton and securty to the self-conscous, bounded subject Framed wthn an analyss of U.S Judge Benjamn N Cardozo’s hstorc 1914 decson on the rght to bodly ntegrty, ths chapter suggests that these varous “gfts of lfe” are methods of physcally and bodly manfestng ctzens n peces—ctzens qute physcally besde them-selves Chapter Four concerns tself prmarly wth the repeated, f countern-tutve, grantng of rghts to dead bodes durng moments of dsaster—wth the reteraton, for nstance, of the rght to property and the rght to bodly ntegrty possessed by the respectable dead ctzen, and the suspenson of the rght to lfe forfeted by the lvng looter or “ghoul.” Addressng the postdsaster rhetorc of death tolls, democracy, and decomposton, ths chapter descrbes one functonal process by whch the dead body—a dsntegratng body almost proverbally n ecstasy—becomes the norm of dsaster law

Chapter Fve turns to the spaces defined by the law and poltcs of dsaster—and partcularly the extent to whch these spaces become ecstatc backdrops for the artculaton of ecstatc subjects Contextualzed wthn a dscusson, first,

of Henr Lefebvre’s crtque of captalst or fascst space, and second, of Achlle