“Choc en Retour”

The contemporary theorization of security and terror, this chapter demonstrates, is less a direct and autonomous critical project than a synthesis of three categories of critique: the critique of spectacle; the critique of the politics of exception; and the critique of global capital qua empire. Each of these categories of critique is conditioned by but unevenly revelatory of the “choc en retour” of colonial rationality to the metropole—the boomerang return, to the postcolonial North, of imperial forms of governance and accumulation. This unevenness, this chapter argues, is an effect of, and reveals, theory’s symptomatic nature—the ways in which theory often echoes the form of its critical object.