Beyond Settler Futurism

Beyond Settler Futurism: Schotten’s Queer Terror Adam Dahl (bio) Heike Schotten. Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 272 pp. $35 (pb). ISBN: 9780231187473. In Queer Terror, Heike Schotten provides an important contribution to continued efforts to theorize the enduring legacies of US imperialism and settler colonialism. In a creative and compelling blend of queer theory, biopolitics, canonical political theory, settler colonial studies, and critical indigenous theory, Schotten sets out to explore the roots of the War on Terror in the settler colonial project. One of Queer Terror’s central contributions is to reframe “the biopolitics of settler sovereignty as operating primarily at the level of desire, not biology, which establishes the distinction between life and death via the institution of temporality” (xiv). Put differently, settler sovereignty ideologically legitimates itself through the projection of desire for the good life (i.e. for a specific form of civilization) into the future. If so, then queer theory is an ideal tool to criticize US empire and the settler colonial project because it disrupts the moral boundaries and propriety of desire. In taking a “principled position of antimoralism,” queerness acts “as both advocate and exemplar of improper desire” (xvii). Using Lee Edelman’s No Future to stage an original re-reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan (chapter two), Schotten argues that what fundamentally defines the function of settler sovereignty is the institution of the very conditions of possibility for temporality, and thus life and desire to take hold over modern subjectivity. In Hobbes’s state of nature, Schotten shows, there is no time and thus no future. The sovereign halts the state of nature by instituting temporality, and thus allowing for the very possibility of desire. For Schotten, sovereignty constitutes life as worth living by granting it civilizational value. In turn, the sovereign deems those who deny the value of life, signified as a particular form of civilization, as backwards, savage, queer, and uncivilized. In other words, the function of sovereignty is to produce the settler as civilized and the native as savage and queer, and thus a symbol of death. Using this framework, Schotten provides an illuminating analysis of the Declaration of Independence, which charged King George with endeavoring to “bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” (60). What we have here is not just a description of eighteenth-century discourses about savagery and civilization, but also a perfect distillation of the contemporary War on Terror which is distinguished by its Manichean us vs. them logic. As George W. Bush put it, you are with us or against us. In such formulations, yesterday’s “savage” is today’s “terrorist.” Settler colonialism and the War on Terror both embrace this moralistic logic and civilizational discourse that contrast the “savage” and “terrorist” to so-called “civil order” [End Page 487] that has long characterized the good life in Western political thought. The bio-political force of settler sovereignty in this scenario is not simply to protect biological life against savage violence, but to ensure the perpetuation of desire for a moralized way of life. Without contending with this biopolitical feature of settler sovereignty, critical theory risks unwittingly reproducing the settler colonial logics of the War on Terror in its critique of US empire. Instead of remaining content to apply the insights of critical theory to the problem of settler colonialism, as many have done before, Schotten uses the lens of settler colonialism to probe the limits of critical theory. Chapter one, for instance, argues that, rather than offering an emancipatory critique of US imperialism, Giorgio Agamben’s influential theorization of biopolitics in fact reinforces the civilizational discourse of the War on Terror. Through meticulous textual reconstruction, Schotten convincingly reveals how Agamben’s distinction between zoe (bare life) and bios (political life) tacitly rests on Hannah Arendt’s hierarchical distinction between labor and action. Just as Arendt’s labor/action distinction revolves around a series of hierarchically ordered binaries (e.g. slave/free, savage/civilized, female/male), Agamben associates zoe with der Muselmann, (i.e. “the Muslim

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