The location of terrorism: Counterterrorism, American politics, and the docile citizen

Beginning with Hobbes, political theorists have sought to strike a balance between the dictates of security and the requisites of freedom. While the motivations behind the establishment of political community have shifted from Hobbesian fear to an array of competing principles over the course of the development of liberal political theory, the conceptions of sovereignty and political authority that accompanied them repeatedly return to the threat of violence—at the levels of the individual, the nation, and the state—in defenses of political legitimacy. This theoretical trajectory, while neither uniform nor unchallenged, culminates in Max Weber's treatment of the state as the entity wielding the monopoly of force within a territory, a description that today operates definitionally as a guiding principle in international relations as well as internal governance, evidenced today in the pursuit of counterterrorism in the U.S. and abroad. The dissertation analyzes domestic counterterrorism in the U.S. since the 1960s for the ways it exhibits and refigures this tension between political order and agency in modern political theory, and argues that American counterterrorism displays with unusual clarity the limits of liberal tolerance alongside the cultivation of state power in a wide range of practices through which political order, national identity, and models of political agency are fashioned.; As part of its effort to delineate the underlying assumptions and political implications of counterterrorism, the dissertation turns to a host of thinkers who confront and complicate the foundations of liberal thought in overlapping yet distinct ways, developing close readings of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Michael Rogin, Judith Butler, and Elaine Scarry. One aim of the dissertation is to build from Rogin's insights into American political demonology and countersubversion in its own examination of the figure of the domestic terrorist and contemporary counterterrorism. Another aim, drawing from Michel Foucault, is to explore in a genealogical mode the emergence of a domestic discourse on terrorism in the U.S. as it has been applied to describe the acts, politics, and identities of American citizens of widely disparate beliefs and commitments.; Proceeding from a critical engagement with the unfixed meaning of “terrorism” in popular and political discourse in the U.S., the dissertation advances by investigating the appearance of the term rather than by applying its own preferred definition. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...