Chapter Two - Necropolitical Law’s Planetary Jurisdiction

Summary

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the 2001 Patriot Act is necropolitical. As legislation, the Patriot Act takes on the authorizing, legitimizing resonances of the state. Debated and passed through Congress and the Senate, the Act emerges from processes of domestic legislation to enact this law’s global reach, in part through UN Security Council Resolutions. Additionally, the opening lines of the Patriot Act legislate necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction: the Act’s purpose is “[t]o deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world.” Necropolitical law’s dynamics of deception are immediately apparent in the naming of the Patriot Act, a naming that imports spectacle, the closures of meanings for “patriot” in war contexts, as well as the compound meanings of patriot as a peculiarly American keyword. The Patriot Act shows how legal illegibility is part of necropolitical law’s deception, operating through law as publicity to undo law as public thing. In 2022, we find ourselves in legal landscapes still conditioned by the Act. Chapter 2 traces the Patriot Act’s role in normalizing and consolidating necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction for the discounting of life in the unending long War on Terror.