i.’s Reviews > Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony > Status Update

"...the settler colonial foundation of biopolitical sovereignty transforms itself into an expansionist, imperial security state that finds new enemies abroad, new obstacles to its endless expansion..."

"The state of nature is...[a] highly abstract geographical imagining and...Hobbes displaces it from a time to a condition to a place to a metaphor, eventually determining that it never existed at all, even as a hermeneutic."

"Lorenzo Veracini has argued that settler colonialism is distinct from other types of colonialism insofar as it seeks consistently to erase itself as settler colonial..."

"A significant consequence of this reading is that the sovereign effectively constitutes the very meaning and content of life itself. For, considered temporally...there is no distinction between life and death in the state of nature...as there is no way to tell present from future."

"Futurism is less an ahistorical or universalized psychoanalytic theory of the subject and its (de)formation than it is a fundamental baseline of modern culture and the workings of modern, necessarily European and Eurocentric politics."

"...necropolitics is the very operation of biopolitics that establishes life, the value of life, and those whose lives are valuable."

"...at the heart of European sovereign biopolitics is an oppressive, heteronormative ordering of time that queers all of those beyond, before, or or outside its civilized progress narrative as specters of death, 'savage' and immoral others who become valid targets of necropolitical elimination...in the sanctimonious name of preserving 'life itself' and upholding its value."

"...sovereignty is what constitutes life aslife to begin with....life is not a 'bare' biological phenomenon that is only subsequently and inappropriately politicized....it is political through and through."