Lateral (Apr 2020)
The Necropolitics of Liberty: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and United States Gun Culture
Abstract
This article approaches the speculative fiction of the survivalist right as an archive that can illuminate the continuities between the fantasies of necropolitical power that animate the radical right and undergird the sovereignty of the United States. Liberal commentators have represented the paramilitary social movements of the radical right that produce survivalist fiction as 'anti-government,' but this representation elides the ambivalent relationship to state power that these movements maintain. Focusing on Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupier LaVoy Finicum's 2015 novel 'Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom,' this essay argues that such survivalist fiction, in imagining a future civil conflict that enables the reinstatement of Lockean property rights, should be understood as settler colonial rather than anti-statist. The paramilitary 'land transfer movement' that mobilized the occupiers at Malheur exploited the fundamental contradiction in the mythos of America’s 'public lands.' These lands were maintained as a commons to memorialize a process of enclosure. In representing the dystopian future in which those lands are reopened as a frontier, survivalist novels like Finicum's reaffirm, rather than challenge, the fantasy that produces the constituted power of the United States.
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