Governing ghosts: Race,incorporeality and difference in post-political times

Introduction

Set during a thunderstorm, James Mangold’s 2003 film Identity hinges on an interview between a psychiatrist and a psychopathic murderer troubled by conflicting personalities that interrupt the expression of a unified personality. At stake is a stay of execution, but the key to the film lies in an interwoven narrative. Also set during a thunderstorm, this narrative explores the gruesome fates that befall a group of strangers stranded in a remote motel. The guests are bumped off one by one before it is revealed that they are not real people, but representations of the various multiple personalities of the killer from the first narrative, and their grim ends constitute a radical solution to the murderer’s pathology: the single surviving personality will be the killer’s true, unified personality (Derry, 2009: 190). Another way of expressing this is to suggest that there is insufficient shared symbolic ground between the different personalities to allow for them to coexist without tearing the murderer apart, so this difference needs to be eradicated so that the host can live.

This solution to the murderer’s pathology also illustrates a wider logic through which minority populations are governed during the war on terror. The nursery rhyme narrated by the killer during the opening credits refers to the haunting quality of his multiple personalities, which seem real and yet spectral. Muslims are also conjured in the hegemonic imaginary as somehow phantasmatic (Daulatzai, 2007: 135; Sayyid, 2003: 1–2). This is because the expression of Muslim identities interrupts the processes by which racialized minorities are subjectified in western states, since by choosing their preferred modes of categorization they express an agency not generally afforded to racialized populations within the logics of the racial imaginary, and since by supplanting ascribed racial labels with religious identification they reveal the limits of that imaginary as the basis for governing racialized populations (Patel and Tyrer, 2011). In turn, Muslims are frequently represented as an awkward presence, interrupting the closure of the nation because of an assumed lack of shared symbolic grounds between Muslims and the ‘host’ nation. The solution offered with increasing regularity takes the form of attempts to tame or erase the difference that is seen as tearing the nation apart.

This discourse conflates raciality with subjecthood for the ethnically marked and paradoxically racializes Muslims as incompletely racialized, thus incompletely realized. This is best illustrated by the contests in which those who reject requests for protection against Islamophobia have tended to base their case on a refusal to acknowledge the racist nature of Islamophobia. This position has not been based on an interrogation of the nature of Islamophobia, but rather on an interrogation of the nature of Muslim identities, foregrounding the idea that Muslims are not properly racial, and that therefore Islamophobia cannot be considered a form of racism (cf. Toynbee, 2005). Thus, denials of the racist nature of Islamophobia are reliant upon the claim that Muslims are incompletely racial, even though it is firmly established that race has no biological basis and that it refers rather to the ways in which populations are categorized and constructed as racial (Tyrer, 2011). The perverse racialization of Muslims as incompletely racialized thus serves a dual purpose: by deferring recognition of Islamophobia it leaves open the possibility of anti-Muslim racism, and by centring racial knowledge it underwrites the further, corrective, racialization of Muslims. Although some have emphasized ethnicization – for instance, framing Muslims as quasi-ethnic (Meer, 2008) – ethnicity is framed within the logics of racial discourse, providing a cultural register for racialization (Hall, 2000). As Stuart Hall (2000: 223) notes, although there is a simplifying tendency to draw a hard division between race and ethnicity, ‘The more “ethnicity” matters, the more its characteristics are represented as relatively fixed, inherent within a group, transmitted from generation to generation, not just by culture and education, but by biological inheritance’, because race and ethnicity both establish equivalences between the cultural and biological. Thus, the ‘ethnicization’ of Islam (cf. Tibi, 2010) is actually part of a wider process through which boundaries and subject positions are ascribed and contested within the context of a racial politics that circumscribes appeals to both biological and cultural (ethnic) registers for expressing difference.

Islamophobia racializes Muslims as a jarring presence and a radical, yet somehow incorporeal, alterity that haunts the nation, interrupting its closure as a result of the lack of common symbolic ground between Muslims and nation. For example, the recently formed German Freedom Party politicized around the alleged ‘Islamization’ of Germany (Gutsch, 2011) is an attack on the failure of Muslim integration which has been rehearsed across Europe, from the English Defence League to Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) and the Danish People’s Party. In the context of a hegemonic discourse that conflates questions about the (un)governability of minorities with their supposed excess of alterity (cf. Grillo, 2007), across Europe racial projects seek to manage the identities of phantasmatic, ethnicized non-subjects by snipping off this excessive difference or foreclosing its expression by legislating against such symbols of Muslim presence as the burqa, as has been attempted in France, Italy and the Netherlands. That the burqa is taken as a symbol for essential Muslimness ironically aligns the Islamophobes with the radical Islamists. This unstable and contradictory discursive project is lent a fragile unity through the common attempt to stabilize the hegemonic grammar of race that Muslims have unsettled. Just as ghosts are commonly represented as alternately unreal or terrifyingly hyperreal, Islamophobia represents Muslims as a ghostly presence, as either unreal or as a hyperreal interruption to our consciousness. The remarkable thing about this discourse is that it is expressed by liberal politicians and progressives as well as by those on the extreme right. For example, the literature on Islamophobia in the UK has emphasized the relationship between the roles of the state and ‘street’ level anti-Muslim racism (Frost, 2008; Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009). More widely, populist anti-Muslim hate has been able to appropriate tropes from progressive discourse to represent itself as a defence against the barbarous who threaten Europe with burqas and violence.

There is thus a broader tendency to deny the coherence of Muslim subjectivities or to transform them into a scandal. For example, Zubaida (2007) suggests that Muslim identity is conjured by ‘individuals and institutions that seek communal authority and leadership, encouraged by government quarters’. Similar polemics about the manufacture of Muslims appear almost conspiratorial in press claims that Islamist infiltration has Islamized the west. Such accounts suggest that Muslimness is totalizing, and that beneath the deathly skins of Muslims lie suppressed forms of natural ethnic life. This contrasts the supposed politicality of Muslim identification with the idea that other forms of identification are somehow natural and apolitical. It reflects an incapacity to understand that all collective identities are products of political processes and struggles (Sayyid, 2004), and that since there is no privileged form of identification which is more authentic in the abstract than any other form (Sayyid, 2000), Muslim identities are as legitimate to those who express them as any other. Thus, contests over Islamophobia have problematized the identities of Muslims. This is because the emergence of a Muslim subject position within western postcolonial racialized ethnoscapes introduced a new politics that interrupted the exercise of racialized governmentality.

Racially and ethnically marked populations were historically organized through namings that constituted a pragmatic means of routinizing and translating into governmental practice the possibilities for population management inscribed by the racial imaginary. The names applied to these populations emerged through processes of racialization, state practice (Aspinall, 2002: 806) and struggle, resistance, appropriation and rearticulation (Sayyid, 2004), and their intelligibility was underwritten by the hegemony of an imaginary born in the context of colonial expansion and slavery. In all modern racial projects, populations have unsettled racial namings, through rearticulation or by replacing them with preferred labels (Omi and Winant, 1994). For example, in Britain, by the 1970s Blackness provided subject positions that could be occupied while resisting racism. In the context of state fears about the presence of radicalized Black political identities following urban uprisings in the 1980s (Kundnani, 2004: 106) and concerns among anti-racists about the essentialization of Blackness, broader identifications emerged so that Blackness was no longer the default political signifier for ethnically marked resistance (Modood, 2008). It became increasingly problematic to speak of Britain’s ethnically marked populations within the limiting rubric of ‘Black and Asian’, partly as a result of self-identifications by Hindu, Sikh and Muslim populations which shattered the fragile unity of the labels applied through state practice to govern them as though they were monolithic. These labels had in turn been occupied and rearticulated by minorities, and one corollary of this expression of agency by racialized populations was a shift away from these racialized and ethnicized labels as the main modality for experiencing subjecthood, as minorities increasingly asserted labels such as Hindu and Muslim. This politics of identification interrupted the racial subjectification of minority populations by questioning the governmental classifications which brought order to this fragmenting ethnoscape, and the close association between this emerging identity politics and Muslim mobilizations during the Satanic Verses affair and the first Gulf War (cf. Geaves, 2005; Modood, 1997: 7–8) underlined its seeming politicality.

Contemporary expressions of Muslimness emerged through the agency of racialized populations to name themselves and had the effect of unsettling the terms on which they were subjectified (Patel and Tyrer, 2011: 125–127; Tyrer, 2011). Racialized governmentality does not simply involve reading stable racial meanings from the surface of raced subjects, but rather it ascribes racial labels and inscribes the traits to which they refer as a basis for organizing and managing populations (Hesse, 1997). The ontology of the social was therefore placed into crisis by the mass emergence of Muslim subjects. This represented a problem for governments and a problem of governmentality, and led to responses that have taken the form of attempts to fix the content of the label ‘Muslim’. Questions about power, identities, antagonism and governance are thus central to understanding how Muslim populations are named and managed, and they frequently converge around the difficulties of correctly identifying the seemingly incorporeal, unreal/unracial presence of the deathly Muslim other. Biopolitics takes the form of attempts to defend the life of the population premised on the deployment of a racial frontier to determine the distinction between the population which can live and that which cannot (Terranova, 2007: 135). Within a biopolitical regime concerned with mortality, governmentality offers techniques for the regulation of life and conduct through the deployment of micropower underpinned by surveillance. The Muslim question has therefore emerged as a key site for the emergence of new expressions of biopolitics and racialized governmentalities because of the ease with which Muslim populations could be represented as alien, deathly and threatening after 9/11.

How to spot a Muslim

Islamophobia makes the apparent incorporeality and incomplete raciality of Muslims central to the expression of racialized governmentality. They are thus further racialized as radically different but absent, incorporeal, incomplete subjects who are nevertheless capable of bursting violently through into our world in moments of terrifying hyperreality. This mode of constructing Muslims as alternately invisible and terrifying, unreal and all too real, guarantees attempts to legislate against their hauntings. For example, with the burqa politicized as a site of conflict with an entire minority community labelled as medieval, Dutch legislation on the burqa was a significant point of engagement with this premodern minority, and was passed in spite of the tiny scale of the problem: under 0.003% of the population (Moors, 2011: 157). Similar logic was reflected in attempts to pass legislation against non-existent sharia courts in Oklahoma (Eichler, 2010). Such moves legislate against the fantasy of the ghostly Muslim who does not exist as such, but who still seems likely to interrupt our world. The sporadic daily grind of mistaken identity Islamophobia against non-Muslim minorities also falls into this category, targeting the absent Muslim because of the difficulty of recognizing an adversary who steps outside the rules of the racial game, with the effect of signalling the absence of the ghostly Muslim (Tyrer, 2010).

Discussions about how to identify terrorists thus came to find expression as questions about how to identify Muslims. For example, after Islamist terrorist atrocities in London on 7 July 2005, the term ‘clean skins’ was used in reference to perpetrators previously unknown to the security services. In the context of wider discussions of the racial unknowability of Muslims this term takes on additional overtones. The problem of dealing with terrorists also came to be conflated with the adoption of racialized practices such as immigration control and racial profiling which organize and racialize entire populations based on risk not guilt in order to target those other Others who might also be ‘clean skins’. After the 9/11 attacks, this involved mass arrests of innocent people in the United States (Meeropol, 2005). Similar patterns of discrimination could be discerned across a range of state practices in numerous national contexts (Moeckli, 2008), and between 2001 and 2003, German police operated a massive rasterfahndung data mining exercise to ethnically profile the population for potential terrorists, collecting and trawling through the personal data of 8 million people. Islamophobic representation of Muslims as haunting and unknowable draws upon a rich tradition of terrifying imagery, although it has equally been marked by representations of Muslim absence. These absences and terrifying presences reflect attempts to work through the question of how friend–enemy distinctions can be reworked at a time when the racial terms on which they were constructed have been challenged by the presence of a population that interrupts racialization.

The quest to identify the Muslim other and the terrorist also gave way to a politics of identifying ‘good’ Muslim subjects. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss such projects in greater depth, since we are primarily concerned with tracing the epistemic conditions under which it makes sense to speak of the emergence of contemporary Islamophobia and related attempts to stereotype and essentialize Muslims (e.g. as simply belonging to two camps: threatening/moderate). However, we note that this process has been global and variegated, and has ranged from movements established by Muslims in response to particular social issues, such as the Ni Putes Ni Soumises Muslim feminist movement in France and the Danish Demokratiske Muslimer movement, to groups which have been criticized as less organic. The increasing importance to the war on terror of promoting official ‘moderate’ Muslim allies was illustrated when, in 2003, the US National Security Council earmarked US$1.3 billion to help ‘reform’ Islam (Mahmood, 2006). The politics surrounding such groups is not unproblematic, partly because in many cases they are heavily reliant upon external funding from the state, but also because the project of distinguishing between extremism and moderacy has itself been a centrally political concern. Thus, in the wake of the infamous Danish cartoons affair, the tension which arose between Danish Conservative Party member of parliament Naser Khader – viewed as a defender of Danish values and democracy – and the imam Abu Laban who had done much to coordinate Muslim protests, led Tabish Khair (2006) to write that ‘Between the Danish government and Islamist politicians, between Jyllans-Posten and the mobs in Beirut, between Laban and Khader, the moderate Muslim has effectively been silenced.’ The complexities and contradictions of the British state’s dealings with the Muslim Council of Britain (Birt, 2005; Kundnani, 2009) resonated with this problem, with the UK government’s changing stance on the organization’s status (whether ally or not) reflecting the contingency of the label moderate and illustrating the ease with which ‘mainstream’ voices could be redesignated ‘extremist’ and squeezed out of democratic spaces within the terms of a discourse that constructs politicality and extremism as conditions of Muslim alterity. Geert Wilders has illustrated this logic by asking rhetorically: ‘Moderate Islam? That’s a contradiction’ (Spiegel, 2008). Within the terms of Islamophobia, moderates can straightforwardly be relabelled extremists in spite of their actual political convictions.

There has also been an invigorated attempt to account for the deathly presence of Muslims through recourse to an ossified we/they antagonism. Before the war on terror, this was effected by stabilizing contested racial meanings around the idea that Muslim identities reflected the supposedly pathological condition of racialized minorities. For instance, following urban disorders across northern England in spring 2001, this cemented the idea that the excessive difference of Muslims strained national identity. As Faulks (2006: 133) notes, ‘in words that can only be described as racist, [UK Home Secretary David] Blunkett asserted that “we have norms of acceptability and that those who come into our home . . . should accept those norms just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere”.’ Such claims gave way to a wider attack on multiculturalism (cf. Pfaff, 2005) in which, as Trevor Phillips argued, an ‘ “anything goes” multiculturalism . . . focused far too much on “multi” and not enough on the “common culture” ’ (Phillips, 2005). This problematizing of multiculturalism drew upon the idea of an excess of alterity (Grillo, 2007); a preoccupation with the governability of ethnicized minorities that conflated the idea of a political threat with difference. This shift from individual suspects to wider ‘deviantized’ populations has been a persistent feature of the war on terror, giving way to everyday racisms (Frost, 2008) and the construction of Muslims as a suspect community (Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009), and it emerged before 9/11 through the construction of Muslim youth within a relation of war as an enemy within and a criminalized community (Dwyer et al., 2008). These tensions are best understood as attempts to work through the problem of how one can guarantee the racialization of human populations by dividing them into binary classifications at a time when members of racialized minorities are stepping outside the logics of modernity’s racial project. This process requires us to recognize the nature of this governmental project as it works alternately to make a virtue of Muslim unrecognizability in order to fix Muslims as incompletely realized by perversely racializing them as incompletely racial, and to cement Muslims as radically different antagonists whose excessive alterity needs to be properly racialized in order for us to have the correct knowledge frame and governmental techniques to deal with it. To draw an analogy: if the inability to distinguish between white and black would make it impossible to continue a chess game, then it would be necessary to fix the identities of political antagonists at such times as it becomes difficult to straightforwardly tell them apart. Equally, should the distinction between white and black seem too sharply drawn, it might be necessary to discipline the identity of one or other side to prevent a game within the rules from spilling over into outright antagonism.

How to kill a vampire

Popular culture provides spaces that enable the interrogation of hegemonic meanings in an epoch of neoliberal, post-political consensus. At a time when the west has found itself engaging with a spectral Muslim presence, two genres – one dystopian, the other vampiric – have undergone something of a revival in the US and UK. In films such as Minority Report (2002), The Island (2005) and Idiocracy (2006), and in the 2009 remake of The Prisoner, the return to the dystopian works through questions about a neoliberal condition of surveillance, order, intensified control and militarism, and does so at a time ostensibly marked by post-political consensus while techniques such as mass imprisonment, military tribunals, racial profiling, extraordinary renditions and intensified surveillance have seemingly flourished. The vampire revival does not simply work through questions about outsiders and youth culture, but in focusing on outwardly indetectable, unkillable beings who represent a throwback to older superstitions it reflects wider struggles over knowing one’s place vis-a-vis one’s others in a world in which the potential for antagonism is ever present. ¹ The vampire revival does not simply work through a series of social questions about what it means to be an other, but it engages a centrally political question in an often frightening world.

Since the political is the moment at which the social is instituted (Mouffe, 2005: 17), it is useful to consider the revival of interest in vampires as providing cultural resources for making sense of a point in time when the ontology of the social is placed into crisis. We are not suggesting that there is necessarily an increasing antagonism between Muslims and non-Muslims, but rather we are concerned with the epistemic conditions under which it makes sense for this antagonism to become a defining site for global political conflict in supposedly post-political times. We therefore acknowledge the continued circulation of orientalist descriptive tropes and cliches, while noting that in the context of a global war against terror which has targeted diasporic Muslim populations with practices such as racial profiling, this has been framed by circumstances described by Hesse (1997) as entailing a shift from the deployment of the racial frontier overseas (typifying the emergence of orientalism), to the contests over its deployment at home in the management of postcolonial populations. Thus, the distinction is not between colonialism and imperialism, or between orientalism and a post-orientalism. Since it is impossible to escape the residual traces of orientalist discourse, the idea of a distinct rupture would be unsustainable. Rather, our problematic is located within the terms of the postcolonial question. As Hesse (2000: 111–112) notes, ‘post-colonial racism in the second half of the late twentieth century describes the continuing incidence of an (un)acknowledged white racism in contemporary western cultures, together with a constitutive disavowal of its antecedents in liberal-colonial doubleness and its liberal-democratic configuration of imperial discontinuities’.

If the vampire revival reflects a political interruption in a world that could otherwise appear depoliticized, so too does the appearance of anti-capitalists, animal rights activists and Muslims, who all appear to be framed as extreme based on the activities of small minorities among them. In the case of Muslims, who have been most radically othered as a consequence of their racialization as threatening to western states, a series of labels has been applied to their transgressive identity politics in an attempt to fix the meanings of this unknowable presence. Our focus here does not permit us to elaborate on individual cases of the discursive strategy of extremism/moderation, since we are primarily concerned with shedding light on the conditions under which it makes sense to speak of the emergence of this discourse. The problems with the term extremism are obvious: as a relative, normative term, ‘extremism’ does not necessarily tell us about the political identities and behaviour which it signifies other than through its inscriptions of normalcy and moderacy. This is not to suggest that the kind of behaviours often labelled as extremist do not exist, for clearly they do, but to recognize that discursive practice is such that it cannot access any traits innate to political subjects themselves, but rather that it constructs the problem it defines. Making a cognate point, Smith (1998: 99) cites McClure (1992), who ‘argues that the logic of articulation implies that there are no actual political subjects which correspond to abstract structural categories. “No subject, in sum, is simply gendered; there are no ‘women’ simpliciter, already constituted as a bound political group with necessary common interests, already given as a political category” (McClure, 1992: 121–122)’. We do not deny that there are clearly people whose beliefs and behaviour are consistent with commonsense uses of extremism, but are concerned with how term came to be deployed and how it is articulated such that ‘extremism’ has been incapable of functioning as a means of simply and unproblematically categorizing just the problematic political behaviour of a small number of individuals because it has instead has been conflated with the wider management of entire racialized populations. To understand this it is necessary to sketch out a shift in the consolidation and deployment of the category ‘extremism’.

Before the 1990s, moral panics about Muslim populations were usually expressed around a notion of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ deployed in response to the emergence of a distinctly Muslim subject position. This unsettling politicality was signified as ‘fundamentalist’ in a discourse that constructed Muslims as an alien presence rooted in sub-continental or Middle Eastern religious observances and it made recourse to colonial tropes and orientalist discourse. The shift to ‘extremism’ occurred during the 1990s in response to concerns about the activities of Muslims in the west. As such it was concerned with Muslims as a postcolonial presence who were somehow indeterminate: neither sub-continental, nor properly western, but haunting the racial imaginary. The emergence of the discourse of ‘extremism’ reflects a shift in the construction of the Muslim question as a matter for governmental intervention in a postcolonial west. Although the analytical shortcomings of ‘fundamentalism’ are well documented (cf. Sayyid, 2003), the use of this framing did not preclude representation of Muslims outside the terms of fundamentalism. If contests over fundamentalism surfaced in the context of disputes over secularism, the shift to the discursive frame of a condition of generalized Muslim extremism emerged in the context of a growing recognition of the Muslim identity politics that was straining ascribed racial labels, and in the context of the political contests over identification and rights that this entailed. This is why discussions about Muslims so often shift away from simply examining the lawlessness of the hate pedlars among them and instead interrogate the difference, loyalty to nation and integratedness of wider Muslim populations, irrespective of the diversity of actual political inclinations they contain. Questions about the nature of this minority group and the status of race are thus woven through the emergence of the discourse on extremism. As such the emergence of extremism rather than fundamentalism marks a key shift in the construction of Muslims as a governmental category, and as a means of encoding race.

As behaviour previously labelled as ‘fundamentalism’ became increasingly termed ‘extremism’, extremism thus came to be directly involved with the management of wider populations, rather than simply a means of dealing with anti-Semites, homophobes and hate mongers such as Omar Bakri. The problem of how to spot an extremist thus became interwoven with that of how to spot a Muslim, and cases of mistaken identity in which non-Muslims are mistaken for Muslims are paralleled by a similar array of cases in which innocent Muslims have been mistaken for extremists. Well-publicized cases include Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was detained at John F Kennedy airport in 2002 and subjected to extraordinary rendition to Syria, even though he was completely innocent of terrorism or related crimes. In a similar vein an innocent pilot named Lotfi Raissi was arrested at his London home in September 2001 at the behest of the FBI and became the first person to be charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks. Other serious miscarriages included the arrest of Hicham Yezza, a postgraduate student who downloaded documents about terrorism from a US Department of Justice website for academic reasons, and a botched anti-terror raid on a house in Forest Gate, London in which one of the innocent householders was shot (Patel and Tyrer, 2011: 120–121). Such cases have gained significant coverage, but extremism has more often worked through a mundane logic to establish its popular racist ascription against entire Muslim populations, as is evidenced by the attempts of far right groups across Europe to justify their racism on the grounds that they are merely campaigning against Islamic extremism. Academic accounts which have emphasized the emergence of moral panics about Muslim criminality and threat during the war on terror (Frost, 2008; Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009; Poynting and Mason, 2006) often couch this in terms of the construction of Muslims as a ‘suspect’, ‘criminalized’ and existentially threatening other, although the locus of this falls upon ‘extremism’ rather than simply ‘suspicion’. The distinction is critical: a suspected criminal can always be innocent, whereas a potential criminal can always be assumed likely to pose a threat. In this context, a gulf opens between the practices that are employed to defend western values against the threatening, potentially criminal, Muslim other and the actual values that are being defended.

As a floating signifier, extremism has no meaning independent of its relationship to other discursive elements – notably, that which is deemed non-extreme. The discourse of extremism has therefore been articulated with other discursive elements to stabilize its meanings relative to the possibilities provided by the racial imaginary. Articulation is an attempt to partially fix meanings by combining separate floating discursive elements to create an impression of fixity (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001 [1985]: 113) and institutes subject positions around these. In this way the discourse on extremism was not simply coined to describe illicit actions carried out by militants or psychopaths, but instead drew upon established descriptive clichés previously applied to racialized populations such as the idea that South Asian communities are insular, self-segregating and prone to culturally bound forms of criminality. It thus conflated extremism with the pathologies of the racialized. This requires us to acknowledge that the problem of post-politics – how to displace and suppress political practice – emerges as a focus on the excessively political nature of difference. Thus the attempt to suppress the political through recourse to culture takes the form of normative projects intended to snip off the excessive difference of minorities – coded through the cultural logic of national loyalty and the political logic of ‘moderacy’ (Tyrer, 2011) – on the grounds that there are insufficient shared symbolic grounds between racialized and ‘host’ communities to allow for their coexistence without difference – Muslim difference – tearing the nation apart, but justified as simply being an engagement with extremists. At stake are questions about how identities and difference play out in political practice. To the extent that these questions are concerned with a defence against the excessive difference of a politicized other, they conflate difference with politicality.

Given the polemical deployment of extremism against Muslims irrespective of their individual political or religious beliefs, whether as a justification for far right racism or as a reference to the Muslim interruption of racial ascription, it is fruitful to rethink hegemonic applications of extremism to entire Muslim populations as the possibility of radicalized antagonism. This accounts for how Muslim identity politics interrupt racialized governmentality and the application of extremism to mark the aberrant identities of the racialized rather than simply describing the criminality of militants. To mark the identities of the racialized in terms of excessive difference is simply another way of expressing this centrally political relation. Since it makes no sense to speak of an excess of alterity – otherness is always exterior – a more useful way of rephrasing this is to suggest that it is a mode of otherness that is centrally political. In other words, the post-political tendency to disavow the political and the tendency during the war on terror to suppress alterity are two modalities of the same project. It makes no sense to speak of a difference between the Muslim who can be tolerated and the extremist, for Muslims in general are represented as extremists, whether actual or potential, within popular racist discourse, irrespective of their actual views. As extremism applies well beyond the treatment of anti-Semites and terrorists to the representation and management of entire population groups irrespective of actual guilt (but rather, based on risk), the difference between the tolerable Muslim and the extremist does not exist because it is the political surplus that is snipped off through the politics of managing racialized populations. This surplus is the excess of difference.

Since extremism is a reference to both a political and cultural excess, the notion that contemporary discourse on Muslims represents them as being regulated by ‘culture’ is better expressed as a recognition of the conflation of alterity and politicality. Since culture works as a register through which racial discourse is expressed, this is another way of saying that Muslims as agents and bearers of culture are a reminder of the political in an ostensibly post-political world that could otherwise seem depoliticized. This attempt to excise the excess of politicality/alterity is a mechanism for transforming the political into politics through the creation of a regulatory framework. In the case of Muslims, this framework has as much to do with the regulation of identities that appear to break out of disciplinary categories as with the arresting of more conventional political practices and the policing of actual extremism. If governmentality is predicated on the capacity to institute a pragmatic programme for governing the conduct of the population, the trend through which Muslims have stepped outside the disciplinary logics of the modern racial project places in question the state’s capacity to place the genie back into the bottle. As a result, the authoritative claims being made on behalf of democratic values are often undermined by practices used to manage populations seen as alien, non-western and anti-democratic. From neo-fascist anti-Muslim marches to state practices such as ethnic profiling, the greater the level of coercion used to contain the threat of the other through indiscriminate labelling of Muslims based on a conflation of difference and politicality/criminality, the more apparent this gap between values and practices becomes.

Conclusion – ghost in the machine

Muslims are routinely represented in racist discourse as a deathly presence which bursts through the fabric of life to haunt those who conjured them into (non-)being. But in the attempt to govern the phantasmatic presence of the incorporeal raced subject, the ghost becomes the form of life itself rather than a vengeful interruption of life. This is because this wider identity politics has involved attempts to step outside the disciplinary logics that reduce life to biopolitical categories and ascribed racial labels. This illustrates the stereotyping of Muslim populations as either phantasmatic or as all too real. While there are undoubtedly many in the world who do conform to the stereotype of Islamic extremist, what makes this a stereotype is the success with which it is applied to classify entire populations of racialized subjects. Extremism is applied through popular racist discourse – the tabloid headlines, moral panics about ghetto Britain or inassimilable banlieues, fascist marches and rallies – and interrupts our understanding of the processes at work when politics comes into play in contesting the terms on which identities are expressed and on which dominant notions of culture and multicultures are fixed in a social ontology that underwrites programmes for regulating life. What we are thus left with is not a meaningful project through which extremism can be countered, but rather a wider project concerned with the management of entire racialized populations whose difference from us is seen as constitutive of extremism and criminality.

As extremism has shifted from specific usage to a general signifier for Muslim difference, it has foreclosed analysis of the contingency of identities in favour of essentialist, teleological explanations governing the transgressive nature of the identities of the racialized. Recognition that political practice is contingent, not eternal, opens two possibilities: first, that the political behaviour of Muslim populations is not the inevitable result of Muslim difference; second, that in this light, attempts to fight terrorism by snipping off this surfeit of difference will inevitably fail. To construct extremism as a condition of Muslim difference imagines away any possibility for dealing with extremism other than the removal of that dangerous alterity – a prospect that is at once impossible and fundamentally damaging to the democratic values in whose name it is enacted. The paradox of a human population paradoxically racialized as being incompletely racialized, and constructed as being excessively different (yet at the same time not really there) is a way of working through the idea of a difference which needs to be alternately elaborated, tamed or eradicated through its further subjection to racial logics, and the central violence of this guarantees the existence of the ghostly beings who seem so haunting, so terrifying in their difference, and yet so difficult to categorize or manage.