Instrumental ethics tied to security justify unlimited violence against designated groups

Evidence

These are ethical ends or commitments in signaling not so much what ethics has come to be for – it is for itself and no other, Kant would have it – as who it is for and who not, for whom and where the ethical begins and ends. The figure of the Muslim seems to have conjured the transformation of the ethical from the in-itself, from self-sustaining and self-promoting reason, to the personalization of pure instrumentality. Self-regarding reason, whether in the collectivization of ends or in absolute individualization of religious commitment, has elevated instrumentalization above all else. No limit to terror or torture, death and destruction, incarceration and interrogation, restriction and repatriation so long as they service security of the Chosen People. The one reproduces the other, in a vicious upward spiral. Here we see the link, as much in the logic as in the great chain of being, between historical Europe – “old Europe,” to twist the Rumsfeldian turn – and born again American foreign adventure, the “new world,” in Bush braggadocio. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 912

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and bare life, and echoes the moral-panic dynamics flagged in earlier chapters. — connects to: Sacralized racial hierarchy licenses unlimited violence against the demonized. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1559