War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle

Evidence

For those historians who identified history with public right, with the State, war was therefore essentially a disruption of right, an enigma, a sort of dark mass or raw event that had to be accepted as such, and not, certainly not, a principle of intelligibility. There was no question of that; on the contrary, it was a disruptive principle. Here, in contrast, war turns the very disruption of right into a grid of intelligibility, and makes it possible to determine the force relationship that always underpins a certain relationship of right. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grid of intelligibility — the analytical move central to Foucault’s whole method.
• XREF: This inversion of war and right feeds directly into biopolitics/necropolitics readings and the ‘war as grid’ reading of race. — connects to: Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 84; War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law; Sovereignty annexes the race-war weapon by shifting from law to norm — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 98 (+7 more)

Related

• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.88)
• Sovereignty annexes the race-war weapon by shifting from law to norm (similarity 0.81)
• War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. (similarity 0.81)
• War’s protection reversal exposes domination as the hidden core of sovereignty. (similarity 0.80)
• The juridical discourse of sovereignty has dominated Western analysis of power. (similarity 0.79)
• War reverses the protection-obedience relation so subjects protect the sovereign. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Dominant powers codified their own practical invulnerability as the overriding war norm #exemplifies (0.85)
• A sui generis principle of imperial-combatant immunity emerged above the law of armed conflict #exemplifies (0.85)
• War on terror justice neutralizes the rule of law in the name of security #exemplifies (0.82)
• War reverses the protection-obedience relation so subjects protect the sovereign. #exemplifies (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 559
• Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. #qualifies (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128