Oversight: Ethnic and Racial Studies

Ethnic and Racial Studies
ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20
Oversight
Gil Anidjar
To cite this article: Gil Anidjar (2017): Oversight, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2017.1346268
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Download by: [Australian Catholic University] Date: 10 August 2017, At: 06:42
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1346268
Oversight
Gil Anidjara,b
a
Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, USA; bDepartment of Middle Eastern,
South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, USA
ABSTRACT
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 06:42 10 August 2017
Is surveillance a weapon? Does it have a destructive dimension, destructive

effects and consequences? Revisiting Foucault on the productive dimensions
of power, this article attends to these questions by focusing on the question
of subjectivity. It acknowledges the importance of reflections that take the
target of surveillance as their primary concerns – Islamophobia – but proposes
that vigilance and insomnia (notions that were conceptualized in Levinas’
early work) provide the premises of a different account of surveillance and
the nature of its power.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 May 2016; Accepted 20 June 2017
KEYWORDS Surveillance; insomnia; Foucault; Levinas; weapons; Islamophobia
Confronting the problem of surveillance and Islamophobia, the authors of a

remarkable paper on the topic ask that we not surrender to the universalizing
and levelling rhetoric, which seeks to convince us that we are all under surveil-
lance. For
if the problem is mass surveillance, then what is at stake is not a violent geo-pol-
itical agenda led by a few very powerful states or the deliberate targeting of
communities within national contexts, but that now “everybody” is under sur-
veillance. (Gürses, Kundnani, and Van Hoboken 2016, 582)
The crucial point is that, along with the “terrorist assemblages” scrutinized
by Puar (2007), the “surveillance assemblages” (Hagerty and Ericson 2000),
which we must now take for granted (whether to affirm or resist them), con-
stitute, as David Lyon argued, unequal and divisive mechanisms of “social
sorting” (2003). This means that we are hardly all equal in facing the surveil-
lance apparatus, which is why it is crucial to examine the singularity of
“thorough surveillance” (Sa’di 2014), to underscore as well “the surveillance
of blackness” (Browne 2015), and – with regard to arguments about privacy,
for instance – to recall that “workers, the under- and disemployed, the incar-
cerated, the homeless, and those dependent on welfare (most of whom are
CONTACT Gil Anidjar ga152@columbia.edu

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. ANIDJAR
women) are the most exposed to surveillance and the least enfranchised of
privacy rights” (Maxwell 2005, 13). Acknowledging the multiplicity (rather
than the universality) of targets, and the way in which surveillance but-
tresses and deepens inequalities among them, the question that must be
raised is how subjectivity – in the case at hand, “Muslim subjects” – and
the problem of surveillance have been or should be understood or articu-
lated together. Hagerty and Ericson phrase this matter in terms that are at
once proximate and troubling to the concerns I will want to raise in what
follows. “In the face of multiple connections across myriad technologies
and practices”, they write,
struggles against particular manifestations of surveillance, as important as they

might be, are akin to efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom – a
frantic focus on a particular unpalatable technology or practice while the
general tide of surveillance washes over us all. (Hagerty and Ericson 2000, 609)
Between general and collective subjects and privacy, between “every

body” (and their “body cams”) and the terrifying specificities of targeted com-
munities and individuals, surveillance – like prejudice, persecution and out-
right assault – insistently raises the question of subjectivity (name, label or
“data double”) in the context of a struggle with and within power. Indeed,
since Michel Foucault opposed the assujetissement, subjectivation, of the
incarcerated to the invisible anonymity of the panoptic tower, subjectivity
and subjectivation have been at the centre of surveillance concerns and
objectives (Gilliom 2005, 72). And this obviously applies to the widespread
monitoring of Muslims, and to Islamophobia, when “surveillance becomes
intertwined with the fabric of human relationships and the threads of trust
upon which they are built” (Kundnani 2014, 41). What I would like to isolate
is of a different order than the production of new subjectivities, without,
however, returning to a model of coercion where the power of surveillance
is conceived as dominantly repressive or, as the language often goes, “chil-
ling”. Such are, of course, urgently pertinent dimensions of the “surveillance
society” in which we live, but as Puar has it, what emerges through the prac-
tices and technologies of surveillance is “not necessarily the crafting of the
individual subject cohered through acquiescence to or internalization of
norms but assemblages of ‘militarized bodies’” (Puar 2007, 156). My own
narrow and specific focus will obliquely follow on Puar’s suggestion and
seek to confront the destructive dimension of surveillance. At stake is some-
thing like “the mortification of the self” (Harcourt 2015, 217–233) or indeed,
the dismantling, fragmenting or undoing, that is, the destruction of subjects.
For, as Martin Harries rightly explains, “we may learn as much about how
we imagine subjects from how we imagine their destruction as from how
we imagine the ways in which they are made” (Harries 2007, 15). For my
part, I shall here remain agnostic on the history of such famously made,
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3
constructed, or produced subjects, about which I have written elsewhere, or

on the novelty of the instruments of their targeting (see Anidjar 2003, 2008,
2015). Mindful of “efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom”, I
shall stubbornly treat surveillance as a weapon (political, military or other),
at once a means of inscription and of destruction.
Great awakenings
There are two words – words rather than concepts – that have failed to receive
the attention they seem to deserve in the work of Michel Foucault, “the grand-
father of contemporary surveillance studies” (Marx 2015, 734). I am referring to
French words that, though articulated in opposition to each other by Foucault

himself, nonetheless partake of a joined supplementarity, an elevated or
heightened dimension, perhaps an extended and hyperbolic measure.
These are not particularly strange words, except for the fact that they share
a prefix, the prefix “sur”, which has been rendered into English as “over”,
“above”, or even “super” or “hyper”. And yet, the first of the two words, surpou-
voir, seems striking enough, over-powering enough. It was translated by Alan
Sheridan as “super-power”, which in the context of the Cold War is both odd
and potentially misleading. In Discipline and Punish, at any rate, once and once
only in the book, Foucault deploys that word as a name or an attribute of
sovereign power, the hyper-demonstrative form of power “which, in the
absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the specta-
cle of its individual manifestations, … a power that was recharged in the ritual
display of its reality as ‘super-power’” (Foucault 1975, 61, 1977, 57). The scare
quotes, by the way, have also been added, supplemented to the French orig-
inal, which testifies, I think, to the discomfort of the translator, who otherwise
conveys quite accurately the seminal idea of a significant and historical dis-
tinction between sovereign and disciplinary power. But what I mostly wish
to call attention to here is the way Foucault himself renders this distinction
in a peculiar lexical fashion; the way he distinguishes between “continual
supervision” – notable at this stage by its absence – and surpouvoir.
By now, it will have been easy to surmise that the English word “supervi-
sion” is (and translates) the second sur-mot or super-word, which really inter-
ests me here, namely, the word surveillance. It is, first of all, the apposition, and
the opposition, of surpouvoir and surveillance that should have attracted, I
think, a more scrupulous philological attention for it underscores the compo-
site nature of both words as well as the etymological and semantic
peculiarities of their constitutive elements. I do speak of a philological or lit-
erary attention which, considering the significance of George Orwell’s Nine-
teen Eighty-Four in the representation and conceptualization of hyperbolic
surveillance, is surprisingly lacking in surveillance studies (see e.g. Lyon
1994, 11; Kammerer 2012; Berlatsky 2014; Harcourt 2015, 26–27, 31–53).
4 G. ANIDJAR
Now, “supervision” is not a bad translation for this difficult and quite success-
ful “multidimensional concept” (Marx 2015, 736) even if it did give some
trouble to the translator from the book title onward. Indeed, it is well
known that “Discipline and Punish” remains a poor or inaccurate translation
of Foucault’s original title. As Sheridan puts it:
Any closer translation of the French title of this book, Surveiller et punir, has
proved unsatisfactory on various counts. To begin with, Foucault uses the infini-
tive, which, as here, may have the effect of an “impersonal imperative”. Such a
nuance is denied us in English. More seriously, the verb “surveiller” has no ade-
quate English equivalent. Our noun “surveillance” has an altogether too
restricted and technical use. Jeremy Bentham used the term “inspect” – which
Foucault translates as “surveiller” – but the range of connotations does not cor-
respond. “Supervise” is perhaps closest of all, but again, the word has different
associations. “Observe” is rather too neutral, though Foucault is aware of the
aggression involved in any one-sided observation. In the end, Foucault
himself suggested Discipline and Punish, which relates closely to the book’s struc-
ture. (1977, ix)
Sheridan is correct, of course, though it is notable that the Oxford English Dic-
tionary does have an entry for the verb “surveil” (“to exercise surveillance over
(someone), subject (someone) to surveillance. Also with a place or area as obj
[ect] . … ”), the first listed use of which, in Federal court documents, is dated
1960 (OED Online 2015). According to the same OED entry, by 1966,
Harper’s Magazine was wryly referring to the CIA as both subject and
(evasive) object of surveillance (“If the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is as
adroit in surveilling others as it is in escaping surveillance of itself, the Republic
can relax”). What we are confronted with, in any case, are two words that,
among other things, strikingly summarize and illustrate the famous Foucaul-
dian transition, which moves us from sovereignty to discipline; two hyperbolic
markers that seem to take us from the spectacular mode of sovereign super
power, that must be seen by all, to the ubiquity of supervision, which observes
and oversees all: from surpouvoir to surveillance.
There are a few rare occasions when Foucault referred again to surpouvoir
(mostly in the context of psychiatric power and in his lecture of 29 January
1975 on Sade in Abnormal); yet, the discursive potential of that word does
not appear to have sufficed for an uptake, for the word to morph into a
full-blown concept, and certainly not one of the magnitude of surveillance.
My own wish here is to capture and mobilize the parallel and supplemental
potential of these two über-words, to awaken, as it were, the augmented,
elevated, and hyperbolic dimensions that operate in and through both of
them. It is perhaps easy to understand (or to misunderstand) what the “sur”
of “surpouvoir” refers to or modifies, even if it is by no means identical to
what used to be called superpowers (in French, superpuissances, back in the
good old days when there were more than one of those), and what we
may think of today in the power and superpower-saturated atmosphere we

live and breathe – or merely watch, perhaps. But pouvoir and surpouvoir
aside, what is it exactly that the “sur” of “surveillance” signifies or modifies?
(Szendy 2007). What is it that it comes to affect or fashion?
The etymology of the English word “surveillance” is, interestingly enough,
French, though the word evidently finds its origins in the Latin vigilo, vigilare,
which also gives us the word vigilance, common to English and French. In
French, at any rate, the word surveillance comes from “veiller”, meaning to
guard or to watch, to watch over and watch out; to exercise one’s attention
or one’s caution or indeed, to watch over someone else’s behaviour, to
keep an eye on them; to oversee and supervise. Primarily though, and just
like its Latin antecedent, veiller refers to being or staying awake and aware,
to keep vigil in the sense of postponing sleep, refraining or altogether abstain-
ing from sleep. One engages in this kind of practice, this kind of veille or wake,
or indeed, vigil, in relation to the sick or, obviously, to the dead. One keeps
watch, one wakes, over them. Generally, the word has something to do
with an extension of wakefulness (éveil or réveil), an extension and an intensi-
fication of awareness or watchfulness, of vigilance. Not unlike surpouvoir, then,
with its augmenting and elevating prefix, the word surveillance would thus
suggest a kind of hyperbolic attention or wakefulness (one that is hardly
dented by the increasingly popular “sousveillance”). More than a negation
of sleep, it would designate its extreme and heightened opposite, a state
where sleep becomes close to impossible or even implausible, a state, if
you will, of insomnia. The society of surveillance, to which Foucault awoke
us (or awoke us again) and in which we live, may or may not stand in (histori-
cal) opposition to a sovereign, and hyperbolic, surpouvoir, but it has every-
thing to do with our current understanding (or is it over-standing?), with
the state of our extended awareness, and with our sleeplessness. And if Mar-
shall McLuhan was correct in understanding media (and among them,
weapons) as “extensions of man”, then surveillance, the vigilant ubiquity of
supervision, must surely be conceived as a medium, an extension, and it is
one to be reckoned with. Indeed, Gary Marx ascribes to “the new surveillance”
precisely such an extended character. The new surveillance, he writes, “tends
to be more intensive, [it] is extensive, extends the senses … and cognitive
abilities” (2015, 735). Surveillance thus would signal the extension (and, as
we shall also see, the extinction) of our most prized possession – our con-
sciousness, our conscious awareness. It constitutes, by Marshall McLuhan’s
account at least, a kind of ultimate weapon (2013).
Yet, if it has been broadly recognized that surveillance is a weapon – a
hunting, warring or ruling weapon – that it is structured like a weapon (“the
biometric system is the absolute political weapon of our era”, insists Nitzan
Lebovic), it remains unclear what consequences such recognition might
bring, what reflections might ensue (2015, 853). There is here, to a surprising
6 G. ANIDJAR
extent, a largely uncharted territory. For surveillance, scholars have largely

neglected the military dimension of their subject, despite their recognition
of its foundational importance (Wilson 2012, 269, but see Dandeker 1990
and Graham 2010). By the same token, “little discussion has connected surveil-
lance, intelligence and military security”, and security studies at large (Bigo
2012, 281; and see Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). For my part, by underscoring,
in a military or, more broadly, hoplological context, the link between sleep
(or sleeplessness), wakefulness and surveillance, and by considering surveil-
lance, after McLuhan, as the hyperbolic and weaponized extension of our con-
scious awareness, I mean first of all to echo Jonathan Crary’s study of “late
capitalism and the ends of sleep”, which opens by looking at military and
scientific efforts “to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep

and to function productively and efficiently” (2013, 2). Crary also explains
that sleeplessness and surveillance, the extension of wakeful awareness, is
not something that is targeting the individual alone, or even primarily. In
fact, the incessant surveillance of the individual belongs to the macro struc-
ture of state terror and “the military-police paradigm of full-spectrum domi-
nance” (32). Along this political line, Crary mentions the US Air Force aptly
coded “Operation Gorgon State”, which is “a collection of surveillance and
data-analysis resources that ‘sees’ unblinkingly 24/7, indifferent to day,
night, or weather, and that is lethally oblivious to the specificity of the
living being it targets” (32). One of the names for this general situation is, I
have suggested, insomnia. It is in this context that Crary briefly attends
to the striking reflections on insomnia that were offered by Emmanuel
Levinas.
Dormio, Ergo Sum

Towards an understanding of surveillance as the intense overextension of
wakeful awareness, and its significance as a weapon (subjects are being
destroyed), and an Islamophobic weapon at that, Levinas hardly seems the
best or most obvious choice. And yet, notwithstanding his assertions on Pales-
tinians (Anidjar 2003, chap. 1) and the dramatic transformation of his views on
insomnia over the course of his philosophical career – a transformation that
has been brilliantly analysed by Elisabeth Weber in a recent essay (Weber
2015) – I want to argue that Levinas (who did offer the thought that “being
reveals itself as war to philosophical thought” and that “war is produced as
the pure experience of pure being” [1979, 21]) is singularly attentive to a
different modality of power – surpouvoir and surveillance – than Foucault.
Aside from the repressive or the productive, we might provisionally call this
modality a kind of sous-pouvoir. For we must remember that, through the
layers of elevated and elevating prefixes, what is persistently inscribed and
reinscribed is that we – we underpowered underdogs, we subjects – would
find ourselves under surveillance. Listen, then, to the contemporary relevance

of Levinas’ words, words of vigilance and on vigilance, from the late 1940s.
“This time it is not a matter of an imagined experience”, writes Levinas
([1947] 1987, 48, 1991, 27).
Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish – that is,
that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which
one is held. Vigilance without end. From the moment one is riveted there,
one loses all notion of a starting or finishing point.
Insomnia is vigilance without end, it imposes itself as an unwanted but ines-

capable watch, yet it is also an infinite exposure, the target or object, that “to
which one is held” without recourse or “way of withdrawing”. Insomnia is

therefore suffered “without end”. This state of wakefulness “without possible
recourse to sleep”, is a vigilance “without refuge in unconsciousness, without
the possibility of withdrawing into sleep as into a private domain”, and it cor-
responds, for Levinas, to a primordial experience of being, which insomnia
singularly reveals (49). Insomnia is a sur-veillance, the elevated and hyperbolic
extension of wakefulness. It answers, if one can put it this way, to the unmiti-
gated horror of being, what Levinas calls the il y a (an idiomatic phrase that is
itself badly, if somehow unavoidably, translated as “there is”). I will not expand
on the critical (and persecutory) sense of Being that operates through Levinas’
work, but I do want to insist on a particular, and particularly striking, moment
of his argument about insomnia and the “there is”, where he asserts – Simon
Morgan Wortham calls it an “extraordinary claim” (Morgan Wortham 2013,
102) – that “existing is affirmed in its own annihilation” (Levinas [1947]
1987, 48). What could that mean? In this early text, Levinas does not elaborate
much further. He only says that this state of overextended wakefulness, this
hyperconsciousness is, in a way, the opposite of subjectivity, bringing about
a kind of annihilation. It puts an end, as it were, to the self. “This existing is
not an in-itself [en-soi], which is already peace; it is precisely the absence of
all self, a without-self [sans-soi]” (49).
Another text, also published by Levinas in 1947, elaborates further on sub-
jectlessness, the annihilation and anonymity of the veille, of the vigil and the
wake. “La veille est anonyme, wakefulness is anonymous,” Levinas says there
([1947] 1993, 111, 2001, 66). There is no such thing as “my vigilance”, then,
strictly no subject thereof. “It is not that there is my vigilance in the night;
in insomnia it is the night itself that watches.” In this “impersonal vigilance”,
in the “anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being”,
which is insomnia, Levinas sees not simply “an experience of nothingness”
(65), but an “experience of depersonalization”, something that ultimately pre-
cedes or brings about “the dissipation of personages” (66). That which is, what
Levinas calls the “there is”, occurs therefore as “an impossibility, an opposition
to possibilities of sleep, relaxation, drowsiness, absence”. But how could this
8 G. ANIDJAR
be construed as an annihilation of existence? Of the subject? Are not subjec-

tivity and consciousness synonymous with awareness, with wakeful aware-
ness? Not so, for Levinas. What insomnia reveals, what vigilance as it were
establishes, is that “the ego is swept away by the fatality of being … Attention
presupposes the freedom of the ego which directs it; the vigilance of insomnia
which keeps our eyes open has no subject” (65). That is how Levinas can
oppose wakefulness (la veille) to consciousness (la conscience). To be sure,
consciousness does “participate” in wakefulness, it has a share in it, but that
only “means that it has already torn into it. [Consciousness] contains a
shelter from that being with which, depersonalized, we make contact in
insomnia” (66). To the extent that I suffer from insomnia, then, or more accu-
rately, to the extent that I am in insomnia, “I am, one might say, the object
rather than the subject of an anonymous thought.” Surely, this experience
of being an object is still something, Levinas says. I am, after all, aware of this
anonymous vigilance; but I become aware of it in a movement in which the I is
already detached from the anonymity, in which the limit situation of impersonal
vigilance is reflected in the ebbing of a consciousness which abandons it. (66)
To the extent that there is vigilance, there might remain a trace of conscious-
ness, but it is only a trace, a vanishing where, as we saw earlier, “existing is
affirmed in its own annihilation”. That is why insomnia is a weapon of mass
destruction. At the very least, it “puts us in a situation where the disruption
of the category of the substantive designates not only the disappearance of
every object, but the extinction of the subject” (67). In a state of constant vig-
ilance, “amid the near-dissolution of the very terrain of objects and selves”
(as Morgan Wortham aptly puts it), there are no subjects (2013, 100). “But
then”, asks Levinas, “what does the advent of a subject consist in?” (2001, 67)
Before answering this question, let me remark here on the uncanny way in
which, about 15 years after Levinas began his meditations on vigilance and
insomnia, Foucault also turned away from history and periodization as he
undertook to reflect on the word “veille” (translated as “vigil” or “watch”).
Foucault went on to explain that the word “evokes, first of all, sleeplessness;
it’s the body withdrawn but tense, the mind at attention at its four corners,
on watch” (Foucault 2015, 218). More important, though, is the destructive,
desubjectifying moment to which Foucault points in strikingly Levinasian
terms. Describing “the acute faceless vigilance” found in the work he was
commenting on (The Watch, that is, La veille, written in 1963 by Roger
Laporte), Foucault writes that “nobody keeps vigil on this watch: no conscious-
ness more lucid than that of the sleeping, no subjectivity singularly worried.
It’s the vigil itself that keeps vigil [ce qui veille, c’est la veille]” (218).
It seems clear that, in Levinas and in this Foucault at least, we are led to
think of surveillance, of the watch or the vigil, of the wakeful awareness to
which insomnia testifies, in a way that is dramatically distinct from the
processes, formations, histories and trajectories of subjectivation familiar to us

from elsewhere, and first of all from Foucault’s own work on surveillance and
discipline. If anything, as he sets out to answer the question of the subject’s
advent, Levinas describes surveillance – for Levinas’ entire lexicon here is a
lexicon of surveillance from wakefulness to vigilance, from watch to night-
watch – as a radical, and anonymous process of de-subjectivation, of deper-
sonalization. Just as surveillance is itself anonymous, we might say that it
also anonymizes. It is impersonal through and through. It is never a person
or a somebody who watches in the “there is” of being, in being as vigilance.
Nor quite a subject that is being watched. Rather it is the night that watches.
One might even say, “it watches, ça veille” or “ça surveille”. Il y a, or there is,
surveillance.
Levinas had acknowledged, in Time and the Other, that it might seem “para-
doxical to characterize the ‘there is’ by vigilance, as if the pure event of exist-
ing were endowed with a consciousness”. But, Levinas goes on,
it is necessary to ask if vigilance defines consciousness, or if consciousness is not
indeed rather the possibility of tearing itself away from vigilance, if the proper
meaning of consciousness does not consist in being a vigilance backed
against a possibility of sleep, if the feat of the ego is not the power to leave
the situation of impersonal vigilance. (51)
Consciousness, the advent of the subject, can therefore only be found, Levinas
reveals in a singular reversal of the entire philosophical tradition, in sleep.
“What characterizes [consciousness] particularly is its always retaining the
possibility of withdrawing ‘behind’ to sleep.” Ultimately, then, “consciousness
is the power to sleep” (51). A challenging thought indeed, to which Levinas
provides further clarification when he elsewhere writes that
consciousness appears to stand out against the there is by its ability to forget and
interrupt it, by its ability to sleep. Consciousness is a mode of being, but, in
taking up being, it is a hesitation in being. It thus gives itself a dimension of
retreat. (Levinas 2001, 67)
I sleep, therefore I am. And consciousness must, therefore, not be thought in

opposition to the unconscious. It “is not constituted by the opposition, but by
this proximity, this communication with its contrary: in its very élan conscious-
ness becomes fatigued and interrupts itself, has a recourse against itself … It
never finds itself up against the wall” (67).
As I mentioned, and as Elisabeth Weber demonstrates, Levinas did, quite
dramatically, change his mind on the relation between the terms, between
vigilance, insomnia, and the ethical (non-) subject. But the passages I have
quoted, aside from the uncanny prescience they manifest, are remarkable
in their diagnostic precision with regard to what it means to find oneself in
a state of permanent vigilance and surveillance, the general condition of
24/7 wakeful alertness and exposure that Crary describes so compellingly.
10 G. ANIDJAR
There is much to reflect on and further ponder obviously, beginning perhaps

with the notion that surveillance was always already the new media, that as an
“extension of man”, as McLuhan had it, it is also, and blatantly so, the ultimate
weapon. As the depersonalizing and annihilating force Levinas describes, and
well beyond its historical innovations and military uses, surveillance is
undoubtedly a weapon, a means of inscription and of destruction. But is it
an extension of man? It is an instrument, a technological extension, yes, but
in whose hands exactly? And directed at whom? The generalized anonymity
that Levinas insists upon raises a peculiar conundrum as we reflect on the mili-
tarization of our existence – or nonexistence. In the age of the world target, as
Rey Chow so pointedly calls it, is there a subject of surveillance? (2006). Does
there remain one? How do we think the anonymization to which Levinas

alerts us (in a way that, again, might give pause to our usual reading of Fou-
cault), the waning existence of the subject “in its own annihilation”, together
with the urgency of addressing, under its heading, the clear and present tar-
geting of Muslims the world over?
It might be possible to move closer to the problem by engaging with its
technical lexicon, and by returning to what happened to the opposition of sur-
pouvoir and surveillance in Foucault’s text. I suggested early on that it was an
oversight of sorts. The ambiguity of that word summarizes what I am trying to
argue, as it signifies both a kind of attentive supervision and “the action of
passing over something without seeing or noticing it; the unintentional
failure to notice or act on something; the fact of having been overlooked or
neglected in this way; negligence, inadvertence” (OED). There is a comparable
ambiguity in the difference between “two models of privacy”, which Philip
Agre describes, a difference placed under the heading of two different
terms, namely, surveillance and capture (Agre 1994). That ambiguity might
be said to begin today in the dual use of the word “information”. As Agre
explains, that term too
conceals a significant ambiguity. One the one hand, information can be defined
… as a purely mathematical measure of information and information-carrying
capacity, without regard for the content. On the other hand, information is infor-
mation also about something (A similar point applies to customary uses of the
term “data”). (107)
To disregard the content is to perform an oversight. To gather information (to

surveil, that is) and to make it actionable, to make it about something or
someone – that is oversight too, but in that other sense. Now, Agre insists on
the metaphorical dimension of the operative terms (“the capture model is a phi-
losophical metaphor”, he asserts, somehow peremptorily, while “the surveil-
lance model is a political metaphor” [107]). Yet, he also acknowledges that
these very terms hark back to a hunting lexicon, returning us to the matter of
weapons, or at least to “tracking” as the primary dimension of both models
(“Computationalists’ discourse rarely brings to the surface the connotations of

violence in the metaphor of ‘capture’: captured information is not spoken of
as fleeing, escaping, or resenting its imprisonment” [106]). More importantly, I
think, Agre illuminates the processes of de-subjectivation at work in any
system of tracking, the fundamental disconnection at work between the
system of supervision (or indeed oversight) and the subjects or objects of its
attention. Thus, although one might “distinguish between systems that track
human beings and systems that track physical objects”, this distinction would
be, Agre says, “misleading” since “many of the systems track both people and
objects, and others track objects as stand-ins for people. A system that tracks
people by means of identification cards, for example, is really tracking the
cards” (104). What this ultimately means is that our model of representation,
when it comes to surveillance (or, for that matter, capture) is, well, represen-
tational. It assumes a correspondence between that which is tracked – say,
the person – and that which enables the tracking – the ID card (and consider
what Mayanthi Fernando 2014 tells us about those called “Muslims” in France
and elsewhere). Some operation must close the loop, bridge the distance,
“between the tracked entity and the centralized system” (Agre 1994, 104). As
Agre summarizes it, “some entity changes state, a computer internally rep-
resents those states, and certain technical and social means are provided for
(intendedly at least) maintaining the correspondence between the represen-
tation and the reality” (104). This, you might say, is how anyone killed by a
drone is always already a (dead) “militant”. The strike closes a loop (unless it is
collateral damage), a loop that is always already broken (the idea of skin
embedded chips also gives rise to “a grisly scenario in which identification
can be removed from their owners”, in which case, it is the chips, and not the
persons, that “will become very valuable”) (Michael, Fusco, and Michael 2008,
1197). The point here is that the distance between the ID card (or the label “ter-
rorist”) and the tracking system can only remain an open one, which is to say
that there must exist “some means of consistently ‘attaching’ a given entity
to its corresponding representation” (105). Agre goes on to argue that to under-
stand our current predicament, capture might thus be a better model, or an
enriching metaphor, because it is more obviously sociotechnical. “If a capture
system ‘works’”, he explains, “then what is working is a larger sociopolitical struc-
ture, not just a technical system” (112). Beyond the machinery, what is at stake
are “grammars of action” (107), an entire network of practices (“the empirical
project of analysis, the ontological project of articulation, and the social
project of imposition”) that must be remaking the world in which surveillance
and capture operate (113).
What matters in each case is not the sequence of “inputs” to or “outputs” from a
given machine, but rather the ways in which human activities have been struc-
tured. The capture model describes the situation that results when grammars of
12 G. ANIDJAR
action are imposed upon human activities, and when the newly reorganized
activities are represented in computers in real time. (109)
Surveiller et détruire
“A new way of seeing is giving rise to a way of constructing”, writes Michel de
Certeau, who also underscores the constructive and the productive in his dis-
cussion of divine surveillance. “Such is the question Nicholas of Cusa poses:
what does it mean to ‘see’? how can a ‘vision’ bring a new world into
being?” (De Certeau 1987, 3) Following Mohamed Zayani, one might here
translate and transition with de Certeau (and with Foucault) towards the four-
teenth-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa (incidentally a major figure in the

late medieval Christian confrontation with Islam) (see e.g. Levi, George-Tvrtko-
vić, and Duclow 2014). For what happens in the surveillance society, in the
permanent state of vigilance so powerfully diagnosed by Levinas, seems an
old-new world indeed, and a peculiar staging of an otherwise well-known
script of interpellation (Zayani 2008). Subjects emerge when they are no
longer relevant, identifications proliferate at the moment of their vanishing.
Means of inscription and of destruction. Thus, de Certeau explains that “the
gaze abolishes every position that would guarantee the traveler an acceptable
place, an autonomous and sheltering dwelling, an objective ‘home’” (1987,
20). But this is less about the gaze as such, than it is about surveillance as
the kind of weapon McLuhan described, a weapon that takes one out of
place, that takes one out. Contra Zayani, who argues that the surveillance
here described does “not allow for the existence of ‘a no-man’s gaze’”
(Zayani 2008, 94), Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli phrases the matter more precisely:
for “while you might feel singled out, you realize that this eye calls for a
‘you’, not as an individual subject under suspicion … .[W]hen it targets ‘you’
as a participant, it does so impersonally” (Ravetto-Biagioli 2010, 122).
It would be pointless to argue that the “political technology of the body”
Foucault taught is about anything else than assujetissement, subjectivation
(Foucault 1977, 24, 26). Yet, it is remarkable that there is a profound duality
at the heart of the subject hereby produced, “both a productive body and a
subjected body” (26). Foucault strikingly evokes this dédoublement, the dupli-
cation of the body of the condemned as a parallel, indeed, as a division and a
duplication of the body of the king made famous by Ernst Kantorowicz
(“The King is Dead! Long Live the King!” as the formula has it). There would
be, Foucault tells us, a production apparatus, un appareil de production,
which gave rise to new forms of subjectivity, and which also produced new
concepts. “On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed
and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, con-
sciousness, etc” (29). There is no mistaking the productive and constructive
dimension Foucault describes, the reality-effect that results from the enabling
reaches of power (“we no longer need to ask about the aims of political
regimes”, complains Martin Harries, “they are ‘in the business’ of making sub-
jects” [2007, 15]). And what about the business of destruction? Beyond the
“various concepts” Foucault invokes, is it always “a real man, the object of
knowledge, philosophical reflection, or technical intervention”, that is at
stake? It is, rather, “the effect of a subjection” (Foucault 1977, 30). Surveillance,
“the mastery that power exercises over the body”, would therefore not be the
mere tool Foucault describes. It would be a weapon. The prison (and the guil-
lotine) would be its alternate figures, the soul its instrument. “The soul is the
effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body”
(30). Of course, much depends on what a prison is, or does; on what surveil-
lance is, does, or on what it undoes.

There are, in any case, numerous tools, instruments and indeed weapons in
Foucault’s account, many of which are less coercive, less productive and con-
structive even, than has otherwise emerged. What I wish to underscore as I
approach my conclusion is that, perhaps between the lines of his history of
surveillance, Foucault is also teaching us about another history, which
would not follow the same periodization or the same productive vectors: it
is the history of destruction, the history of means of destruction. Here, the
subject is less a product than a cog (or, we will soon see, a bullet), less a
target than a side effect, collateral damage (Masco 2013).
Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles,
power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-
weapon, a body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from
those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products,
forms of expression or the result of labour. (Foucault 1977, 153)
And though, Deleuze-like, Foucault insists on the ways in which the body is
plugged into a machine, an “apparatus of production”, much of what he
describes, beginning with military grounds and fields of operation, would
be more aptly rendered as an apparatus of destruction. There is, at the very
least, a lack of completion that, when it comes to the ubiquitous subject,
suggests an unfinished product, a non-achievement that is also an achève-
ment, the bringing about of death and of destruction. “Exercise, having
become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration,
does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a subjection that never
reaches completion [un assujetissement qui n’a jamais fini de s’achever]”
(162). Phrased otherwise, “troops were used as a projectile, a wall or a fortress”
(162). Weapons making weapons. Or undoing them. Part of an apparatus of
destruction (and its ever growing business arm), in the surveillance society
the subject is at once target and weapon. Much more and no more than a
marginal, and vanishing, object.
14 G. ANIDJAR
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsi-
bility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon
himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously
plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (202–203)
It is this duality at the heart of power that renders it “a technique of overlap-

ping subjection and objectification” (305), at once inscription and destruction.
Thus, just like the drill of the soldier and other technologies of power, the
examination of the pupil or of the future administrator is made to “manifest
the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification
of those who are subjected” (184–185). Surveillance, in this perspective, is
not only about “emitting signs of potency”, about power “imposing its mark
on its subjects” (187). It is also a technique by which power holds its targets
“in a mechanism of objectification” (187). Truly, “power produces; it produces
reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and
the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (194).
But power also destroys (Vahabi 2004).
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a
subject in communication” (Foucault 1977, 200). Whether “a madman, a
patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy”, or indeed a
Muslim, the object of information trapped in the panoptical apparatus (“visi-
bility is a trap”, says Foucault) is no doubt individualized. Is he, however, a
subject? I have been arguing that the destruction of subjectivity begins on
the “side” of power. As a form of power, meant to be “permanent in its
effects”, surveillance is (about being) marked for disappearance. It is “the
perfection of power”, yes, but it should also “tend to render its actual exer-
cise unnecessary” (201). What Foucault describes as “the automatic function
of power” is very much a machine, therefore, a piece of technology, but it is
one that is meant for destruction, for auto-destruction. At the very least, it is
a machine that works to discard its operator, “a machine for creating and
sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it”
(201). That is why surveillance must be understood as a mechanism, “an
important mechanism” that “automatizes and disindividualizes power”
(202). And that is why “it does not matter who exercises power. Any individ-
ual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine”. It could be one,
anyone, no one or even many. In fact, “the more numerous those anon-
ymous and temporary observers are”, the more effective power will be
(202, emphasis added). But if this structure of power, this machine, “pro-
duces homogeneous effects of power”, it is also because, however paradoxi-
cally, it generates anonymity, disindividuality, ephemerality. Power passes
over to the other side (“The efficiency of power, its constraining force
have, in a sense, passed over to the other side – to the side of its surface
of application”, 202) and with it begins the destruction of the subject into
anonymity.
We have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the func-
tions of surveillance … any member of society … an observer may observe, at a
glance, so many different individuals, [which] also enables everyone to come
and observe any of the observers. (207)
This generalization of anonymity (“its vocation was to become a generalized

function”, 207) is the destruction of the subject, destruction as an internaliz-
ation of power, which throws off “its physical weight; it tends to the non-cor-
poral” (203). There is indeed an exhaustive, and exhausting, dimension to
surveillance, a process of extinction, akin to what happened after Napoleon’s
death, when
the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily
spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily
exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting
gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun. (217)
What Foucault describes as “generalized surveillance” (209), for which he

deploys an insistent lexicon of production (e.g. “the individual is carefully fab-
ricated”, 217, “submissive subjects are produced”, 295), is also the generalized
destruction of the face (a Levinasian moment, if there is one). Surveillance is a
weapon, and it is definitely aimed at Muslims today. But it is something else
than a mere instance of power as productive, of subjectivation. Foucault knew
it and wrote of that “instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent sur-
veillance … It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole
social body into a field of perception … mobile attentions ever on the alert”
(214), the hyperbolic oversight of subjectless insomnia.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude to James Renton for the invitation to the conference he organized, the
participants for their questions and comments, the MESAAS Colloquium at Columbia,
Max Shmookler, Henny Ziai, in particular, as well as Seda Gürses, Joris van Hoboken,
and Mana Kia for their thoughts and attentive responses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors
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Oversight: Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Is surveillance a weapon? Does it have a destructive dimension, destructive

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 May 2016; Accepted 20 June 2017

KEYWORDS Surveillance; insomnia; Foucault; Levinas; weapons; Islamophobia

Confronting the problem of surveillance and Islamophobia, the authors of a

CONTACT Gil Anidjar ga152@columbia.edu

struggles against particular manifestations of surveillance, as important as they

Between general and collective subjects and privacy, between “every

constructed, or produced subjects, about which I have written elsewhere, or

French words that, though articulated in opposition to each other by Foucault

may think of today in the power and superpower-saturated atmosphere we

extent, a largely uncharted territory. For surveillance, scholars have largely

scientific efforts “to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep

Dormio, Ergo Sum

find ourselves under surveillance. Listen, then, to the contemporary relevance

Insomnia is vigilance without end, it imposes itself as an unwanted but ines-

which one is held” without recourse or “way of withdrawing”. Insomnia is

be construed as an annihilation of existence? Of the subject? Are not subjec-

processes, formations, histories and trajectories of subjectivation familiar to us

I sleep, therefore I am. And consciousness must, therefore, not be thought in

There is much to reflect on and further ponder obviously, beginning perhaps

there remain one? How do we think the anonymization to which Levinas

To disregard the content is to perform an oversight. To gather information (to

(“Computationalists’ discourse rarely brings to the surface the connotations of

teenth-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa (incidentally a major figure in the

lance is, does, or on what it undoes.

It is this duality at the heart of power that renders it “a technique of overlap-

This generalization of anonymity (“its vocation was to become a generalized

What Foucault describes as “generalized surveillance” (209), for which he

Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Quadrige/PressesUniversitaires de

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