ABSTRACT
This chapter grew from what was originally thought of as an ‘alternative reading’ of Foucault and Schmitt along the themes of order, territory and security. It is at no point the intention of this work to move point by point through all of the potential connections or disjunctions between the work of Schmitt and the work of Foucault.1 Nor is it my intention to recount and describe the original theories of either in complete or comprehensive detail; that task is left to others in this and other volumes. Here my aim is to offer an alternative reading of security, order and territory as themes that emerge in both Schmitt and Foucault; by doing so I aim to create a point of departure for rethinking how we understand the spatial order of ‘everyday life’ – used here, in a broad sense, to articulate how we understand normative relations that order the conduct of day-to-day activities. The tension between Schmitt’s anti-liberal critique of politics as indecisive, ordinary and fragile has a sharp, if notional, contrast with Foucault’s critique of neo-liberal politics as technically expert in refining the order of subject populations in everyday time and space.
