ABSTRACT
A line between 'acts of God', as the insurance companies like to call them, and the effects of human action on the various 'environments', 'ecologies' and 'systems' in which they act is never easy to draw. Nevertheless, insurance companies are not alone in insisting that the line must be drawn. It is unlikely that people trying to work on immediate and concrete problems of the kind that can be framed as the protection of nature can afford to tolerate either form of arrogance. It is in this context that it is worth reflecting both on what was at stake in those claims about 'national security' that dominated all discourses about the relation between a politics of protection and claims about political subjectivity for much of the twentieth century. Modern political life is constructed as a project of securing modern citizens as subjects in a way that excludes the very possibility of a human being, a humanity.
