Chapter Five - Necropolitical Law, Necropolitical Culture

Summary

Chapter 5 analyzes Eye in the Sky, a 2016 film on drone warfare, to illuminate popular culture’s role in scripting us into being as spectator-consumers while legitimizing the counterterror state’s discounting of life through necropolitical law. The gripping plot, stellar performances, and dazzling displays of technology distract us from, first, the de-democratizing and dehumanizing concealments and erasures that accompany drone warfare and, second, the remaking of lawful authority through a dramatization of the (highly contested) principle of international law known as “the responsibility to protect.” In the process, the film renders visible a particular set of actors, narratives, and questions, while concealing and erasing others, thereby legitimizing drone warfare and valorizing its actors, institutions, practices, and technologies. As text, Eye in the Sky is an instance of the “cultural sensibility … in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play” (Mbembe 2019: 73). Given the official secrecy accompanying drone warfare and the film’s convincing incorporation of “fact” into its “fiction,” Eye in the Sky amounts to a compelling representation of the necessity of drone warfare as enacted by lawful military actors with the aim of securing civilians worldwide.