Governing ghosts: Race, incorporeality and difference in post-political times

Abstract

In this article we are not concerned with the management of extremists, but with the regulation of wider populations stereotyped as extreme based on the conflation of difference with politicality. Attempts to regulate racialized populations by excising the political surplus seen as constituting excessive Muslim difference are viewed in the context of a Muslim identity politics that places the ontology of the social into crisis by challenging the terms on which modernity’s racial projects subjectify actors. As seemingly non-racial, Muslims are represented as haunting, incorporeal and incomplete subjects. Islamophobia emerges as a corrective, racializing apparently incompletely racial subjects. Its success is underwritten by the attempts to deny the racist nature of Islamophobia. The shift from managing lawbreakers to stereotyping entire populations as extremists is central to this.