Waiting Zones

A tremendous temporal shift has turned upside down the world currently rearranged and governed by the winning capitalism. This shift has resulted precisely in the punitive turn operated by the bifurcated state, as studied by Loïc Wacquant. There are two waiting zones: one aims to discipline the social insecurity fueled by the distress of unqualified labor; and the other poisons the perpetual excitement of the new comfortable classes that are simultaneously cherished and abused by capitalism. The main form of intervention in the name of order employed by the contemporary war derives from a punitive turn ruled by excess, from the Shock and Awe strategy to the surgical arsenal designed to imprint the perennial memory of pain in the minds of preferred targets, who are once again spread through liminal populations in the contemporary world-border—considering border as any kind of obstacle in a (social, economic, symbolical, etc.) no-man’s land where the dead weight of the punitive power has been awakened by the new Workfare States.

Originally published in 2012 as a chapter in Vera Malaguti Batista (Org.). Loïc Wacquant e a questão penal no capitalismo neoliberal. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, p. 229-280; and then as a chapter in Paulo Arantes. O novo tempo do mundo. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014, p.141-198.

Keywords: State of Exception, Loïc Wacquant, Giorgio Agamben, Labor, Incarceration, Refugees, Geopolitics, Contemporaneity, Capitalism, Waiting horizon, Ernst Bloch, Occupied territories, Palestine.