Securitati perpetuae Death, fear and the history of insecurity Mark Neocleous If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads. … With true instinct the ancients put on their tombstones: Securitati perpetuae. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, Vol. II (1859). It’s not clear whether in making this statement Schopen- hauer had in mind the satirical inscription to which Kant refers at the beginning of his 1795 essay on peace. The inscription in question, ‘The Perpetual Peace’, is said by Kant to have been seen on a Dutch innkeeper’s signboard along with the image of a graveyard. In an essay known for its argument for a global community of lawful states and the implicit idea that such a community will lead to ‘peace’, Kant begins by hinting that perpetual peace really comes only with death: you will get peace when you fnally ‘rest in peace’, but in the meantime you should commit to law. We might also observe that Kant’s title Zum ewigen Frieden could easily be translated as ‘Towards Eternal Peace’ rather than the standard ‘On Perpetual Peace’, an alternative that has very different connota- tions indeed, especially given that just a year previously Kant had written an essay called ‘The End of All Things’ (1794) which begins with the image of a dying person passing from historical time into eternity. The politics of perpetual peace in Kant’s essay, then, perhaps really requires us to think about death rather than law. In that sense, Schopenhauer’s twist with per- petual security might simply be a cheeky nod towards Kant. But Schopenhauer was not known for his cheeki- ness, and although, philosophically speaking, his sugges- tion that the ancients might have got it right in putting Securitati perpetuae on their tombstones is unremarkable, politically the idea is completely antithetical to security’s status as the supreme concept of bourgeois society, to the extent that the claim might appear as nothing less than scandalous. Borrowing Marx’s astute formulation that security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society, I have for some time been arguing that a critique of security needs to be central to critical theory, not least because of the role security plays in the fabrication of social order and the pacifcation of political subjects. 1 The extent to which the security industry constantly bombards us with its double-sided message – ‘more security with the next security measure’, the interminable message from the state; ‘better security with the next security product’, the interminable message from capital – is obvious. Equally obvious is the way that obedient subjects are created through these products and measures. In this regard, security is pacifcation. 2 But what does this have to do with death? Towards the end of his short book The Loneliness of the Dying (1982), Norbert Elias connects some of his earlier arguments about the civilising process as a pro- cess of pacifcation to the question of death, and makes the following comment: The greater pacifcation of developed industrial states and the marked advance of the embarrassment threshold in the face of violence gives rise in these societies to a usu- ally tacit but noticeable antipathy of the living towards the dying … Thus, a higher level of internal pacifcation also contributes to the aversion towards death, or more precisely towards the dying. So does a higher level of civilising restraint. 3 Where pacifcation in his earlier work was examined through the shift in practices and behaviours, turning once dangerous territories into spaces of security, Elias RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.06 / Winter 2019 19