The vermin of the street: the politics of violence and the nomos of automobility

Abstract

Since the appearance of automobiles on public roads, violence has been a constant, intrinsic property of automobility. Carl Schmitt’s concept of a nomos, constructed on the basis of primordial, violent acts of land appropriation, equally describes the history and processes by which automobility has rhizomatically expanded across the globe to become a hegemonic mode of transportation and mobility. The nomos of automobility is a bracketed space wherein a permanent state of exception holds. On entering this space we are reduced to the status of what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as homo sacer: bare life who may be killed without homicide having been committed. The nomos of automobility is constitutive of the visible spatial order, not only of the bracketed space that is the road but the spatiality of the globe. It has transformed space and inscribed new modes of being within the lifeworlds of humans and other terrestrials.