The world without outside

The world is all that there is. In the world, ontology and epistemology coincide. The thing and the perspective are part of it, scale is ingested in its multiplicity, communication stops at the world's edge. By reading together Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence and Niklas Luhmann's proto-global concept of Weltgesellschaft (“world society”), I suggest a conceptualisation of the world as the materiality of the multiple spaces of creation in an insular, all-inclusive immanence. Deprived of an outside, the world pushes its own understanding of circumference through, first, the expansion of its own limits through the process of worlding, and, second, the multiplication of modes of material (self-)production through its process of othering. Thus, the world swells up from the inside and expands on both the material and the semantic level, producing a multiplicity of fractal microcosms. Issues of responsibility and justice arise that are intricately linked to the materiality of the world and take place in and between the various bodies and spaces of the world but without an overarching hierarchy or principle. This approach is a way of counteracting the all-pervasive Hegelian understanding of synthesis, arguing instead for a plenitude that brims with positivity and that can never become fully complete. The world remains its own infinite process of worlding.

Tackling the terrorists: the experience of internment without trial in Northern Ireland

In August 1971, the devolved Stormont administration in Northern Ireland introduced internment without trial of those suspected of involvement in IRA terrorism. Ever since, the policy has been regarded as an abject failure. This article will reassess many of the key questions about internment: why did the Northern Ireland government introduce it when it did? Why did the Westminster government agree to a measure without parallel in British peacetime history? Why did it fail, when it had worked before? Was internment always doomed, or only because it was badly implemented? What was the alternative? How does the liberal democratic state defend itself against violent subversion without itself resorting to brutality and violence? This article is based on archival research in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and on interviews with former internees, politicians and civil servants, and former members of the security forces. It suggests that internment was a relatively humane and honest policy and might, in different circumstances, have spared Northern Ireland thirty years of murder and mayhem.