Memories of Security
By: Chris Zebrowski
A review of Charlotte Heath Kelly’s Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite (2017:
Manchester University Press)
Critical Security Studies
Introduction
Security, one might think, concerns efforts to anticipate and prevent dangerous events from happening.
It is the process of ensuring safety and predictability. It is the promise of managing to control the future.
In Death and Security (2017) Heath-Kelly encourages us to consider the ways in which memory is also
being increasingly implicated in contemporary security practice. Bucking a recent trend in security
studies that has focused on the relation between security, anticipation and futurity, Heath-Kelly’s book
shines a light on the ways in which security is also increasingly invested in the control and management
of how past events are represented. Through an extensive study of memorials erected in the wake of
bomb attacks, Death and Security investigates the evolution of the ontological relationship between
death and security through deep empirical investigations of a selection of international cases, including
the World Trade Centre in New York, the 7/7 bombings in London, the Norwegian sites targeted by
Anders Breivik and the Bali bombsite. In drawing our attention to the ways in which collective memory
has increasingly become a target of contemporary security policies, Death and Security compels us to
rethink our assumptions about the discrete temporalities through which security operates today.
For Heath-Kelly the management of death anxiety is the end of sovereignty: its objective as well as its
potential undoing. Drawing on a diverse selection of intellectual resources from the sociology of death,
psychoanalysis and phenomenology, Heath-Kelly traces the historical evolution of this relationship.
Death anxiety, it is argued, is an aporia driving the production of a wide range of social structures,
including language, culture, religion and politics. These systems develop in an effort to cover up the
foundational absence representing by mortality: sublimating death anxiety by providing a semblance of
purpose, meaning and permanence. With the advent of Modernity, the modern State came to displace
the Church as anxiety manager-in-chief. The co-evolution of rationalism and secular authority marked a
profound transfiguration in the symbolic management of death. Security developed as a “a technique of
mortality effacement” (176) that “function[ed] to displace, the anxiety of mortality – which would
otherwise disrupt the performance of sovereignty” (1). Yet, whilst death provided the State with its
raison d’Etat, the impossibility of achieving closure or resolution to this aporia ultimately served to
unsettle and undermine the claims to authority. The inability of the State to ultimately provide total
security, thus sealing the aporia of mortality, announced the limits of its power. The persistence of
mortality disrupted the claims to omnipotence and permanence made by the State. Security,
understood as much as an anticipatory disposition toward future ‘threat’ as it is a retrospective
technique deployed to quell social anxieties surrounding death, is thus deployed to tame these
destabilizing affects.
With the rise of resilience discourses, Heath-Kelly identities a distinct shift in the sovereign relation
between death and security. As has been well-established in biopolitical literatures, resilience strategies
