Bad Cops and True Detectives: The Horror of Police and the Unthinkable World

• In Event: Visualizing Crime, Policing and Evidence

Abstract

The acclaimed HBO series True Detective has drawn critical attention to Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world and the subject’s relation to it. For Thacker, there is the human centered world in which we live—the world-for-us—a world difficult to escape because it is we human beings who think of it. Thacker also understands that the world “bites back” and resists or ignores humanity’s attempts to mold it. This already existing natural state—the world-in-itself— is beyond the reach of human interference, or returns following it. Of greatest interest to Thacker however, is a third dimension, an unthinkable world-without-us that exists beyond the subject and sociality and beyond disaster and extinction. This paper is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative realism into a critique of the police power. Where police is vital to sustaining the world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation, the limitations, failures or horrors of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. However, a critical reading of True Detective and other cultural texts reveals that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable from law and order, the police power is thus never beyond redemption. What is rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological supposition—a world-without-police—as it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the outer limits of human thought.

Author

• Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University