An exception of one: Deeming the grammar of Canadian national security certificates intelligible.

摘要

This project develops an effect-based interpretive methodology that views Canadian national security discourse as a "grammar" or a discursive schema of intelligibility. Reading statutes, regulations, House Debates, Cabinet Summaries, and media interviews as the "texts" produced from this grammar, it argues that the recurrence of "sentences" serves to normalize national security measures (like national security certificates) as necessary to the nation-state, through the interplay of intrasubjective and intersubjective apperceptive processes. Arguing that "intelligibility" is the hinge between logic and discourse, and that "affect" is a mode of statecraft which yokes events to perceptions and attitudes, it sets out an "alternative genealogy" of security certificates. Countering government and critical claims that certificates emerged in 1978, it considers five antecedent certificates and in particular the certificate within the Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act, 1970, in order to recontextualize the contemporary certificate as a discursive "tactic" that serves to consolidate "deeming" as a form of political judgement and turns the state of exception into a mechanism that operates on individuals.;Keywords: Foucault, Gadamer, Cavell, Butler, Canada, post-structuralism, national security, apperception, affect, intelligibility, grammar, deeming, political judgement, effective history, genealogy, security certificates, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act, War Measures Act, National Defence Act, Defence of Canada Regulations, state of emergency, state of exception, equivocation.