Purpose– Investments in the technologies of borders and their securitisation continue to be a focal point for many governments across the globe. This paper is concerned with a particular example of such technologies, namely, “Big Data” analytics. In the past two years, the technology of Big Data has gained a remarkable popularity within a variety of sectors, ranging from business and government to scientific and research fields. While Big Data techniques are often extolled as the next frontier for innovation and (...) productivity, they are also raising many ethical and political issues. The aim of this paper is to consider some of these issues and provide a critical reflection on the implications of using Big Data for the governance of borders.Design/methodology/approach– The author draws on the example of the new Big Data solution recently developed by IBM for the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. The system, which relies on data collected from Passenger Name Records, aims to facilitate and automate mechanisms of profiling enable the identification of “high-risk” travellers. It is argued that the use of such Big Data techniques risks augmenting the function and intensity of borders.Findings– The main concerns addressed here revolve around three key elements, namely, the problem of categorisation, the projective and predictive nature of Big Data techniques and their approach to the future and the implications of Big Data on understandings and practices of identity.Originality/value– By exploring these issues, the paper aims to contribute to the debates on the impact of information and communications technology-based surveillance in border management. (shrink)

This article explores the relationships between crime, collective responses to it, and the social production of so-called great criminals. It argues that crime, especially sexual and violent crime, produces significant imbalances in individuals habitually subject to instrumental actions, identitarian thinking and positive law. These imbalances are emotional as well as cognitive and, under certain conditions of communication, can generate states of multitude, that is, collective states linked to an intense affectivity and to the prevalence of mythic or symbolic thinking. These (...) states reach their limits and become condensed in the mytho-historical figure of the great criminal. In this sense, great criminals are a function of such multitudinous states: points of imputation that concentrate and catalyze the affective imagination unleashed by collective effervescence. (shrink)

Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, (...) remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika. Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari Kasparas Pocius Summary The article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death. The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu. There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization. Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics. (shrink)

This essay responds to Frederic Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson’s own model of allegorical reading the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Jameson’s central example of ‘bad’ allegory. While this novel is ‘bad’ for implying a one-to-one allegory between the plague infection and the occupation of France during World War Two or to the (...) human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the ‘immortality’ of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology. (shrink)

Sanctuary traditionally meant something different for humans and nonhuman animals, but this is changing. Animals are increasingly seen as subjects, and, similar to human sanctuaries, animal sanctuaries are increasingly understood as political spaces. In this article I compare human and nonhuman sanctuaries in order to bring into focus under- lying patterns of political inclusion and exclusion. By investigating parallels and differ- ences I also aim to shed light on the role of sanctuaries in thinking about and working towards new forms (...) of community and democratic interaction, focusing specifically on the role of political agency and voice. I begin by briefly discussing the political turn in animal philosophy, in which nonhuman animals are conceptualized as political actors. I then discuss ‘Zatopia’, a thought experiment that shows that viewing sanctuaries as separate from larger political structures runs the risk of repeating violence, and I investigate parallels with certain practices and policies in farmed animal sanctuaries. In order to overcome the obstacles thus identified, I turn to the concept ‘expanded sanctuary’, which explicitly focuses on connections between sanctuary and larger political structures. I discuss two examples of expanded sanctuary in which the agency and voices of those seeking or taking sanctuary are foregrounded: VINE Sanctuary, and the Dutch migrant collective WE ARE HERE. In the final section I briefly touch upon the consequences of these con- siderations for our understanding of sanctuary in relation to political membership and reforming communities. (shrink)

These days, discussions of what might be the ‘essence’ or the ‘core’ of nursing and nursing practice sooner or later end in a discussion about the concept of care. Most of the ‘newer’ nursing theories use this concept as a theoretical core concept. Even though these theoretical approaches use the concept of care with very different philosophical foundations and theoretical consistency, they concur in defining care as the essence of nursing and thereby glorify goodness as the decisive characteristic of nursing. (...) These theoretical approaches neglect the fact that nursing is above all a profession with a societal task and is characterized by an asymmetrical power relation between nurses and their patients. Based on the results of a research project that analysed the role nurses played in the killing of psychiatric patients in Germany during the Nazi regime, I demonstrate that an approach based on the concept of care is not able to explain how nurses were able to commit crimes of such atrocity. These crimes were bound to an emotional investment that sustained the production of ‘life unworthy of living’. In the case of nurses under the Nazi regime, certainly a kind of sadism was at issue that can only be explained if we recognize that the social bond is characterized by a certain tension; ‘goodness’ that caring theories assign to the social bond always coexists with the capacity for destruction. Using the Foucauldian theoretical framework of biopower and biopolitics enables one to analyse violence and power as integral parts of nurses' practice. Seen from this perspective, the killing of patients was part of a biopolitical programme and not a relapse into barbarism. The concept of care obscures the political agenda of nursing and does not provide a critical and political framework to analysing nursing practice. (shrink)

In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to close down the lab. The moral landscape (...) had changed, and it was no longer considered acceptable to use nonhuman primates in Danish biomedicine. From being considered a biological resource serving as a model of man, the monkeys had become moral subjects with a claim to a life suiting their natural needs. Simultaneously, the monkeys became instrumental in creating moral legitimacy for the actors involved in their rescue. What we see is an instance of pathfinding in a changing moral landscape where actors negotiate nonhuman primate nature as they create new moral positions for themselves. (shrink)

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to (...) this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival. (shrink)

Bu yazıda, ölmenin ve öldürmenin özel biçimlerinin yaşam ve ölüm arasındaki karanlık bir bölgede veyahut bulanık bir sınırda meydana geldiği gerçeğini göz önünde bulundurarak, ötenazi olgusu üzerinden, Michel Foucault ve Giorgio Agamben’in biyopolitika kavramsallaştırmaları arasında bir orta yol bulmayı deneyeceğim. Bu doğrultuda, tarihsel bir arka plan sunmanın elzem olduğuna inandığım çalışmaya, egemen iktidarın bugünkü felsefi temellerini aldığı ve teorik doğrulamalarını sağladığı mevcut hukuki-tıbbi-siyasi kompleksi anlamak için, ötenazi ve intiharın kısa bir tarihi ile başlayacak; ve iktidar ile ölüm arasındaki ilişkinin her (...) daim oldukça sorunlu olduğunu göstereceğim. İkinci olarak, Foucaultcu biyopolitika bağlamında ölümün ortadan kayboluşunun anlam[lar]ına yoğunlaşacak ve Foucault’nun düşüncesinin aksine, Batı’da yirminci yüzyılın ortalarından itibaren ölümün yeniden-keşfedilmesine benzer bir durumun gerçekleştiğini öne süreceğim. Ve nihayet makalenin üçüncü ve son kısmında, ötenazi sorunundan hareketle, Agamben’in yaşanmaya değmeyen hayat kavramını takdim ederek, Foucault’nun biyopolitika düşüncesindeki eksi[kli]ği, yani ölüm politikasını, tamamladığını ileri süreceğim. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential (...) for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. (shrink)

In this paper reling on Agamben’s genealogical endeavour with regard to the concept of oath, I shall try to discuss how he renders the relation between language and the destituent power that will lead me to address ‘the new experience of the word’, namely, pistis (faith), which is placed at the centre of the messianic announcement. In order to open up this point, I will take into consideration Jacques Derrida’s arguments related to faith and language which appear to be one (...) of the main addressees of Agamben’s critical undertaking, even though he is never mentioned in Agamben’s later book The Sacrament of Language, in which he elaborates the contours of the relation between language and pistis. For Derrida the opening of language is based on an oath, a promise of saying ‘yes’ and thus, speaking is an act of faith. However, it is this functioning of language that has to be suspended according to Agamben, since it is this very dispositif that is connected to sovereign power. It is through this suspension the living being who has language may cease to be homo sacer before language and sovereign power. (shrink)

In this paper, I will try to address the question of how to conceptualise a form of life that is better than others, by putting Rahel Jaeggi’s pragmatism inspired critical theory and Giorgio Agamben’s genealogical perspective in conversation. I argue that for both authors the critique of forms of life is intertwined with “the critique of how”. Not restricting itself to ethical abstinence, and without imposing certain norms upon forms of life, “the critique of how” focuses on the reflexive capacity (...) of forms of life, or their ability to question how they become what they are, which gives rise to an increased perception of the connections and continuities of activities in which they are engaged. In this sense, it may become possible to free the present in order to open it to contingency, and to see the glimpses of a better form of life. (shrink)

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a (...) distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice. (shrink)

En este ensayo, nos proponemos explorar los diferentes significados de los conceptos de vivibilidad y vida en el pensamiento de Judith butler. si bien es crucial para su obra temprana —butler se refiere por primera vez a este concepto en su introducción del libro, El género en disputa de 1999—, el concepto en sí emerge con más claridad y elaboración en su obra tardía. nuestra pregunta principal sería: ¿cuál es el hilo conductor que une las diferentes concepciones de vida en (...) el trabajo de butler? ¿cuáles son los lazos entre la vida abyecta, invivible, precaria, indolora, desechada y desposeída? De estas dos preguntas surgen otras más: como la cuestión de gradación de vivibilidad — qué vida importa, y “cuánto,” y cómo pensar este tipo de cuantificación de algo no-cuantificable—; y la cuestión de la universalidad. estas preguntas, obviamente, tienen que contar con evidencias bajo las cuales la vida es cualificada, calificada y contada como vivible. estas condiciones abarcan las normas que organizan las posibilidades de reconocimiento y los órdenes de reconocimiento tanto como la distribución diferencial de la humanidad. Y además engloban las maneras en las que estamos constituidos políticamente, pero también, las maneras en las que el “nosotros” se define como social y corporal. La cuestión de la vida vivible está, por ende, enmarañada con la problemática de la contraposición entre la voluntad individual y la idea del “nosotros”, que, como seres, necesitamos —en palabras de la propia butler— “para mantener y reproducir las condiciones de propia vivibilidad”. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western (...) Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western (...) Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

This paper explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophical reflection on surviving his own heart transplant. In ‘The Intruder’, he raises central questions concerning the relations between what he refers to as a ‘proper’ life, that is, a life that is thought to be one's own singular ‘lived experience’, and medical techniques, shaped at this particular historical juncture by cyclosporine or immuno‐suppresssion. He describes the temporal nature of an ever‐increasing sense of strangeness and fragmentation which accompanies his heart transplant. In doing so, Nancy (...) opens up the concealed of transplantation in terms of the problematic ‘gift’ of a ‘foreign’ organ, the unremitting suffering intrusiveness of the treatment regimen, and the living of life as ‘bare life’. He uncovers and exposes the relentless uncanniness that pervades the post‐transplant experience, which for him is an example of our humanistic, never‐ending impulse, to alter ourselves. Nevertheless, Nancy offers no answer to this dilemma, but instead calls us to think about the meaning or ‘sense’ of the prolonging of life and deferring of death, which currently drives our medical interventions. (shrink)

Three clinical cases of very ill neonates exemplifying extreme ethical situations for nurses are interpreted through Arendt's concepts of life and natality, and Agamben's critique of bare life. Agamben's notions of form-of-life, as the inseparability of zoe/bios, and testimony are offered as the potential foundation of nursing ethics.

Thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideological constructions of nature, warning that popular “ecology” or the “natural” is just the latest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, I turn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dōgen Eihei (1200–1253) to explore the possibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideological self-presentation or what Dōgen called “mountains and rivers (sansui).” I bring Dōgen into dialogue with his great champion, the (...) American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansui as “the wild”), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Žižek, Agamben, and Muir. Beyond Nature being any one thing, what Badiou derides as the “cosmological one,” I argue for the reawakening and sobering up to multiple Nature, beyond its appearance as an object to a discerning subject, as the bioregions which give us our interdependent and dynamic being. (shrink)

(2013). Nietzsche and Heidegger: Ethics Beyond Metaphysics. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 44, Life, Truth, Transcendence, pp. 266-285.

In this essay, I trace the motif of abandonment that runs through the ethics of Simone Weil. In doing so, as a conceptual lens, I make use of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of abandonment. Taking my cue from Weil’s hesitations concerning baptism, I examine her stance as a case of either sacrifice or exception, of ambiguity or indifference. Subsequently, I use Weil’s hesitations to examine an interconnected sequence of soteriology and metaphysics, following Church and potentiality, World and actuality, and The Kingdom (...) and contingency. This allows me to explore the themes of writing and life. A crucial role is reserved for the Parable of the Sower, and how it discriminates between the saved and the damned. (shrink)

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist (...) analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarmlike as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek (1987–1994, 1995–2001, 1996), Alien (1979) and The Fly (1958, 1986) to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist Utopia in Gilman's Herland (2015 [1915]) and Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1989 [1976]). Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm. (shrink)

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a (...) form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s (...) theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail. (shrink)

Much has been made of the power of the Internet and related communication technologies to serve as a new public sphere in which democracy can flourish. The evidence, however, has been limited; like the telephone and the postal letter before that, the Internet has powers as a capable tool for organizing social action and protest. Otherwise, though, it seems to have been co-opted by commercial interests and to be used by the public for arguments concerning already settled opinions, a far (...) cry from the fruitful and thoughtful debates demanded by a true public sphere. (shrink)

Whilst the Neoliberal alludes to an array of very real material practices and axioms of contemporary capitalism, the concept of Neoliberalism itself has arguably become moribund. Worse, perhaps it has become an asphyxiating and enervating monolith, a ‘ptolemization’ from which our critical thinking cannot escape. The key strategy of the article is to explore the Neoliberalism concept as a ‘mode of telling’, and how the constitutive moments of that concept have been discursively constructed into a hegemonic discursive formation. Whilst the (...) resultant paradigm of Neoliberalism has ironically been constituted out of the identity-thinking and the synthetic historicizing of its very critics, the article searches for alternative avenues of reconstitutive deconstruction, so as to offer both critical optimism and a more effective means of struggle against the material practices of contemporary capitalism. To this end, I shall indicate how overdetermination in conceptualization provides the opportunity to break down identity-thinking and how articulation can translate the material elements of contemporary capitalism into fresh moments of a counter-hegemonic discourse. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Husserl’s conception of the natural attitude, which, I argue, is one of his most important contributions to contemporary phenomenology. I offer a critical exploration of this concept’s productive explanatory potential for feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies. In the process, I draw attention to the rich, multi-faceted, and ever-changing social world that can be brought to life through this particular phenomenological concept. One of the most striking features of the natural attitude, as (...) Husserl describes it, is that it is not natural at all, but rather, is a developmental phenomenon that is acquired through, and profoundly influenced by, specific socio-cultural practices. To de-naturalize the natural attitude, then, is to recognize that the natural attitude is not fixed or innate but relative to a particular time period and culture, and therefore always capable of being changed. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss how the space of the classroom is a contested object that is constituted by historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, and discursive practices (Lefebvre in The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1991). I then employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” to characterize the ways in which educational spaces cohere “content and affect” quoted in Puar (Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, 193) into discursive figures of the heteronormative and racialized (...) national “family.” Finally, I argue that in order to advance contemporary theorizing on safe space we might consider shifting the metaphor of the classroom (and/or schooling) as a situation of home (in loco parentis) to that of a metaphor of camp. As a discursive practice, “camp” is like “home” in that it has multiple associations of past histories. However, the advantage of the metaphor of classroom as camp allows for a more capacious range of past histories of association, from recreation to temporary inhabitation to forced relocation, thus foregrounding the innate political implications of theorizing space. Moreover, the metaphor of camp implies transience (whether real or imaginary) while keeping in mind the partial and situated nature of particular places and spaces. Foregrounding the transient component/feature of safe space allows us to make visible and explore the possibilities and limitations of conceptualizing relations of power as circuitous, contested and performative through competing claims to particular places as objects of safety. (shrink)

Statelessness and displacement represent nothing short of a loss of place, the violation of rights and international norms, threat to safety and belonging, and severely limits access to law and citizenship. Social work must leverage and sustain an ethical standpoint as a critical counterpoint to the increasing moral and political urgency of statelessness. However, traditional and normative social work ethics operate at a level of abstraction that do not engage sufficiently with the realpolitik of statelessness. This paper critically engages with (...) moral questions concerning displacement and statelessness by engaging the philosophy of James Tully and Christine Korsgaard. This engagement enables connections between agency and notions of democratic constitutionalism where people have the right to call into and contest relations of governance that oppress them, through various means such as advocacy and activism. We present a reconsideration of established ethical understandings by arguing for the place of public philosophy and the constitution of the self as key to social work theory and practice in response to statelessness and displacement. Korsgaard’s work on normativity and agency, and Tully’s notion of democratic constitutionalism provide a rich and original contribution to social work ethics that will be articulated for social work theory and practice. (shrink)

Schmitt insists that the sovereign decision is unavoidable, that even an anarchist is caught in the trap of sovereignty when he tries to ‘decide against decision’. This article begins to think about a critical legal vocabulary that might suspend the necessity of the will to constitute, while emphasising the creativity of the constituent moment. The terms inoperativity, dis-enclosure and dissensus are developed and deployed in order to think about certain aspects of the Tunisian revolution. In particular, the article focuses upon (...) the refusal of the state of the situation, the subtraction of loyalty and the insistence of a form of life beyond Ben Ali’s sovereign order. (shrink)

Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a (...) concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart. (shrink)

Humanitarian aid’s psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of psychologization. This (...) allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to Homo sacer, to use Giorgi Agamben’s term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated. (shrink)

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil’s body. Thinking with place-respons...

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the contemporary international refugee regime is grounded in a paradigm of ‘homesickness’, which puts the refugee in an inferior position of the supplicant, whose subjectivity is framed by the regime of fixed belonging. In order to address this situation, we need to challenge the ontological primacy of homesickness and embrace ‘homelessness’, which offers the possibility of rethinking the positions of both refugees and non-refugees in ethical terms. While the responsibility of the non-refugees lies in cultivating an (...) ethos of hospitality, the refugee can take hold of her subjectivity through the practice of care of the self. This paper first examines Nietzsche’s thought on homelessness and compares it with Foucault’s reading of the role of anakhōrēsis in the Hellenistic practice of care of the self. It then suggests how, by building on the project of universal hospitality, we can interpret the figure of the refugee through the prism of an ethic of freedom, anchored in a posit... (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the (...) overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

This article addresses the fundamental issues about sovereignty and an ethical polity that the event of September 11th has brought to a crisis. It examines the geography of power that has become more visible as the USA sets about ensuring that the new world order that has been emerging with neo-liberalism and corporate capitalism is protected from challenges of any kind. It argues that the state of emergency has become chronic, making possible the enactment of exceptional measures that threaten the (...) basic principles underlying democracy and liberty. Terror is becoming a universal tool to compel compliance with a global form of neo-feudalism. It questions the way in which Islamic fundamentalism is being used as ideological cover to legitimate another fundamentalism, namely neo-liberalism. The article opens up aspects of fundamentalism to an analysis that explores the interconnections between onto-logical lack, violence, surplus terror and the unpresentable in the discourse constitutive of authority. It also examines the exceptional status and character of the USA in the history of modernity, particularly with regard to its militarism. It calls for a critique of the present that recognizes that the current forms of totalitarianism eliminate the possibility of just forms of sociality emerging. (shrink)

Foucault’s analysis of the relation of power and the economy in the lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979 opens up modern societies for a radically different interrogation of the relations of force inscribed in historically heterogeneous forms of wealth creation and distribution, but more specifically within the period of liberal capitalism. Its vast scope clears the ground for genealogies of power, political economy and race that demonstrate their intertwinement, yet he underplays several elements which have (...) been central for the institution of the political economy of liberal capitalism, particularly regarding colonial expansion and subjugation, the prior existence of trade and other networks operating on a world scale, and politico-economic and technical developments, such as banking and finance, that acted as conditions of possibility. By redressing the balance, this article outlines a different genealogy of the emergence of biopolitics and the mechanisms supporting global capitalism, making visible the constitutive role of colonialism. It suggests elements for a more fundamental critique of inequality, one that relays the Foucaldian themes of economy, territory, security, population and race according to a longer periodization that reveals most economies to have been zero-sum games of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Transcending this situation requires a radically different, transcolonial and transindividual understanding of the essentially collaborative and co-implicate character of the production of all life. The implications mean the rejection of ontologies that support not only neoliberalism but other forms of dispossession and pauperization, often allied to the hierarchization of difference, opening the way for a different history of the present and for imagining new economies and socialities. (shrink)

Derrida, in some remarks about the inauguration of new refuge-cities in Europe and America,argues for the invention of a new cosmopolitical polity which would be instituted on the basis of an ethics of hospitality. The implications run up against current notions of sovereigntyand challenge many current assumptions about citizenship and rights which draw from Enlightenment thought. This article will sketch these issues, linking up notions of rights and sovereignty inherited from the Enlightenment to their possible transmutation in contemporary conditions and (...) to questions of an ethics of responsibility and hospitality. It will examine the implications for the dissolution of the public sphere as it is now constituted and the emergence of culturally plural and transmodern forms of sociality. (shrink)