How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting (...) the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou have both recently made central use of set-theoretic results in their political and ontological projects. As I argue in the paper, one of the most important of these to both thinkers is the paradox of set membership discovered by Russell in 1901. Russell’s paradox demonstrates the fundamentally paradoxical status of the totality of language itself, in its concrete occurrence or taking-place in the world. The paradoxical status of language is essential to Agamben’s discussions of the (...) “coming community,” “whatever being,” sovereignty, law and its force, and the possibility of a reconfiguration of political life, as well as to Badiou’s notions of representation, political intervention, the nature of the subject, and the event. I document these implications of Russell’s paradox in the texts of Agamben and Badiou and suggest that they point the way toward a reconfigured political life, grounded in a radical reflective experience of language. (shrink)

Derrida's key concepts or pseudo-concepts of différance, the trace, and the undecidable suggest analogies to some of the most significant results of formal, symbolic logic and metalogic. As early as 1970, Derrida himself pointed out an analogy between his use of ‘undecidable’ and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate the existence, in any sufficiently complex and consistent system, of propositions which cannot be proven or disproven (i.e., decided) within that system itself. More recently, Graham Priest has interpreted différance as an instance (...) of the general metalogical procedure of diagonalisation. In this essay, I consider the extent to which Derrida's key terms and the essential operations of deconstruction can be formalised. I argue that, if formalisation is indeed the technique of writing par excellence, then the formalisation of deconstructive concepts tends to show how the auto-deconstruction of total systems arises from the problematic possibility of writing itself. For instance, since diagonalisation permits the ‘arithmetisation of syntax’ whereby a formal system is able to formulate claims about its own logico-grammatical properties, we can understand its potential to inscribe the undecidable within the systematicity of language as simply one instance of the potential of writing, in figuring itself, to render inscrutable the trace of its own origin. (shrink)

In Kingdom and Glory, Agamben analyzed the dual perspective of the void, through the metaphor of the empty throne, in the governmental machine in the West. I engage with the ambiguous question of the void with regard to the concept of sovereignty through my reading of two Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period, Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan. This paper therefore addresses the question of sovereignty and the void in the discourse of nation in early modern China, an issue (...) that is related to the problem of the political economy or the politics of life. I argue that the rhetorical move in Liang Qichao’s argument for the birth of a new nation and new people was to move from the not-having to the there is in support of the formation of a new nation-state and a restricted logic of sovereignty, while Zhan Taiyan’s position was to affirm the dynamitic re-composition of the void by constantly negating the given fixated state, and thus proposing a different and radical vision of nation and full sovereignty of the lives of each and every one of the people who are co-inhabiting in the polis. (shrink)

Technology takes an unprecedented position in contemporary society. In particular, it has become part and parcel of governmental attempts to manufacture life in new ways. Such ideas concerning the governance of life organize around the same contention: that technology and life are, in fact, highly interconnectable. This is surprising because if one enters the sites of techno-scientific experimentation, those visions turn out to be much frailer and by no means “in place” yet. Rather, they afford or enforce constant interfacing work, (...) a particular mode of manufacturing life, rendering disparate, sturdy, and often surprisingly incompatible things available for one another. Here, we contend that both of those aspects, pervasive rationalities of interconnectability and practices of interfacing mark the cornerstones of what we call a new techno-bio-politics of life. In order to grasp the government of life under the technological condition, we must understand how both human and non-human entities are being rendered interconnectable and re-worked through practices of interfacing. We take neuro-technology and care robotics as two illustrative cases. Our analysis shows that the contemporary government of life is not primarily concerned with life itself in its biological re-constitution but rather with life as it is interfaced with and through technology. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's name often comes up as scholars debate the history of biopower, which regulates the biological life of individual bodies and entire populations. This article examines whether and to what extent Hobbes may be regarded as the first biopolitical philosopher. I investigate this question by performing a close reading of Hobbes's political texts and by comparing them to some of the most influential theories on biopolitics proposed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others. Hobbes is indeed the (...) first great thinker to assert the supreme political importance of safeguarding life. Furthermore, this prominence of non-contemplative life is not limited to mere survival but also seeks to allow for the people's happiness. This may indeed allow us to consider him as the first biopolitical philosopher, at least in some limited capacity. However, the Englishman's biopolitical stance lacks the practical aspects seen in examples of ‘properly modern’ biopolitics. Moreover, peoples’ lives were already governed radically in antiquity. I argue that Hobbes's biopolitical system was, therefore, minimal in the sense of a ‘biopolitical nightwatchman state’. However, he acted as an undeniable catalyst to the ‘properly biopolitical era of modernity’, when mundane life and happiness became the explicit main objects of virtually all politics. (shrink)

While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction (...) is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state. (shrink)

This article outlines three interlocking and mutually reinforcing registers in Giorgio Agamben’s work: the law, the apparatus, and the anthropological machine. While Agamben is clear that rules render inoperative laws and counter-apparatuses suspend the functioning of apparatuses, that which neutralizes the anthropological machine remains undisclosed. To explore this messianic opening, the author moves beyond Agamben and posits the possibility of a shift from an anthropological machine to a phytological machine. Whereas the former functions through the production of binary oppositions that (...) divide life from its form, the latter yields to the internally generative potentiality of lifeforms. In conclusion, the article proposes an alternative reading of several of Agamben’s key examples, including his references to Tiananmen Square, as manifestations of a phytological machine emerging from within the composting of anthropological divisions. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentiality and impotentiality are separated from one another, the result is a stratified educational system where some students (...) are commanded to actualize their potentiality in the form of standardized tests while others are abandoned by the system. Second, thinking im-potentiality enables us to move beyond problematic formulations of learning and rediscover the uniqueness of studying. Here, I offer a brief example of study through an analysis of ‘Tinkering Schools’, an alternative program founded by Gever Tulley in San Francisco. And finally, without a concept of im-potentiality, the discourse of the ‘child genius’ becomes commodified as a power to be harnessed and actualized in the name of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Only through a return to im-potentiality can we reclaim Genius and its relationship to the question of educational freedom. (shrink)

In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational philosophy of John Dewey. In conclusion, the paper suggests that while Hardt and Negri are missing an educational theory, John Dewey is (...) missing a concept of democracy adequate to the biopolitical struggles of the multitude. Thus, I call for a synthesis of Dewey and Hardt and Negri in order to generate a biopedagogical practice beyond both traditional models of education as well as current standardization. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals. Not unlike how pre-modern philosophers conceived of oneness, truth and goodness as transcendental properties of all things, both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies present various structures which can be universally predicated of all being. However, (...) as opposed to the essentialist or even theological tendencies of traditional metaphysics, Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies are committedly “inessential” and atheistic at their very core. By replacing the divine names of the one, the true and the good in traditional metaphysics with a new yet quasi-classical transcendental notion of “the void” as a universal predicate of all beings, Badiou’s and Agamben’s works may be regarded as projects that go beyond both the pre-Kantian “theological” and the post-Kantian “subjective” conceptions of transcendental philosophy, thereby marking a new development in the history of western metaphysics. (shrink)

Tendencies and efforts have shifted from genome description, DNA mapping, and DNA sequencing to active and profound re-programming, repairing life on genetic and molecular levels in some parts of contemporary life science research. Mirroring and materializing this atmosphere, various life engineering technologies have been used and established in many areas of life sciences in the last decades. A contemporary progressive example of one such technology is DNA editing. Novel developments related to reproductive technologies, particularly embryo editing, prenatal human life engineering, (...) and germline engineering need to be analyzed against the broader social and structural background. The crucial analytical scope for this paper is a specific field: the life-editing technologies used in reproductive medicine and performed experimentally on viable human embryos, particularly CRISPR/cas9 technology. This text argues that germline editing technologies, as a representative part of contemporary biomedicine, are merging ideas of treatment and enhancement to avoid future risks. Using this specific life manipulation of embryos and gametes, the text analyzes these processes within the concept of power over life—biopower and the specific governing rationality that imagines, classifies, and governs contemporary societies. The text specifically focuses on the potential to create, define, and manage future risks and uncertainties related to prenatal life. (shrink)

(2013). Nietzsche, Einverleibung and the Politics of Immunity. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 3-19. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.746271.

The article explores the perspectives of Foucault’s notion of government by linking it to the debate on the ‘new materialism’. Discussing Karen Barad’s critical reading of Foucault’s work on the body and power, it points to the idea of a ‘government of things’, which Foucault only briefly outlines in his lectures on governmentality. By stressing the ‘intrication of men and things’, this theoretical project makes it possible to arrive at a relational account of agency and ontology, going beyond the anthropocentric (...) limitations of Foucault’s work. This perspective also suggests an altered understanding of biopolitics. While Foucault’s earlier concept of biopolitics was limited to physical and biological existence, the idea of a ‘government of things’ takes into account the interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Finally, the conceptual proposal of a ‘government of things’ helps to clarify theoretical ambiguities and unresolved tensions in new materialist scholarship and allows for a more materialist account of politics. (shrink)

This article discusses the basic arguments and important achievements of Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, as well as some problems and limitations of this theoretical perspective. It first analyzes the ontological underpinnings of Bennett’s materialist account and presents two examples she uses to illustrate the notion of a ‘force of things’. The paper then addresses central conceptual and analytic problems of Bennett’s account. The notion of an all-encompassing ‘vitality of matter’ is insufficient to explain the relationality of matter; it is also (...) empirically limited and provides only a selective account of agency. These shortcomings and limitations affect the political perspectives of Bennett’s version of vital materialism. I conclude that there is a tendency in her work to displace political considerations by invoking new ethical responsibilities and sensibilities. Being attentive to the vitality of things translates into a systematic blindness concerning the inequalities, asymmetries and hierarchies enacted in vital materializations. (shrink)

This article examines John Locke’s theory of subjectivity to challenge the recent critical tendency to associate biopolitics and empiricism. Michel Foucault, most notably among modern theorists of biopolitics, proposes that the Lockean man, or an interest-seeking animal, constitutes the paradigm of a person that remains subject to biopower. Such understanding of empiricism by biopolitical theorists is, however, reductive because Locke’s view of human subjectivity is fundamentally equivocal. As I demonstrate by analyzing his discussion of freedom, action, and desire in An (...) Essay Concerning Human Understanding and other writings, Locke admits the possibility for a human being to think and to act freely, although in the process of restricting the capacity for free action. Hence, the theorists’ simplistic view of Locke rather reflects the limits of their own conception of subjectivity, especially their behavioristic premises. As they consider a person as a mere machine of survival without agency and initiative, they preclude the possibility of overcoming biopower at the fundamental level. In demonstrating contradictions and tensions within Locke’s empiricism, this article then proposes the ways in which Locke can show a way beyond the critical impasse in political theory in elucidating the power of acting against the chain of causality. (shrink)

Taking a largely thematic approach, this reflection aims to demonstrate the richness of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical work in relation to questions of justice and injustice. Injustice becomes primary because a definition of justice continues to be open to debate, whereas injustice as incarnate in the scapegoat as depicted by René Girard is far less so, if at all. Through her analyses of the work of Mallarmé and the Paris of the Dreyfus affair, Céline and abjection and anti-Semitism, the ‘need to (...) believe’ as a key component of subjectivity, the foreigner as the other in ourselves, Dostoyevsky and forgiveness, a vista is opened up onto injustice and how it might be combatted. (shrink)

This article argues against the doxa that Foucault's analysis of education inevitably undermines self-originating ethical intention on the part of teachers or students. By attending to Foucault's lesser known, later work—in particular, the notion of ‘biopower’ and the deepened level of materiality it entails—the article shows how the earlier Foucauldian conception of power is intensified to such an extent that it overflows its original domain, and comes to ‘infuse’ the subject that might previously have been taken as a mere effect. (...) What emerges, accordingly, is a subject divested of ‘traditional’, substantial, formation, located wholly on an immanent plane, and yet centrally concerned with the practice of freedom and ethical resistance. In turn, what seemed to have no place at all in the earlier Foucault becomes central: in general, active subjectivization (subjectivation) as a counter to passive subjection (assujetissement); more particularly, subjects' ongoing production and creation (via strategic decisions and localized opposition) of a new ethos, new ‘practices of self’, and new kinds of relations. With this alternative Foucauldian position outlined, the article then focuses more particularly on the practices of education: it concludes that, instead of being rendered merely the factories of obedient behaviour, schools or colleges can be the locus for a critically-informed, oppositional micro-politics. In other words: the power-relations that (quite literally) constitute education can now be regarded, on Foucault's own terms, as being creative, ‘enabling’ and positive. (shrink)

This article aims to elucidate the relationship between Agamben’s notion of messianism and his project of philosophical archaeology. Whereas the former relates to political and ethical aspects of Agamben’s philosophy, the latter belongs to the domain of methodology of philosophical research itself. The main thesis of the paper argues that these two components rely on each other and constitute one and the same project. The author demonstrates that Agamben’s notion of messianic action and scholarly activity of philosophical archaeology overlap, which (...) leads to a problematization of political dimension of Agamben’s messianism. The orientation towards the past in Agamben’s understanding of the messianic is its crucial presupposition that imposes limits on its applicability to the realm of politics. This thesis is substantiated by an investigation of the problem of relation between theory and practice in Agamben’s thought and by a close reading of the ‘Mystery of Anomia’ section in The Time that Remains. Beginning with the problem of the possibility of a transition from the tragic narrative elaborated in the Homo Sacer project to the messianic state of lawlessness, the author demonstrates that in Agamben’s thought this transition is made possible only by means of an archaeological inquiry. (shrink)

Despite the promise to save every life, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed social and racial inequalities, precarious living conditions, and engendered an exponential increase in overdose deaths. Although some lives are considered sacred, others are deliberately sacrificed. This article draws on the theoretical work of Foucault and scholars who further developed his concept of biopolitics. While biopolitics aims to ameliorate the health of populations, Foucault never systematically accounted for the unequal value of lives. In the name of saving the biological (...) lives of people who use drugs (PWUD) during the pandemic, the harm reduction movement has emphasized the need for safe supply, decriminalization, and housing; governments have started implementing these measures, which were previously rejected as utopian and unrealistic. Paradoxically, the use of drugs itself, and therefore the increased risk of death from overdose or other medical sequelae, is the only way PWUD can achieve enough visibility to be recognized as a life worth saving. The humanitarian rationale of harm reduction concerns itself with the biological life and stipulates social and political rights in the name of its sacredness. This is what anthropologist Fassin and others called biolegitimacy—the recognition of life reduced to its physiological, biological essence. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt argued that refugees pose a major problem for liberalism. Most liberal theorists endorse the idea of human rights. At the same time, liberalism takes the existence of sovereign states for granted. When large numbers of people petition a liberal state for asylum, Arendt argued, these two commitments will come into conflict. An unwavering respect for human rights would mean that no refugee is ever turned away. Being sovereign, however, allows states to control their borders. States supposedly committed to (...) human rights will thus often violate the rights of refugees by denying them entry. I attempt to defend liberalism from Arendt’s criticism by outlining a rights-based model of asylum that is enforceable by sovereign states. This approach avoids the question of what border-enforcement measures, if any, are defensible at the level of ideal justice, and instead seeks to outline a framework of refugee rights that can be realized in a world in which migration controls are a fact of life. Central to my argument is a distinction between the place where a person is recognized as a rights-bearing agent and the potentially different place where he or she exercises those rights. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on Carl Schmitt’s political and constitutional thought in order to reflect on the political struggle over the foundational norms and values of a constitutional settlement in...

Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921) has been a relevant source of legal and political philosophy about the nature of law, from Derrida to Menke. In this article, we rebuild the reading of Benjamin’s Critique proposed by Menke and consider the appropriateness of violence in the law not as a tragic tension, but as a condition for its reproduction. Finally, we will consider its paradoxical nature as a confirmation of the difference between the force of law and social-normative elements such as (...) recognition [ Anerkennung]. (shrink)

This paper examines how Western humanitarianism has attempted to work through its simultaneous commitment to individualized moral universalism and ambivalence about substantive global egalitarianism via what is identified as humanitarian sentimentalism, namely an ensemble of narrative and visual mechanisms designed to cultivate charitable moral sentiments among Euro-American publics toward victims of humanitarian crises in the global South. After briefly discussing how the aforementioned ambivalence is rooted in the founding philosophical principles of humanitarianism, the paper examines the visual economy of humanitarian (...) sentimentalism, constituted through four iconographic tropes found in the history of Western representation of humanitarian emergencies and injustices (personification, massification, rescue, and care), each of which aims to trigger sentimentalizing responses on the part of viewers. Hence, it is argued that if the Western humanitarian movement's dependence on visually based sentimentalism has been effective in generating a sense of concern for distant others, such concern has not been converted into a more radical and egalitarian set of political practices of global solidarity, which would aim structurally to transform the current world order in an egalitarian manner to tackle the systemic sources of humanitarian crises. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to deconstruct the language used in President Trump’s Facebook posts while on the campaign trail, and the subsequent comments which reiterate and reify this rhetoric, to understand how Syrian refugees are labeled as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum. By utilizing the theoretical groundwork of Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe, this qualitative content analysis will explore how Syrian refugees, as depicted by Facebook comments, represent a “disposable population.” We conclude that by reducing Syrian refugees to (...) a sub-human status and representing them as the dangerous and unworthy other, both President Trump who initiated this rhetoric, and those who responded in a way which legitimized his views, effectively labeled Syrian refugees as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum within the USA. (shrink)

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

The recent terrorist attacks and ongoing state of emergency in France have brought questions of police surveillance into the public spotlight, making it increasingly important to understand how police attain data from citizens. Since 2005, the French police have been using IBM’s computer program, i2 Analyst’s Notebook, to aggregate information and craft criminal narratives. This technology serves to quickly connect suspects with crimes, looking for as many associations as possible, ranking and visualizing them based on level of importance. Recently, surveillance (...) and state power have been theorized as having shifted to a posthegemonic, order. Drawing from literature on power, surveillance, and identity, this paper considers the various ways that algorithms can impact policing under a state of emergency by comparing the technical protocol of i2 Analyst’s Notebook with the administrative protocol of the French state. Using i2 Analyst’s Notebook as an example, this paper argues that posthegemonic theories of power have their place in determining how algorithms can be used for surveillance, but that they cannot completely explain their use under the state of emergency. (shrink)

In recent years, a future in which humans have attained Immortality by means of technology, and yet, this miraculous achievement remains a luxury of the rich, has become a staple not only of specul...

The historical specificity of Michel Foucault’s practice of critical genealogy offers a valuable model for political theory today. By bringing into focus its historical attention to detail, we can locate in Foucault’s genealogical philosophy an alternative to prominent assumptions in contemporary political theory. The work of political theory is often positioned in light of an assumed goal of staking political theory to certain political positions, judgments, or normative determinations that already populate the terrain of politics. This goal may be illusory; (...) certainly it is not requisite. The alternative model of political theory in Foucault’s work involves resolutely refusing to take positions in politics so as to enact specific critical politicizations on the terrain of the political. Such a practice of ‘critique without judgment’ is dependent upon the historical attention to specificity brought to bear in genealogical work. This history-centered genealogical model is instructively exemplified in Foucault’s under-discussed introduction to his book Herculine Barbin. Foucault’s curation and discussion of the Barbin dossier offers a concise account of how Foucauldian genealogy engages with historical specificity in order to politicize its objects of inquiry without reducing its own work to the task of issuing a political judgment. (shrink)

Political protests involving clashes with police are often delegitimized by governments for using “uncivil” and “violent” means. Drawing on a creative video clip made by a group of Gezi protestors, this paper theorizes an alternative response, which refuses the dichotomy between peaceful and violent struggles and instead seeks to transform the field of judgement. The protestors in the clip, by echoing a verse originally written by poet Cemal Süreya, reconstruct destructive activity – breaking billboards – playfully and detached from its (...) presumed ends. Placing their performances in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of mediality – means without end – I argue that the clip reconstructs political action in play-form, corroding the significance of the means-ends relationship. In doing so, it frustrates the usual grounds of judgement within which the meaning and value of protest activities are arbitrated. (shrink)

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.

The aim of my paper is to show the discussion concerning the idea of cosmopolitan society. I intend to examine the structure and content of the argumentation which put into question the very notion of cosmopolitanism, as well as the contemporary content of this concept. I will look at nationalistic discourse as presented, for instance, by Gertrude Himmelfarb, which puts emphasis on national values as an indispensable part of group and individual identity. On the other hand, I am going to (...) analyze left-wing evaluation of cosmopolitanism as an ideologically motivated attempt to hide the real contradictions of the contemporary world. Finally, I will prove that these critiques cannot undermine the concept of cosmopolitanism, but they force us to rethink a way in which cosmopolitan society can be achieved. If cosmopolitan society is to emerge, we need to reconstruct the idea of democracy and the notion of multi-cultural pluralistic society. I propose such rethinking of cosmopolitanism by the introduction of the notion of “dialogical cosmopolitanism,” which refers to M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and G.H. Mead’s idea of “taking the role of the other.”. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

This article makes the case that Greece has witnessed a transition from a ‘post-democratic’ condition in the ’90 s and the early 21st century to a regime of ‘post-political biopower’ in 2010–12 that can bid democracy farewell. To adequately theorize this modality of power in a way pertinent to contemporary Greece, the paper takes its bearings from Agamben’s take on biopower, the homo sacer and the endless state of exception. But the analysis fills in Agamben’s theoretical skeleton by drawing on (...) Naomi Klein’s account of the ‘Shock Doctrine’, which captures a particular technique of biopower deployed by neoliberal hegemony, Deleuze’s insights about the ‘society of control’ and Lazzarato’s elaborations of these insights with reference to the ‘indebted man’, which can shed light on the political implications of the Greek debt crisis. Yet popular responses, initiatives and electoral politics, as well as the intricacies of dominant power relations, upset any monolithic and quasi-totalitarian account of sovereign rule, disclosing cracks, imbalances and dispersion in its edifice. (shrink)

Organ transplantation has been central to debates on medical technologies and their complex biopolitical consequences, new forms of medical governance and new opportunities for capital. Attending to transplantation has also opened up new ways of thinking about, acting on and living ‘in’ the body, raising important questions about what it means to be embodied under particular cultural conditions. The specific ways in which a technology like transplantation puts the body parts of some at the disposal of the bodies of others (...) has served to (re)write bodily boundaries, commoditise body parts and reorganise the social relations of exchange, care and responsibility. The controversies that this family of technologies has given rise to are both readable and read as embedded in and expressive of wider forms of conflict and contestation. Putting these controversies and their entanglements centre-stage, this article focuses on the manner in which transplant technologies construct their publics in gendered and socially stratified terms, as they reconstruct the transplanted organ as a new site for the extraction of surplus value. Drawing on data from fieldwork in Mexico, I will examine the catastrophic consequences of transplant medicine for Mexico’s poor, particularly women who bear the burden of care for the country’s predominantly living transplant programme. In carrying the costs (moral, social and economic) their accounts of these processes offer us an important critical vantage point from which to assess the interplay between state, market and the ‘worn’ body in the context of transplantation. (shrink)

This article examines how migrant ‘illegality’ is experienced in the Swedish context. How do ‘illegal‘ migrants manage work, housing, healthcare, safety and a family life in the absence of access to formal provisions? What are their survival strategies? I use direct quotations from undocumented migrants themselves to build a multifaceted picture of migrant ‘illegality’. Following Willen's (2007) call for a ‘critical phenomenology of illegality’, I move beyond the socio-political situation of undocumented migrants to their embodied experiences of being ‘illegal’. I (...) conclude that undocumented migrants are not excluded but are excepted; they have not been thrown out, but neither are they considered participants. Undocumented migrants are included in society without being recognised as members. (shrink)

Does democracy lead to more ethical or just systems of welcoming, of hospitality? Derrida considers an analysis of sovereignty as pivotal to any re-evaluation of contemporary politics and ethics, tying such a project in with deconstructions of democracy and hospitality: ‘what is “living together”? …must one live together only with one's like, with someone semblables?’ he asks in Rogues, prompting us to think through what it means to be, at once, democratic and hospitable. In this paper I propose that Derrida (...) provides us with a way of re-orienting democracy and hospitality that complicates conditions of citizenship and belonging, of the nation-state and sovereignty and of justice and unconditionality. It is the contention of this paper that deconstructing sovereignty is essential for any re-orientation of practices of hospitality within liberal democratic countries. The figure of the foreigner and questions of hospitality reveal a deep ambivalence at the core of democracy in the sense that it provokes the desire for openness and closure simultaneously. In closing, I raise questions concerning the potential for deconstructive practice to engage in a future politico-ethics of the border in light of this critical evaluation of democracy. In so doing, I consider the role of deconstruction in relation to liberal modalities of hospitality. (shrink)

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the (...) emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts. (shrink)

Most critical discussions of European immigration policies are centered around the concept of Fortress Europe and understand the concept of the border as a way of sealing off unwanted immigration movements. However, ethnographic studies such as our own multi-sited field research in South-east Europe clearly show that borders are daily being crossed by migrants. These findings point to the shortcomings of the Fortress metaphor. By bringing to the fore the agency of migrants in the conceptualization of borders, we propose to (...) understand how borders are being shaped by taking as a starting point the struggles of mobility. Against the background of our two-year transdisciplinary research project TRANSIT MIGRATION European migration and border policies cannot be longer conceptualized as being simply oriented towards the prevention of migration. Since migrants cross the borders daily, what happens if the borders’ permeability is part of the way they work? If so, we have to investigate the mechanisms of border policies and practices anew. One is the concept of the border or migration regime. The other is the concept of the autonomy of migration. Our concept of ethnographic regime analyses is based on a transdisciplinary approach, comprising political studies, anthropology and sociology. (shrink)

This article investigates the role of ‘anarchy’ in state securitisation. First, we discuss state hierarchies’ struggle with active and reactive anarchic networks, theorising a state in existential crisis, which exploits anti-anarchist discourses to respond to network threats. In the second part, we illustrate with examples the use of fear of anarchy in hierarchical productive structures of securitisation. As an ‘antiproduction assemblage’, the state treats logics stemming from the ‘social principle’ as a repressed Real, the exclusion of which underpins its own (...) functioning. The scarcity and fear resulting from state terror ensure responses to this structural violence by reactive networks, while paradoxically also exacerbating reactive tendencies within social movements. In the concluding part, we discuss visions of desecuritising society, breaking away from majoritarian logics of control and the coming of other worlds counterposed to the hierarchies producing and reproducing an eternal loop of state and ne... (shrink)

Abstract. To understand the problem of torture in a democratic society, we have to take up a political-theological perspective. We must ask how violence creates political meaning. Torture is no more destructive and no more illiberal than other forms of political violence. The turn away from torture was not a turn away from violence, but a change in the locus of sacrifice: from scaffold to battlefield. Torture had been a ritual of mediation between sovereign and subject. Once sovereignty is located (...) in the people, it no longer makes sense to speak of being sacrificed for the sovereign. Instead, sovereign presence is now realized in an act of self-sacrifice. The wars of modern nation-states have been acts of reciprocal self-sacrifice. Terror invokes torture in response because both speak a primitive language of political sacrifice, denying the enemy the privilege of self-sacrifice. (shrink)