Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida’s ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while police violence is aimed at constructing (...) safety for the cultural majority, in reality, it reveals discourses of anxiety and precariousness. The unethicality of police violence lies in the enlargement of recognition in vicariously blaming the person who has been killed for being involved in several terror attacks. We show that police violence is premised on the temporal structure of majoritarian nationalism, the prevalence of gender inequity, and the call to breach the secular framework of law. (shrink)

This article uses a fictionalised encounter as the basis for an autoethnographic exploration of the intersections between the South African social value of ubuntu and the notion of spatial justice. Ubuntu describes the interconnectedness of human lives. It asserts that a person is only a person through other people, a recognition that calls for deep respect, empathy and kindness. Ubuntu is expressed in selfless generosity and sharing. The spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities has resulted in a concern (...) with the relationship between space and justice. It recognises that space is not simply an empty container in which people live and act, but is something that is constructed by social relations – and simultaneously constitutive of them. While this recognition gives rise to spatial perspectives on justice, what constitutes spatial, justice, as distinct from other notions of justice, and how such justice is to be achieved are contested. Building on the work of legal scholar, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, on spatial justice, I argue that the notion of ubuntu is able to shape our understanding of spatial justice, and when practised, it is able to disrupt space and challenge dominant spatial configurations. (shrink)

This text begins by considering the phrase ‘digital haptology’ as suggested by the closing pages of Derrida's Le Toucher. It suggests that this moment in telecommunications presents a model of ‘tele-haptology’. The text goes on to consider Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘Noli me tangere’ as a response to Le Toucher. In particular it is concerned with Nancy's hypothesis on Modern literature and art as having an essential link to the gospel parables. Through a reading of Nancy's text and the gospels, this hypothesis (...) is placed in doubt. Notably, the argument is made that once again Nancy's discourse on touching leads him to make a too hasty fore-closure of otherness within his intended deconstruction of reading and his account of Mary Magdalene. In response to Nancy's formulation of literature as parable, an alternative consideration of literature as tele-haptology is proposed. (shrink)

In the contemporary US, a configuration of market theocracy has melded together laissezfaire economics and right-wing religious conservatism, in spite of the many differences among the groups involved; it is a configuration that remains powerful even as it is increasingly fractured. Market theocracy draws on the mechanism of literalism, not the literal reading of texts but a concept of realism based on a belief in a common-sense version of unmediated natural law. Literalism filters meaning through two concepts long available in (...) American culture: spirit and surrender. Analyzing this configuration requires an analysis of a double structure: a highly complex deployment of strategic vagueness, joined to claims of simple clarity, and wrapped in passionate, emotional intensity. It is the most valuable prize in mass-mediated US politics. This article traces literalism by way of the concepts of ‘surrender’ and ‘spirit’ in three secular discourses: a best-selling marriage self-help book for women; marketing texts directed at entrepreneurs and investors; and an academic study written for neoconservative economists, in order to assess the importance of the strategic deployment of literalism. Unlike the literal, literalism draws on the most advanced sophisticated technological resources of modernity in order to produce a form of ‘vague clarity’ characterized by passionate, affective intensities. This literalism often confounds scholars and activists on the left who, in too many cases, still presume that knowledge and faith, the secular and the religious, the rational and the emotional can be kept ‘cleanly’ separate. (shrink)

Derrida notes that while many discourses—like law, politics, morality and theology—make use of the term cruelty, psychoanalysis alone takes psychical suffering as its own object of study. He is therefore incredulous that psychoanalysis has had so little to say about such important legal and political questions as the death penalty and other forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. His diagnosis is that insofar as psychoanalysis remains attached to a logic or a fantasy of sovereignty—one in which subjectivity is understood as individual or (...) indivisible—its revolutionary force remains blunted. Thus, Derrida calls for ‘a psychoanalysis to come’, a psychoanalysis for whom ‘cruelty’ is delinked from moral or theological approaches, a psychoanalysis which is delinked from its reliance on sovereignty—the sovereign subject, the sovereign nation or sovereign knowledge. Significantly, the ‘to come’ here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for psychoanalysis, as if this were just an Idea that we must move towards. Rather the ‘to come’ expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of psychoanalysis from within. I conclude by asking how this psychoanalysis to come might shed light on what Angela Davis called the ‘great feat of the imagination’ required to ‘envision life beyond the prison’. (shrink)

The critical resources furnished bydeconstruction have more than occasionally beenturned with negative effect on traditional andmore recent conceptions of liberal learning,including the reaffirmation of the humanitiesassociated with philosophical hermeneutics. Thefirst two sections of the paper review thecontrasting and mutually opposed stancestowards learning represented by earlyformulations of deconstruction and ofhermeneutics. An exploration is thenundertaken in the later sections ofdevelopments that have taken place in bothdeconstruction and hermeneutics since theDerrida-Gadamer encounter in Paris in 1981.While not in any sense assimilatinghermeneutics to deconstruction or (...) vice versa,this exploration identifies significant shiftsin later formulations of both which provide amore inclusive context for understandinglearning as a human undertaking, including theidentification of tensions that are morepromising than negative. (shrink)

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.

(2000). Religious narrative, post‐secularism and Utopia. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 205-224.

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

This paper responds to the violence inherent in modern ‘formal’ conceptions of justice which sever the ‘cultural’ from the ‘political’. As a counterpoint to this dominant rendering of justice the paper explores an alternate justice whose character is typified by the disposition and exigencies of the viscera.

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics (...) of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in (...) these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito. (shrink)

"Every power is transcendent; the Transcendent is power; every attempt to escape power is a way to seize power; every movement, which is directed to the prevention or limitation of power, is a seizure of power. It makes no sense and is very dangerous to oppose a political myth" (Schmitt, 1991, p. 180). Behind these cryptic words, dated July 19, 1948, lies the ‘mystery’ of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. A complex problematic that has sealed the intellectual and political fate of (...) the German jurist, and around which he has laboured for more than half a century. (shrink)

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am (...) more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion. (shrink)