This paper highlights the relevance of moral authority, and the role that egoistic ethical claims have in waging war. This is done, in view of the just war tradition, by drawing a parallel between the crusades in the 'kingdom of heaven' proclaimed in 1095, and the present Islamic jih d , as well as the Bush administration's declaration of a war on terror. It maintains that the role of self-legitimized leaders is crucial in shaping the order of the jus ad (...) bellum criteria, in both Christian and Muslim societies, and that the indiscriminate usage of just war rhetoric proves to be a formidable weapon. Moral authority is described as a power resource, capable of capsizing the relevance of ethics, subjecting the interpretation of justice to declare war to the self-proclaimed authorities, and moving masses on the grounds of enthusiasm. (shrink)

The aim of this article is (1) to investigate the ‘neurosciences’ as an object of study for historical and genealogical approaches and (2) to characterize what we identify as a particular ‘style of thought’ that consolidated with the birth of this new thought community and that we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’. This article argues that while there is a long history of research on the brain, the neurosciences formed in the 1960s, in a socio-historical context characterized by political change, faith (...) in scientific and technological progress, and the rise of a molecular gaze in the life sciences. They flourished in part because these epistemological and technological developments were accompanied by multiple projects of institution-building. An array of stakeholders was mobilized around the belief that breakthroughs in understanding the brain were not only crucial, they were possible by means of collaborative efforts, cross-disciplinary approaches and the use of a predominantly reductionist neuromolecular method. The first part of the article considers some of the different approaches that have been adopted to writing the history of the brain sciences. After a brief outline of our own approach, the second part of the article uses this in a preliminary exploration of the birth of the neurosciences in three contexts. We conclude by arguing that the 1960s constitute an important ‘break’ in the long path of the history of the brain sciences that needs further analysis. We believe this epistemological shift we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’ will shape the future intellectual development and social role of the neurosciences. (shrink)

This article takes up Foucault's politics of human rights and suggests that it may constitute a point of departure for the renewal of HRE, not only because it rejects the moral superiority of humanism—the grounding for the dominant liberal framework of international human rights—but also because it makes visible the complexities of human rights as illimitable and as strategic tools for new political struggles. Enriching human rights critiques has important implications for HRE, precisely because these critiques prevent the dominance of (...) unreflexive and unproductive forms of HRE that lead toward a declarationalist, conservative and uncritical approach. It is argued that Foucault's critical affirmation of human rights—that is, an approach which is neither a full embrace nor a total rejection—provides a critique that can be disruptive to the conventional HRE approach and creates openings that might renew HRE, both politically and pedagogically. (shrink)

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the "body politics" of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as "constantinian" entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as "racelessness," by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopolitical alternative to the nation–state's (...) politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of "nonviolent violence." Thus, Hauerwas must do something that he has been reluctant to do. He must talk about race and racism more directly, specifying how his ecclesiological theopolitics resists such forms of violence; more importantly, he must demonstrate how actual ecclesial congregations instantiate such resistance. In short, to be truly nonviolent, Hauerwas's body politics must become a politics of bodies. (shrink)

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of ‘neoliberalization’. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political economy. Alloyed with poststructuralist social theory, the historical materialist thrust of the article demonstrates how, in the technologically (...) articulate ‘social factory’ of advanced capitalism, the spatial operations of these techniques of dispossession have a particularly ‘aesthetic’ character that is immanent to their appropriative operation, and which renders their workings both more discreet and effective. The article aims: (1) to problematize the neoliberal concepts of efficiency, transparency, and autonomy, in terms of practical outcomes; (2) to stimulate reflexive consideration of the ‘positioning’ of academics themselves in the reproduction of these techniques; and (3) to ask how these techniques might generate new ‘historical subjects’ of struggle and organization in academic life. (shrink)

Ethnicity and im/migrant classification systems and their constituent categories have a long history in the construction of public health knowledge on tuberculosis in the United Kingdom. This article critically examines the categories employed and the epidemiological discourses on TB, im/migrants, and ethnic minorities in health reporting between 1965 and 2015. We employ a Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Analysis to trace the continuities and changes in the categories used and in the discursive construction of im/migrants, ethnic minorities, and TB. (...) These continuities and disjunctures are analysed within their socio-historical context to demonstrate the historical contingency of epidemiological knowledge production. We outline two historical phases in knowledge construction. The first coincides with the period of decolonisation, which witnessed a change in discursive identity ascriptions from ‘immigrants’ to ‘ethnic groups’ in health reporting as the ‘other’. The second commenced after 1991, when the adoption of the census ethnicity categories as a standard in the collection of population statistics entrenched ethnicity categories in health reporting. We argue the health reporting discourse reveals that the ‘new’ public health exhibits continuities with the ‘old’ by targeting the immigrant ‘other’ through biosecuritisation practices. We contend that these categories originated within a postcolonial paradigm and that increasing immigration and new forms of mobility are creating the preconditions for new discourses on identity construction that have implications for the current collaborative TB strategy. (shrink)

In this article, a framework is suggested to deal with the analysis of global environmental risk governance. Climate Change is taken as a particular form of contemporary environmental risk, and mobilised to refine and characterize some salient aspects of new governance challenges. A governance framework is elaborated along three basic features: (1) a close relationship with science, (2) an in-built reflexivity, and (3) forms of governmentality. The UNFCCC-centered system is then assessed according to this three-tier framework. While the two-first requisites (...) are largely met, the analysis of governmentality points to some institutional weak spots. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The (...) article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing bio-objects in the emerging field of regenerative medicine is umbilical cord blood. Employed in existing haematological therapies, but also loaded with potentialities for future uses, cord blood has been lately the focus of a regulatory debate which confronts public and private forms of biobanking. This article explores the political and anthropological side of this debate, describing the ways in which different health practices related to the umbilical cord (and to its symbolic sibling, the placenta) have (...) been involved in processes of societal production and reproduction. Through the use of ethnological and historical data, and their comparison with current practices, I contend that the technical manipulation of cords and placentas goes much longer into the past than what a first glance suggests, and that these two objects can be understood as biological spaces in which forms of social belonging and versions of the societal bond are at play. The current conflict between public and private cord blood banks is therefore interpreted as part of a longer history of bodily practices, and as reflecting recent mutations in the biopolitical constitution of advanced liberal societies. (shrink)

Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘gig economy’, ‘quantified self’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘data colonialism’, ‘data subjects’ and ‘digital citizens’. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sovereign, disciplinary and regulatory. This article argues that the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought these three forms of (...) power into sharp relief but made particularly visible a fourth form of power that we name ‘sensory power’, which has been emerging since the 1980s. The article draws on early studies of power by Michel Foucault, subsequent studies on biopower and biopolitics that expanded on them, and studies in the past decade that focused on data produced from apps, devices and platforms. Yet, despite its ambition, the article is inevitably an outline of a much larger project. (shrink)

The accurate illustration of the contemporary refugee subject has presented an unprecedented theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenge to all fields of academic research. Seeking for alternative philosophical modalities capable of liberating refugee representation from the suffocating threat–victim bipolarity, this article critically investigates Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler’s theoretical perspectives on refugee subjectivity. Section 1 systematises the dominant tropes of refugee representation either as dehumanised threats or depoliticised victims. Section 2 introduces the readers to Giorgio Agamben’s emblematic homo sacer as a (...) potentially fertile reconceptualisation of refugee subjectivity. In this context, Judith Butler’s critique on the Agambenian bare life is presented in two core pillars. Following one Butlerian claim, we trace the Agambenian inadequacy to successfully overcome the contemporary threat–victim mode of refugee representation in the absence of an empowering theoretical account of the homo sacer’s agentic and resisting capacities. In Section 4, we explore Judith Butler’s main argument regarding the constitutively political character of vulnerable refugee existence. By designating the Butlerian constellation of vulnerability and agency as an invigorating alternative perspective on modern refugee representation, we finally argue that Butler’s epistemological framework provides a more agonistic and nuanced theorisation of refugee subjectivity than Agamben. (shrink)

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring to primary (...) texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate. (shrink)

This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the modeling of national governance in the social sciences and also framed the representation of the social impact of migration. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with these conceptual frameworks. The limits of this framework are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt's theory of residentialism, and the outlines of an alternative conceptual frame is proposed by drawing (...) on key terms that have been developed in complexity theory. (shrink)

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over (...) constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited. (shrink)

This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizing us about the continuous negotiation of the meaning and materiality of particular ways of living vis-à-vis other (...) ways of being. Specifically, the article addresses modes of existence peculiar to the postcolony or encompassing antithetical value systems and argues that biodiplomacy opens up a wider field of ethical and cosmopolitical possibilities by making visible the interconnected plurality of human and non-human forces. (shrink)

The article defends the importance of metaphysical inquiry in feminist philosophy and interrogates possible directions for such a project. A key aim is questioning the possibility of revisionary metaphysics as well as emphasising the consequences of the linguistic turn for any such project. I argue that before we can embark on any metaphysical inquiry – feminist or otherwise – we are doomed to repeating Immanuel Kant's monumental question of how is metaphysics possible? I then ask how metaphysics is understood in (...) feminist discussions and focus on one contemporary effort to create feminist metaphysics, namely Christine Battersby's The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (1998). Through a critical analysis of her position I tease out the problems, paradoxes and obstacles that the project of feminist metaphysics faces. Finally, I explicate the politicised conception of reality that I find in Michel Foucault's thought and conclude by considering its consequences for our understanding of feminist metaphysics and politics. (shrink)

The key theme in this essay is the rethinking of the human, as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example, by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions (...) of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights—issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism. (shrink)

Utilizing social semiotic approaches, this article addresses how genetic researchers’ organizing narratives have involved extensive ontological and epistemological violence in their objectification Karitiana Indigenous people of Western Brazil. The paper analyses how genetic researchers have represented the Karitiana in the US and Canadian courts, post-9/11 forensic identification technology development, and patents. It also considers disputes over the sale of Karitiana cell lines by the US National Institutes of Health-funded Coriell Cell Repositories. These case studies reveal how the prominent population geneticist (...) Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale University and other genetics researchers have constituted the Karitiana as Extreme Other; liminal figures who define the boundaries of humanity. Originally sampled in 1987 by a Yale University epidemiologist, forensic genetic researchers have since utilized Karitiana cell lines to metonymically represent the Karitiana. The practices of objectification have imposed a genetically distinct special status upon the Karitiana that restricts recognition of their self-determination, rights and dignity, and which imposes onerous obligations to serve as research objects for the greater good of Humanity. The Karitiana are included as biological labour, but excluded from decision-making or asserting any other claims. Scientists have organized and maintained biotechnologically-mediated colonial relationships in which they and their institutions extract nearly all immediate and tangible benefits. The fusing of genetic research’s ontological and epistemological violence with the violence of state legal institutions raises important questions about the scope and practices of sovereignty, particularly in determining and enforcing states of exception through violence. (shrink)

Conservation biology is a branch of ecology devoted to conserving biodiversity. Because this discipline is based on the assumption that knowledge should guide actions, it endows experts with a power that should be questioned. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault can be seen as a relevant conceptual resource to think these aspects of conservation biology through. I critically analyse the relevance of the Foucauldian approach to conservation. I argue that Foucauldian arguments are deeply ambiguous, and therefore useless for (...) conservation purposes, unless they are supplemented with unsaid assumptions that are, depending on the case at hand, untenable, or at least at odds with basic assumptions underlying conservation biology. In any case, the prospects of using the Foucauldian approach for conservation purposes are deeply undermined. However, the Foucauldian reasoning contains some ideas that can be important and useful for conservation purposes, if they are duly clarified. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory, based upon the hopeful premise that it heralds an ameliorative response to the malignity of sovereignty's lack and the treacherous violence of sovereignty's excess. The promise of cosmopolitanism inheres in the claim that state sovereignty is and should be supplemented by an international system backed by the legitimacy of international law, grounded in the sovereignty of human rights. Drawing upon Foucault and Agamben, my argument in this essay (...) is that the laudable endeavour of liberal cosmopolitans is flawed in two ways: first, cosmopolitanism cannot escape sovereign violence, because it cannot escape sovereignty; and second, cosmopolitans misconstrue the composition of the very sovereignty they aim to escape. This means that cosmopolitan theorists are unable to identify cosmopolitan practices of sovereignty that also entail forms of violence: cosmopolitan exception. Cosmopolitan exception denotes violent sovereign practices that cannot be differentiated from the protection of rights. (shrink)

This paper explores the influence and use of agrarian thought on collective understandings of food practices as sources of ethical and communal value in urban contexts. A primary proponent of agrarian thought that this paper engages is Paul Thompson and his exceptional book, The Agrarian Vision. Thompson aims to use agrarian ideals of agriculture and communal life to rethink current issues of sustainability and environmental ethics. However, Thompson perceives the current cultural mood as hostile to agrarian virtue. There are two (...) related claims of this paper. The first argues that contrary to Thompson’s perception of hostility, agrarian thought is popularly and commercially mobilized among urban populations. To establish this claim I extend Charles Taylor’s notion of a social imaginary and suggest that urban agriculture can be theorized as an agrarian imaginary. Entwined with the first claim is the second, that proponents selectively use agrarian history to overemphasis a narrative of virtue while ignoring or marginalizing historical practices of agrarian violence, exclusion and dispossession. I do not discount or deny the significance of agrarian virtue. By situating agrarian thought within a clearer virtue ethics framework and acknowledging potential manifestation of agrarian vice, I suggest that the idea of agrarian virtue is strengthened. (shrink)

The potential for biases being built into algorithms has been known for some time, yet literature has only recently demonstrated the ways algorithmic profiling can result in social sorting and harm marginalised groups. We contend that with increased algorithmic complexity, biases will become more sophisticated and difficult to identify, control for, or contest. Our argument has four steps: first, we show how harnessing algorithms means that data gathered at a particular place and time relating to specific persons, can be used (...) to build group models applied in different contexts to different persons. Thus, privacy and data protection rights, with their focus on individuals, do not protect from the discriminatory potential of algorithmic profiling. Second, we explore the idea that anti-discrimination regulation may be more promising, but acknowledge limitations. Third, we argue that in order to harness anti-discrimination regulation, it needs to confront emergent forms of discrimination or risk creating new invisibilities, including invisibility from existing safeguards. Finally, we outline suggestions to address emergent forms of discrimination and exclusionary invisibilities via intersectional and post-colonial analysis. (shrink)

The paper treats several ontological questions about certain nineteenth-century and contemporary medical and scientific conceptualizations of hereditary relation. In particular, it considers the account of mid-nineteenth century psychiatric thought given by Foucault in Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974 and Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 . There, Foucault argues that a fantastical conceptual prop, the ‘metabody,’ as he terms it, was implicitly supposed by that period’s psychiatric medicine as a putative ground for psychiatric pathology. (...) After presenting the heart of Foucault’s thought on the ‘metabody,’ the paper investigates the possibility that a contemporary version of a ‘metabody’ may operate today as a conceptual analog of the nineteenth-century psychiatric theory and practice that Foucault began to expose in the texts examined here. It speculates that we might identify a contemporary genetic version of a ‘metabody’ in a particular current conception of the gene as replicator, an item marked by an ambiguous temporal ontology. (shrink)

In this paper I chart the origins of modern day “biopedagogy” through an analysis of two historically specific figures of abnormality: the nervous child and the degenerate. These two figures form the positive and negative surfaces of biopolitics in education, sustained and articulated through the category of immunization. By analyzing the relation between the medical discourse of immunity and the practice of pedagogy, I will reveal how biopedagogy is predicated on a dialectical reversal of life into death and thus unsustainable (...) for furthering social democracy. In conclusion, I begin to search for an affirmative notion of biopolitical education that is no longer predicated on the dialectics of immunization. For help in this project, I briefly suggest that a theory of natality helps to disentangle the promise of life from its negation in the form of educational eugenics and mental hygiene. (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)

Today we can identify two challenges of pluralism: the ever-growing conflicts between religious, national and ethnic groups on the one hand and the oppression of dissenting individuals by their respective communities on the other hand. Both intercommunitarian and intracommunitarian conflicts find their origin in a communitarian conception of our political, cultural, or religious identities. After presenting some of the problems of the communitarian solution in particular with regard to the challenge of internal pluralism, I introduce alternative conceptions of multiculturalism that (...) consider our commitments to be part of our personal or individual identity. Distinguishing a conception of identity based upon self-knowledge from liberal, postmodern theories (Richard Rorty) and alternative non-cognitive theories (Bernard Williams) that consider identity to be individual in nature, I propose that the awareness of the individual nature of commitments makes it possible for us not to impose our values upon other individuals who do not share them while at the same time justifying the multicultural project. (shrink)

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain ‘traditionalist’ (...) positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves. (shrink)

Today, very few would doubt that there are plenty of reasons to liken Weber’s and Foucault’s theories of power. Nevertheless, their respective works have divergent ethical and ontological preoccupations which should be reconsidered. This article explores Foucault’s account of a historical episode in Discipline and Punish and Weber’s theory of life spheres, uncovering evidence that there is a need to reassess the conceptual bridges which have been built so far. The exploration reveals a radical difference between a monological theory of (...) power (Foucault) and a multidimensional approach to power (Weber). Yet by unbridging the two thinkers and focusing on other aspects of their theories along with their ideas about power, we also find that alternative links between the two frameworks may offer a more promising critical theory. (shrink)

I distinguish between the nineteenth- to twentieth-century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth- to twenty-first-century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth-century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, and so on). This move—using racial nonwhiteness to rescue pop culture from white femininity—is a common twentieth- and (...) twenty-first-century practice. I use Nietzsche to track shifts from classical to neo-liberal methods of appropriating “difference.” Hipness is one form of this neoliberal approach to difference, and it is exemplified by the approach to race, gender, and pop culture in Vincente Minnelli's film The Band Wagon. I expand upon Robert Gooding-Williams's reading of this film, and argue that mid-century white hipness dissociates the popular from femininity and whiteness, and values the popular when performed by white men “acting black.” Hipness instrumentalizes femininity and racial nonwhiteness so that any benefits that might come from them accrue only to white men, and not to the female and male artists of color whose works are appropriated. (shrink)

Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech.A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments.These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as philosophy and sociology of education.The occurrence of such situations has prompted debate regarding ‘silencing words that wound’. This has prompted the question, ‘should we keep students from stating such discriminatory (...) speech?’ Our article takes up this issue, and considers it from the perspective of the importance of critique.Working with Foucault’s What is Critique? together with his discussion of subjectivation in the 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France, we set out to make the case for the significance of the relationship between truth and critique.This leads us to a position where we ask the question, if we silence, what do we risk doing to critique? (shrink)

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the actions (...) of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work. (shrink)

In this paper, I work through the possible contours of an anti-genocide based on a framework informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben. Such a framework posits the inherent need to circumvent sovereign power within any form of normative activism. To begin, I show how the nascent anti-genocide movement promotes an ideal in which ?Western? states, particularly the USA, accept the global responsibility to protect persecuted life beyond national boundaries. Using Agamben, I argue that this vision also entails an acceptance (...) of a sovereign framework for the valuation of life, thus failing to confront the inherent power of the sovereign to condemn life in the first place. I then highlight the limitations that Agamben's ontology places on us in dealing with this inherent problem within the sovereign-subject relationship. By positing an alternative ontology, I suggest the possibility of establishing communities of solidarity that challenge the sovereign's self-ascribed role as the absolute valuator of life. Counter to Agamben, I argue that the basis for such communities could be a dedication to the universal sacredness of human life, which is maintained independently of, and in challenge to, sovereign power. (shrink)

While organ transplantation has been established in the medical imagination since the 1960s, this technology is currently undergoing a popular re-imagination in the era of global capitalism. As transplantation procedures have become routine in medical centers in non-Western and developing nations and as organ sales and transplant tourism become increasingly common, organs that function as a material resource increasingly derive from subaltern bodies. This essay explores this development as represented in Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s 2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, focusing (...) on the ethnic and class characteristics of the global market in organs and possible modes of counter-logic to transplant technologies and related ethical discourses. (shrink)

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 article analyses Foucault’s 1972–3 lecture course,La société punitive. While the course can certainly be seen as an initial draft of themes for the 1975 bookSurveiller et punir, there are some important differences. The reading here focuses on different modes of punishment; the civil war and the social enemy; the comparison of England and France; and political economy. It closes with some analysis of the emerging clarity in Foucault’s work around power and genealogy. This is a course where Foucault makes (...) use of Marxist language and categories, engages with historical materialism, and offers a complementary and at times corrective focus. (shrink)

Living in modern biopolitical risk culture might be seen as synonymous with living in prognosis time, in the sense that risk of illness is endlessly forecast (prognosticated) in the broad social arena. ‘Safety,’ in this context, is framed as the anticipatory guarding against risk or disease in order to ‘make live.’ Thinking of risk and safety in these ways is limited, however, in that the prognosis cannot account for the individual’s life or death drama. This paper asks: how are we (...) to understand the constellation of risk, prognosis, and safety in relation to ‘the subject in breast cancer prognosis’? (shrink)

This paper explores the gendered and temporal dimensions of the political ontology of hospitality that Derrida has developed from Levinas's philosophy. The claim is that, while hospitality per se takes time, the more that hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time it takes is given by women without acknowledgment or support. The analysis revisits Hannah Arendt's claim that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is disclosure of "natality" (innovation or the birth of the (...) new). This can be described as accounting for the "temporalisation of time": the disruption of the past (cultural tradition) in the present that is a condition of agency and political hospitality. On the other hand, the unpredictability and instability of human affairs that this temporalization of time engenders can, in times of heightened insecurity and fear, give birth to political conservatism that would contain "natality" and dampen the hospitality that characterizes democratic pluralism. The paper examines the connection between this idea of the temporalization of time and feminist observations, overlooked by Arendt, that "lived time" is gendered, that is, that the condition of "natality" and political hospitality is an unacknowledged stability provided by women giving lived time to others, beginning with reproduction in the "home." The inequities that result are exacerbated, and democracy is further compromised, if this re-gendering of domestic space is accompanied by the deregularization of labor time. (shrink)

Michel Foucault provides a radical challenge to the liberal approach to power and law, which is echoed by Jacques Derrida. Important differences exist between the analyses of Foucault and Derrida which should not be overlooked. This essay proceeds on the basis of an awareness of these differences, yet it at the same time attempts to bring these thinkers closer together, with reference specifically to the thinking of Freud. It is often said that Foucault does not offer an alternative to that (...) which he criticises or that his analyses do not provide for a way in which to escape from the effects of power. By specifically focusing on Foucault’s reliance on the notion of ‘play’ in Society must be defended, it is submitted that an ‘escape’ is in fact provided for. The deconstructive reading of Foucault which is presented here attempts to ensure that Foucault does not remain trapped within metaphysics. (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)

The study of world politics in theoretical and empirical terms has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest in the question of complexity, drawing upon complexity theory; particularly, renewed interest in emergent properties and the aleatory nature of the political. This article seeks to demonstrate, primarily via an exploration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the possibilities for a type of thinking about the ‘international’ that utilises the notion of social complexity as its primary mode of enframing the (...) major dimensions to world politics. As such it argues for a theoretical reconceptualisation of the system of states, markets and societies as individual and overlapping scale-entities, each possessing causal agency, with overlapping and enmeshed boundaries, situated in their historical and concrete manifestations. The reified concepts of polity, economy and society are re-cast in the language of assemblage theory as ordering, exchanging and cohering, thus highlighting process in world politics and providing a theoretical base better equipped to cope with complex social processes and practices. And this I conclude clears the way to re-situate international space theoretically as a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

In contemporary Western societies, birthing is framed as transformative for mothers; however, it is also a site for the regulation of women and the exercise of power relations by health professionals. Nursing scholarship often frames migrant mothers as a problem, yet nurses are imbricated within systems of scrutiny and regulation that are unevenly imposed on ‘other’ mothers. Discourses deployed by New Zealand Plunket nurses (who provide a universal ‘well child’ health service) to frame their understandings of migrant mothers were analysed (...) using discourse analysis and concepts of power drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, read through a postcolonial feminist perspective. This research shows how Plunket nurses draw on liberal feminist discourses, which have emancipatory aims but reflect assimilatory practices, paradoxically disempowering women who do not subscribe to ideals of individual autonomy. Consequently, the migrant mother, her family and new baby are brought into a neoliberal project of maternal improvement through surveillance. This project – enacted differentially but consistently among nurses – attempts to alter maternal and familial relationships by ‘improving’ mothering. Feminist critiques of patriarchy in maternity must be supplemented by a critique of the implicitly western subject of maternity to make empowerment a possibility for all mothers. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight of subjecthood. (...) Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period (1485–1602). Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre-existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There is (...) a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power-ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always-already the embodiment of the field of society-power-ideology. (shrink)

In the early twenty-first century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other ‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as (...) oriented towards consensus but then considers how technologies of real-time ‘control’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. In response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists but does not originate there. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores specific forms that neoliberal discourse and culture in academia today take in the field of Israeli Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The article applies various textual and contextual interrogation strategies to the language, narratives and the unsaid in interviews with leading scholars in the field, in order to construe what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘political unconscious,’ particularly that arising from the use of market as a conceptual metaphor. Contextualising this field of discourse within neoliberal academia, I deconstruct (...) the work ‘demand’ and ‘interest’ do, and highlight the dialectical dynamics of experts’ dependence on audience. I argue that, in this field, the economic discourse shelters Zionist logics, presuppositions and praxis, such as recruitment logics and fundraising practices that effectively address Jewish and Zionist students and donors. (shrink)