The aim of this article is to explore how, and to what extent, Italian thought – by its focalization on pre-modern theoretical issues and its distance from classical modern topics, such as the philosophy of conscience or the transcendence of language – can offer a different insight on contemporary social theory and critical theory, after the dissolution of the idea of totality as a foundational concept of modernity. In the last decades, a frame named ‘Italian theory’ has started to circulate (...) in international theoretical debates, often with the aim of replacing the exhausted paradigms of poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. Indeed, ‘Italian thought’ seems to offer new insights, thinking about the ‘post-totality’ era in a different way. In the article we present a synthetic cartography of Italian thought and we analyse the way in which it can contribute to design new horizons for social theory. (shrink)

This article investigates the intersections of secrecy/interiority, the state, and speech/ expression, and their implications for the rights of women. I propose a critique of commercial pornography that reanimates MacKinnon's claim that pornography and American democracy are in a relationship of mutual reinforcement, and incorporates poststructuralist (Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Butler) commitments to secrecy and unintelligibility, as well as their role in the production of pleasure.

The building of the blockchain is predicted to harken the end of the contemporary sovereign order. Some go further to claim that as a powerful decentering technology, blockchain contests the continued functioning of world capitalism. Are such claims merited? In this paper we consider sovereignty and blockchain technology theoretically, posing possible futures for sovereignty in a blockchain world. These possibilities include various forms of individual, popular, technological, corporate, and techno-totalitarian state sovereignty. We identify seven structural tendencies of blockchain technology and (...) give examples as to how these have manifested in the construction of new forms of sovereignty. We conclude that the future of sovereignty in a blockchain world will be articulated in the conjuncture of social struggle and technological agency and we call for a stronger alliance between technologists and democrats. (shrink)

Conventional historical and popular accounts tend to emphasize sharp polarities between empires and nation-states. While an empire is traditionally associated with conquests, slavery, political inequalities, economic exploitation and the wars of yesteryear, a nation-state is understood to be the only legitimate and viable form of large-scale territorial organization today. This article challenges such interpretations by focusing on the organizational and ideological continuities between the imperial and the nation-state models of social order. In particular, I focus on the role coercive and (...) ideological apparatuses as well as the transformation of micro-solidarities play in the formation of polities over long periods of time. I argue that although empires and nation-states are different ideal types of polity they are highly compatible and as such prone to metamorphosing into each other. More specifically I explore how, when and why specific coercive-organizational, ideological and micro-interactional processes make this periodic historical metamorphosis possible. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue focuses on the complex and contradictory relationships of empires and nation-states. It contests the traditional views that posit nation-states and empires as the mutually exclusive forms of state organization. The paper identifies the key features of these two ideal types and then briefly reviews the current developments in this field. This introduction also provides a summary overview of the nine contributions that compose the special issue.

Since the foundation of the Santa Fe Institute, the new science of complex adaptive systems has seen extraordinary development, breaking with previous, more epistemological, trends in complexity theory. This article makes a critique of CAS as a model of the current global complexity. Its basic model, the cellular automaton, which focuses on the interactive dynamics among components, ignores the nature of any complex system as constructed by the observer/actor and is unable to explain the sociohistorical construction of the agents/subjects and (...) the social structure in which they are located, thus being unable to accurately represent the overall social complexity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis contribution seeks to develop some reflections on Marx as an analyst of the economy. I argue for a discursive Marxism that makes the integration of Foucauldian ideas into a Marxian framework possible. Three distinctive but interrelated questions will be addressed. First, what is specific about a Marxian understanding of the economy, especially compared to certain tendencies in economic sociology and political economy? Second, how is a Marxian understanding of the economy reflected by current Marxist studies and how have these (...) studies contributed to a discursive-cultural turn in Marxist and neo-Marxist analysis of the economy? Third, while the discursive-cultural turn became increasingly important, what is the contribution of discourse studies of the economy to a Marxian framework? The paper concludes with the idea of a Discursive Political Economy approach in order to grasp the cultural and institutional complexity of power. To put discursive processes into a Marxian framework, a combined analysis of discursive-imaginary as well as institutionalized-sedimented power positions is required. (shrink)

The skin is always and already a serietl of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one's subjectivity through one's own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminists, particularly corporeal feminists, (...) have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman's body’. Thinking a tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists, this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin, and possible configurations of skin and world, which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity. (shrink)

There are many people in organizations who have feelings of alienation; that is they feel they do not fit in, they get no meaning out of their work, they feel belittled or abused by their superiors or colleagues; they desire to break loose the masks they wear, or to find some sense of meaningfulness. In our paper, we demonstrate our assumption of alienation in the workplace by reviewing a collection of satirical and ironic organizational stories from police officers working at (...) a county sheriff’s department. Our argument is that if it seems that alienation might not be resolved through organizational change efforts and interventions, or might not be resolved through radical change of the economic conditions of modern industrial life, then alienation might be changed through the aggregation of individual projects from below. We discuss the possibility of resolving alienation at the workplace by using the legend of Percival as an analogy. (shrink)

The scholarly field of the digital humanities has recently expanded and integrated its fundamental concepts, historical coverage, relationship to social experience, scale of projects, and range of interpretive approaches. All this brings the overall field to a tipping point where it has the potential not just to facilitate the work of the humanities but to represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state. Are the digital humanities up to this (...) larger task? (shrink)

The French and Dutch referenda on the adoption of a European Constitutional Treaty highlight a remarkable ambiguity in the self‐constitution of a polity, which can be viewed as both constitution by and of a collective self. This ambiguity is a fundamental feature of polities in general, and the European Union in particular. Rather than suppressing this ambiguity, democracy—and a fortiori a European democracy worth its name—institutionalises it as the guiding principle of political action. As will transpire, the conceptual and normative (...) problems raised by political self‐constitution are linked to self‐attribution, i.e., the conditions under which a collective ascribes legislation to itself. (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 paper suggests that lessons from the field of environmental ethics and sociological perspectives on knowledge are important tools for rethinking what type of ethical analysis is needed for building up further the field of development ethics and, more generally, for addressing some of the most fundamental ethical problems related to global poverty and development. The paper argues for a methodologically pragmatist approach to development ethics that focuses on the interplay between facts, values, concepts and practices. It views development ethics (...) as a hybrid between a public moral?political philosophy and a public conception of social science. Ethical analyses of poverty and development must lead to fundamental changes in the ways knowledge is produced and justified and must challenge the dominance of global institutions and orthodox economics as the single sources of expert knowledge for development. Two of the main tasks of ethical analysis is to provide tools for the formulation of alternative knowledge for development centred on the equal moral worth of all human beings, and to influence global policy making as well as multilateral institutions' goals and policies. The last section of the paper argues that Amartya Sen's version of the Capability Approach is already methodologically pragmatist and points to some convergence between Sen's work and John Dewey's. Further sociological and methodologically pragmatist analysis of the approach is needed to assess the ways in which it is influencing debates on human development and leading to policy changes, and the possible distortions it suffers when adopted by multilateral agencies and policy makers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference on Ethics and Development at Michigan State University, East Landing (USA) 8?15 April 2005. The section on methodological pragmatism draws from an unpublished paper written with Andrew Light called ?A Pragmatist Methodology for Development Ethics,? presented at the American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting in New York, December 1999. I have updated, transformed and used some parts and insights developed with Light in a way he may not recognize. (shrink)

The review assesses first and foremost the capability of Mezzadra and Neilson’s book to radically tackle some urgent issues concerning both capital’s regulation of migratory movements and the subjective autonomy these latter incessantly express. The main original contribution of the text is a conception of the border as an epistemic device through which to address and act upon a variety of social processes, from migration policies to labour transformations, from capital’s restructuring to governmental regulations. Subsequently, two crucial topics are critically (...) discussed: 1) the methodological link between epistemology and conflictual subjectivity ; 2) the compelling – but problematic from a practical perspective – way in which the issue of political organisation is situated against the current phase of capitalist development by means of concepts such as translation and the common. (shrink)

‘The art of living with ICTs ’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes (...) and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective. (shrink)

: This article focuses on cognitive enhancement technologies and their possible anthropological implications, and argues for a reconsideration of the human-technology relation so as to be able to better understand and assess these implications. Current debates on cognitive enhancement consistently disregard the intimate intertwinement of humans and technology as well as the fundamentally technogenic nature of anthropogenesis. Yet, an adequate assessment of CET requires an in-depth and up-to-date re-conceptualization of both. Employing insights from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this article (...) proposes an organology and pharmacology of CE. What is typical about new CET is their interiorizing nature, which can be expected to fundamentally reshape organological configurations. Starting from the premise that CE is a phenomenon that predominantly unfolds within the current conjuncture of cognitive capitalism, I will present the issue of cognitive proletarianization as being of crucial importance for considering CE. I conclude by providing some methodological guidelines for the development of a positive pharmacology of CET and by suggesting that CET should be considered as technologies of the self sensu Michel Foucault. (shrink)

In this article, I bring Marx and Adorno into conversation with affect theory to establish three points: First, an affective reading of the concepts of alienation and exploitation via Marx’s metaphor of the “vampire capital” explains how capitalism depletes raced, gendered, and sexed working class of their bodily and mental powers. Second, discussing these thinkers’ ideas in the context of the larger mind and body opposition revives attention to the body in contemporary political theory and exposes how the mind and (...) body opposition covers the suffering caused by capitalism. Third, it shows that we must theorize the mind and body, feeling and thinking, as a mediated relation to grasping how particularly negative feelings can generate critical thinking, necessary to rebel against the vampire capital. (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)

The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will trace the (...) shift from hegemony or extensive politics to such an intensive politics in terms of: 1) a transition to an ontological regime of power, from a regime that in important respects is 'epistemological', 2) a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within and power as generative force, 3) a shift from power and politics in terms of normativity to a regime of power much more based in what can be understood as a 'facticity'. This points to a general transition from norm to fact in politics. From hegemonic norm to what we will see are intensive facts. The fourth section will look at this shift through a change from an extensive regime of representation to an intensive regime of communications. (shrink)

Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of extensity, equivalence, equilibrium and the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s intensity, inequivalence, disequilibrium and the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in (...) contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The article argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour to abstract heterogeneous life. Material cause changes from the commodity’s units of equivalence to consist of informational units of inequivalence. Formal cause takes place through the preservation of form as a disequilibriate system through operations of closure. These operations are at the same time information interchanges with a form’s environment. Final cause becomes the deep-structural generation of information from a compressed virtual substrate. This may have implications for method in the social and human sciences. The article illustrates this shift with a brief discussion of global finance. (shrink)

In post-Fordist economies, the nature of laboring activities can no longer be subsumed under a Taylorized model of labor, and the service sector now constitutes a larger share of the market. For Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and other theorists in the post-Marxist tradition, labor has changed from a commodity-producing activity to one that does not produce a material object. For these authors, this new type of labor is immaterial labor and entails communicative acts as well as added worker (...) agency. This paper reflects on this new paradigm of labor by examining the paid practices of care defined as the activities performed by individuals who have a mandate to help another adult accomplish the tasks of self-care. Because care workers take care of other bodies, care labor exemplifies an embodied practice. I make use of the corporeality of care to put forward the notion of thin and thick embodiment in order to examine critically the meaning of immaterial labor and to support my claim that immaterial labor, as conceptualized by Hardt and Negri, erases both the materiality and relationality of care labor. Furthermore, typifying care labor as immaterial only serves to maintain its marginalized status.Care Assistant. Required to work within a private residential center to assist nursing staff. Experience desirable, qualifications an advantage, but caring and understanding more important than either. Must have good English to understand instructions and be co-operative to work in a friendly team environment (Toynbee 2007, 220). (shrink)

Este artículo discute la llamada economía colaborativa para señalar, en primer y segundo lugar, algunas dificultades que aparecen (o pueden aparecer) a la hora de comprenderla tanto en términos analíticos como conceptuales. En tercer lugar, expone dos de las interpretaciones más extendidas actualmente para, en cuarto lugar, centrarse en aquella que atribuye a la economía colaborativa un carácter emancipador. En particular, se discuten tres importantes limitaciones a las que usualmente debe hacer frente dicha perspectiva: el excesivo protagonismo que otorga a (...) las comunidades colaborativas y al principio de paraigualdad; su modo de entender la racionalidad humana; y su visión a-institucional y meramente psicológica de la naturaleza y el funcionamiento de los mercados. El artículo concluye sugiriendo que, para lograr que la economía colaborativa despliegue su potencial emancipador, se requieren instituciones sociales y políticas que pongan a funcionar dicha colaboración en beneficio de todas y todos.This paper discusses the so-called collaborative economy, first and second, by pointing out some difficulties that appear (or can appear) in its understanding, both in conceptual and analytical terms. In the third section, two of its most currently widespread interpretations are analysed, while the fourth section focusses in the one that imputes to it an emancipatory character. In particular, three of this interpretation’s most usual boundaries are analysed: the excessive prominence that it confers to collaborative communities and to the principle of egalitarianism; its understanding of the human rationality; and its a-institutional and its mere psychologic approach to the nature and the functioning of markets. The paper concludes by suggesting that, in order to collaborative economy deploy its emancipatory potential, social and political institutions that turns collaboration in benefiting everyone are required. (shrink)

This article proposes a more culturalist and variegated conception of the individual than that presented by individualization theorists. Inspired by the approach of the individual advocated by Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and John Meyers, it first outlines the general script of the individual-as-actor that informs modern individualism as well as the generic characteristics that are routinely attributed to persons such as agency and free will. It subsequently reconstructs three predominant interpretations of this general script, i.e. utilitarian, moral and expressive individualism. (...) For each variant, the intellectual genesis and overall definition of the institutionalization in specific societal domains and the dominant articulations in social theory are briefly presented. With this threefold distinction, the aim is to synthesize the extensive literature on individualism and to show the sociological strengths of approaching subjectivity in terms of institutionalized scripts. (shrink)

InWorkers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, Rohini Hensman maintains that globalisation has afforded workers new opportunities for confronting capitalist exploitation. Using India as a point of departure, Hensman highlights globalisation as paradoxical, challenging anti-globalisers and the globalisation-as-imperialism thesis, to argue that capital’s toilers are now becoming its gravediggers. This analysis also explains why the World Trade Organization is so appealing to Hensman: a quintessence of capitalism’s contradictions. Hensman argues for both transnational solidarity and independent trade unions, embodied in (...) the ‘employees’ unions’ of India, as well as in favour of thewto’s ‘social clause’ amendment, in which the global exploiter is transformed into an arbiter of workers’ rights. The review maintains that the terms of Hensman’s twin position are impossible to reconcile. It evinces an underlying contradiction between opportunistic statism and a conception of revolutionary strategy predicated on action ‘from below’. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and emotional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as “inter-affection” that are part of the inter-corporeality of the “Flesh” of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational life-worlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of (...) affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined. (shrink)

Sohn-Rethel’s theory undermines the line of thought that, from Kant to deconstruction, severs being or the thing from representation, by showing that the Kantian a priori categories of thought are a posteriori effects of the relations of things, to the point that it is ‘only through the language of commodities that their owners become rational beings’. This is the thesis of Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’, and Sohn-Rethel’s work develops the methodology that follows from it. ‘ Realabstraktion’ means that the (...) commodification of things amounts to their transformation into the language that provides the a priori categories of human thought. As a result, far from being inaccessible to representation, being is precisely that which reveals itself whenever the transcendental categories of representation are laid out. Therefore, Sohn-Rethel’s theory entails that not only can one not separate economy from thought but also economy and thought from being, so that there are no three distinct fields – economy, ontology and epistemology – but one: an economic epistemontology. Just as Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ introduced the unconscious in both subjectivity and economy – ‘they do this without knowing it’ – Sohn-Rethel analysed all economic, intellectual and practical spheres in terms of the fundamental distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. The article also points to certain corrections that Marx’s own theory indicates need to be made in Sohn-Rethel’s account, particularly regarding the source of abstraction, the role of coined money, and the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production and exchange. (shrink)

From his adoptive academic home in East Timor, the Australian lawyer-philosopher-cyclist Martin Hardie has delivered a riveting assessment of the anti-doping fight as applied to cycling. To anyone...

This article approaches commercial divination as a lens to examine the gendered contents and discontents of labor and intimacy in the neoliberal era. While coffee divinations have long been a feminized medium of socializing and caring in Turkey, they were recently transformed into a commodified service that recruits women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals as workers and consumers. In dialogue with scholarship on emotional and affective labors, I conceptualize divination as “feeling labor” that produces an affective intersubjective space for the incitement, (...) experience, and articulation of emotions. The feeling labors of divination create commodified intimacies through which women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals explore their feelings. However, these intimacies are produced at the expense of devalued labors of those who are feminized along the heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender, age, and sexual orientation. Attending to the gendered production and consumption of feeling labors and the intimacies they create are central to understanding the relationships between gender and labor in postindustrial capitalism. (shrink)

This article is an argument for furthering the understanding, role and scope of critical theology in reflection on the act, content and implications of theological thought through appropriation of...

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.

Several recent works in political theory argue that exit, rather than being a coward’s choice, is a potent mode of resistance that is particularly well suited to the current political era. These works reclaim exit, seeing it as a method of political opposition. While innovative and illuminating, these accounts are limited because they tend to treat all exits as resistance, regardless of context or content, and they are inclined to over-saturate exit with oppositional political meaning. I argue that resistant exit (...) should be more narrowly defined. By examining a range of empirical cases, I identify and explore three distinctive characteristics of this particular type of opposition. In addition to clarifying a recently developed idea in current scholarship, this article provides a systematic way for scholars to understand and interpret the intersection between resistance and exit. (shrink)

Intelligent machines are no longer distant fantasies of the future or solely used for industrial purposes; they are real “living” things that operate similarly to humans with verbal and nonverbal communication capabilities. Humans see in such technology the horrifying dangers and the bliss enabled by the saving power. Entrenched in the emotions of hope and fear concerning intelligent machines, humans’ attitudes toward intelligent machines are not free of expectations, judgments, strategies, and selfish agendas. As the discovery of the New Worlds (...) has led to the development of an understanding of self as distinct from the other, narratives on intelligent robots have taken on similar forms of colonial discourse: contradictory manifestations of ethnocentrism (anthropocentrism) and exoticism. Similar to colonial encounters, the racialized Mechanical _Other_ operates like any other marginalized group. Colonial discourse often regards the mechanical _Other_ as both inferior yet exotic, which usually produces a mixed sense of blessing and curse, ambivalence composed of both desire and aversion. In these representations of machinic _otherness,_ one should not miss the fundamental injustice of creating the “Machinic Other” and imposing humans’ viewpoints. The field must expand the purview of intelligent machines to consider the larger historical and cultural forces shaping our understanding of who we are as reflected in the mirror of intelligent machines. (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)

Democratic politics might be defined as the agonistic struggle of different parties, groups or individuals over resources, recognition and influence under reciprocal and inclusive conditions. It is based on an unconditional orientation to equality as well as freedom of all those involved to consent to - or dissent from - the norms, policies and practices that are established in the process of public dialogue. This article reconstructs the general agent-based capabilities required for a democratically defined public sphere under conditions of (...) globalization. Making capabilities central is intended to correct a certain over-emphasis regarding institutional macro-structures in the discourse on globalization and cosmopolitanism. After setting the stage with a critical analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s concept of capabilities, the analysis proceeds in two major steps. In the first part, a notion of hermeneutic agency is introduced that avoids a Foucauldian reduction of agency to power structures, while thoroughly situating agency in a symbolically mediated social context. The symbolic mediation of agency is, in the second part, taken as a ground of potentiality for reflexive capabilities that, once actualized and enacted, allow for a normatively satisfying process of public deliberation. The aim of the analysis is to relate a normative model of value-orientation to the linguistically grounded empirical resources of social agents. The core argument lays out as basic capabilities (1) to be able to normatively orient oneself at contextually defined yet universally open postconventional commitments, (2) to be able to engage in an interpretive and dialogical perspective-taking vis-a-vis differently situated agents and backgrounds, and (3) to be able to critically distance oneself from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions and background structures via a power-alert social reflexivity. (shrink)

Approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, the visual encounter between humans and birds, which has been going on since both forms of life have existed, began to solidify into a hobby, into something that a middle-class citizen of American might spend a morning doing. Certain technologies—optics , field guides, and later, automobiles—helped to enable this pursuit. In the twentieth century, bird watching became an immense industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one report claims that in America (...) "an estimated 70.4 million people now go out-of-doors to watch birds one or more times per year" . Much has been written on how and why bird watching has grown in popularity during the last 150 years or so. 2 This essay will look instead at the effects produced by the nearly infinite acts of looking inherent to a hobby that has been described as one of "Americans' most-favored [outdoor] activities". (shrink)

The intention of the article is to offer stakeholders affected by mergers a criterion from which moral arguments may be generated for the organization of each individual case. The criterion: "Any operation causing legitimate interests to suffer vital infringement should be avoided in a merger process." A vital infringement of these interests is assumed when the merger undermines unique positive opportunities or considerable impairment in the future, impossible to overcome for the person affected without an unacceptable level of difficulty. Therefore, (...) we mainly concentrate on implicit contracts – which should be based on the principle pacta sunt servanda as well. These contracts are mandatory to run an economy that produces increasingly more knowledge-based goods. (shrink)

This article considers the academic writings and activism of the major Continental feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti against the background of the growing religiously and racially biased anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Special attention is paid to Braidotti’s recent response to the post-secular turn in feminism. The article contends that Braidotti’s work highlights and embraces the destabilising structural effects the intensified migration flows have on European identity. It argues that Braidotti charts new models of European subjectivity that would facilitate mutually affirmative and (...) trans-formative relationships between those (self-)perceived as Western feminists and those positioned as immigrant women. (shrink)

Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how “brain-based self-help” literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault’s discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a (...) central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences. (shrink)

Based on an empirical study of the British think tank Demos, the article deliberates on the nature of current political ideas. The key argument is that such a deliberation must take into account not only ideas of production but also ideas of mediation. The article argues that the ability to disseminate, brand, and market political ideas in the public sphere through the mass media is a crucial part of the activities of modern idea producers such as think tanks. Ideas are (...) normally conceptualized as statements. As an analytical tool, the article makes a distinction between the two components of a statement. The two components are utterance (or impartation) and proposition (or semantic unit more generally). By so doing, it is possible to focus on (1) the necessity for think tanks to be an `impartational node' in communicative networks and (2) the importance of attributing certain meanings and values to the political ideas (to brand ideas). From this theoretical outset, the article then describes the logic or nature of the mediation, marketing and branding of political ideas. (shrink)

In this essay I bring together Lacan, Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari as mediators and intercessors for one another. The tensions that exist between them still continue to reverberate throughout the academic community. The intent is to query their pedagogies in what they are trying to ‘do’ within the context of capitalism in particular. I have called their pedagogies anomalous in keeping with their thrust of becoming other in their own particular ways through what I take to be three pedagogical conceptual (...) personae: saint, jester and nomad. I try to show how Deleuze and Guattari managed to supplant and perhaps overcome Lacan's own pedagogical project to have psychoanalysis as a way out from capitalism, which has been continued today by Žižek. I do this by showing how Lacan's mathemes, used in his four discourses, can be understood as having been deterritorialised by Deleuze and Guattari to present us with a counter-actualised pedagogy that challenges psychoanalysis as presented by both Lacan and Žižek. Nevertheless, reconciliations between the thought of Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan are possible. The reader will also find that particular door open, yet not fully explored here. (shrink)

There have been two distinctive aspects to James Tully’s approach to the study of imperialism over the years, and both are put to work in these remarkable volumes. The first is his belief in two seemingly contradictory claims: (i) that imperialism is much more pervasive than usually thought (conceptually, historically and practically); and yet (ii) that there are many more forms of resistance to it than usually appreciated. (Part of a symposium in Political Theory on James Tully's 'Public Philosophy in (...) a New Key'). (shrink)

The ancient Greek historian and political scientist Polybius is not as well known in the present day as figures such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. This is in part due to his having lived in the Hellenistic period, an epoch often thought to be characteristic of Greek cultural and political decline, rather than in the earlier ‘golden age’ of Greek intellectual life in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Yet Polybius’s ideas have been of profound importance in modern western (...) thought, in areas as diverse as historiography, philosophy of history and the theorization of political institutions. This article illustrates the main contours of how subsequent thinkers have received and made use of Polybian ideas and themes, and argues for regarding Polybius as an important precursor of contemporary social scientific analyses of ‘globalization’. The article first excavates and identifies some of the main forms of appropriation of Polybius’s ideas that have occurred in the West over the last 500 years. Secondly, it delineates the most important appropriation of Polybius in the human sciences that has been effected in recent times, namely the use made of Polybian themes by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, their influential diagnosis of the contemporary state of world affairs. Thirdly, the article proffers a critique of these authors’ use of Polybius, and in its stead offers an alternative mode of appropriation of his work for the purposes of analytically reorienting the human sciences in light of present-day concerns with globalization and conditions of globality. It is argued that, far from being a figure of only antiquarian interest, Polybius continues to be of much relevance for human scientists today, for he may be seen as a foundational figure in efforts to think about the ‘global’ level in human affairs. (shrink)

This paper explores how Pope Francis’ critique of “the technocratic paradigm” in Laudato Si’ can contribute to an environmental ethics governed by asymmetries of power and agency. The technocratic paradigm is here theorized as linked to forms of anthropocentrism that together engender a dangerous alliance between the powers of technology and technologies of power. The meaning and import of this view become clearer when the background of these ideas gets excavated in the works of Romano Guardini. The contemporary manifestation of (...) Guardini’s warnings appears in the form of myriad environmental injustices wrought by structures of power linked to technology. To counter such injustices, we must discern which types of technologies to develop and how to limit technocratic approaches for the sake of other values. The integral ecological outlook favored by Francis may be interpreted as a kind of eco-politics, or even, controversially, an eco-technology, with the cultivation of technologies of contemplation. Applying Peter Sloterdijk’s conceptions of anthropotechnics and monogeism to the Ignatian Exercises animating the Jesuit Francis’ work, we can see how such technologies hold potential for Catholicism to collaborate better with secular strategies in relating to Earth’s agency in a new eco-politics. Such an eco-politics could furnish an alternative to bio-politics, especially if governed by aspects of the Franciscan form-of-life identified by Giorgio Agamben. Such a project ultimately moves us beyond Laudato Si’ and the work of Romano Guardini, pointing up the limitations of Laudato Si’ in engaging the agency of the Earth. (shrink)