Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

Death is frequently seen as the ultimate manifestation of materiality. Without denying this materiality, this article will investigate the discursive character of death and its contingent nature, through the lens of Laclau and Mouffe's [. Hegemony and social strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso] discourse theory. First, the core elements of the discourse of death, such as end/cessation/termination, negativity, irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability, in combination with life as death's constitutive outside, will be analysed, showing the specificity of this (...) discourse of death. The contingency of death is argued further from a more genealogical stance, through the changes over time in the articulation of death and good death. Finally, the political nature of the discourse of death is illustrated by an analysis of end-of-life debates and the struggle between the hospice and the right-to-die social movements over the exact articulation of a good death. The article concludes by pointing to the necessary and constitutive failure of discourse to capture the materiality of death. (shrink)

As is made evident in Rosalyn Deutsche’s recent book, Hiroshima After Iraq, Hiroshima keeps returning through the way diverse artistic genres evoke parallels between the bombing of Hiroshima and subsequent atrocities. After contrasting US and Japanese perspectives on the event of the bombing and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of temporal plasticity (while at the same time heeding the relationship between presence and grammar), this essay ponders the future anterior of Hiroshima, its continuous will-have-beens, as new films and re-analyses of (...) older ones (especially Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Cats of Mirikitani) continue to restage its significance. (shrink)